by John Lydon
The Sex Pistols weren’t New Wave at all, and they didn’t have anything in common with the bands that became New Wave, just as we had nothing to do with the bands that became punk; I always wanted to be completely separate from them. These were all just imitators jumping up on our bandwagon and trying to mellow it out so they could go for the big bucks and the easy life. All of them, to a man, wanted stardom.
I wanted to work with Sid in London after the Pistols broke up because Sid had told me that he had cleaned up his act. He was sick of Malcolm and didn’t have any liking for Paul and Steve anymore. I was working with Branson over at Virgin during that time, helping him sign some reggae bands, which annoyed Sid no end. I thought about it and decided it might work out, so I presented Sid with the opportunity of us working together again. I told him to meet me at my house on Gunter Grove so we could talk, provided he didn’t bring Nancy, which he did. Nancy was getting at Sid and wanted to be his manager. The ego games were so appalling, it resembled something out of that rock ’n’ roll satire movie, Spinal Tap.
Nancy started whining, “Sid’s the star, and any band you guys get together, Sid’s gotta be the front man. Playing bass isn’t for him. He’s a lead singer!”
“That’s very nice,” I asked, “but where am I in this scheme of things?”
“You can play drums.”
“Don’t think so, dearie.” I had to point out to Nancy who actually wrote all these fucking songs.
“Those songs are shit,” Nancy said. “Sid can write better ones than those.”
“Well, he hasn’t so far,” I shot back.
It went on like that until it became insane. That was it. I couldn’t cope with it any longer. I didn’t want anything to do with the two of them. Then Sid and Nancy wanted to borrow money. That was the crux of it for me. I told them to get the fuck out of my house. I told Sid, “I don’t want to ever see you again when you’re with her!”
They wanted money for drugs, so I sent them off. About three days later they came back to the house at some ungodly hour at night, shouting and banging on the door. They wanted to borrow money. Again. Urgently. I opened the window from the top floor and told them they were not coming in and I wasn’t giving them any money. “Go away. You got the same amount as me. Equal rights and all that.”
One of my mates staying in my house at the time ran down with a hatchet because they tried to kick the door in. Sid and Nancy ran off, but they came back twenty minutes later with the same old bollocks. Then I went out with a sword, and it went on like that all bloody night. They were so desperate for money, but I didn’t carry amounts like that and I certainly didn’t want to keep people in their bad habits. The very thing destroying Sid was certainly not going to be the thing I’d be paying for. Soon after, Sid left for New York with Nancy.
Yes, Sid was my mate and I thought about putting a band together with him after the Pistols. I even got Sid to work on several ideas because I was writing all the way through the American tour during the bus rides. In my own mind, I’d already formed the first Public Image album. I had already written three of the songs, “Religion” and a couple of others. I asked Sid if he wanted to be a part of that. I told him it was a completely different direction, which Sid thought was excellent. It was anything to get away from the trap that we were both in. That’s when Sid was away from Nancy. He was a different person, like Jekyll and Hyde. But when we both returned to London after the breakup, in came Nancy, his new manager. It didn’t work, and as soon as she turned up, Nancy had something bad to say about everybody. I believe Sid went on to do the “My Way” song for the money. According to Julien Temple, Sid would be at Malcolm’s throat at every opportunity possible.
JULIEN TEMPLE: In terms of Sid’s relationship with Malcolm, when we did “My Way” in Paris, Boogie and I would go to the studio every night and come back to report to Malcolm that the guy didn’t want to do the song. Sid would spend all the time in the studio trying to learn the bass. We would have to come back and tell Malcolm we had wasted another night’s money.
When we came back the next morning with the same news, Malcolm was still in bed. Finally Malcolm grew tired of it. He picked up the phone and started screaming at Sid about what a useless junkie he was and so on. Meanwhile, Sid had given the phone over to Nancy and while that was going on, suddenly the eighteenth-century door of Malcolm’s hotel room flew off its hinges. Sid crashed into the room wearing his swastika underpants and motorbike boots. He dragged Malcolm out of bed and started hitting him. Then Sid chased a naked Malcolm down the corridor intent on beating the shit out of him. The ancient floorboards went up and down like a ship as the chambermaids started screaming.
