by John Lydon
The Pistols era proved to me that ideas were far more important than how well or how badly you could play. That was the most vital thing. Without punk there certainly couldn’t have been anything like Prince. His first couple of albums were really raw—the same sort of drum pattern all the way through. Until the Sex Pistols, nobody ever talked about this expression, “overproduced.” You never thought about it. You never knew the difference between an overproduced band and a raw band because, before punk, there were no raw bands. All the bands had a little drum kit, a combo bass amp, one bass, and one guitar. You used to recognize bands by their back line. I always had a Marshall and a Gibson Les Paul. Nobody minded, you could do whatever you wanted on stage. You could be as shitty as you wanted to. No one would like you if you were brilliant anyway. It didn’t make any difference.
NORA: Hippies were supposed to be friends with everyone. Punk meant you could be frank with everyone. You could tell someone to get out of your way or drop dead. Before, we were always diplomatic. Since I’ve known John I’ve become much more open. I don’t give a damn. I tell people when I don’t like them. Ich sag’s ihnen in’s gesicht. Don’t beat around the bush.
Punk challenged the class concept. The whole class system in England is Know Your Place. You keep the place that you were born to. That’s the old idea of it. I’ve actually met members of the royal family, and they are the most unpleasant, disgusting, vile people you could ever meet anywhere. It’s like that point of racism where you hate everybody just because they are not born in your family. Everybody is below them. The queen is not this happy, smiling lady. She’s not that at all. She’s a fucking hard bitch.
CAROLINE COON: During the punk movement, the atmosphere for women was glorious! For the first time in the working art environment, apart from ballet, where there was a good percentage of women. Apart from Siouxsie, there were the fans like Jordan, musicians, and poets like Patti Smith. It was such fun. I loved it. You could feel the power. The balance was coming. It was still tough, and we were all fighting in different ways, but I loved it. The playing field was leveling in the sense that the theater of rock ’n’ roll art had always been an arena that was slightly looser than straight culture. Although the misogyny in the rock ’n’ roll culture was bad, it sure wasn’t as bad as the orthodox corporate world, the overground.
NORA: The gays didn’t come out of the closet in the sixties. They came out when punk came out. So the women came out, too. If they fancied someone, they didn’t wait around. Now the gay movement has turned into an organized thing. It’s like joining the army.
I don’t think anybody actually looked down on women. They were equal, and everybody was as stupid as each other. You would sort of hit women the same way you would a guy if she was taking the piss at you or spilled your drink. But it wasn’t an antisex attitude or a matter of acting puritanical. People just didn’t give it the same importance as it had before.
“I think I might fuck that girl.”
“How boring.”
It was a rebellion against the lad ethic—get drunk, pull a bird, and get around the back, wherever. The punks believed they had some kind of intellectual capacity—each and every one of them—and didn’t want to slip back into that rock thing. There were millions of people doing that. That was just one part of it. Most of these kids lived with their parents, so the opportunity wasn’t there anyway. People didn’t go out of their way so much. It was just a rebellion against what you saw college kids doing. Anything that came before was naff—falling in love and all that. People did pair off, and there was lots of sex going on in the toilets. That’s where it happened the most. You could get it out of the way. You remember the famous Lydon quote when he describes sex as “two minutes of squelchy noises”? That was a good summary for a lot of people. This thing was building its own sort of rules as it went along. There were days when I would ask myself, “What do I think about girls? What is the hip way to get on with them? Am I queer or something?”
JOHN LYDON: All these punk girls started turning up at our gigs. It was like learning how to have sex properly, rather than having someone know all the right moves. It was clumsy and deeply confusing. Always in toilets. And quick. And messy. There would be stains left all over the place. But that was excellent. I know it’s far more calculated in “the world of rock ’n’ roll,” but we were young kids guessing as to what to do next, enjoying it for that amateurishness. The girls were new to this, not old-timers who ran through the scene before. They didn’t come around with an attitude from the past, not a repeat of history.
I went through the cheap sex period. We really did attract a definite kind of harlot. They were new, and that’s what was so exciting. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. When we started, the old-style groupie couldn’t take us at all. Hence there was a whole new breed of groupie that came along. That was interesting to me. Fascinating. I liked that very much. But then it got boring because it got as predictable as the old ways.
When Sid joined the Pistols, it all seemed to change. It got much more serious. You didn’t see them around anymore. The Sex Pistols started to think about what they really were. Before that they were just a bunch of blokes in a band, I think the Pistols stopped being a real band when Sid joined, and I couldn’t really be into them anymore. I saw one gig at Screen on the Green when Sid was playing, just before “God Save the Queen.” He was really crap. I could see the rot setting in because the Pistols were getting heckled. They had never been heckled before! Then after the Grundy thing, the secret was out. I kinda lost interest, but I didn’t hold any malice. I still thought the Pistols were good. When Sid joined I figured they would make him learn proper. But they never did. Sid just fucked about. That Screen on the Green appearance was when I thought they lost it. They only had one new song, “Holidays in the Sun.” Sid joining contributed to their lack of productivity. I know what it’s like to have to keep the group going with one hopeless member, and he was one hopeless member they couldn’t really get rid of. They couldn’t dump him.
