by John Lydon
As much as there was animosity between us, when you see footage of the Sex Pistols live, we were so damned tight that the aggression and lack of communication somehow worked on stage. Steve, Paul, and I could have been a fucking awesome threesome. We could have done without that bass nonsense. This will annoy a lot of people because of the Sid mythology, but the Sex Pistols never really needed a bass guitarist! Sid was just there because that was the thing that bands had. Now I can say this years later. Why? At the time it never occurred to any of us because it seemed to be so deeply essential. I had seen Iggy Pop and Ron Ashton play as a duo at King’s Cross. It didn’t strike me as particularly radical.
Paul just needed something to flop his bass drum with. We sure put Paul through it all with Sid on stage. What a torture for a drummer having to constantly slow up and speed down so you could accommodate a drug-crazed idiot twanging away. How do you go “boioioioiinnngg” on a bass drum?
When the Pistols sold thousands of copies of “God Save the Queen,” I felt more detached than anything. It felt unreal. The chaos and nastiness against us and the political intrigues inside the organization of what you’d jokingly call the Pistols made it somehow not seem like an achievement at all. Quite the opposite. Success just seemed to make it worse. I felt as if management had no grasp on what was happening. I didn’t know what to do or when things would happen. Malcolm would never discuss what was going on because he didn’t like people to contradict his ideas, no matter how few he had. He would announce a plan or a weekly schedule, and that was the end. It made the Pistols’ success grim.
SEGMENT 10:
THE SKATERS OF STREATHAM / NORA, MY WIFE
NORA
I wasn’t interested in John when we first met. I came to notice John because Ariana, my daughter, was such a fan of John’s that she formed a punk group called the Slits. She was only fourteen, and all the Slits were in ecstasy over John. In 1977 Ariana jumped up on stage at a Pistols concert in Soho, ran up to John, and said, “You are the greatest,” and kissed him.
I first saw the Pistols at the 100 Club. I thought they were awful. Steve played guitar like the Who and John’s awful screaming voice was so unusual. You had to listen to its piercing sound. It was so bang-bang, rock ’n’ roll.
In the early seventies I promoted big concerts in Germany with bands like Wishbone Ash and Rory Gallagher’s Taste. I was always into promoting, but I didn’t come over to England to promote concerts. It was too much hassle. I came over to England from Germany in the mid-seventies. I took Ariana out of boarding school when she was thirteen and brought her with me to England.
I was living with a man who later made demos with the Sex Pistols. All the Sex Pistols came over to meet him, and that was the first time I saw John. I was very aloof at the time. I just went upstairs. I never thought we’d ever see each other again. I was very narrow-minded at that time. I didn’t want to deal with someone who didn’t look classy.
JOHN LYDON: We met again a couple of months after we recorded the demos, and Nora was even more aloof, positively rude. The nose went ten feet up in the air in her forties film star outfit. Long blonde hair. Padded shoulders. That forties femme fatale look—which I was a complete ham for. Women were still wearing those crushed-velvet tops, denim flares, and bell-bottoms. Nora wouldn’t have anything to do with it, which was absolutely fine by me. So few people wanted to break that boring mold. I was the filthiest thing on earth to her.
John and I knew each other for that six months before we got together. There was no dating at all.
JOHN LYDON: I had never been on a date in my entire life. Ever. The concept was bizarre to me. It’s ridiculous! Real people don’t do things like that. That only happens in TV-land. You meet, you meet, and you meet. That’s it.
John asked me for a lift to the Speakeasy. He had no money, and he kept asking me for a drink inside. I just passed him by because I was with other people. I was embarrassed by him and his bad reputation.
JOHN LYDON: Nora was meeting someone. She just drove to the Speakeasy and said, “I’m going now.” She wouldn’t even let me walk into the club with her. I had no money. She said in her thick German accent, “I’m not payings.” Nora was so cruel, and I love cruel women. She did not want this embarrassing lump near her.