“Monsieur, monsieur. Stop! Stop! Stop!”
Jerry Nolan, the late drummer for the New York Dolls, lied about having given me heroin. He was a junkie, for God’s sake. It’s their nature to lie about everything. I tried heroin just once, and it was years later than the Pistols. I got sick as all hell, and it was horrible. Heroin is just not fun, and I cannot understand why these fools say, “It’s only like that the first time.” Why would you want to go for it a second or third time? Who wants an instant hangover? The London scene in the seventies was definitely not drug free. The punk drug of choice was amphetamine sulfate. Marijuana or any kind of downer drug didn’t go well together with the early punks. It’s oversimplification to say Johnny Thunders brought heroin over to London. It was always there. Eric Clapton was doing his stuff a long time before. But New Yorkers like Thunders definitely brought it into the punk thing, which was supposedly very anti-heroin in its early days. It intrigued a lot of very foolish people because of the romance of New York. Sid was one of the major gullibles. Gullible’s travels.
Sid couldn’t see that it was just a sham and an image. To Sid, that was the way New York rock stars lived their lives—morning, noon, and night. He thought they all went to bed with their high heels on. I don’t think so, Sid. “They have their breakfast in a pink negligee.” Don’t think so Sid. It’s just an image. Give it up.
“You have to spoil everything.” That would be his attitude with me.
BOB GRUEN: Malcolm gave Sid and Nancy ten thousand pounds to come to New York. I saw them at Max’s the night they arrived. Sid was in a stupor with a glass in his hand, a straw in his mouth. Nancy would occasionally take the empty glass and replace it with a full one, all the while talking a mile a minute. “Can you lend us ten bucks? We need a cab back to the hotel.”
She pulled out this huge roll of money, ten thousand pounds sterling, all in ten-pound notes. Unfortunately they didn’t take pound notes in New York, so I lent them the ten bucks.
Nancy Spungen, twenty, was stabbed to death in New York with a hunting knife in October of 1978. It was a disgusting period, and I was furious with Sid—but not so much when I found out he was up for her murder inside. Riker’s Island. I felt, Oh, dear, no! I still think he was incapable of such a thing, particularly seeing that he was so deeply fascinated by Nancy. Even a squabble over heroin wouldn’t make him kill her. I did go to the press at the time to say I wanted to help him. I thought the whole thing was being turned into a circus, and that’s when I wanted to get involved and help sort it out.
BOB GRUEN: I still don’t believe Sid did it. I don’t think he had it in him. First, he was a wimp. He wasn’t vicious—it may have been his name, but it wasn’t his nature. Because of all of the things he told me about Nancy, I don’t think he could ever hurt her. I think somebody might have come in and killed her. Face it, this is New York City, where there are lots of bad people, particularly inside the Chelsea Hotel. On the other hand, if Nancy was whining about some suicide pact, maybe he did it to shut her up. Something like “Here, take the knife.”
But he couldn’t have knowingly or violently killed her.
CHRISSIE HYNDE: To tell you the truth, at the time it wouldn’t have surprised me if he or anyone killed her, she was that obnoxious. When she started up with that incessant whining sh
e was more than the human mind could bear.
Sid did send a message to me through Joe Stevens when he was in jail. He wanted to speak to me, and I wanted to get a lawyer for him. There was no way I could speak with him. That was canceled very quickly by Malcolm and Sid’s mother. I couldn’t get through to him without going through one of them. I was in London and they were in New York, so there was no point flying over because I would never get in to see him. Sid asked for me in a roundabout way. No letter, just a phone call from Stevens in New York. I asked for Sid to ring me or send a letter. Nothing came. So I tried to get in touch with Sid through Joe again, but he said that Malcolm was putting the mockers on that. It was a no-no.
Sid died on a minor American holiday called Groundhog Day, February 2, 1979, a year and a month after the Pistols’ demise, three and a half months after Nancy’s. According to folklore, the groundhog emerges from hibernation. If he sees his shadow, six more weeks of wintry weather follows. Neither Sid the hamster nor Sid the groundhog saw his shadow that morning. They found his nude body just past noon in the Greenwich Village apartment of a twenty-two-year-old unemployed actress.
