Rotten

by John Lydon

  Artwork for the “God Save the Queen” single was just a picture stuck on to a tattered flag and photographed. Safety pin in the nose. Big deal. They were apparently trying to ban that, too, yet there was no law to stop us. The controversial “Holidays in the Sun” sleeve cover was done by a kid who just turned up at the office one day. Some travel agents, like Thomas Cook, thought we were having a serious dig at them. That wasn’t the idea, but we didn’t deny anything. Why? It’s much better than promoting yourself. The press don’t realize how much publicity they’re giving you.

  Managers are supposed to get together an efficient team and elevate you into situations you normally wouldn’t be in. Our gigs were chaotic enough. It wasn’t because we couldn’t play or were too lazy, the equipment was so goddamned third-rate awful. We had a very important concert at Brunel University in December of 1977. It was presumed that if we broke that one, we could be one of the biggest bands. Four and a half thousand people turned up, and we had the cheapest, shittiest PA with a spray-can piece of canvas hung behind the stage. The PA wasn’t good enough for a small nightclub, let alone an aircraft hangar with four thousand screaming people. You couldn’t hear anything except fuzzy noise. The backdrop was a piece of black plastic hanging on the wall. Paul Simonon of the Clash spray-painted something on it, and that was it. The Clash were very into their slogans at the time. No monitors and no lights. No music playing in the hall beforehand, so the audience grew very angry and impatient. Everything ran late. There was no consideration for the crowd having to get home afterward, since transport in London is not good in certain areas after hours. Backstage I knew it was making the Pistols look bad. I said so at the time, but Malcolm wouldn’t have it. He’s well and fine with his hindsight of wanting to create that sense of chaos. But this was rubbish. He wouldn’t put the money into a marvelous show. Instead it backfired on the Pistols rather pitifully. We could have turned that one pivotal gig into an important movement. In hindsight, Malcolm might say he did it deliberately. Yet Malcolm is full of big schemes, although he has never done anything minimally, except spend.

  Malcolm had no qualms about spending on that movie, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. Hundreds of thousands of our pounds went into that. He thought doing a movie was the most novel thing we could have done. I liked the idea of our own movie—think of what we could have been up to! But no. It turned into a Russ Meyer script, tits and God knows what. After I met Russ Meyer, this dirty old man, I felt really shabby about the whole thing. I didn’t want to know from there on. I knew fuck-all about scripts, but I had ideas. When we got there it became, “Shut up and listen!” That kind of attitude never appeals to me. I hated Russ Meyer from the first second I saw him—an overbearing, senile old git. Malcolm was in love with the idea because it was his idea, if not quite his money.

  BILLY IDOL: The best thing about Malcolm—he said things to you that were volatile and helped put you into a position where you had to come up with something.

  I was asking too many questions. “What’s happening here? Where’s the money?”

  SEGMENT 13:

  PAUL COOK, DRUMMER

  PAUL COOK

  GLEDHOW GARDENS, LONDON

  Before the Sex Pistols, I was working in a brewery as an electrician fixing plugs and electronics. One time I got caught stealing nine hundred pounds’ worth of gear. As usual, Steve got away and I was using a van, and we got caught very early on. Steve was great. I’d known him since we were little; we went to school together. We used to go and see bands like the Faces and the Stones and thought, They’re not that fucking great. They can’t play that well. We also felt they were losing touch; they had nothing to say.

  We wanted to create our own thing, so when we initially decided to get a band together Steve was learning the drums, then he went on to play guitar and sing, so I took over. He already had the drum kit, the equipment, and the rehearsal space, so he and I would practice every night.

  Steve and I used to hang out in the Sex shop while Glen worked there, especially on weekends. We’d see John come in with his two mates, Sid and John Gray. We’d also see the three of them on the King’s Road. I noticed John because he was quite striking with his green cropped hair. When we began looking for a singer, Glen talked about the guy with the cropped green hair. John seemed mad enough, and we wanted to know what he was like. We met him and set up the famous meeting at the Roebuck pub.

