by John Lydon
This was about the time that Siouxsie, Billy, and I were starting to experiment musically, in a Velvet Underground sort of way. Our influences were the Stooges, the Velvets, Roxy, and Bowie. Also the first Ramones album, which had come out around that time. All of this served as an Identikit for the next group of bands that would evolve after the Pistols. The three of us had this idea that we wanted to form a band for just one gig, a one-off happening. I was a nonmusician. Billy was working up his new band, Chelsea, with guitarist Tony James. Siouxsie had gone to a few auditions a few years earlier, through Melody Maker ads and the like. Those bands always turned out to be hopeless pub rock groups, so she’d never sung in public. In fact, what she was trying to audition for probably hadn’t been invented until the Pistols came along. We’d just seen the Pistols at the Screen on the Green, a landmark gig in their growth and development. It was at that point that the music papers started taking them seriously, while at the same time the band hadn’t yet propelled themselves to a national level. At the end of the show, we cornered Malcolm. We knew he was putting together a two-day festival at the 100 Club that was scheduled in about a month’s time. We told him we were going to form a band and play there. He agreed. That was the way it was then; it was that easy.
We were set to play on a Monday or Tuesday. The Friday before, Billy rang me up.
“Tony James doesn’t want me to play with you,” he said. “He thinks my playing with you would be too much of a distraction and take away from Chelsea.”
Even though we were going to do just this one gig for the one night, we had to find a guitarist quickly. We put everything together on the Saturday night at this bar called Louise’s. We knew Marco Pirroni, who could play guitar. We asked Sid, “Do you want to play drums?”
“I’ll play drums. I don’t care.”
The next day, Sunday, Bernie Rhodes decided to let us rehearse at the Clash’s studio and to let us use their equipment. We practiced for about twenty minutes. Me on bass, Marco on guitar, Siouxsie on vocals, Sid on drums. After the twenty minutes, Sid jumped off the drums and said, “That’ll do. We don’t want to actually learn anything, do we?”
Then came the actual gig. There was a bit of a problem because Siouxsie was wearing a swastika. Bernie, who had supplied the equipment, took offense to that, so instead of using the Clash’s gear, we ended up using somebody else’s equipment instead. The thing I remember most about the performance was that John came right to the front of the stage and started leaping around. John was big pals with Sid. He, with Wobble and John Gray, intent on being the audience, went straight to the front of the crowd. He made no bones about it. Maybe they were returning the favor—a role reversal of all the times we were the audience. After the set, we walked back and melted into the crowd. We were interviewed for the Evening Standard. I told them, “We’re splitting up. We just wanted to play for twenty minutes.”
Two people cornered us. One was Nils Stevenson, who had worked with the Pistols. He wanted to manage us. The other was Kenny Morris, who became our drummer. They both said it was the best thing they’d ever seen.
Everything was so focused. As the music evolved, there were huge spreads in the papers about the events before they happened and after they happened. There were no other diversions, nor was there any diversity. The Pistols, and the few bands who evolved along with them, were the only thing going on in English music at that time. That was it. If there were other bands, the spotlight wasn’t on them. It was on us. And the more music we tried, the more ways we could go.
I don’t want to sound like this musical era represented a crusade. It was more like you’re given this opportunity, which was not necessarily our only opportunity, but it was such a good time that we felt the need to do something special. It was a time that manifested itself. You couldn’t even dream of the same opportunity coming along again.
In hindsight, I can see that the Pistols era cleaned the rock ’n’ roll slate. As more time passes, it may not be looked back on so fondly, since the outcome of it all was fairly depressing. Some may have found the whole period too nihilistic, but I disagree with them. I think of it as an honest time. It appears now that if you bracket it next to the decade that followed—the positive, opportunistic, money-grabbing eighties—the Pistols era may seem to be lacking in terms of money-making attributes. But we were trying to throw away a lot of the false positivism of the hippies, whom we viewed as ostriches with their heads in the sand. Neither of the usual descriptions—asexuality or nihilism—fit the times. There was a lot of humor and a lot of provocation. A lot of people were making fun at the expense of a lot of other people. It certainly wasn’t as calculated as other musical periods.
