by John Lydon
John’s attitude with the Sex Pistols was letting everyone be what they wanted to be, not making too much difference between boys and girls. Girls didn’t need to worry about being frowned upon when they came out with their own opinions. Before punk, women kept it inside. After the Sex Pistols there was no age gap or sex gap. It all melded into each other. Suddenly women like Caroline Coon did talk about sex. I don’t remember her being so open before then. She was for the underdog, and because she came from an upper-class culture and was educated, she wanted to help the ones who were unjustifiably put down. Caroline had other boyfriends who were very uneducated; Paul Simonon of the Clash was a good example. She was kind of a converter, because then everything became so free.
I was shocked when I saw Siouxsie at the Screen on the Green. This was still before John and I were close. She was walking around wearing some suspenders and a bra with her whole tits out. I was stunned. How could she have the nerve? I think she contributed a lot to the women’s free movement. Madonna got it all from Siouxsie, who was totally on her own then. That night I couldn’t listen to the Sex Pistols at all because Siouxsie was sitting one row behind me. I was so uncool because I couldn’t stop looking at her tits. Siouxsie and her friends looked like what Russ Meyer would have liked to see a Wagner opera look like.
JOHN LYDON: Siouxsie came from the Roxy Music, Dave Bowie dress-up world and got fed up with that. When the Pistols started they jumped straight in on it. Instead of all that dressing up, they just dressed down—or out. There were lots of gays with them in their crowd—a real mixture of people.
I was the first woman of my age to roller-skate through the whole London town. The newspapers even wrote about it. JOHNNY ROTTEN’S LOVED ONE IS ROLLER-SKATING THROUGH TOWN. The Evening Standard made up this headline called THE LONG-SUFFERING NORA, and about how I had to put up with John and his bad manners.
I was the very first older person who went to Battersea Park to roller-skate. Back in 1977 there were no roller-skaters, and this was pre–roller disco. John and Keith Levene had a pair of roller skates, and there was this big terrace. I tried it out there, and I could do it instantly. I bought myself a new pair and taught everyone around Stretham how to skate. After two years they were spinning around on one leg. They all learned so quickly because they were young. Some of the gay discos turned into roller discos, and I would give them lessons. John would come home from the studio and there would be all these gay guys in the front room on roller skates.
John used to get very weird sometimes. I knew Leslie McKeown, the lead singer from the Bay City Rollers. He was a fan and wanted to come over to meet John and maybe play some music with him. I arranged a meeting, and John said it was okay to bring him around. The moment Les came up the staircase, John disappears. It looked as if I didn’t even know John. John was into his antifood thing, and he locked himself inside his room. After two days I would ask him what he wanted to eat. I left an Indian meal outside the door, and John kicked it down the stairs.
One time we met Peter Townshend, and he was in awe in front of John. He gave a harangue about how much John was his hero, how he changed the world, and how elevated he felt standing next to John. Townshend was very open-minded.
JOHN LYDON: The McCartneys would send me their calendars and invited me to their place. They got my address through a PR person. But I wasn’t capable of sitting down with Paul and Linda McCartney and having a regular conversation. The McCartneys wanted to make records with me. I could see that if I fell into that, then I would become Johnny Showbiz. The whole thing would be unreal and fake, and I couldn’t cope with it. One day Nora and I were driving past Harrods in a cab. McCartney and his family came out, saw us, then ran after the car. I locked the door so they couldn’t jump in. The driver turned around and said, “Jesus, I’ve seen it all now. I remember when people used to chase him. Now he’s chasing you.”
I sensed when John was unhappy in the band and it was falling apart. John never wanted to discuss the problems and be a whiner. I could see it from his attitude that something was wrong. John was very moody when there was tense confrontations with the Pistols. There was no way I could even talk to John. Even when we had good trysts together, it was just for the time being.
I looked after John’s house in Gunter Grove when he was off on tour in America. He was excited about getting a passport to leave, but he didn’t seem so excited to go to America. He wasn’t scared but felt apprehensive about what would happen next. The fear of the unknown was there. Sid was becoming so difficult and more and more addicted.
