Rotten

by John Lydon

  Apart from Sid, the Pistols weren’t self-destructive, nor were they on the road to hell—quite the opposite. We were out to wreck the system, but certainly not wreck ourselves. Branson was wacky enough to enjoy it all. He perceived the Pistols as a jolly good fun ride, mostly because he was up and coming and his company was new and not firmly established into any set format. He turned out to be the best person for us to be with. He was always interested right from the start, even with us sneering at his beard. That kept us apart. He looked like one of those Greenpeace followers—the sensible sweater, the casual beard, and the corduroy flares. The old duck collector that he is, he has a huge house in Oxford with a pond full of exotic ducks with their wings clipped so they don’t fly away. Give me a bastard in a three-piece suit any day, because at least I know where that’s coming from and it’s something I can deal with. A let’s-be-kind-to-everyone hippie is something I can’t have.

  I’ve been proved right about Rich-ass Branson. Actually I like him a lot—a public school boy to the nth degree. But he doesn’t use it against you. He plays one on one, and with him everything is a game. He loves to get one over on you, any which way he can.

  Today Vivienne Westwood and Richard Branson have been sucked into the system. They pretend to themselves that they’re really changing everything, but they’re not. They’re part of the same problem ad infinitum. Virgin could have single-handedly changed the whole record company perspective, but they didn’t do it because a while after signing the Sex Pistols, Branson lost interest in record companies and had very little to do with the daily running of the record company. He barely knew who was on or off that label at any particular time. He just collected the money, the ego, and the reputation of it all. Virgin used to see themselves as a family company who would look out for their artists. Very few acts on Virgin made big money. The few that did made an awful lot. Many bands have since been unceremoniously ditched. I recently dropped Virgin myself just in time before the EMI acquisition.

  BILLY IDOL: We used to go to clubs like Louise’s and hang out together. We wanted to do things together so we could feel it growing. But later on it got bitchy. Everyone started getting their own bands, and it was wild how we started to slag each other off. At the time, the scene had no name. Then Caroline Coon came up with the name punk.

  By 1977 the tabloids absolutely reveled in “how to be a punk” articles. They’d have a centerfold of these boring kids that they would pick off the street and dress them up as they thought punks were. It was really bad—ironed leather trousers, cardboard-stiff jackets. There were a lot of people who did mutilate themselves with safety pins. I used to stick a safety pin through my earhole. Is that mutilation? It looked much better than a normal earring. A lot of girls used to do it through their lip and nose. It would go all swollen, bruised, and filled with pus. You can’t drill holes through your lips or cheek. Your lips swell up, now a fashionable Hollywood actress look.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: The beauty of the punk thing was that from January to June of 1977, nondiscrimination was what it was all about. There was little or no sexism or racism. For a start, everyone loved reggae music. It was uncool to be judgmental of somebody’s sexuality. If Sid Vicious saw a girl with big boobs, he may have said, “Whoa, you got really big tits,” but it wasn’t really a macho come-on. There was a kind of innocence, and when I say innocence, I mean innocent!

  NORA: The sixties was organized peace and love, and I was never for that. The Pistols was not about organizing for other people. I hated all those hippie concepts of cuddling up and all that stupid painting on the body. You did it because everyone else did it. In the punk days, you didn’t do something because others did it, you did it because you wanted to do it. The hippie period was totally organized. You go to an open-air concert and they preach love and peace, leave garbage behind, and not mean a word of it. Because a few women showed their tits and a few men ran around naked on the boulevard, it was not liberation. It was merely a fashion. Big business and society told us it was the “in” thing. But society was totally against punk. We were told it was bad.

  Malcolm and Vivienne Westwood were jumping on all of this gloriously. They were sewing together bits of old Marks and Spencer’s shirts and dyeing them different colors, calling them “anarchy jackets”—with an outrageous price tag to go with it. It was utterly funny. When I saw people go into that shop and pay forty pounds for a dyed shirt—the picture of Karl Marx and an upside-down Nazi symbol—I thought, Fools! Make your own. For God’s sake, I did. Again, people like their statements sold to them rather than making their own. That’s why a shop like Vivienne’s worked.