I can never understand why people perceive the period as asexual because there were lots of shenanigans going on. Asexual is the wrong word. Trisexual may be a better word, even though sex wasn’t really that high on the agenda. It didn’t really have too much importance in the structure of this little society that was building. That was one of the ways we were rebelling—by not getting into the usual stifling situations. It wasn’t particularly promiscuous, but it certainly wasn’t asexual. Wasn’t it John who called sex “two minutes of squeaking noises”? That was on a par with Boy George saying he’d rather have a cup of tea.
HOWARD THOMPSON: There weren’t hundreds of beautiful women hanging around the Sex Pistols. There was the occasional good-looking girl. The idea was not to dress up or down, but out. Provocative. Shocking. Apart from everything else, this whole movement brought fetish wear—leather, vinyl, and latex—out from the sex clubs right onto the street. I’ll tell you, a lot of it was extremely sexy. As for how it changed the relationships between young men and women, I don’t know if it changed anything at all. I’m sure everyone went home afterward, peeled their clothes off, and did what they did normally.
If the government sensed trouble, they had no idea what form it would take. As usual, they chose to come in with the iron fist first and ask questions afterward. Certainly, during the beginning, the scene was so underground they hardly knew it existed. All the police and the councils saw were a few strange-looking people walking about in the streets. But it was slowly building from the inside of nightclubs and small gigs that the Pistols were playing to the outside, the streets. Originally there was nothing the government or the police could put a handle on. Much later, John was systematically raided, which had more to do with the media grabbing hold after the Grundy show.
I didn’t see Malcolm as a manipulating Svengali. My favorite incident came after we’d all been on “The Bill Grundy Show.” In the heat of the moment, as the whole thing had began to snowball, Malcolm was convinced the incident marked the end of the group. He’d thought they’d blown it. Instead the band landed on the front page of the papers. Once we’d actually finished the Grundy interview, after Steve and John had taken it over, we went back into the hospitality room. There was the band, me, and Siouxsie. All the phones started ringing. Siouxsie and I were picking up the phones, telling people to fuck off. We also posed as the complaint department, bantering with the indignant callers:
“Well, actually, I thought they were rather articulate.”
Malcolm was freaking out. “Don’t you dare answer those phones,” he shouted.
The Grundy show was absolutely the hinge. Before, the Pistols were just a group of annoying musical hacks. There were a few little TV specials tracing the evolution of this strange youth culture. Art programs were very keen to find out what this stuff was all about. Mainly, though, there was lots of shooting in the dark, with everybody getting off on the energy of it. The Grundy show debacle gave the movement its shape. With or without the Grundy show, however, an explosion was inevitable. After all, the Pistols were so good. There’s no other way of describing them. No matter what people say, the Pistols were a fantastic band. Something else would have happened that would have thrown them into the public eye.
The force with which they were thrown into the media’
s eye was the turning point. The Pistols scared people. People didn’t know what it all was because it appeared to be so malevolent. It was misunderstood in the same way people misinterpreted Malcolm’s role as a Svengali. It wasn’t like that. On the inside, we were confused and sometimes unfocused. Maybe that’s what made the Pistols so frightening to outsiders. You couldn’t pin it down nor understand it, so the police, the Teds, and the government chose to smash it down as hard as they could.
Although I wasn’t on the boat, the clamp-down seemed to have occurred during the Jubilee celebration. That was the first indication that the band was a bit out of their league. The fact that the police had a semi-riot on their hands scared people like Malcolm. I think he liked to feel as if he were in control most of time, even though by that point he clearly wasn’t. He became outnumbered around the time things got out of control—when John started to get personally harassed on the street. The police now knew who he was and where he lived, leaving him open and vulnerable, and he took the hits. Malcolm could have cared more about what happened to the band, but I don’t think he could have done much. What could he have done apart from hiring bodyguards?
