Rotten

by John Lydon

  “That was Steve Jones who did that.”

  I would nod in agreement. “Yes, you’re right there, Mum!”

  JOHN GRAY: Eileen Lydon was proud of her John; she was proud of all her children, whatever they’d done. For friends of the Lydons, part of the fun of the household was that we could go over there for drinks and beers and play records ’til midnight. I could crash on the sofa in the front room. In the morning someone would come down and make you a cup of tea. That was unheard of in my house. There, people were all over. Jimmy might have a mate or a girlfriend. Sometimes they’d have breakfast and would be careful not to wake us up. In a tiny flat! Not a word would be said. If it was my house, my mum would be downstairs blasting your head off.

  I know my dad was proud of all of it. I was in the newspaper. Well, that was something good. If he didn’t understand the rest, fine. He could sweep that away into a corner and just deal with “That’s my son there!” His friends would never say anything bad to him. He’s rather on the tough side, definitely not one to shirk away from a fight. If there would be any insults thrown, it would be greeted with fists on face. He’s shorter than me, but like a lot of small people, he’s always been quick-tempered. He’s quieted down a lot over the last couple of years.

  My mother used to egg me on. She was an absolute fun-loving person. Mum loved Alice Cooper and saw him as a wonderful joke and silly theater. She liked modern music of any kind—all dance music. She was very open. I took her to see Gary Glitter, and she thought that was fabulous. I bought the tickets and took her to the concert, but I couldn’t get my old man to go. Gary was really nice; someone in his management spotted us sitting in the audience. They took us backstage, then to Tramps, a posh disco. We drank wine until four in the morning. My old man was furious when we both got home pissed.

  “You bringing that dirty drunk shit on my wife, you fucking hooligan. Get out of my house!”

  He was jealous because he’d missed out, but at the same time his pride wouldn’t let him go because it was something he couldn’t fit into. He’s shy about big crowds.

  You’d see newscasters and TV stars at our gigs trying to punk it up, man. “Gee whiz, you kids!” I saw lots of old rock stars—and lots of jealous rock stars, too. One of the most verbal instances was Mick Jagger. “The Sex Pistols are awful, and they can’t play!” Shame on you, Mick. The Stones were one of the most notoriously inept bands in music, and here was this old coke hag pointing fingers and calling us disgusting. The Stones were into patting themselves on the backs and being self-congratulatory, like many of those old-timers. The Pistols were an absolute threat to that nice little world they had all built for themselves. They came out of the ever-so-generous-and-love-everyone sixties and soon turned into fucking greedy, shifty little businessmen doing their utmost to stifle the opposition. The lot of them deserved the name dinosaurs—too big, too pompous, elaborate, enormous amounts of equipment, only playing very large auditoriums or open-air festivals. Music became as remote from the general public as you could possibly get. They became like little royal families unto themselves. They carted themselves around the country, waving to us occasionally. They bought immense houses, joined the stockbrokers’ belt, and sent their kids to—public schools! See? The system! They became it.

  CAROLINE COON: By the mid-seventies, we were disappointed with what the rock ’n’ roll cultural leaders were doing. They were shaking hands with the fucking royalty! They had turned into English gentlemen! Street-fighting, man? Huh! The tragedy was seeing Jagger at an aristocrat’s table having nothing to do with Jagger joining the aristocracy. The aristocracy has always had clowns at the dinner table, and there was rock ’n’ roll, emasculated, shaking hands with royalty.

  For some weird reason, Elton seems to be all right. He’s more like Coco the Clown, so utterly harmless I’d put him in the Barry Manilow category. Elton is not pretending to be something he’s not. He’s a fat buffoon who plays piano—adequately.

  Cliff Richard is a joke. He’s bad-mouthed me over the years. During the Pistols he supported what was known as the Festival of Light, a Christian light movement held on Trafalgar Square, to save the world from the likes of punk and Johnny Rotten. I remember seeing it on the news. I was thrilled at hearing Cliff bad-mouth me in front of thousands of Christian hypocrites. It was lovely. They were burning candles in the middle of the hot sun on a Sunday afternoon. For God and humanity!

