Rotten

by John Lydon

  There weren’t many bands in the early days. The Sex Pistols had only played a few gigs. There was already an audience when the groups got there. The bands that came along were quite in earnest. A lot of them were serious about making good music, but the audiences were just pigs. When a band would come on stage at the Vortex, it was like a momentary inconvenience. People would get pissed off because you couldn’t hear anything. Bands would be up there for a half hour, and people would take the piss at them. After a while it was like saturation bombing. Every group was called “the” something. The Gnats, the Crabs, the Dicks, the Ants, the Mosquitoes. It became a comic situation. The Vortex used to book five or six bands a night, and they didn’t use the same two bands, apart from the headliners. It was crazy after a while. They never ran out of bands. They had four a night, every Monday and Tuesday. Where these fucking bands came from, I don’t know. It got so chronic that the bands that stuck out in your mind were the really dreadful ones. We used to make lists of them.

  One band that had credibility was the Heartbreakers. I guess I was one of the few people who didn’t like the Heartbreakers because they represented everything that was ten years before punk—especially [Thunders’] drugs and heroin. When Thunders came over to the U.K. and started playing, he was literally falling on his face by the second song. All the other groups would groupie around the Heartbreakers, hanging in their dressing room. Lydon was well above all that. He was cleverer than they were. I remember once when Lydon said he liked reggae, and that was it—everybody liked reggae. There was a picture of the Sex Pistols on the cover of the Record Mirror with Lydon dressed as a Ted. Then every-fucking-body at that lesbian club Louise’s was dressed exactly like a Ted with their hair up. He really had that much clout. It was unbelievable. Ultimately, what the Sex Pistols added was the slovenly. Before the Pistols, everyone was quite fastidious. Before the Pistols, even if you wanted to look like shit—with ripped jeans, T-shirts, or whatever—you would try to look smart. Johnny Rotten always looked like he’d just crawled out of bed wearing what he had on. Whatever he said, that was it.

  RAMBO: John was slovenly then. That was his sort of style. I remember once before John had a concert, he would be lying in his bed, and when it was time to go, off would come the blanket. He’d be fully dressed and that was it. Shoes and everything. He’d kick right up and leave for the concert.

  I used to visit Marco in Harrow, and going there was like fucking Blade Runner. Harrow was the Ted’s emporium of the Western world. There’s a barber shop there that specializes in Ted haircuts, but Marco was all right because they all knew him. He used to get his clothes in the same shops as them. But oh, God, the times I had to leg it from his house to that station! Working-class types wanted to kick your fucking teeth down your throat, and the intellectuals wanted to slag you off on an intellectual level. You just couldn’t win. But it was exciting. I remember once I fell asleep on the fucking train, then I woke up and there were literally Teds everywhere. They were sitting on the seats opposite me. I got off at South Harrow. I was so frightened, I was green when I got round to Marco’s house.

  In the end I think McLaren fucked it all up. The Sex Pistols playing Texas, for Christ’s sake! It was totally absurd making them play to those isolated rednecks in Rattlesnake, Arizona, or wherever they went. I can’t believe they didn’t get killed. They should have been playing New York to people who would have appreciated them. New York would have opened its legs to them. But it was fashionable to slag New York.

  In the end, what really ended it for me and my mate Marco was when those Sham 69 fans called him a poser for wearing Sex clothes. I was standing at the bar in the Vortex, and Marco came up to me really outraged, totally indignant about the whole punk thing. He said, “That is it! That’s the end.” I don’t think Marco was the same. There was absolutely fuck-all to do after that. Once punk was obviously gone, the other bands were faced with the same choice as the Sex Pistols. They needed to develop the music or fuck about forever.

  MARCO PIRRONI

  There was a mate of ours who ran with a whole gang of these soul boys and they all came from Aylesbury. Their big look was to wear mohair jumpers and see-through T-shirts. They usually wore jeans, and all of them wore those pointed brothel creepers, colored hair, and multiple pierced earrings. You had a lot of the early seventies glam bands like Roxy Music, a bit of David Bowie—and especially Wizzard and Mud—all dressed as Teds. That was a popular look, a Teddy Boy draped jacket and waistcoat. Some of the band members in Wizzard looked just like Teds. That alternative English fifties look was the strong undercurrent theme just before punk. That was the whole basis for Sex. I don’t know if Malcolm started it originally. It was one of those things that people picked up.