By that time, if it wasn’t the authorities, it was the Teds who were waging war. It was pretty scary to try to do anything. Ironically, whenever the Pistols played in the heart of London there was hardly any violence. However, there was a whole network of towns to the north that were notoriously violent. The Pistols did well up there because there was such a large number of disenchanted youths to play to. They got off on it. A lot of the crowd was soul boys.
I think the music also attracted Rasta people into the fold because initially it was more tolerant. There was always dub reggae around, and it was the most experimental music going. Before, there was mainly blue beat and ska, which was the province of the mods—which was bizarre in that the white followers of this early Jamaican music were, in essence, budding Nazis. From the mods came the skinheads who were the precursors of the National Front. We found it weird that their chosen musical form was created by black people. That’s the way it still is to a degree.
Even when you consider all the trappings, the swastikas, leather bondage, and chains, we never felt much intolerance. To us these weren’t badges of intolerance, but symbols of provocation to an older generation that had to get out of the way to make room for the younger voices. To do so, we made use of any form possible. However, the swastikas were dropped fairly quickly because we realized it wasn’t the most clever way to get our point across. When it was still a small movement you could use symbols like that, but once the following got too big, you couldn’t use symbols like swastikas and images of German decadence. On a broader scope, it would communicate the wrong meaning.
A lot of people associate Sid with his heroin days. Actually, before he got deeply into drugs, he was one of the funniest guys. He had a brilliant sense of humor, goofy, very sweet, and really cute. In a lot of ways he was like a cartoon character. We first met him at one of the concerts. He began bouncing around the dance floor, the so-called legend of the pogo dance. It was merely Sid jumping up and down, trying to see the group, leaping up and down because he was stuck in the back somewhere. Up until the time we rehearsed together for the 100 Club, I didn’t know him very well. He was always around and, ironically, very quiet until he began to get involved with Nancy. She was this horrible whining woman who appeared as a spin-off of the Heartbreakers’ scene when they arrived from New York. Up until that time, drugs consisted mainly of sulfates. However, it was Thunders and Nolan who wreaked heroin and havoc.
A mutual friend, Linda, had a flat in Victoria at the St. James Hotel, a place where we’d all go to stay over because none of us had flats in London. Most of us were still living with our parents, so we’d stay at Linda’s, waiting for things to happen, making things happen. Linda was … kind of a dominatrix.… She’d tell stories about TV celebrities that she was hired to beat every now and again. They were people into children’s programming and stuff. I remember thinking, Really? Him?
Also, Simon Barker was renting one of the rooms, so we’d stay there quite a lot. Jordan would stay there. That’s where I met Nancy—she was hanging out with Sid. None of us could understand why Sid was involved with her. They seemed completely different from one another. I never really saw Sid much after he got together with Nancy. Siouxsie and I did go to see him after he’d been arrested for throwing a glass at the 100 Club. He was sent down to a detention center in Ashwood in Kent, and he was beaten up; he had a black eye and was down in the dumps.
Sid did throw the glass. Siouxsie and I were standing right next to him. He was aiming at the Damned, so he had my full support. The three of us were saying, “What is this band? Nonsense, nothing to do with anything. Pantomime seaside-special stuff.”
So Sid drank his glass empty and threw it in the direction of the stage. Instead of landing on the stage, it hit a pillar, and I think it shattered and hit some girl. It was one of those irresponsible Sid things that have been chronicled ever since, even though I had never seen him act like that before.
CAROLINE COON: My instinct at the time was that Sid didn’t do it. However, if he was at the bar sneering around, he could have. Whether he did or didn’t, I would have been there to defend him. So the next day after he got out, I took Sid to one of the Bond Street Release lawyers. It was very funny. I also took him to Fortnum & Mason’s tea room and soda fountain for an ice cream. You couldn’t get more posh. They still sell the most fantastic Knickerbocker Glories! It was just around the corner from the lawyer’s office. Sid and I walked in. At the time, the more high-classed the places were, the more likely you could wear anything you liked. That’s why I thought I could easily take Sid there.