We had a horrible argument in front of the Speakeasy when John wanted a lift home. He screamed blue murder: “You bitch! You dropped me here, so you drop me back.” I told him I wasn’t going to give him a lift home. He climbed into the car. I said no. “Get your stuff out.” So he walked all the way home.
JOHN LYDON: It took hours to get home. She left a lasting impression on my feet.
There was no physical attraction at first. I didn’t even think to be nice to him. I was brought up differently as a teenager in the fifties. I was totally old-fashioned the first time I was married. Oh, God. My sense of chaos comes because I was repressed all my life. When you are not interested in a man, you pay no attention. I felt embarrassed with John in the very beginning. After that horrible incident, I was at another gig with someone else and John passed by my table and said, “Drop dead!”
I never heard expressions like that before. I expected people to be polite. Even when people used words like “f-u-c-k,” I never heard it that much. Then he says, “Drop dead.” So we don’t speak again for a long time.
Then one day he came up to me and said, “You never invited me to your house. I know people told you—”
“People told me,” I said, “you would destroy everything in the house.”
He was drinking and being more open. I was more open as well. By then we had all the same friends, so I thought that we should talk rather than harbor the hostility. We started to talk, and I saw he was quite a pleasant person. I told him to come around. We talked about our forced religion and found a kindred spirit there.
When people found out he came around to the place I rented in Shepherd’s Bush, they were jealous. A lot of men, including Steve and Paul, warned me that he was terrible and mad. They didn’t say he would steal, but they told me John would spray-paint the house and the furniture. John sprayed the word Arsenal all over the garden and alongside the pavement.
Later on he came over to my house with a lot of people. I hardly knew all the punk boys and punk girls exept Debbie and Paul Young. This was still before John and I had any close relationship. He used to come around the house with Wobble, Sid, and others. It was so wild; things went missing in the house. Someone had classical records and some really rare classical music on tapes up in the loft. John used the tapes and recorded reggae over them. But I didn’t mind because it was rented. Some of the girls started to cut up the curtains. The kitchen was black and burnt out. It looked horrible.
We had terrible scenes there. A neighbor complained about noise because John was banging up and down on the piano with his bum for a couple of hours. The neighbor didn’t ring police or anything, he just came over. Somebody dumped water over his head. He was a nutter, and he came back with a knife and wanted to stab Ariana. He attacked me, and the knife went into my arm. John came out with fists raging, so he rushed off. We rang up the police and told them to look for the man.
The police recognized John immediately and told us that we probably asked for it. It was around the time John was being attacked on the street by royalist fans. They wrote our names down and told John, “We’re going to get you, Cockie. One more word from you and you’re off.”
There was a law in England that you could stay in a flat at least three months without paying the rent while they evict you. I knew I wouldn’t get my deposit back, so I just had to move out by the moonlight. It’s a miracle they never chased me after I left.
After John found out that I was attracted to him, that’s when he turned around. We were together on and off during that first six months. When I fell in love with John, it was his turn to be nasty. He was really terrible then.
JOHN LYDON: Revenge was sweet. Nora was a spoiled schoolgir
l and I was a spoiled brat, so we just annoyed each other. When Nora started following me, I was going through a bad time in the Pistols with Sid and all of his problems.
I fell in love with John because he surprised me. He was pictured really bad, but he had a really sweet attitude. We both had a Catholic upbringing; he had to go to church all the time, I went to the convent school. He was more innocent and not like the rest of the group. He was more interested in having fun with the boys than taking groupies into bed.
John was into getting drunk, using speed, and he started smoking marijuana. I never touched any drugs in my life except when John gave me some heavy marijuana once. The earth moved when I was on a mattress on the floor. My heart went fast. I didn’t have the strength to go to bed. John yelled, “People pay a fortune to feel that way, and you are complaining.”
JOHN LYDON: The speed made me very paranoid. I used to love sitting there thinking, They’re out to get me. When you’re that watched, you become very insular and cold. You build walls around yourself, and you can’t trust anyone. So I used to have a huge entourage of circus freak types around me.
