Rotten

by John Lydon

  LYDON: I had a package of weed upstairs, which the police didn’t see.

  LEE: Someone had given John this big sword for his birthday, so when John came down the stairs, not knowing who it was, he pointed this big sword at the police.

  LYDON: They searched the whole of the upstairs flat and tore everything apart. They ripped my mattress and ripped up the floorboards in the bedroom upstairs. Their police dog chased the cat around the house. Eventually the police were disappointed and were ready to leave. I had a big bag of marijuana hidden in the teapot, but because the cat decided to stand on the speaker near the teapot, the police thought the dog was barking at the cat. Thank God for Satan! They took me down to the cop shop anyway after smashing down my front door. I didn’t know if anybody was left in the house. Then they made me walk all the way home down the Fulham Road in my bare feet, pajamas, and red dressing gown. That was it for me. I had to get out of Britain. There was no point in being in London any longer. Very quickly after that, I fled to New York.

  SEGMENT 19:

  WHERE’S THE MONEY?

  Malcolm was already putting together The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, which had already started and stopped several times before with wanker film directors like Russ Meyer. Malcolm took Paul and Steve to Rio, and they did that farce down there with Ronnie Biggs. Then they went back to London, and from what I was told, Malcolm carried on auditioning for other Johnny Rottens. They even conducted the auditions at the Astoria in London’s Finsbury Park—a real insult because this place is directly opposite where I lived all my life. I know this because friends of mine went down there and tried out for the part, along with various Johnny Rotten imitators. Even my little brother Martin went over. This all happened a long time after Rio. They were trying to get the Sex Pistols going again, but with a replacement for me. Malcolm desperately wanted to continue the Pistols, but he really couldn’t. Joe Public wouldn’t have been too interested. There was obviously going to be no Sid. Sid was still around because they used him in the movie, but they didn’t have any intention of keeping him in the band. They were just using him. I know who won the audition—a wanker called Ten Pole Tudor.

  PAUL COOK: We never figured on carrying on with another singer. There was never a serious audition to find another Johnny Rotten. That was done pretty much for the film. We couldn’t have replaced Rotten and gone on calling ourselves the Sex Pistols, so we concentrated on cutting a few tracks for the film soundtrack and that was it. Steve was a lot more involved with the film than I was. I knew it was all over. I started to drift off, but Malcolm was obsessed with the film. We didn’t know at the time, but he was finishing it off with our money. I hung around waiting for Steve to finish the film so we could start something else.

  JULIEN TEMPLE: I eventually became disillusioned by the hypocrisy and the lying that went on. Malcolm wanted to take over the film and felt he should have all the credit. It wasn’t going according to any plan. By the end stages of the film, it was imploding. It was like an atomic chain reaction going on inside the camp. Malcolm had the feeling that the band was kind of irrelevant and conventional, and it was him that was responsible for the brouhaha and the importance. He was seduced by that vision of himself in the film even though he was always aware that we were creating this provocative distortion, a preposterous tale.

  That’s the kind of underhandedness that was going on. Malcolm still wanted to use me to prop up his crap idea of a movie, but he didn’t pay me. He claimed that I had nothing to do with it and I could just fuck off and die. That’s when I decided to take legal action. It took me eight years to beat the bastard at his own game. Persistence does win through.

  The way I fought the case was not me versus them, but rather for equal shares among me, Paul, Steve, and Sid’s estate. I’m sorry, I can’t play dirty. I only play fair. I don’t like to cheat people. Even when they are trying to cheat me, that’s not really the point. Paul and Steve were trapped in a kind of no-man’s-land because Malcolm held the lease where they lived. It took them a long time to turn around. When the case finally went to court, they switched dramatically. They saw that it wasn’t me versus the world and there was something in it for them. They saw the dollar bills and the pound notes, of course.