  I used to love all the sex gear she used to sell, but I’m still angry over some of my designs. I designed some of my stuff and had to pay full whack for her to make it. I’d see copies soon after in the shop. That used to piss me. The tartan kilt. The bondage gear. I did a series of photos in a straitjacket. I really liked being in that straitjacket, so I wanted gear on stage that wouldn’t be quite so restrictive but would look like it. That’s how the bondage gear came about.

  I never found Vivienne attractive. From the first minute I saw her, I always used to think turkey neck. I know she never liked me.

  I used to go to the movies a lot when I was in the Pistols. I remember when Texas Chainsaw Massacre first came out. We all went with Malcolm and Vivienne. I liked it so much I went back. It was the funniest movie I had ever seen. It was so vile to be cut up by a such an ugly thing as a chainsaw. You couldn’t fight it off! “Oh, stop it! Go away! It’s not happening!” Hand on eyes. You can enjoy the gristle of it all. Outcast characters in film always attracted me. I enjoyed Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Best of all, I loved the way Laurence Olivier played Richard III. He portrayed the character as so utterly vile, it was great. As I said before, Johnny Rotten definitely has tinges of Richard III in him. I saw it a long time before I conceived Rotten. No redeeming qualities. Hunchback, nasty, evil, conniving, selfish. The worst of everything to excess. Olivier made Richard III riveting in his excessive disgust. Having seen it aeons ago, I took influences from Olivier’s performance. I had never seen a pop singer present himself quite that way. It wasn’t the norm. You’re supposed to be a nice pretty boy, sing lovely songs, and coo at the girlies. Richard III would have none of that. He got the girls in other ways.

  Occasionally I think of Richard III when I do interviews with journalists I don’t like. I’m very sharp and give one-word answers. I bounce off people’s characters. I do that a lot. If someone is all right, then I’m all right. If I think they’re an ass, then I hand it back to them. I’ll merely mirror their images for the sheer fun of it.

  CAROLINE COON: John thought himself ugly and unattractive, and he played that part with a hell of a lot of style. He was ethereal, with a face like a Giotto painting.

  Vivienne Westwood always made me laugh, and it annoyed her no end. She’s like Malcolm; she likes to manipulate people, but if they don’t agree with her, then she doesn’t want them around. Silly bitch. She went nowhere fast after punk and found herself stuck for lack of ideas. She went to Italy to work in one of the fashion houses there and claims it disciplined her. Methinks not. She just joined the bleeding brigade. She went with the flow. To be weird just for the sake of it is incredibly uninteresting, and that’s what Vivienne’s into now.

  Vivienne Westwood’s clothes are completely sexless—totally alien to sex. They incorporated all the trappings of sex, but they were presented in such a way that they were more like items of fun. You certainly could never wear anything of hers and go out and expect to be picked up. There’s no sex appeal in anything she’s done; she never designed with that in mind. But Vivienne thinks her clothes are romantic, sexy, and erotic. I’m sure she’s convinced of that. She misses the point. Years later on the “South Bank” television show, Malcolm intimated he created designs for her. I think they both got it wrong. It’s neither romantic, sexy, nor erotic. They were always blab
bing on about sex and freedom, but that’s exactly what they denied the very people who worked for them. They didn’t share their ideas. It was all dictated; this is the way you must wear it. It must never be mixed with anything else; it’s a uniform. It’s just a neat little box and so blinkard in its vision. But that’s the way Vivienne thinks; she’s completely indoctrinating.