  We talked about music, and John had a lot to say for himself. It must have been nerve-racking for him to come back to the shop and sing in front of a jukebox while we watched. He broke into this spasmodic routine—arms and legs flailing to Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen”—and it was then I had the earliest inkling that we could work together. At first I thought he was really funny, then I said to myself, We’ve got it! I knew it straight away, but Steve wasn’t too sure. Glen and Malcolm thought John was okay, but I knew right then we were going to give it a go.

  John is a stickler for being on time. He was a very uptight, angry young man, and it didn’t take much to make him fly off the handle. We were all over the place that time and were late to meet him for the first rehearsal. I remember he got very upset at us.

  JOHN LYDON: But I’m my own worst critic. It had to be that way, even as a little kid. I think it’s very constructive. I just can’t let things slide and say, “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.” It matters to me. Most people find it annoying when I throw those same standards on others. I can make such a big deal out of someone not turning up for a recording or a rehearsal. I’ll take that so personally. There you go. I still have to go through my little ceremony. Isn’t it odd that for someone who hates the German mentality of time, that I can be so rigid about the fucking clock myself?

  From the start, John and Malcolm didn’t get along. John was a very difficult person to get on with, but I got along with him fine. I hung out with him the most. We used to stay over at his mum’s house and go out drinking together. John’s mum would do anything for you. She was a very nice lady. She’d have dinner ready like mums who look after their boys do. She had four boys—four Lydons—to deal with. She ran an open house and was very supportive of John. Among the other band members, I was the one who made the biggest effort to get along with him.

  STEVE JONES: I remember once Paul beat John up on Denmark Street. We’d been out drinking, and John had been going off on Paul. John, Paul, and I were drunk, and we went upstairs. John just wouldn’t shut up, and Paul couldn’t take it anymore, so he started pounding him. John was helpless, and I had to get Paul off him because he was beating him up pretty bad. Still, there wasn’t much physical violence; it was mainly all talk.

  Malcolm couldn’t handle John’s observations. John has a habit of putting people on the defensive straight away. He tests you out. So he started ridiculing Malcolm, and Malcolm couldn’t handle it. Malcolm could take it if it came from Steve and/or me, but he couldn’t handle John rubbing him up the wrong way. John couldn’t handle some of the things Malcolm would be doing. They both took it all personally.

  John always had this thing about his not being invited anywhere. Malcolm never said to me, “Let’s go. We don’t want John coming.” Since we were all so highly strung, what usually happened was that sometimes after we had a big row we’d all go off on our own and wouldn’t bother to speak to each other. I wouldn’t want to speak with John if we just had a row. The rest of us would go off and do our own thing, and he would go off and do his.

  John loves verbal rapport, plays on words, the odd put-down. He thrives on those things because he’s so good with words. He’s a semanticist, and he would push Malcolm, who would try not to take the bait. While Malcolm always said he didn’t want to be a baby-sitter and mollycoddle everyone, John would always ask Malcolm to do certain things.

  BILLY IDOL: They played the strip club, El Paradise, with the big mirror behind them on stage. They looked really fantastic. Apart from the lighted stage, it was all black. They were getting better and better
, and just the fact that the club was so small and the audience was made up of people like us who knew them made it possible for them to relax, get on with it, and be themselves. Week by week we saw them get better, take out the sixties numbers, and add new songs. Yes! Here we go! Throwing off the shackles of the past. It was exciting, and that antagonism between them and Malcolm made it happen. The first time I saw the Sex Pistols must have been when they played the 100 Club. Johnny kept haranguing Malcolm. He would say, “Get me a beer, Malcolm, you cunt.” Nobody was in the audience, and Malcolm was standing off stage saying, “Fuck it, get it yourself.” There was only us lot in the audience. The Pistols would play a song, then stand around.

  Up until the time we signed our first record deal with EMI in 1976, I was still working at the brewery. John was on the dole, and Steve wasn’t working, either. Forty pounds a week spending money for each band member seemed like enough at the time. I had somewhere to live, sharing our rehearsal hall with Steve on Denmark Street.