  Oh, God. David Bowie mentions the Sex Pistols in a lyric on his Tin Machine album. Well, how strange for him! This is the man who had me thrown out backstage. I was at an Iggy Pop gig at Camden Palace in London, and I went backstage to say hello because I had met Iggy a year before. Mr. Bowie wanted me removed—thrown out, in fact. He wasn’t touring with Iggy, he was just backstage. I thought it was odd. It was Iggy’s gig, and Mr. Bowie got his personal bouncers to have me removed.

  I’ve had an utter loathing for Bowie since then. What a pompous prat! A couple of years later, PiL were playing a nice nightclub in Switzerland. In trots Mr. Bowie. He made his way backstage. It’s two minutes before we go on. “Hi, I’m Dave Bowie, and this is my son. He’d like to meet you.” I don’t know anyone who could deal with that shit two minutes before going on. We’re just going up the stairs, and I had to cope with this. I wasn’t rude to his son. His son had never done me any harm. But to him—blank. “Now if this was your gig and I came back, would you have me thrown out?” I walked away and left it at that. And I’ll bet he would have. Again and again.

  ZANDRA RHODES: Whereas some people might question how something like colored hair could be considered beautiful, I think some of the extreme punk with the points and the safety pins was so heavily designed, it was beautiful.

  I made no point of condemning fashion designer Zandra Rhodes for her high-priced punk fashions. I thought the safety pin trend was hysterical. If someone was going to pay two thousand pounds for a torn dress with a safety pin on it, well, it serves them right. They don’t deserve the money. I enjoyed the absurdity. There were fools going around in clothes like that because the fashion houses had moved down to street wear. The joke was a joke was a joke, as Zandra would do chat shows while her clothes would raise great titillations from the audiences.

  ZANDRA RHODES: The concept of what is rebellious and what is ugly can be turned into beauty and new thought. Its rebellion has a huge influence on how the youth culture looks and how it wears things.

  The Pistols used to gig under assumed names, more based on humor than anything else. The undercover SPOTS—Sex Pistols on Tour Secretly—was a way of keeping things alive while not having to deal with the mass hysteria of the press. We did the gigs to stay fresh and fully rehearsed for better days. It was agreed by all that a low profile was sensible. We went out under several different names: Tax Exiles, Acne Rabble, and the Spots. We thought of the names as we arrived or the day before—the silliest thing we could think of.

  We once played a gig in Hounslow at a Teddy boy convention. We booked ourselves under some cowboy name. Then we trotted onstage as the Sex Pistols. My God, was that a hoot! They thought it was the cheekiest, most sarcastic thing done to them, yet there was no violence at the gig, even though there was all this so-called, high-profile press animosity between Teds and punks. We weren’t supposed to get on together, but there we were on stage playing our songs and there they were in the audience dancing. Then you’d read in the Daily Mirror and the Sun about all this punks versus Teds nonsense.

  There was so much sex around in the seventies, it got very boring. It made you feel kind of grubby because somehow it wasn’t right. When I met my wife, Nora, we had such a row, but I knew there was something about that woman that I wanted. It wasn’t just the sex. I wanted that person in my life, and I never got that before. It was always just little trysts and these situations—like grabbing a bag of speed, then thinking, That was all right, but now I’ve got a headache.

  The first time I met Nora, we absolutely hated each other on sight, but I l
oved her image because she wears forties clothing. Nora doesn’t follow fashion. She has her own thing. She was warned that I was the most awful person on earth, so she behaved accordingly. There were a few bitter words. It turned around because the warnings came so thick and fast that Nora’s curiosity was piqued. “He can’t be all that bad, can he?” She invited me over to her place, and from there on in, we got on really well. This was through the Pistols days. The way she puts it, she had escaped from her native Germany. I was living around when we first met. We were together occasionally at that time. It fluctuated; I was young, I needed my freedom, and I hadn’t been naughty enough in the real world for anything permanent.