John rang me from America. We talked all the time. I gave up my flat in Shepherd’s Bush to stay in the house in Gunter Grove. It was a nighmare for me to be alone. The house was on a corner, and one day the door was smashed down by squatters. I got them out, and another night someone came in through a little window in the kitchen. I almost had a heart attack. I had to hide the big speakers and cover up all the heavy amplifiers. Somebody pitched a tent in front of the house, and the police would do nothing. They couldn’t care less.
John had a fit one day and destroyed the whole bedroom. It was macabre. He didn’t like the fitted cupboards, so he just ripped them out with an axe. He left me with a bedroom like that. I had never seen a room in such a state. He ripped the wallpaper down. He had a tombstone that somebody stole and gave to him. He used it as a headstand for the bed.
The whole place was flying around with moths. There were many moths in the carpets, in the living room and the bedrooms. The end result was I gave away all of his moth-ridden clothes from the Pistols. I just kept on throwing them out the window. I never thought that one day they could become memorabilia. One person started to rummage around outside, and soon they came all the way down from the King’s Road as the word spread. The queue was around the block. They didn’t know John was in America, but they knew where John lived and that those were his clothes. It was like a social event, but I didn’t dare go out of the house. They could have ripped my clothes off thinking they were John’s clothes.
We didn’t have a lot of time alone during the Sex Pistols. That came later. After America we got really close together. It was the end of the band.
My father read something in a magazine in Berlin that his daughter lived with the murderer of his girlfriend. They said I was going out with someone from the Sex Pistols who killed his girlfriend. They didn’t mention Sid or any name. They got John mixed up with Sid, and they mentioned my name as well. My father was outraged and shocked. He said, “The company you’re keeping, I can’t agree.” My father didn’t even ask me if it was true. He believed what was written. Maybe that gave him a heart attack. He died very soon after that.
SEGMENT 11:
STEVE SEVERIN ON THE BROMLEY CONTINGENT
STEVE SEVERIN
BATTERSEA, LONDON
Bromley is in the south of London—the last stop before you hit real countryside. Bromley was its own breeding grounds, a mismatch of people who came from all parts of London. That included me at age eleven when my family moved from the Irish parts of North London. My father was a librarian for the Daily Express newspaper, and most of the time my mother was a dressmaker. I was also raised by my grandmother, who was fantastic.
Moving to Bromley was supposed to be a move up in the world in the sense that you could go from a terraced house to a semidetached abode. Bromley was greenery abound, where the schools and the facilities were supposed to be better. High Street was the center of town. Central London was only fifteen minutes away by train, far enough away from the hustle and bustle of London, though not quite enough for us to be considered isolated. Bromley isn’t just one town, it’s a cluster of them, so our “Bromley contingent” was just a rare collection of people from several different outlying towns in and around the south of London. And 1966 was a strange time for the area. What changed things for Bromley was that just down the road was a place called Catford, and it became one of the main arrival points for drugs coming into England. So
Bromley was quite drug-infested. Nobody knew where the stuff came from, just that our part of south London was always awash in them. Maybe there were lots of small drug factories around there—who knew? Amphetamines, marijuana, and, of course, LSD were rather rampant. Perhaps that set the tone for the youth culture of this little town, which was otherwise perceived as a normal suburb.
BILLY IDOL: In 1970 we moved up to Bromley in Kent, a district on the farthest edge of the suburbs of London. Twelve and a half miles or a fast twenty-minute train ride and you were in the den of iniquity.
Something in the atmosphere of the time and the place made a lot of people want to break out and do something different. The catalyst ended up being the Sex Pistols and a clothes shop called Sex. By the time we’d hit our mid- to late teens, we were mainly going around as a group. This was even before the Sex Pistols came along. By definition, and out of need, we were into making our own fun. Because of the way we looked and the kind of music we liked, there weren’t that many places we could go in and around Bromley—even London, for that matter. Now there’s a club or a part of town for every different music cult or gang that you can imagine. Then it was either the Bee Gees or gay discos, so we gravitated toward the gay discos because they were much more tolerant of young people like us being different; they left us alone.