  JOHN GRAY: Steve was a burglar. Steve was a bit older than us. He had big, brutish, thuggish mates. When Glen goes on about John bringing his own mates with him, he forgets to mention that for every Wobble, Sid, and me, there were three brutish Steve mates, three dumbo Paul mates, three wanky, middle-class, Beatles-fan Glen mates. A lot of times, after we left the pub, we’d crash out at the studio. Nobody wanted to go home. You’d have Glen in one corner on the floor in a sleeping bag, and in another corner would be one of his wanky mates. Steve and Paul over here; John over there. It was mad. There was a whole gang of us that crossed class barriers, and the friction between the different elements was funny and made for a great social grouping at a gig or a party—all these different people thrown together who normally wouldn’t spend five minutes with each other.

  Like the band, it was a microcosm of what a typical Pistols audience would later become.

  In the early days things happened very quickly, and we played a lot of gigs. We got so popular right after the Bill Grundy television thing that we had to be careful where we played. We had to deal with the crowds and trouble. A week after the show, I was attacked on the street by some Teds. There was violence going on between Teds and punks at the time. We always have rival gangs fighting in London—skinheads and rockers, mods and rockers. When the punks came along, the Teds, who were English reactionaries, seemed to take to warfare. One day my girlfriend and I were walking to my home in west London when I got jumped by three Teds. I don’t know if they knew I was in the Pistols. They did know I was a punk. We reacted mostly in self-defense against the Teds. Punks sparked something in people, so they were ready for anything. We started fighting back; it turned into a pitched battle down on the King’s Road on Saturdays. People were so bored. Things happened more out of excitement than aggression. There was a lot of violence in 1976, but if anything happened it was blown up by the press. If someone got injured at a concert, it would be big news.

  HOWARD THOMPSON: I remember going to the 100 Club to see the Sex Pistols with Nick Kent of the NME and Michael Beale, who was the graphic art designer for Eddie and the Hot Rods. The three of us showed up early, standing against the back wall in a line toward the right-hand side of the stage. While I knew Nick Kent a little bit—not very well—I remember pointing out to Michael this guy toward the stage. About twenty yards to the edge of the stage was this kid leaning against the front of the stage, looking directly at Nick Kent. He was giving Nick “the eye,” staring, looking as tough, as mean and aggressive, as he possibly could. I don’t know whether Nick had noticed it, but I had already sensed that this guy was looking for a little trouble. Who was this person? I’d never seen him before. It was uncomfortable. While Michael had noticed it, he thought nothing of it. As the band ambled onto the stage, this guy walked straight toward us and then turned around, so his back was to us, right in front of us as the band started to play.

  By this time two chairs had come up, and Nick and Michael sat down. I was still leaning against the wall. Suddenly this guy who had stood in front of us, turned around and pulled out a small knife and held it under Nick Kent’s nose. Then he put it away. Michael was a bit freaked out and stood up. The kid then began kicking Nick’s foot, irritating him and winding him up a bit. I asked Nick and Mike if they wanted a drink. I went to the bar and ordered three lagers. I come back to find Nick holding his head, bleeding, while Sid Vicious was being beaten to a pulp on the floor by bouncers. Amid the chaos, the Pistols were playing. Malcolm McLaren was running around, trying to calm everybody down. Michael was in pain, holding his arm after, apparently, Sid had pulled out a bicycle chain and swung it across Nick’s head and Michael’s, too.

  And that was the first time I ever saw Sid. He was a nasty piece of work. Two or three months later he joined the band.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: Why all the fighting? I don’t know. It’s an English thing. London can be very violent. There’s a sadism and an element of intrigue involved. Everything here has to have a twist. There’s no such thing as an out-and-out murder. There’s got to be a riddle, always a mystery.

  With regard to other bands, I suppose our attitude was a bit snobbish. We were full of ourselves—maybe rightly so. The Sex Pistols started the whole thing, and the rest of the bands came later. We were the forerunners, and we were by ourselves on the front line. There was no big rivalry. At the time we did slag a lot of bands, but we used to slag everyone. There was no big punk movement, no camaraderie between the bands, like in bebop or jazz. We knew each other, but we were seldom friendly. Everybody was just starting out in music, and many of us had never picked up an instrument before. We weren’t a collection of musos, and we were skeptical of the other bands’ motives. Fits of insecurity entered into it early on, but eventually we all got on better as we grew up a bit more and felt more comfortable with ourselves and our bands.