  When I first started playing guitar at home, I didn’t fit in anywhere musically. All I wanted to play was “Rebel, Rebel” and Velvet Underground songs. I got into the Velvet Underground in early 1973 through Lou Reed’s Transformer album, which I bought because David Bowie and Mick Ronson were on it. I did the same with Iggy Pop’s Raw Power. I used to read the music press every week, but all they covered were bands like Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Genesis. In early 1974 the New York Dolls were also interesting because of their trashiness. Their sound was an influence, but they made the unforgivable mistake of having long hair and wearing platforms. So people in Britain wrote them off a little bit. You had to figure they were American because they had long hair and platforms. When I was thirteen and first wanted to be a musician, bands were judged primarily on musical talent. The big thing that made the early seventies so exciting was David Bowie and Roxy Music. Those were the people I emulated. But even they were still very slick musicians, and at the time I could never hope to play with them.

  There I was trooping down on my own, all the fucking way down to 430 King’s Road. I bought my first pair of brothel creepers. That was me making what now would be called “my fashion statement.” I actually wanted to look like Andy MacKay, the sax player from Roxy Music. He had this whole fifties look down perfect. It wasn’t a “Girl Can’t Help It” fifties look, it was glitter, leopard skin, green quiffs, and eye shadow. It happened in stages for me. I didn’t go down to Sex with thirty bob and buy my whole punk outfit. I picked up bits and pieces every week. The 1976 punk look was a mixture of absolutely everything. A lot of Ted, a lot of rocker, a lot of fetish stuff, transvestite sort of stuff, a bit of mod, and a lot of glam. That’s what it was. People didn’t wear leather motorcycle jackets in 1976. Mohawks didn’t exist then, either. Even though it was a relatively short period of time, it was started by maybe a hundred and fifty people, all bringing a little bit to the whole. It wasn’t individuals, it was more like small gangs of people that used to hang out. The real impact of John Lydon’s look was, “Fuck, he’s ripped everything up!” They were far more punk than what I came from. But it was all still linked. There were a lot of people who came from all these offshoots of Roxy Music, the Sex shop, whatever.

  Then the Pistols started. They happened to be first, and a lot of people gravitated toward them, and suddenly a scene evolved around them. These people had already existed, but they didn’t have anyone to connect with. I remember going down to the Sex shop one day and hanging about and being pretty shy, but desperately trying to get in with everybody. I guess they liked me, because I was tolerated and I wasn’t asked to leave. There was a jukebox in Sex. Somebody put on a Beatles record, “I’m Down,” and someone yelled, “Awwww! My God! The Beatles,” and then grabbed it. They started kicking this Beatles record around the shop. “We hate the fucking Beatles!” I thought: How brilliant! They hate the Beatles. What a fucking brilliant thing to say. I’m going to go back to college and say, “The Beatles are shit!” It was like saying “Jesus is queer” or having a shit in church. You just didn’t say it!

  BOB GRUEN: When John Lennon was a househusband, I talked to him about the Pistols and what was happening in England. Sean was born in 1975, and that’s when John
withdrew from the whole scene. Still, John was mildly curious. It seemed to him that what the bands like the Pistols were doing was somewhat derivative of what the Beatles had already done, so he generally adopted a “been there, done that, glad they’re doing it, more power to them” attitude. In 1980 just before he returned to the studio, I gave Lennon some of Don Letts’s videos and film footage of the punk era, so John could catch up and know who the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Slits were. He watched those films one weekend, but I didn’t get to discuss it with him. He had the tape for a week and returned it to me. In fact, the tape was at the front desk of the Dakota, waiting for me the day Lennon was shot.