Malcolm must have decided he had two choices: they could become a real band, make real music, and really fucking do it. The Pistols could have gotten a proper bass player and risked losing some credibility. They would have been good, but it would have been a different market. They would have cleaned up and conquered the world. Personally, I would have thought, Great. That’s brilliant, but I wouldn’t have been as interested, to be honest. They chose the second option and just brought Sid in. After that, it was nothing to do with music anymore. It would just be for the sensationalism and scandal of it all. Then it became the Malcolm McLaren story and going with silly ideas like using Ronnie Biggs. Nobody was going to buy a fucking Ronnie Biggs record. They just couldn’t carry on without Johnny Rotten.
When the Pistols broke up, that was the real end of punk. I remember sitting in Watford bus depot. The Sex Pistols breakup was the front headline of every newspaper. It was all over, and there wasn’t anything to replace it. We stuck with it for a bit, although I remember being aware of trying not to wear leather jackets and not wanting to be a punk anymore. Then when Sham 69 came in and the Pistols broke up, that really was the end. You couldn’t possibly be interested in any part of it after the Pistols broke up. Once I had actually been that involved, it was hard to just became a Clash fan. I had lost my innocence, I wasn’t impressed anymore. I listened to the first track of the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope and that was it. I didn’t buy any more of their records or go to any more of their gigs. Then to really ram it home, Sid died. Every other band, except for the Pistols, had the choice to carry on as a band and sell records. Malcolm had the big idea that you didn’t have to know how to play to be a band. But the Pistols could play. If they had made shit records, there’s no way anybody would have been interested in them. They would have been a joke. Believe me, they had it.
DAVE RUFFY
The summer of 1977 was a funny old time because there was some political fervor, but very
few people had a clue about what they were talking about. There was Rock Against Racism, and they were canvassing and getting lots of youth on their side. They took advantage of the skinhead thing. We had skinheads back in the sixties as well. They would go Paki bashing. When I used to live in the East End, you’d see black guys in gangs with the skinheads and they’d all go Paki bashing together in Leyton and Forest Green. With the skinhead thing there was suddenly all this Rock Against Racism outrage. But punks were outcasts. Even your liberal music fans who loved music were saying, “Hey, I love jazz, rock ’n’ roll, I love Detroit, the MC5.” Yet they were really, really annoyed with punk. Personally, I always liked a lot of black music, and reggae was a good sound track. It was a music you could actually listen and chill out to.
The Pistols made really good records that had edge. I was reborn during the Pistols era. I had a really weird life as a kid. I had gotten married really young and had a baby. My first wife and I got on quite well, but we didn’t know what we wanted to do, so we both went on the dole. Then I went to work in a record shop for a while. After, I decided to go for it. If it weren’t for punk, I probably wouldn’t have become a musician. During the Pistols era, it was, “Yeah, yeah, you can do it!” The whole thing about English society is that if you’re a poor boy, you’ve got nobody to tell you that you can do anything. Everyone thinks you’re just crap. No one is there to encourage you. The important thing about the Sex Pistols is that they were years ahead of today’s realities. “No future” is much more of a reality for more people now than it was then.
BILLY IDOL: The Sex Pistols operated on many different levels. They weren’t just a little band—they had a world view for being so young, and somehow that made them seem revolutionary. Politics was walking hand in hand with rock ’n’ roll. Because it was oriented around art work, T-shirts, and clothes, a lot of it had shock appeal. That was the point of wearing a picture of Karl Marx—it was the politics of outrage.
When I was in the Ruts, the punk thing took off big our second year in. We went everywhere and met thousands of punk rockers. It was quite good for a while because you met a lot of genuine kids who could be part of the movement without having the money to buy a uniform. They could use their imagination. Normally it’s the music that brings everyone together. In a sense it did during punk, but it wasn’t directly acknowledged as important. That was the whole turnaround. I could already play the drums when we formed the Ruts in 1976. We were quite successful, but the whole vibe was that although you were accepted and you were in a way exonerated by your fans, instead of saying they thought you were great and your music moved people, the ultimate sin was to be a pop star. You couldn’t be seen enjoying it. They’d say, “Fuck off!” You’d say, “Fuck off!” back.
I remember during the punk days when it was considered uncool to go on about sex. When you used to play and girls used to come and see you, it wasn’t the scenario that everyone imagined. It was the complete opposite of “You’re in the band, we think you’re groovy, so let’s fuck each other.” It was more like “We think you’re groovy, so we’re going to slag you off.” It was a reaction of the sexual chase thing with groupies in the sixties and the early seventies. Plus a lot of these guys were young blokes. They didn’t really have it sussed out on how to treat women. It wasn’t going on like high school, “Hey, can we go steady tonight or go on a date?”
BOB GRUEN: Johnny Rotten was aloof. You rarely saw him hustling up the girls like most musicians do. His attitude was that nothing was right. He was alone, cynical, and angry. He seemed to be in it for the reaction he was getting from being nasty—something he did quite well.