Everything sprang from that gay scene.
CAROLINE COON: Where did you find the most interesting aspects of sexual politics? In the discos. The gay scene. It was pop culture.
I can see how the role of the Bromley contingent has been miscast and misunderstood, as there was such a short transition between the time we were a bunch of people on our own and seen as acolytes to the Pistols. When our path crossed the group’s, it was more a meeting of the minds. It was never so much that we were fans as much as they just happened to be guys who played in a group. At that time, nobody knew what was going to happen with the band. The circuslike notoriety hadn’t yet set in.
I remember the moment we met the Pistols. It was me and Simon Barker. Simon was actually the first person to notice them. I was in the bar drinking, and we weren’t even aware they were playing. This was at Ravensbourne Art College, not too far from Bromley. Simon saw their last couple of songs and came running back, saying anxiously, “This band—they’re kind of like the Stooges.”
We’d met Malcolm before through the shop, Sex. So after the Ravensbourne gig, we got to talking to him and the band. I can’t remember if Vivienne was there or not. Malcolm invited us to the Marquee the very next week, so we shuffled along. That was the gig where they played with Eddie and the Hot Rods. The Pistols were fantastic! That was it. While we purposely didn’t go to every show, we went to what we felt were the important ones, particularly those at the El Paradise and the 100 Club. There was me, Simon, Siouxsie, a girl called Sharon, Tracy, Debbie, and a guy named Berlin. Lots of other people—in and out—were attracted to this new sound, particularly guys who were known then as soul boys. It was a rather strange grouping, but the thing that brought us all together was probably the music of David Bowie.
Bowie seemed to attract people on lots of different levels. You didn’t have to particularly “get it” with Bowie. “It” could be either his music or his look. There were a lot of straight, bricklayer types who liked Bowie, partly because he was so huge at that point. Roxy Music, who were stylish and camp, also served as common ground. As everything got going, these soul boy clubs sprouted up in London.
The soul boys would go down and shop at Sex on the King’s Road and pick up vinyl T-shirts and do their hair up. Sometimes the music didn’t particularly mean anything special to them, except that it was a great way to meet girls. That’s how the scene sprung. Soul boys were usually tough, while the Teds might be considered more like a fifties/seventies equivalent to, say, the Hell’s Angels. Soul boys could be considered the equivalent to the current Rave scene. Soul boys were only interested in music that wasn’t generally available—lots of import and obscure dance and soul records. Oddly enough, they used to congregate in places like Essex. They were a kind of tribe. You might describe them as inherently intolerant, bigoted, and possibly racist. It was an edgy alliance between “the punks,” as we were later called, and the soul boys. Meanwhile, the Teds were the enemy of everyone who looked different. It was all kind of strange when you stop to realize that the original reason the Teds and the soul boys dressed differently was because they didn’t want to fit in, either. They only wanted to look sharp and smart. They should have understood what it meant to look different. However, they were a bit older, probably second-generation Teddys, and by then their look had become a uniform, far removed from their movement’s original motivation, which was breaking away in the spirit of being different.
No doubt we represented the Pistols’ first organized following, and Malcolm encouraged the whole idea of a following, a movement as such. He didn’t give it a name. Nobody gave it a name. We just tried to be as irritating as possible to anybody who got in the way. Not in a violent way, but more in a clever, sarcastic way. The violence escalated a bit later.
Another thing I remember during the rise of all this was the heat of the summer of 1977. It was unbelievably hot! We’ve since had summers that have been hot, maybe hotter, but this seemed like the first one. Temper and temperatures were boiling to the point where you knew something, maybe something particularly unpleasant, was about to take place. The heat had a lot to do with what went on during the summer of 1977, although it never deterred anyone. Maybe that’s why people mixed their clothes with a lot of see-through stuff. Also, a lot of the imagery that Malcolm was creating in the shop came from two movies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Cabaret.