I was sitting in my front room when I heard about Sid’s death. I got a phone call from Joe Stevens. It didn’t seem to mean anything to me. It’s funny, that. I kept thinking, Should I feel something here? I didn’t. Not for years, actually. It was much later that it struck me as sad. I shoved it to the back of my mind. I knew it would happen, so … Quite frankly, the wrong person died. I was happy when Nancy went. I thought that was great, but I knew in my heart that Sid didn’t kill her. I think he got set up. Sid would have probably gone to jail for a sizable amount of time, although now you get less time for murder than you do robbery.
There is a lingering rumor that Sid was murdered. He was detoxified when he was in Riker’s Island, but the night he came out, he was suddenly on drugs again. One night, a matter of hours, really. It’s very curious. Was Sid set up to fall?
JULIEN TEMPLE: The most wonderful memory I have of Sid was as a member of the audience—before he joined the band. He was an extraordinary model of punk. I remember seeing him at a Clash gig. These drunk guys in the audience were hurling big beer glasses at the band and chiming for Led Zeppelin. Out from behind the stage came this figure, Sid. Suddenly, he ran as fast as he could from behind the drums, jumped from the stage, flew through the air and landed in the audience, on top of these guys, flailing away. It was like a kamikaze run because there was about ten of these big fat beer drinkers. You knew Sid was going to get beaten to shit. But he didn’t care. That was his strength. He was fearless with this total belief that gave him a strange power.
I still think of Sid. The whole thing was awful for him. There’s no point. He died, and that’s the end of it. I wish he was around, but only the way he was originally. All that self-destruction was just too much. You watch someone deteriorate before your eyes in the space of a year, and that’s it. They erase any good memories you have of them. Time after time, they get worse and worse and more offensive. Self-pity gets people into drugs. Sid was a lost little boy utterly beyond help, and like all arrogant teenagers, he knew it all, and that’s all there was to it.
CHRISSIE HYNDE: The first time the Pretenders played in London I was nervous because everyone I knew was at the gig. I was dying. I was in the bar around the back of the club in a little place called the Railway Pub having a drink. The place we were playing at was up in West Hampstead and it was called the Moonlight Club, when someone came up to me and said, “Wow, what about Sid?” I looked at him and said, “What about Sid?” Then I realized no one had told me Sid had died that day because they were afraid it would bum me out before the gig. Instead, I found out right before I went on! We used to do a punky version of an old Troggs song called “I Can’t Control Myself.” I distinctly remember the night he died because we played that song especially for Sid.
Nobody will ever conclusively solve the mystery of Sid’s death because it’s all just Fantasy Island. No one will tell the truth about it, and the tragedy is that it’s all buried in drugs and the drug culture. Death becomes those situations.
CHRISSIE HYNDE: I loved Sid. Where John liked colorful things, Sid was into black leather jackets. He also didn’t have the creativity John had. It seemed like the punk thing was his last stand. His style was unique. Before punk, only reggae was unique; everything else had been recycled. Punk cleared the slate, but it was only temporary. It did some good for a few years; it brought things back to a decent, honest level.
I was utterly appalled when I heard the damned urn with Sid’s ashen remains was dropped and smashed to the floor at Heathrow Airport. It was common gossip at the time of Sid’s death. Classic Sid mythology. Sid was such a hopeless failure at everything, it was so typical. Such a horrible way to end—just blowing around the air-conditioning at Heathrow is kind of funny. At least he’s occupied. What a marvelously ironic way to end; it’s so extreme, it’s deeply hilarious. Poor sod. No peace even for the dead.
What I knew the Pistols could be and what they sickeningly became were two different things. The band thought they could trundle on like the Rolling Stones ad infinitum pumping out the same kind of sound, appeasing the same kinds of people. That’s just not the way I am. If there’s no challenge in it, then I’m not interested. I formed PiL because I got bored with the extremist point of view that I’d had in the Sex Pistols. PiL has had its successes and its failures, but you’ve got to keep doing it. PiL is much more of a democracy than the Sex Pistols, which was just a war, constant arguing about the stupidest of things.