  STEVE JONES: Cook and I got caught in the middle of the court battle between John and McLaren, and we didn’t know which way to go. I was on McLaren’s side from day one because I knew him and trusted him. Then I realized we were going to get screwed if I stayed on his side. So it wasn’t a case of going over to John’s side, it was a case of getting my share.

  I didn’t really have a dialogue with Steve and Paul until six months before the court case. We didn’t speak at all for a long time, eight years. It wasn’t that we were enemies or anything like that. It just never occurred to me or to them, either. We get along fine now, although it’s still a bit strained—as indeed it has to be. I think they must feel slightly embarrassed about their original positions. It was rather a shitty thing to do. They didn’t believe in me at the time, and Malcolm was pulling strings. They were just going with the flow. That’s all Paul and Steve ever did. If you were to ask them what any of this was about, I don’t think they’d be able to tell you at all. They didn’t realize any of the implications or the long-range value of it all. It was always just rock ’n’ roll to them—sex and birds, and that’s it.

  BILLY IDOL: Steve Jones came up to me after the Pistols broke up. We were in the Speakeasy, and he asked me, “What am I going to do, Bill? My band’s gone.”

  The later works with the post-Rotten Pistols lacked humor, the very things the Pistols were all about. We might have frightened the living daylights out of people, but there was a deep humor in it. We worked on several levels, and going to meet Ronnie Biggs, a failed train robber, in Rio is hardly covering new territory. Deterioration set in. It all became very mean-spirited.

  STEVE JONES: After all the excitement of the Pistols was over, I was left with a massive hole inside me. I had to fill it one way or another. I just happened to run into heroin, and it helped me survive a few years until even that stopped working.

  British pop culture is now much more into the public mainstream forefront. They don’t care about war in the Middle East. That’s nothing to do with them. Samantha Fox wins every time over the Middle East. This is the nature of the British. They are very trivia-orientated, gossipy villagers. The English press are like those horrible old women peeping behind the lace curtains, watching the neighbors going in and out. Dot Cotton from “EastEnders”—that’s Britain. All of this is very well manipulated by the public school boy system. They own the newspapers and run the show, keeping things down to that trivial level of permanent bitchiness. Real truths never come out because people aren’t very interested. They’ve been denied access to the truth for so long that it really wouldn’t matter since the working class tend to read the Sun and the Daily Mirror—two scabby papers that are nothing but tits on page three and gossip about dirty vicars. A few pop stars are thrown in with their drug overdoses or late night parties. That’s about it. People don’t know or bother to find out. There’s access to all kinds of information, but the English are so lazy. If it doesn’t come through the door every morning, then they just don’t bother with it. It’s the isolation of being British. Papers like the Manchester Guardian are looked upon as snobbish. A working-class person wouldn’t even dream of buying it. There’s too many words, and it’s an awkward size, a lot like the guy in the New York subway reading The New York Times. It’s odd when I hear some Americans clamoring for more isolationist political policies. They don’t realize what that leads to. You’ll just be narrow-minded and stupid like the British. You can’t go through life with blinkered vision. That’s why chaps like me are a real nuisance. They certainly don’t want to see the likes of me smashing the shit out of some public school bastard in court. I’m attacking the very system they love—lies, cheating, fraud. If you attack that, you attack being British.


  If the same stuff they put into the American supermarket tabloids were put in the Sun or the Daily Mirror, people in Britain would seriously believe it. The class system keeps it that way; it suits them fine. When it came to the Pistols, the press jumped on all the wrong things. The idea right from the start was to just let the press say whatever they wanted. We knew they’d do that anyway, so there was no point in denying anything. They had a field day. So did we. We were using them, but they dropped us when it came to court case time. My other band, Public Image, was working well by then, and I’d earned myself a lot of respect for the work I was doing. They couldn’t call me a foul-mouthed yob anymore. I must have been a complete enigma.

