by John Lydon
RAMBO: I remember when Public Image first played the Rainbow in 1978 on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. He had all the Arsenal mob doing the security. We had Public Image T-shirts on. We done it well. Some West Ham people turned up to give us grief, but we didn’t steam into people when it wasn’t necessary.
People were changing and moving on. Why couldn’t I?
For instance, I was never what you would call friends with Siouxsie, but I knew a lot of that crowd, the Bromley contingent. A few years after when I was with PiL, she moved across the street from Jeanette Lee, who worked with us at that time. Siouxsie came over, bragging about her new washing machine and spin dryer. She said we were all welcome to come over and wash our clothes. A washing machine party. You can imagine what I let rip. I couldn’t sit there and take that from her. Housewife superstar. I took the piss at her for about twenty minutes, and she has never spoken to me since—all because of a washing machine. I thought it was so funny that this punked-out girl was coming across the street and telling me about her washing machine. The picture I can conjure up still is of her in her rubber-and-leather bondage wear. “Oh, it’s a really good one! Why are you laughing?” Now she’s acting like a dreadful housewife. After, she used to walk down the street and I’d open the window and shout out, “How’s the washer?”
The Slits were one of the few punk bands I really liked. They were so shambolic. The idea of girls dressing so badly and not bothering to look pretty—without being ugly—and going on with the dolly bird image was great. If somebody forgot the song, well, too bad. Bang, crash, wallop their way through it. It was great anarchic stuff. A lot of the punk audience would just stand there with their bottom jaw dropped to the floor, appalled.
The Pistols had just broken up, and brother Jimmy had just formed his own group, the 4 be 2’s. They asked me to come over to Ireland with them for a laugh. Within about forty-five minutes of getting off the plane, I was in deep shit. I had gone to the pub around the corner from the hotel. Two yobs copped an attitude with me, and unfortunately one of them was an off-duty policeman. I got done in for GBH (grievous bodily harm) because I attacked two policemen’s fists with my face several times.
I was charged with assaulting two police officers—no small thing. I got out on bail that Friday afternoon. At first it was no big deal, just a silly fine. But they wanted to make an example out of me. These two cops decided to push it, so they came back to the hotel that night and dragged me to the cop shop where I had just been released earlier that day. I was let out again and told to turn up in court on Saturday morning for an initial hearing.
Richard Branson paid for some English lawyers to come over. One of them had this upper-class, twitty English voice. “Ohhh Yawwww. Yourrrr Honourrrr.”
To say this irritated the judge is putting it mildly.
They canceled my bail and sentenced me automatically to six months. Then they transferred me and put me in Mountjoy Prison. From there on in it was hell on earth, and it looked like it was going to go on forever. A friend of mine offered to put up a brand-new BMW as collateral toward my release, but they wouldn’t accept it. Then they said I needed an Irish address, so I gave them my uncle’s in Cork. They wouldn’t accept that, either, and went on a tirade about “damned kulchies,” which is what Dubliners call people from the country whom they consider thick, ignorant louts.
Mountjoy was filled with IRA, UDA, psychopathic murderers, and the lot. I was lucky in this respect that the warders decided to make an example of me. They stripped me naked and threw me out in the exercise yard and hosed me down. The rest of the prisoners watched and figured I must be all right. If the warders hated me that much, I must have been doing something good. There I was on a Saturday night, we had one hour of TV a week, and what do the warders decide to put on to show the prisoners? Don Letts’s Punk Rock Movie! I figured I was doomed. The Pistols opened the movie singing “God Save the Queen.”
“It’s him.”
I squirmed. “Ouch…”
They put me in a cell with this so-called big-time jewel thief. I asked him, “What did you do?”
“I was walking home drunk one night,” he answered, “and I threw a brick through this window. It had an iron grill on it, and the brick bounced back and knocked me out!” He got caught unconscious on the street. What a cruel world! He was my prison mate. Welcome to Ireland.