As we got close John realized I wasn’t so arrogant. He changed his attitude as well. He didn’t do all the wrecking. John was too shy because he was so scrutinized. I started to like him, so I seduced him. It was difficult for him. The first time he was at my house it seemed the whole of London must have known about it. Our friends tried to make him look like a monster. Finally he came to my house alone. The morning after, Ariana almost came in. I saw John secretly at first because I didn’t want Ariana to know. She loved John as a teenager. He was her hero. But she didn’t like any of my lovers after I split up with my ex-husband. Then she said to me, “Finally you have someone decent.”
There was a time when Ariana started getting nasty with me when I started to see John. Ariana took the whole punk thing too seriously. That’s when she started to get really nasty. I was alone with John at Gunter Grove, when his mother came around. She was very ill, but she brought John a nice set of plates over for the house. Ariana turned up soaking wet, yelling, “Let me in! Let me in!” It was embarrassing. I could have died. She was wearing stiletto heels and a short miniskirt. Then she swore. We couldn’t get rid of Ariana. I didn’t know John’s mother very well at that time. There was conflict between my daughter and me. I told Ariana quietly not to use bad words, but she wanted to listen to records. John told her to leave.
John and I became close when Sid first joined the band. Sid locked me in a toilet once at a gig near Birmingham. I had lost my driving license and some money and went back to look for it in the toilet after the show. Sid locked the main toilet door. He was jealous when John suddenly was open about him and me. It was already very late, and nobody heard my screams. Everyone was sitting in the dressing room. Sid would do everything to antagonize me. John was either shy or angry, but Sid was such an attention seeker. In that sense Sid and Nancy were brilliant together. They were both like that.
Before John and I were close I used to see him with Linda. She was a very nice girl, but I didn’t know who or what she was. I was a bit intimidated by that. I was so naive in that aspect. John wouldn’t tell me, but Ariana used to come around her place at the St. James Hotel. John used to tell her not to come around. I didn’t know that Ariana was over there with Linda and Nancy.
I knew Nancy very well. She came around my house immediately after she turned up in England. Ariana liked her because Nancy had that open New York attitude. Ariana was too naive to figure out that she was a whore and brought her around to Shepherd’s Bush. I’ll never forget first meeting Nancy with her big mouth. She looked and talked very cheap. I asked her what she was doing in London.
“Wanking men off for twenty dollars.”
That was the very first thing Nancy said to me.
“Oh, very nice. Would you please leave?” But she would take no notice of me. You couldn’t believe how offensive Nancy was. She didn’t say it for a joke. She kept coming around because she thought Ariana had money.
Nancy kept coming around the house because Ariana liked her and insisted she stay. Ariana liked Sid a lot, too. When Sid was in the hospital with hepatitis, Ariana insisted on bringing our television there when she visited him. When Sid came around in the early days with John he had that show-off attitude and would do anything to get attention. He was acting, but I didn’t like him.
Sid and Nancy would be constantly arguing. The only time they were quiet together was when there were drugs. That’s why I didn’t want her coming over to my house. I was so worried that Ariana might be at the age to be attracted by all that. Nancy had an influence, I knew that from Sid.
When John was having problems with the Pistols, he would never tell me much. I didn’t know it was so bad internally with the Pistols. I did not go to many Sex Pistols concerts anyway. I might have been to two or three the entire time. The violence against him was over the top. Bricks would come through the windows. After John was stabbed, whenever we would go to a club he had ten bouncers around him—Wobble, the English brothers, John Stevens. I thought it was ridiculous, but necessary. If anyone would come close to John in public, his friends would go crazy.
John’s other friends from Finsbury Park were bad news, even though he wasn’t violent himself.
RAMBO: I ran with a smaller Arsenal group in Finsbury Park called the Herd. I’ve been stabbed in the kidneys. I got a brick on my head at Luton. I bent down to pick it up and got another on the back of my head. Two full-grown house bricks. I got cut with a Stanley knife on my shoulder and one down my back. I got a screwdriver stuck in my leg. Most football mobs either know me or respect me. It was the way I was. Basically, I’m a small bloke, and I wouldn’t run.