  It was like the Nazi gear. I don’t think anyone knew what all the Nazi clothing really meant, and if they did know, it was perceived as a reaction to a right-wing thing. It was a reaction against Mum and Dad talking about World War II. It was just a look. Vivienne’s Anarchy shirts even looked like concentration camp shirts with their badly painted stripes. They had a round collar with two holes in it, like the college boy shirts in America where they stuck the gold bar through it. It also had the double cuffs like a proper dress shirt, and there were pictures of Lenin and Chairman Mao together with some sort of slogan. Mine said, “Only Anarchists Are Pretty.” Then she stuck an upside-down swastika armband on it and festooned it with every political slogan you could have. Mine cost thirty-five quid. That was ludicrous, big money then, so I used to ponce off my mom and dad. They ran a restaurant, and I had to work in there. One time I nicked a couple of T-shirts and a pair of leather trousers from Vivienne. Sid was working at the Sex shop for two weeks and said, “I’ll turn a blind eye. You can have them.” He let me steal them. Unfortunately I wore them the next night at the Roundhouse and Vivienne was there. It was the only pair they had. She sussed me out, and I had to give her the money. She said she knew what Sid had done and didn’t really mind. Vivienne was actually all right about it.

  Malcolm McLaren really was a real menswear obsessive. He actually knows a lot about the history of menswear. He knows all the looks, the youth cults, and stuff like that. That’s where many of his ideas came from. He once told me about some French aristocrats after the French Revolution who were really dandies and wore a red lipstick line around their neck. Punk fashion came from ideas like that.

  BOB GRUEN: Malcolm tried to politicize the Dolls but failed to realize that they had already created a sensation just by wearing lipstick. People assumed they were being openly homosexual, which at the time was still very much an underground lifestyle in America. No one used the word gay, homosexuality was illegal and you seldom talked about it. Everyone assumed the Dolls were a bunch of queens because they walked around wearing women’s clothes and lipstick. In fact, the Dolls weren’t queens at all.

  By 1976 I suppose I was as good a guitarist as Steve Jones. Actually, going on stage in 1976 wasn’t like being on stage at all. It was like getting into a pit. Every band that walked onto a stage was just gobbed at. As soon as you walked up—one, two, three—everything they had just came at you. When they ran out of the glasses they were holding, all they had to throw was to gob at you.

  JULIEN TEMPLE: When the Pistols finally played at Leeds, all the kids in the audience felt that they had to wear safety pins, tear their clothes and spit at the stand. I still remember that amazing image. When Rotten finally came out on the stage, it was like Agincourt. There were these massed volleys of gob flying through the air that just hung on John like a Medusa. It was like green hair or snakes.

  It was the punk idea of What’s the furthest thing you could do to show adoration to your heroes? We won’t say “We love you” … we’ll gob at them! That was it. I think the worst place for spitting of all was the Croydon Greyhound. It was a big place. It was a big ballroom upstairs that used to hold about a thousand. For some reason that was the worst place, and it was unbelievable. I played there with a band called the Models. As soon as we started it was un-fucking-real. I had never seen anything like it in my life. There was no way to dodge it because it was like standing under a shower. I remember this big greenie landed on my guitar and it stopped working. It was a big splat and it landed right on the pickup. I shook my guitar. It was horrible—all these big phlegmy gobs would land on the strings. You had to shake it off somehow and keep on playing. They were still spitting even when I played with Adam and the Ants. The only reason I stopped being spat on in 1981 was because we were playing theaters. There was a pit between the band and the audience, and they couldn’t reach us. Then they finally gave up. There was actually a bit of a movement, the nonspitting movement. It was written up in Sniffing Glue. “Bands are getting fucking pissed off with being spat at. So don’t do it, you cunt!” It did absolutely no good. Adam Ant got conjunctivitis from getting spat in the eye on one of our tours in 1980. That’s why he had to wear his eye patch. Everybody thought it was part of his pirate scene, his big look.