In the middle of the night two warders decided to come in and beat me with truncheons. You know the way they do: “Your blanket isn’t straight!” The other prisoners started screaming, and I was all right from there on in. But there were so many lunatics, it might have gone any way at that point. I would get IRA chaps coming up and saying, “You’re with us,” but then they copped my accent, and suddenly I wasn’t. Then the UDA came over and they said, “But your name’s Lydon.” I’d lost both ways because of my Irish name and my English accent. I was a doomed gang of one.
I learned to be vicious pretty quick in that environment. I was locked up for four days—felt like four years—before I was released on bail pending my appeal. My father flew into Ireland from London the day I was released from prison. We met with my new Irish lawyer in the hotel that evening. Later that night my father’s hotel room was searched by the police for IRA weapons and fugitives.
The next morning he was sitting next to me in the courtroom, and I was shaking. We hired a local lawyer to help with the case. I was told if I lost my appeal, they would double the previous six-month sentence. The years were going by in front of me. Five. Ten. Fifteen. I was scared. I figured I could do six months, but a year wasn’t too feasible. Mountjoy was a mad place.
I was convinced I was going to do time. There was this Gypsy woman before me being sentenced. She was done for nicking a watch. The judge said to the Gypsy woman, “Well, you bought this watch, and the watch was stolen. You gave seventy pounds for it. Now if I asked you to go back to the camp and find your seventy pounds, could you find the money for me?”
The woman said, “No, I can’t find seventy pounds.”
Then the judge said, “How come you found it for the watch?”
The woman answered, “I haven’t got any more money.”
So the judge said, “All right, I’ll give you three months.”
The Gypsy woman said to the judge, “Excuse me, Your Honor. I get a radio if I get three months, don’t I?” The judge said yes. “Could you give me six?” she asked. “And I’ll have two radios, then I can trade them in for a TV.”
Up next, I was squirming on my seat—Midnight Express running through my brain. What’s going to happen? People trying to bargain with the judge for radios and TVs.
Then my Irish lawyer came in. He said to the judge, “Hello, sir! How are you doing? I’ll see you later on. We’ll have a game of golf.” Those were the first words out of the guy’s mouth.
The whole case was eventually reduced to a hundred-pound fine.
I said, “That’s fine!”
Then the two English lawyers came up to us, confused. “What happened? We missed something here. Did they give him a year?” My father told them it was over and dismissed, but I wasn’t happy until I was on that damned plane. As far as I was concerned, anything could have happened.
SEGMENT 18:
BIG DRAW, THEN HAND ON FACE/DON LETTS, JOHN LYDON, AND JEANETTE LEE
LADBROKE GROVE, LONDON
DON LETTS: We used to frequent the Roebuck Pub because Jeanette Lee and I managed a shop on the King’s Road called Acme Attractions. There were two happening shops on the King’s Road at the time—Acme Attractions and Sex. Prior to Sex, Vivienne used to sell clothes to Teddy boys, and I used to go there before Acme Attractions. Before the Pistols and Acme, I worked in some naff high-fashion shops on the King’s Road when I first found out about Sex. Wow! I couldn’t believe the designs. I was fooled by their stuff, whereas John realized they were just copying old fifties stuff. One day I remember looking at an old fifties magazine in the back of the shop, and sure enoug
h, I saw the things Sex basically ripped off. Vivienne promised me a job in the shop when Malcolm was in America working with the New York Dolls. I used to go out with Vivienne occasionally, once to see Lou Reed. She gave me a crash course on a white culture I hadn’t been tuned into before—the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls. I ended up having a fight with Westwood outside her shop when I went to work for Acme Attractions, which she saw as a rival. But she wouldn’t give me a fucking job. Eventually Jeanette and I were banned from the shop.
JOHN LYDON: If Vivienne bothered to open the shop, because sometimes she wouldn’t turn up—the final punch line was the price tag. That’s why Acme Attractions really pissed her off. Acme sold original secondhand clothing, and that’s what she was styling her clothes after at the time. I liked Acme more than Viv’s shop. Sid and the rest of us would buy our gear there and then we’d go to Viv’s to look at the prices. I got a job at Sex eventually because that was the only way I could afford the rubber and see-through T-shirts.