  With Nora, my life is total commitment. I couldn’t go home night after night to a brain-dead zombie. Being a two-career family eliminates boredom. Boredom is the killer of any relationship. That will get you every time. The one-income family structure is wrong to me. Both should have an outside life, because without it, things won’t work. I’m the kid in this family. So is Nora. We can play any role we like.

  I don’t think my old man liked any of my girlfriends at all. If I’d bring them to the house, he’d say, “That one’s on drugs, I’m telling you!” “That one looks like she’s got fleas!” Probably has. But he loved Nora the first time she walked in. It was so funny when he said, “God! She’s more my kind of woman. Wha’ are you doin’ with a good woman like dat? Leave her here!” Nora was saying, “Mr. Lydon, get your hands off me!” I suppose our age difference—Nora being older—meant something to him, but not to any great offense. He was just trying to think of himself as younger. My mum was gone by then, so he was just lonely. After the Sex Pistols there were many punk girls who went through his bedroom. One was affiliated with bananas. A lot of the punk girls at the time were intrigued. What’s Rotten’s father like? Is he anything like him? Some probably went from me to him. I didn’t bother to think about it too much at the time. I just thought it was good that he was having fun.

  I was a bit bored making the Sex Pistols album. There was something like twenty-one guitars laid down and only two tracks for vocals—one for the verses and one for the choruses. I did most of the songs all the way through, one or two takes, and that’s it. There was very little bouncing of tracks, and I got annoyed about it. We did some different versions of songs, I did a different version of “Submission” with Sid, which wasn’t put on the album when it was first released in Britain. It was a lot different from the Glen Matlock version because it was a hell of a lot less musical and I thought more chaotic and important.

  STEVE JONES: I loved recording the Bollocks album. I remember when I was doing some guitar overdubs late at night, I heard on the radio that Elvis Presley had died. I remember it clearly because I wasn’t sad. I just thought I’d better get back and do those guitar overdubs. No one gave a fuck about Elvis Presley, especially us lot.

  Chris Thomas did a hilariously good job as producer of Never Mind the Bollocks. I liked the idea of using him because I liked Roxy Music, although I knew we would never sound anything like them. I didn’t realize until we got in the studio that Chris was hearing impaired in one ear. He has engineers like Bill Price to tell him what’s in and out of tune. “Chris, the guitar’s out of tune.” “Is it? Where is it?” Can you imagine that at a recording session? Bozo yobs! A producer with one good ear. Sid was so bad in the studio that even Chris Thomas knew. The whole thing went way over his head so Sid drowned himself in vodka. He could not hold a tune, and I think it was a fear of the whole situation. It was all too much, which is understandable. Sid was thrown into the deep end just like me—from a member of the audience to suddenly being in the group. Outside of Glen, there were no hired musicians. Any talk otherwise is all bullshit. By that point we were playing very well. Steve was very good and certainly didn’t need session musicians to come in and back him up. If they were used, they were used without my seeing them—unless they sneaked them in when I left.

  STEVE JONES: Sid wanted to come down and play on the album, and we tried as hard as possible not to let him anywhere near the studio. Luckily he had hepatitis at the time. He had to stay at the hospital, and that was really good. He actually came down a couple of times and played on “God Save the Queen” and “Bodies.” He played this farty old bass part, and we just let him do it. When he left I dubbed another part on, leaving Sid’s down low. I think it might be barely audible on the track.

  The Pistols album compromised too much. It was most definitely too traditional. The music was traditional sixties, but my approach wasn’t. The tunes can almost be found on old Who or Small Faces records. It used the mod, Kinks approach of quirky little melodies and three chord progressions. If the sessions had gone the way I wanted, it would have been unlistenable for most people because they wouldn’t have had a point of reference. “This doesn’t remind me of anything! I can’t relate to it!” You know the attitude; the general public are exceptionally lazy. They like what fits in neatly with everything else. I have had to learn to deal with this, I’m afraid. I’ve found ways of using that and twisting it into other things. The approach is more subtle these days than initially. While there’s no compromise as far as what the vocals do, I guess it’s the very nature of music; if you want people to listen, you’re going to have to compromise. You can’t go totally out into space. Nobody will follow and a voice in the wilderness is rather pointless.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: The Pistols were a true band. Although they hated Glen Matlock so much for his musicality, songs like “You’re So Pretty Vacant” were very musical, and I reckon he had something to do with that. Then Sid was brought in, and he wasn’t musical, which, spiritually, could have been a good thing. Ultimately, though, a band has to be musical, and John will admit to that now. If you go through John Rotten’s record collection, you will find some very musical albums. He likes music and is a music fan. That must have been a bit of a dilemma for him.