His jacket was absolutely unbelievable. We’re sitting at the soda fountain bar, and it’s even beyond their tolerance level. The waitress said to Sid, “Will you please take off your leather jacket?”
Sid took off his leather jacket, and underneath he had on this ripped, filthy T-shirt, with burns up and down his arms. At that point the waitress couldn’t say anything since it was far worse than if she had let him keep the jacket on. So we sat and ate ice cream together. Later we went to court together as well. I was quite content to bail these rock ’n’ rollers out when they got busted. I didn’t think it was a good lesson for any young person to be taken into prison.
The Ashwood detention center visit is the last vivid memory I have of Sid. I was shocked when he died. I heard about it on the radio. Certainly by this point, any closeness between the Pistols and what was called the Bromley contingent had totally vanished. We were more concerned with our own careers as the Banshees. Although we were still friends, we never saw the Pistols much. They’d be off on the Anarchy Tour or they were doing gigs under pseudonyms. Things had seemed to be going pretty badly for them, and our paths no longer seemed to cross. The split between Nils Stevenson—his working for us and leaving Malcolm—was probably looked at by the Pistols as a bit of a betrayal. Nils certainly felt betrayed by Malcolm if only because he paid him three hundred pounds for a year’s work. Nils took us over when we had only a few hundred pounds in the bank. Since then we’ve managed to make everything last. Our estrangement with the Pistols wasn’t as if anything went sour; our relationship just sort of dispersed. We also couldn’t handle the fact that the media had gotten hold of things and there were so many new people turning up—the bridge and tunnel crowd. It was on to the next thing—on to our music.
I saw Sid’s first show with the Pistols. It was at Notre Dame. By that point, the band had gotten too big for me. It wasn’t quite the same anymore, but I thought they played well. It wasn’t their fault that things were escalating out of control. In our own way, we English people view music as our own personal, closely guarded secret. By that time there were too many people, so eventually I got shoved to the back of the hall as well. I never resented the band for getting that popular. I never felt they’d changed. They were as vibrant
as ever. Yet this seething mob in front wasn’t for me. That was never my scene. I just liked to stand and watch the band and dig what they were doing. I remember thinking, the monster took over and ate itself.
It was weird hearing of the Pistols’ decay secondhand and from afar. It all happened in America. Sid had been accused of killing Nancy, and that was so terribly depressing. Yet I don’t think Sid deserved that fate at all. He was a victim of circumstance. Sid may have been self-destructive, but he wasn’t mean. But then I didn’t see the effect that heroin had on him; that can totally change anybody. That may have brought out things in him that I’d never seen before. The person I was reacting to, the Sid that I knew before Nancy, had died. I couldn’t believe it. It was such a waste. At the same time, I was really pissed off. I’ve never really understood the band’s reaction to his death. I don’t know if it was true, but the reaction seemed to be, “Sid asked for it. It was long overdue.”
Whether or not that was their true reaction, there was never ever any public display of remorse. Sid deserved better than that from all of us. Yet by the time he died I was well on the outside, so it was hard to tell what was going on. After the American tour, everything crumbled.
I look at the early Pistols period as an apprenticeship of sorts. Not in a musical way. The music of the Banshees, even the music we do now, evolved from a time before the Pistols. But as far as attitude, how to do the music, how to approach the business, how to approach life in general, it all comes from that explosion of my adolescence, and the farther it recedes into the distance, the more important it seems. I keep waiting to see if something as powerful, as equally meaningful, will happen again, and I haven’t seen it. There have been movements since, but none of them have had such an awesome ideology or attitude behind them. Nothing has had the kind of single-mindedness or focus that the Pistols had. And there hasn’t been anything as crafty since. Hip Hop is too sexist and intolerant, detracting from the fact that it is a very interesting and experimental type of music.