LETTS: Black people didn’t wear earrings or rubber clothes, and I was the first person in Brixton to do all this shit. Once, on my own, I put on one of those gold rubber T-shirts upstairs in this house. I couldn’t get it off, but I was too embarrassed to tell anybody. So I’m in this bedroom with this rubber T-shirt and it’s up around my neck. I was dying and I couldn’t breathe, so I ended up having to hook myself onto a bedpost and rip the fucking T-shirt off.
JEANETTE LEE: The first time I met Sid, he and Don did not hit it off. Sid was very soft and easy to push around, and Don was never easy on soft people. Sid would come into Acme and hang around the shop and just be a bit gormless, really. Don was awful to him and would try to throw him out and be rude to him. The first time Sid ever spoke to me, he came up and said, “Excuse me! Do you know how I can make my hair stay in a quiff like Bryan Ferry?” Then he showed me this picture of Roxy Music in Nineteen or Honey. “I love Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry and I don’t know how to get my hair like that.”
LYDON: This is how we know Sid—as this soft guy. He was very effeminate because that was the scene then. He came from his Dave Bowie, Roxy Music angle. Is my nail varnish right? It was the only viable thing happening at the time. There was nothing to do except dress up, be ludicrous, take some sulfate, have a few tins of beer and, if you were lucky, a joint.
LETTS: We sold Sid Keith Moon’s jacket and told him it was Elvis Presley’s jacket. The people who sold it to us told us it was Elvis’s, but it was used in the movie Stardust and Keith Moon wore it. I wore the jacket first, then we sold it to Sid, then John wore it, then Viv Albertine wore it, then Palmolive wore it. All these kids used to come into the shop, and we used to like them and give them the clothes and feed them. It wasn’t my money anyway. We were redistributing the wealth. In 1977 I became the deejay at the Roxy because the accountant at Acme, Andy Czezowski, started the club. I took the job at first for the money. I thought the punks were just a bunch of crazy white people. I didn’t really tune into it. When I became the deejay and started meeting them, I picked up on what they were doing. I got the job first, and then got all my black mates to work there. Everybody who worked there, besides Andy, was black. We used to make joints before we went to work to sell to the punks over the counter. The people would come up and say, “Give me two beers and a spliff. No, make that two spliffs and a beer.” They couldn’t roll Jamaican cones.
LEE: The Roxy was only open for a hundred days, by the way, but it seemed like forever. One night when Don and I were there—we were only about nineteen—we had taken real purple haze acid. Don was deejaying on acid, and he had this cyst on his eye. Then Don disappeared from the club for about an hour when the band was on. When he came back, he had been to the eye hospital and had the cyst removed from his eye while he was on acid. He had his head in a clamp, and they took this thing off his eye, then he came back and continued deejaying.
LETTS: There is this myth about how reggae and punk came together. There were literally no punk records to play when the Roxy started, so I had to play something I liked, which was reggae. I guess I did turn a few people on to it. The crowd wanted to hear more reggae. John was already into reggae before the Roxy anyway. There was a famous reggae artist called Dr. Alimantado whom John promoted by playing his record on Capital Radio one day.
LYDON: Reggae was the only other radical music that was completely underground and not played on the radio. It wasn’t played on the air until I did that appearance on “The Tommy Vance Show” on Capital. Then suddenly you’d get Joe Strummer and the Clash say, “We always loved reggae.” But those fucks never did. They were not brought up with it the same way I was.