I would stay outside the eye of the storm. I couldn’t go out with them, and John would go nowhere without them. It must have been like Elvis Presley’s friends. They were constantly around. They would stay in the front room at my house drunk, and John and I would go to our room.
A traumatic thing happened between me and John after we first met in 1977. I became pregnant from John. I was with no one else by that time. We weren’t together very often because of the Pistols, yet I panicked thinking at the time that he was so young: Why tell him when I can look after it?
The next time we saw each other, I told John. We didn’t live together at the time, and some of the other women he knew were sluts and some whores. John was much more shocked than I was. “Oh, no. Are you sure it’s mine?”
Funnily enough, Ariana said the same thing as John. I told her I loved John and wasn’t with anyone else. She was in ecstasy about getting a sister or brother.
Nobody believed we lost the child naturally. I screwed in some light bulbs and lost my balance, falling badly right on my belly. Ariana saw blood all over the living room in our house on Waterford Road. Pains shot up to my neck. I just knew. I booked into a clinic. It was the second month, so it was very early.
John had gone off to tour in Sweden, and he didn’t even know I lost the baby. He was on the road a lot, but I’m sure he was worried that I was going to hit him for money. At that time, lots of girls came to John. You wouldn’t believe how many girls claimed to have had a baby with him.
Nobody thought about abortion then. When I had Ariana, I had to marry because my father told me to have Ariana at a Swiss hospital and have her adopted. That’s how good parents were with the shame. The Pistols definitely helped change the whole social concept about sex.
John and I didn’t even talk about the miscarriage until years later. John probably thought I reacted too quickly about not having my period. But I always knew. John was only nineteen then, so he must have felt the whole thing was my decision.
JOHN LYDON: I felt responsibility, but that would have been the next step. There are areas where you shouldn’t interfere and it’s a woman’s choice. Even if she would have had an abortion, it wouldn’t have been my decision. If Nora would have had the child, we would have d
one something about it. I would deal with it one step at a time. You know what runs through your mind: Oh, my God. Nappies, feeding, school, commitment. Tied down. It was an ongoing thing for women to approach me. Just recently my father got a phone call from someone who was thirty-two years old and reckons he was my son. Talk about starting early. I mean, four years old?
John lived in King’s Cross and just got back from Sweden. We didn’t see each other because he was touring on and off for five months. Then after that John and I started being serious. I had never had someone with so much age difference. It was also the first time John had met someone older, too. People didn’t think anything about my being fifteen years older than John. My friends didn’t use terms like “baby snatcher.” I think John’s father was shocked because he knew I was much older. It never bothered John, and he didn’t care what people thought.
John remembers seeing me go into the Sex Boutique when it was called Too Fast Too Live. John was behind the counter. This was 1975, a long time before the Pistols. John thought I was a loud woman with no shame, but wonderful. I never knew he’d seen me.
JOHN LYDON: Nora would buy women’s clothes for strange men, particularly this unknown person. She’d drag him in and he’d be all shy and trying things on behind the screens. She made him squeeze into a rubber skirt. Nora would pull the screen out with a shop full of people, shouting, “No, that rubber one’s too tight.” The geezer was dying of embarrassment. If he wanted this stuff and just went in and put it on, no one in that place would have noticed. But he was trying to be all coy and shy behind the screen, and Nora being Nora was yelling, “It’s too damns tight! She’s ripping you off. I’m not standing for this!”
The punks didn’t even know what the swastika meant. In Germany we couldn’t even talk about it. Punks used it innocently just to show off. They were told that the swastika was forbidden and should not be brought up, Siouxsie wasn’t particularly educated about it at that time. To them it meant that it was taboo and antisocial. They never questioned what it stood for because they were too naive. Do you think Sid knew what the swastika stood for? Sid’s idea was that it was naughty, and that was as deep as he went for it. It didn’t mean anti-Semitism to Siouxsie or Sid.