  Once I was supposed to be in a band that John named the Flowers of Romance. They never got together on any one occasion, ever. There were originally fifteen people in this band, and I never actually met the others until years later. We never rehearsed. The idea of it became famous. I think I only knew two of the other members—Sid and Viv Albertine. Sid had some song ideas, “Belsen Was a Gas” and “Postcard from Auschwitz.” Then he got arrested after the 100 Club bottling incident. It was definitely Sid who threw the glass, but I don’t remember any girl who actually had her eye put out. Those were the two great casualties: the mysterious girl who had her eye out at the 100 Club Festival and the bloke who had his ear bitten off at the Clash gig.

  I met Shane [MacGowan] one night on the train. He said, “I’ve seen you before. You go see the Pistols, don’t you?” I was a big Pistols fan, so I had all this Seditionaries stuff on. He still had a jacket with big lapels. There were a lot of people trying to get into punk, and they would cut their hair and get themselves some drainpipe trousers. But they still had these jackets with big lapels, and Shane was one of them. One time I saw Shane, and I couldn’t believe it. He was dressed from head to foot as “The Prisoner,” the Patrick McGoohan TV serial. He had the slacks, boating shoes with the white soles, a black turtleneck, a scarf, and the black jacket. It was strange with him. Shane was one of those Irish guys you would see on the building site wearing a suit. He’d work all day in his suit with mud all over it. He was one of the ugliest guys on the scene.

  There was a time when Teds popped up from wherever they had been hiding and decided they didn’t like us punks. It was Teds versus punks. The Harrow Road station was the worst, especially when you went down to the platform. My most vivid memories about the Teds and punks wars was getting on the train. You always had to suss out which carriage was okay. Are there any skins in this carriage? Any football hooligans, Teds, in this one? If you walked in dressed like a punk, you were dead meat. Practically everybody fucking hated you.

  These were the bands I always went to see: the Pistols. The Clash were really good when they started off. At the time there were five geezers playing guitar at the front. There was about a week when I couldn’t decide if the Clash were better than the Pistols. Then I came to my senses and thought the Pistols were much better. I also really liked the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, and the Banshees. The Heartbreakers turned up in the middle of 1976 to play the Roxy. They brought two things with them—colored leather jackets—which everyone started wearing—and [Thunders’s] drugs.

  Rotten realized what he was—a figurehead of everything. John could keep himself apart from things. From the beginning, Lydon was the one—anything he said went until people would then catch themselves and say, “Hang on, we might be getting a bit fan-struck. He’s a cunt!” If you were to be a punk, then everything that somebody said, you had to do the opposite. If John brought out the best record in the world, he’d be a cunt. Suppose Lydon would say to the press, “Mick Jagger is a cunt.” I’d guarantee there would be two hundred people with that written all over their leather ja
cket the following week. Plus there would be fifty more that would have “Mick Jagger isn’t a cunt” written on their jackets. I still think the lyrics to “God Save the Queen” are even more relevant now. Especially that bit about “tourists are money.” Or in “Holidays in the Sun,” where you investigate the conditions of other people’s miseries. Let’s go take a drive through Compton and investigate the conditions of the poor American black man.

  Sid was desperate to get into anything that would kill him. He got into a fight at the Speakeasy with Bob Harris, the deejay who hosted “The Old Grey Whistle Test.” Now Harris was the complete antithesis of punk. He was a real hippie with long hair and a beard, and he would talk in whispers. He liked a lot of shit music like Keith Christmas and String Driven Thing. He hated Roxy Music and the New York Dolls, but he liked Little Feat and Rory Gallagher. If John Lydon was the outspoken figurehead of punk, Bob Harris was the timid figurehead of the ones who intellectually attacked punk. That made us hate him even more. Sid came up to Harris at the Speakeasy once and gave him a kicking. I went to a party on Neal Street near the Roxy when Sid first joined the Sex Pistols. It was an opening for Andy Czezowski’s clothing shop. Sid bottled four people that night. He bottled Nils Stevenson, the manager of the Banshees. When I went to see the Clash at the Royal College of Art, there was a big fight there that Sid actually started. He threw bottles at the Tyla Gang, some horrible support band.