LETTS: We turned each other on through our different cultures. They liked me because I gave them access to Jamaican culture, and they turned me on to a white culture that didn’t fucking exist before they came along. Punk was a focal point because there were a lot of people walking around dissatisfied, disinterested, with no hope and no future. I didn’t speak to John for a while at first because there was something there. It was a threat-to-my-space kind of thing. He was captivating a lot of people’s attention at that time, and I was a bit standoffish—just a bit of jealousy, really. Any of the guys who were happening—like John and a few others—I respected from a distance. My way to do that was to not speak to him. I somehow got around to talking to John. It was some kind of respect, and we literally picked up on each other’s vibes. I could see that John was a serious dude because there were very few people around during those times who gave off that aura. It took time for us to get to know each other, whereas people like Sid, I was messing around straight away. John had that older look, and I had my dark glasses and dreadlocks. I started taking him to reggae clubs. We went to a place called the Four Aces in Dalston, which is the heaviest reggae club in London. No white people went in there. The only white person there was John, because I took him. Everybody left John alone. We black people had a respect for him because he came across as a real dude. He wasn’t created by the media. He seemed real to us. Wherever we went, people left him alone. He could walk into places white people could never go with total immunity. It was amazing that Johnny Rotten was so acceptable to the Rastas in London. They might not have liked his music, but it was like outlaws banding together. We all felt like society’s outlaws.
LYDON: Don and I first said hello and hung out after a Pistols’ gig at the Nashville. We went back to Forest Hill and spent the whole night rapping on about reggae or anything. Don didn’t know, but it was the night I was frustrated and getting ready to quit the Pistols. Going to those reggae clubs gave me a lift.
LETTS: John used to come visit me in Forest Hill quite a bit. I was a deejay, and I had a car and money. We’d have Jeanette, John, the Slits, some of the Banshees, the Adverts, Neurotic Steve, and Keith Levene sitting around the apartment listening to reggae and burning spliffs. I would be driving around in the car with John, and my friends would see me with a punk in my car. They would take the piss out of me, then realize it was John. “Nuff respect, Rasta.”
LYDON: Don used to drive this Zodiac—a great old English car from the fifties. It was great when Yah Mon Rasta was driving with fifty punks in the backseat. Sometimes we’d see some Teds on the street and drive by slowly.
LETTS: After Acme, Jeanette and I opened this fucking Boy shop in 1977. We didn’t really like it because it was a total rip from Sex. By that time Saturdays became this meeting point for all the punks on the King’s Road. They would pass by our shop on the way to Sex. Then the Teds got wind of this, and they used to go down there as well. Every single Saturday there were running battles. I used to get personally involved with the fights when I would see six Teds beating up one punk. I ran down the street and chased these Teds off with a mallet. Punks used to come and hide in the shop because the Teds were after them. Then next week you’d see six punks chasing one Ted. I even remember helping a Ted because I was impartial. Each gang would always pick on the most pathetic punk
or the most pathetic Ted.
LYDON: Worse, when the Chelsea football club was at home, you’d get the Chelsea boot boys running down there after the away supporters. You’d get punks, Teds, away supporters, and football hooligans all together. You would see trouble, and because of the chaos, it was a very interesting place to be.
BILLY IDOL: It got really fucking heavy on the London streets. I’d stay off the King’s Road when they had all that trouble with the punks and the Teds. All the punks would meet at one end, all the Teds would meet at the other, and then they would converge. The Teds were totally right wing, but people in England are always looking for a fight.
Before Thatcher was elected the police became even more heavy-handed. A few times we got hassled by the police on our way to Louise’s in my van. The cops used to stand there laughing at us when they saw all of us piling out of the van. It got scary because we were the first people who looked like that. To them we looked like we were from some weird horror show. They just couldn’t believe all the gear we used to wear.
LETTS: I remember when John bought the house on Gunter Grove, he lived like the Addams Family. He had a cat named Satan that he trained to fetch things. I’d never seen that before. One time we were there in the house bored on sulfate. I used to be so skinny from using sulfate. It was big in those days and so bloody cheap, cheaper than booze. One night I took a canister of gas and sucked in a whole load of it. But I took in a mixture of air and gas, and when I lit it, the flame shook the room. Boom! All the hair on my face—including my eyebrows—was gone.