  CAROLINE COON: Punk was said to be very alcoholic because of the drinking, but I think they used it to calm down, to get on stage. You don’t have that amount of drink in other performing professions—theater, ballet—because the performers have fifteen years of technique to fall back on. It was very interesting to see where the terror was in rock ’n’ roll. But how do you replace that?

  At the time we were naive about Sid and the drugs. We didn’t realize how serious his problem was until we did the gigs in Sweden, then went to America. When he first joined the band, Sid was fine. That was one of the best times for the Sex Pistols. Sid was learning and was really into it. He had to prove that he could do it.

  I never dealt directly with Nancy Spungen. I used to see her out and about, but she wasn’t allowed anywhere near our rehearsals, so Sid would go to meet her after. I had nothing against her because I didn’t know her that well. But John couldn’t take her, so we kept her at arm’s length. That was Malcolm’s main problem; he should have taken control of that situation. With the band falling apart, he should have done his job as a manager, but he just let it go.

  We got lazier and lazier. Although some people said we couldn’t, we wrote some of our best songs after Glen left—“Bodies,” “EMI,” and “Holidays in the Sun.” We could have carried on writing songs, but there was a breakdown between Steve, John, and myself that affected the song-writing. It’s difficult to explain what was going on at the time. It all happened so fast that time seemed to flash. We were short of songs by then and were concentrating on getting the album out in 1977. There were the musical differences, but early on that’s what made the band work.

  SEGMENT 14:

  HOW BRILLIANT! THEY HATE THE BEATLES!” PAUL STAHL, MARCO PIRRONI, & DAVE RUFFY

  PAUL STAHL

  We had a very strong soul tradition in the U.K. since the mods. Before the Pistols’ era, I came from the soul circuit background. I was in college at the time. Just prior to that time in 1973, the standard look of the day was flares, long pointed-collar shirts, and suits with epaulets. Then we started cutting our hair short, which was radical. People would come up to me and ask wh
ich battalion I belonged to. They figured I got out of the navy or the army or just got out of prison. They couldn’t believe that you had your hair cut around the ears. I don’t know where the idea came from, but we also used to dress in forties’ fashion zoot suits. I think it came from a Bryan Ferry style. We weren’t into rock music at all; we were listening to stuff like Ronnie Laws. The mods adopted that kind of music, and it never left certain sectors.

  The soul boys, an offshoot of the mods, were essentially working-class kids from rural areas and suburban parts of London. Now these soul boys clubs, although very much underground, carried on right through 1976 and beyond. The kids from the soul background never got into the band scene. They didn’t form bands because they didn’t come from that guitar-playing background. But they were the fashion icons to early punks. It was a real crazy situation. A quiet guy like Marco Pirroni with an art school background listening to Roxy Music was suddenly mixing in the same company as … maniacs who just lived for a fight in the tradition of football hooligans. But they looked fantastic. All their clothes were from Sex—the earliest things they ever wore. This was from 1974 onward because Sex was around a long time before the Sex Pistols. The national newspapers once did a piece on this scene in Canvey Island, Essex—real soul boys country. Everybody in Essex was implanted there from the East End of London. An American equivalent would be an overspill of the Bronx to Connecticut. All these kids were dressed in zoot suits with big quiffs. Girls had Veronica Lake—type hairdos.

  The real turning point for me in the mid-seventies was short hair and tapered trousers. Before that, old men of eighty and young guys all wore flares. It was that ingrained. Then, because of the tapered trousers thing, people started looking fifties again as a reaction against the long-haired hippie thing. Soon the soul boys actually changed their fashion and mixed in a lot of Bowie influences and effeminacy. You started to get a crossover with the arty kids and the tougher soul boys. Some of the early punk look was built on the fringes of that soul boys era. Because there were so few people who dressed like that, they all went to the same clubs and you had this incredible intermingling. I think it was Bowie more than anybody that made punk acceptable to the soul element, much more than Roxy Music. Bowie was the soul boys’ rock act. Everybody liked Bowie, and it was through him that punk became acceptable to the soul boys element. Mod, rockabilly—everything—had all been absorbed by punk. In terms of fashion, there has never been a more creative period—even if a lot of it was retrospect. It still had the mark of the day on it.