The parents of one of our Bromley friends disappeared for a couple of weeks, so we planned a series of parties at his house. The first one was called the First Annual Bromley [Anti-]Nazi Party Rally. We all dressed up in a homemade, twenties, Berlin, cabaret, decadent style. The Pistols must have been playing out of town that night. They came to that party afterward, which marked the first social event between us. For some odd reason, you could buy these little pins down on the King’s Road, little eagle badges with swastikas on them. So the whole thing was a bit of fun designed to provoke. And it did provoke a lot of people.
Although it may have seemed unusual for a band to be close to their fans, we became more like friends since things hadn’t really gotten to the stage where the notoriety had set in. The Pistols had only done maybe half a dozen gigs. You didn’t meet in bars. As it is with the blacks in America, you could let your hair down by taking over somebody’s house and having a house party. A house party was part of everybody’s youth.
As for the Pistols, for me, the whole group was John. He looked amazing—so skinny. He had a real style about everything he did. Each night he reinvented the band’s sartorial side. A lot has been said about the Pistols stealing Richard Hell’s look. I don’t agree; John invented his look himself. While the shop was still called Sex, I don’t believe it dominated the way the band looked per se. Once Malcolm and Vivienne’s shop became Seditionaires, and they started showing all the bondage gear, they’d give it to John first so afterward his fans would buy it. It was manipulative from that angle, but before that, John was always mixing up styles, inventing as he went along. One of the strongest things about seeing the Pistols’ live show was John’s sense of humor—his wisecracks. There was also the lyrical content, even in a live situation, where lines that would pop out would really make you think, “Pretty Vacant.” Oh, yes, I feel like this.
BILLY IDOL: They were what we wanted to happen. If we could visualize the rock band of the mid-seventies, there it was in front of us. The Sex Pistols. We all wanted to do music, and here was the prototype. In a way, it was like being in heaven. All our lives we read about other scenes. We wanted one of our own. We had gone away from rock as something to be believed in. Iggy, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground took me away from people like the Mahavishnu Orches
tra. That’s beautiful music, but, fuck, I can’t play guitar like that! Going all that way for somebody else’s religion was something I didn’t want to do.
JULIEN TEMPLE: When I saw them play … and the kind of audience they attracted at their early gigs, it was clear to me that I should stop what I was doing and find a way of working with the Pistols. It was an earthquake in the first stages.
Here was a band talking about the very things I was feeling, and it all came back to Bromley. I desperately wanted to find what I wanted to do in life and break out of this suburban boredom. As far as we were concerned, here was a soft, hedonistic approach. We didn’t know what we wanted to do. We especially didn’t know where all of this was going, but for the first time in our lives we were having a brilliant time as it was happening. We were making waves, but they were ripples at first. It was also an adolescent search for identity, though we didn’t think of it that way at the time. It’s only with hindsight that I can see that.
At the time, John was the focus. He seemed the perfect front man, while Steve and Paul were more the lads. Although I’m not really an expert on other musical eras, I do know that the precursor of the hippie era in England came out of a rich upper-class set of Chelsea people. When the Pistols began, these people were still hanging over; hence they were the first wave that was going to be usurped. As far as we were concerned, the Chelsea hippie art crowd was going to be destroyed. They were too effete and ineffectual, they were safe in their own little world. Their artiness annoyed us. Ultimately they didn’t really care about music, much less seeing it as a force for delivering anything meaningful. So they had to go. And they did. They were pushed aside—to the back of the hall, starting when the Pistols played at Andrew Logan’s party, which actually seemed boring for the band. They played the same set twice. Nothing really happened until Jordan from the shop jumped up on stage. By the end of the evening I think the art crowd got the message that they were being pissed on from a great height. Ironically, Malcolm was part of that crowd, even though he wasn’t the type to take a side about anything.