The glorification of Sidney at first was nice because when we took Sid in, what we had to do was make him instantly appreciated as a valid member of the band. The trouble was that he actually believed that to be the case, which of course it wasn’t at first because he could neither play, record, nor contribute to songwriting. Technically he contributed zero, apart from the image of it all. That became too show bizzy for me. That was much more Malcolm’s field than mine.
When we went our separate merry ways, I knew Malcolm would continue his own way. It was sad to see what they’d done to the Sex Pistols because I thought that toward the end, they trivialized us. They’d taken away the real importance. On the American tour I was writing PiL songs even though I didn’t know they’d be PiL songs at the time. “Religion” and “Public Image” were being put together during the tour. “Low Life” was in my mind. Steve and Paul, during the sound checks, didn’t want to know about any new songs. It was an impossible situation. When that happens, you’ve just got to call it a day and move on.
Sid showed a lot of interest in what I was doing and wanted to be a part and work with me. It would have been his first real contribution. When we hit San Francisco and he hit the drugs, that ended that right there and then. He went back into Nancy mode and didn’t understand why I would not tolerate that. By that time, Sid was just into chaos for the sheer hell of it. Destroy everything. That’s well and fine, but you don’t destroy things offhand and flippantly. You’ve got to offer something in its place. Since I always have to have a point and purpose to everything I do, that’s why people accuse me of being calculated. But it’s the way I am. I always know my next move. I could never conjure up a death wish. This is all I have, life. I don’t know what comes next, and frankly, I’m in no rush to find out. I didn’t believe in playing the martyr just for the sheer hell of it, either. And to die over something as vaguely childish as rock ’n’ roll is not on. Even though there’s a lot of popularity in Sid’s character, the people who buy the Sid myths, they don’t buy records. They’re wasters. That’s the drug culture thing for losers and junkies, people who bemoan their sorry lot. I’m not part of that. I never was. I’ll always go out and make sure it gets better. That’s the difference between the Sid fanatic and the Johnny Lydon Appreciation Society. Life and death! There’s nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it.
I managed to put together PiL—Public Imag
e Limited—and package it in a credible way. I got the name Public Image from a book by that Scottish woman, Muriel Spark, who wrote Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. When I was in Italy, somebody introduced her writings to me. I checked out some of her other books when I went home. One of them was called The Public Image. It was all about this actress who was unbearably egotistical. I thought, Ha! The Public Image. Limited. Not as a company, but to be limited—not being as “out there” as I was with the Sex Pistols. I didn’t have the enigma of the Sex Pistols dragging me down, but it was difficult at the start because many people wanted the Sex Pistols Part Two—particularly Virgin Records. They would recommend that I work with Paul and Steve on various projects. The answer would always be no.
HOWARD THOMPSON: The first time I saw the video of John and Public Image Limited doing “Public Image,” I flipped. That song took exactly what the Pistols stood for and put it in a musical and very original context. It was a real step forward for John. As seriously as one could take him previously, now you knew he was coming through as an artist. He didn’t need the safety pins and all the outrageous shock paraphernalia that surrounded the Sex Pistols. John has a lot to say, not only musically, but in sociological terms. He’s a bright man. He’s got a great opinion on many important issues. Unfortunately he’s looked at by too many people as somebody who isn’t serious, whereas he’s as serious as a heart attack. John’s done a lot with PiL. He’s got a great repertoire behind him, and boy, hasn’t it been colorful and interesting all along the way?
There was one really awful situation when Branson called me to his boat one day. This happened right after we released the second PiL album, Metal Box. “Come over. We’ll have a few drinks. Ha ha ha ha.” Lovely. I didn’t know that it was a total trap. He had a tape there that Paul and Steve had sent him, and the idea was for me to sing over these Ramones rip-offs. They wanted to call themselves the Professionals. No. It was very bad music with shitloads of money as an incentive. I’d rather die. The implication was, “Look, you and PiL are going bankrupt fast. If you do this, it will only take a year out of your career. Then you can always go back to PiL later.” They had forgotten who they were talking to.