  The only way I could make waves in the Sex Pistols’ music was lyrically and vocally. The music was right in one respect, that it reflected back to a more working-class, ground-roots way of approaching music. My ideas at the time might have been too heady for most people. If you want to change things, you have to do it slower, you have to learn to have patience.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: There was nothing musically unique about the Sex Pistols, it was their spirit that was unique. By 1977 nothing could be unique. After all, there are only twelve notes to the scale, and these were twelve-bar songs they were writing. In a four-piece band—bass, drums, guitar, and vocals—rhythm guitar is the basic ingredient. With four pieces in a band, you can evoke almost any kind of music you want. Everything had been done before, and that’s what was so great about the Sex Pistols. They actually came out with an original voice and look that said something.

  The Pistols’ ultimate mark wasn’t left by recording. We were a threat—for what reason is anyone’s guess. Our record wasn’t done according to how the industry felt it should be done. That stumped a lot of people, particularly the major record companies. They had their set formats, and if you break out of that mold, then they have no space for you. I only wish Malcolm was a bit more humble about it and didn’t try to pretend that it was all his work of art and genius. It certainly wasn’t. He was shooting in the dark like the rest of us, but he would never accept that anyone else but him could have any thoughts about it at all. You can’t do that to people like the Pistols.

  BILLY IDOL: Lydon always said exactly what he thought, and he never kowtowed to anybody. Once he and Malcolm were on this TV program together, and he argued as much with Malcolm as the host did. He had a larger-than-life charisma. The Pistols said and did what they wanted to do, and it wasn’t just Malcolm thinking it up.

  What is the point in arguing and trying to take credit for a title like Never Mind the Bollocks? Steve Jones said it when we were debating over what to call the fucking thing. Steve said, “Oh, fuck it, never mind the bollocks of it all.” That will do.

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sp; I was in Nottingham with Richard Branson when they banned the cover in some record stores. It was declared illegal and offensive. They were offended by the word bollocks. We fought it in court and showed them that the word was in the dictionary. How could it be illegal? It was a valid Anglo-Saxon term for testicles. Branson enjoyed the jolly good fun of it. Heaven forbid if politicians like Mary Whitehouse ever liked anything we did—that would be slash-your-wrists time for me. I didn’t give a damn who didn’t like what.

  The cover concept comes from a blackmail letter. A ransom note. If the cover had been left totally to me, I’m sure I would have come up with something vile, so it was best to keep it simple. We already had the reputation, there was no point in compounding it. We just wanted to put the album out, plain and simple. There it is. A really horrible, ugly, cheesy cover with absolutely no consideration about it. There was no great master plan, it was just the simplest and ugliest thing we could come up with on a bored afternoon. No genius. However, now, of course, it’s become the punk Venus de Milo, and everyone is claiming credit for it.

  BOB GRUEN: The first time I got the Pistols record, I couldn’t believe it. It was so pink, yellow, and green, with boxes, shapes, and angles. Nothing was even. It was truly chaotic—nothing like I expected. I brought the record to Sheila Rock’s house. She was into the avant garde movement and very open-minded. We played the record and looked at each other in horror.

  What the fuck is this? we thought.

  We didn’t sit around and wax Situationist philosophy. Never. I understood who the Situationists were. Jamie Reid was very into it, but I always thought it was foolishness—art students just being art students. The Situationists had no situation—no rules, no regulations. That’s their apparent philosophy. But the trouble was that they thought about “organized” chaos. They were too structured for my liking, word games and no work. Plus they were French, so fuck them. I don’t know what the big palabra was about the Situationists, anyway. Mind games for the muddled classes.