  It was nice that “God Save the Queen” came out two weeks before the Silver Jubilee. Originally it should have come out on A&M a long time before. There we go. Lucky timing. But not deliberate. Renting the boat was wonderful. Well played by Malcolm here. I loved that because we were quite lethargic at the time. We weren’t allowed to play anywhere for all kinds of weird reasons. There were Sid’s bloody problems and all of that. So we chartered this boat—the ones the tourists go up and down in to see the Tower of London from the Thames. We invited a lot of friends, fashion bloody designers, and whoever was doing something new and different in London at the time. Painters, for instance. Rabble-rousers. Filth. And loads of tarts. It was not at all the way Alex Cox projected it in that film. According to his movie, everyone had mohawks and leather jackets. Well, that image didn’t come along until much, much after. On the boat you would have a John Travolta type next to a beatnik next to anything. The sheer mixture was what made it offensive to the British public and the police. But I liked that. I loved the diversity of it. That’s when I knew there was something really important happening. It’s very important when you combine different elements getting on very well with each other. According to the normal rules of society, we should all be at odds. Yes, again the Alex Cox movie fucked up big time. It missed the major point. There’s no point preaching to the converted or the clones.

  The whole idea of the jubilee was that you could do anything you liked for twenty-four hours. It was supposed total freedom. All the pubs were open all night. Everything was open. People were supposed to celebrate, so that’s what we did. We rented a boat, went out on the river, turned up the volume, and played our favorite new song. No doubt countless complained because the amount of police who turned up to stop us was out-fucking-rageous. Motor launches. They waited on every bridge in case any of us jumped off and got away. Fabulous. I wasn’t arrested. I managed to escape. I suppose the good old days of burglary—get in and out of tight situations—helped. My brother Jimmy got nicked. It was pathetic. The charges were so stupid and trumped up. It was an amnesty of volume declared to celebrate the jubilee! The fact that we were slagging off the queen was our own business. But that’s what they arrested us for. Breaking the peace. What peace? Can’t you see the streets are full of people? In the papers the next morning was a photograph of my brother in the Daily Mirror. He had the typical boot boy look at the time. Hair squarely cropped, suede jacket affair, and flares. There was this caption: PUNKS IN MAYHEM ON THAMES or whatever they said. They nicked Malcolm, but he got out of it. That was the shit.

  Steve, Paul, Malcolm, Glen, Boogie, and Sophie rarely mingled with music or the possibilities. They would slag off bands and not know who or what they were talking about. Sid would slag off bands as aging hippies but didn’t really go to many concerts. He didn’t know what he was talking about most of the time, either. Malcolm guided Steve and Paul into this regressive sixties mod band vibe. Paul Cook was really into the Raspberries and soft California rock sound. Suddenly that went by the by. Malcolm helped make their musical decisions in that respect.

  That’s why I was such a cunt to them. I knew more of what I was talking about. When the band would say, “Let’s do a Kinks-style song” I’d ask, “Which album? I’ve got fifteen. Would you like to pick out a track?” They might have had one album from the sixties where the band was sitting in a Mini-Cooper on the cover. They didn’t know the range of Ray Davies’s music. Glen had a couple of friends who would pass records his way. Then he’d think he knew it all. But I would know more. One evening I got fed up with Glen accusing me of knowing it all. We sat around with his friends and played library, and I won hands down. Glen hated me even more. There’s no joy in that, but why should people treat knowledge as something disgraceful?

  “How dare you know, and why can’t you be like the rest of us? Vague. Muddled. Indifferent.”

  JOHN GRAY: John has always maintained that if he had more control over the band, they would have been unlistenable. But that’s partly what made the Pistols a brilliant group, the fusion of the members. Steve’s power chords; Paul’s plodding Ringo Starr drums; Glen’s Beatle melody mentality; John’s anarchy and free-form expression. It was those ingredients put together that made the Pistols such an exciting band.

  I’m writing this book because so much rubbish has been written about us that it might be interesting for someone to get the correct perspective on it and see it for what it really was, rather than what the fantasists of this world would have you believe. There’s so much exaggeration and intellectualizing going on about what was basically real human beings trying to come to grips with each other and somehow or another actually writing songs that mean something. It’s such an intense process being in a band, but some of the books out there never understood that. These writers have never been in bands, and they have never really committed themselves to other people in such close quarters. They’re more like solo performers, and there ain’t no such thing as that in any band. You should never leave any single member in a band up to their own devices. I don’t care how big-headed the lead singer is, it all comes down to the fact that he must eat shit in a rehearsal room. The histrionics of the lead guitar, the excesses of the drummer, and the stupidity of the bass player have to mix on equal footing.