Looking back, I knew it was near the end when the Pistols went to America. I don’t think anybody really ever expected them to do anything after that. The whole idea of them going to America seemed a bit ridiculous. But the Pistols would have been massive if they’d played New York. Everybody there would have loved them. I remember watching The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle at the Danceteria on my first visit to New York. They billed it as Hurrah. It was this crap film, and everybody was trying to analyze it. I thought it was just pretentious bollocks—everybody looking for the mystery of the great god punk.
SEGMENT 15:
KISS THIS—THE PISTOLS TRACK BY TRACK
SEX PISTOLS TRACK BY TRACK
FIRST PHASE: EARLY SONGS AND OTHER PEOPLE’S MATERIAL
“DID YOU NO WRONG”
PAUL COOK: “Did You No Wrong” was one of the only songs that came along before John joined. We were just learning still. We finally recorded it properly at Wessex for the B side of “God Save the Queen.”
JOHN LYDON: I changed the lyrics because I didn’t like the niceties of the song. It’s a News of the World epic, which is a fairly good indication of where I was heading, completely antisocial.
“SEVENTEEN”
COOK: John rewrote the song because he couldn’t read Steve’s writing.
LYDON: AKA “Lazy Sod.” This was around the time Steve Jones was learning to read and write. It was originally called “Lazy Sod.” There’s some Glen Matlock input in there—but I’m not quite sure how much. The song was already set up by the others before I came along. I remember laughing at Steve’s original words. I could not read the original set of lyrics, and Steve couldn’t remember them. Everything was misspelled. “I’m all alone, Give a dog a bone.” That was one of the original lines.
It was about being young, having nothing to do, and going through the typical emotions that every seventeen-year-old goes through. You’re lazy, you don’t see any future, and you really don’t care. You give up before you even begin. Everybody goes through that period. Unfortunately, most English people stay there.
“LIAR”
LYDON: Self-explanatory, really—considering …
COOK: We never used to believe anybody then. “Liar” was another song with Glen. It was one of the earliest songs that John and Glen worked on together. It was the friction in the band that made it work well.
LYDON: I never got on with Glen, but we’d somehow work together all right. We’d put the animosity aside, and good things would come out of that. I think it was the animosities between us that made the songs what they were. Nice guys come in second.
“I WANNA BE ME”
COOK: We used to work on these songs together in our rehearsal studio on Denmark Street, a famous musical area in London. It was just an old shack out the back of Tin Pan Alley. We’d be there every night rehearsing and writing songs. The rehearsal room was downstairs, and there was a living dump upstairs. Steve used to stay there a lot because he didn’t have anywhere to live. Glen, John, and I used to stay there on and off.
LYDON: By the beginning of June 1976 we had “Did You No Wrong,” “No Lip,” “Seventeen,” “Stepping Stone,” “New York,” “What You Gonna Do About It?” “Submission,” “Satellite,” “No Feelings,” “No Fun,” “Substitute,” “Pretty Vacant,” and “Problems.” Even though we look back on ourselves at the time and think what a load of lazy sods we were, we really were quite proficient. That’s also considering that money was so damn hard to come by. Just raising two shillings to get on the subway and travel to rehearsals was a major effort. Most of the band’s money went toward maintaining the rehearsal space.
“NO FUN”
LYDON: “No Fun” is a song I love. We made up our version on the spot. I always wanted to do it. I asked Steve to learn the riff, which he did very quickly. Paul filled in, and it went on from there. I hummed and hawed around the words because I didn’t quite know them. That’s fairly typical of me. While I love the feel of “No Fun,” I don’t like the actual lyrics. I think they’re flippant in some places while they can be very astute in others. No fun was definitely what we were having at that particular time.
“SATELLITE”
COOK: It’s about us running around London doing our earliest gigs in the satellite towns.
LYDON: We used to play in the satellite towns aroun
d London—St. Albans. We’d get twenty pounds to play Middlesbrough. We had to hire a van, and there was no chance of any hotels. It was just trundle off up there, then trundle back the same night. There wouldn’t be a lot of change left over. It’s the story of the traveling nonsense and picking up enough money to survive for a day or two. We had to do it. But in a way, that’s what built the Sex Pistols’ crowd. They came from all those godforsaken new towns—Milton Keynes, St. Albans. As bad as it was in London for young people, they had nothing at all in the satellite towns. No social scene, nothing.
COOK: We played those gigs outside London—Northeast London Polytechnic, St. Albans Art and Design College, Welling Garden City—because we thought we’d be so awful, we didn’t want that many people to see us. We were still learning to play and just be comfortable in a band. It was a chance for us to get away from the bullshit of London.
LYDON: The only other gigs available would have been pubs or art colleges. Art colleges at that time were not the place. You would get snotty attitudes thrown at you. There was a semifashionable scene in London, which focused on Dr. Feelgood and the pub rock thing—something I personally never wanted to be a part of at all. It tended to be older people who were much more proficient with their instruments playing retro R&B.
COOK: There was another reason we liked playing a bit farther out. There was a bit of a buzz about the band before we even played a gig. It was ridiculous. We were this band that had something to do with Malcolm, the Sex boutique, and Seditionaires. We wanted to do some gigs for ourselves, get together as a band, and beat each other up on a transport van away from the motorway.