  We were teenagers making teenage music. It was never meant for subtlety, was it? The mechanics on my part of getting Sid into the Pistols was that he looked the part, but he was becoming a Johnny Rotten clone. There was no one else. At the time we were just about the only band in Britain with short hair. The rest were still in flares. We stuck out like sore thumbs, and Sid was there. I even helped get Sid a day job at the Sex shop, and he used to come to all the gigs. The Pistols ruined him. He just didn’t understand it. He was much better as a member of the audience than being in the band. He didn’t have the grasp of what it was all about. I thought he would fit and adapt. I didn’t realize he was that stupid. Once Sid joined the Pistols, he became jealous of me. He wanted to be center of attention in the band. I should have seen it. This goes back to his fashion victim days when we were in school together. He always had to be noticed. The nail varnish and such. He had to be loved and adored by millions. He tried his very best to out-Rotten Rotten, but he didn’t understand Rotten was my alter ego. He would think that would make me a fake. That’s the primitive way his logic ran. He got it all wrong, and he was egged on by Nancy.

  “You’re the star, Sid.”

  “I am. I must be. Nancy told me.”

  At the start Sid was actually getting into learning how to play. Then he would come out with these ridiculous Ramones stances—with the legs spread as wide apart as they possibly could. He was imitating the Ramones’ bass player. We had to sit him down one day and say, “No! You can’t do that!” Make up your own style, don’t slavishly adhere to something else. But then again, that’s the fashion bit of Sid. “Ooo. That’s what everyone does.” God’s sake! Then he’d go home and huff and be back the next day and try to imitate me.

  “Oh, I can sing that better.”

  “Okay, do. Now write something equivalent.”

  “Duuhhh!” Pause. About turn.

  He got it pretty close toward the end. When I hear Sid’s version of “My Way,” it sounds like me. There’s a line he added: “What is a prat who wears silly hats?” That’s about me. Silly boy. He hated my hat collection—comprised of all the most unfashionable things the world has ever known. Top hats or whatever, things I would buy at jumble sales.

  JULIEN TEMPLE: Sid would make fun of John for wearing Rasta hats, but at the same time Sid would be there shaking and sipping methadone f
rom a straw.

  I didn’t want to be forced into this ridiculous rock ’n’ roll theory. I think the music you make should reflect your real personality, your real self. Unfortunately, before the Pistols came along, that generally wasn’t the case, was it? It was a lot of people living up to what they thought they had to do. That ultimately destroys musicians, which is why a lot of them end up heroin addicts. They can’t cope with the lie of it all.

  What impressed me about Sid when we were both younger was that he knew the pitfalls and didn’t want to end up like that, but somehow once he joined the band, he got into that groupie thing with that awful Nancy Spungen. She convinced him that heroin was the way it should be. To be a true star, you must mess about with dangerous drugs. So he eventually bought the whole rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. He absolutely, thoroughly believed the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed thing, that whole approach to life, that drug commitment. It never occurred to Sid that it was just an image, that they were not necessarily living it themselves. Sid got into being a heroin addict as an observer. “Gee whiz, there must be something good about it. All these great, decadent New Yorkers.” Sid, they’re not great! They’re fucked up!

  As a kid, when I knew him, he wouldn’t go near any hard drugs. Wouldn’t touch them. Some took speed. But then we never viewed speed, amphetamines, as a drug at all. It was so easy to get, you could buy them anywhere. If you wanted to stay up and not miss anything, that’s what speed was for. It was a mod drug. I got it by spending my dole money, all of it. You could get a gram for ten quid and that would last you a whole weekend, easily. Speed had no high, no hallucinogenic effect. It kept you awake so that you could do other things. That was fine. I liked that. That meant I could drink more. I could go see all those bloody films all night long if I wanted to. I could go to any club. I could do all of it in the same twenty-four hours. Very nice. Unfortunately, speed absolutely tears you apart. That’s why I stopped doing it.