  “What is he up to?” That is the constant English press thing about me. They always put a question mark after my name. “Is this a joke, is he taking the piss out of us?” It’s a pretty long joke, isn’t it? They don’t trust me. They think I’m some big elaborate hoax. Maybe I am. It’s good not to be trusted. It certainly keeps people alert, and that’s far better. I’d rather be hated or loved, rather than just thought of as all right or nice. “Nice” is the worst insult you could pay anybody. It means you are utterly without threat, without values. Nice is a cup of tea.

  My values have hardly changed from day one as a boy in Finsbury Park. I don’t like cheating, fraud, or lying. I can’t do those things. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work, a bloody hard line to live by, particularly being in the music business with its many compromises. That in itself can be conceived as a lie. The length of time it takes trying to get the money out of the record company, you have to make all kinds of promises. That’s the only time I enjoy fibbing and lying.

  It became necessary to surround myself with lawyers and accountants for the case. There are some things you cannot do on your own; anything to do with the law is one of them, and finance is another.

  When I got back to London after the end of the Pistols, I got in touch with a lawyer named Brian Carr through Gloria Knight, who worked at the Sunday Mirror—ironically, the wife of the editor! She figured I needed a lawyer, but I didn’t know any. She suggested Brian, and I went and checked him out. I don’t think he had anything to do with the music industry until he met me. But he loves a good legal fight, so he took on the case.

  He was very good at keeping the hounds off and pursuing contracts. Since then, he’s worked with many people in the music industry. Others followed me in, like the Clash and Spandau Ballet. It worked out fine. We got a barrister through Brian, and it took an awful long time for my case against Malcolm to reach court because British law is extremely slow. That’s the whole idea of it. The system wants to grind you down so you’ll give up. Brian Carr helped me out with business and helped me form PiL. He was useful, and I’ve learned a lot from him.

  The court case against Malcolm was always touch and go because so much evidence was difficult to assemble. Funds weren’t confirmed, and little was documented. Taxes weren’t paid for a long time. Tax bills for the Pistols were sent to me personally. It didn’t matter to Inland Revenue. For instance, if a husband runs away and leaves the wife, doesn’t she have to accept the financial burden? Income tax people don’t care. “You’re one of them. We can’t find the others. You’ll do.” That’s one of the very last few things that Malcolm’s office managed to handle well. They gave the tax people my address, and it scared the shit out of me, but it also dug my heels in a lot firmer. Creditors came crashing through my door. It toughened me up; I was determined not to back down. Again, another sink-or-swim situation. You have to get through it; you can’t run away.

  I remember how it started. Malcolm had presented us with a management agreement. It was late that evening when we went to Malcolm’s lawyer’s office; it was dark, and there was no one in the building. We were definitely pressured into signing. Nobody was given separate legal representation. I do remember being annoyed that it was sign quickly or else. It was that stressful. The whole thing stank to me. The office was tiny and smelly. The whole thing was too Dickensian. It reminded me of a Charles Dickens setup, only I didn’t feel like Oliver Twist. There was no porridge.

  As for our management contract with Malcolm, it was very crummy when I look back on it, and I know that Malcolm didn’t understand it, either. He couldn’t have. Where would be the benefit in a crap deal? As a manager, if you want to continue—and Malcolm did definitely want to continue—you can’t formulate a reputation on crap deals. He is a great thinker and a waffler, but he’s not very good at executing. So I fought him on the band’s behalf. All on my own. Eventually we went to court—Lydon vs. Glitterbest. Malcolm thought he could turn it into another jamboree. He didn’t quite realize just how purposeful I can be. I put together what I thought could be quite a case, which was actually quite frail. I was worried, and my lawyer was definitely worried, too, because we had no idea what the other side was going to come up with as a defense. If Malcolm had bothered to get off his stupid egomaniac arse, he could have done some serious damage to me. I had a telegram from my lawyer three days before the court date, advising me not to pursue my case. That’s how tight it was. Malcolm could possibly have won it. In fact, I know he could have, but he was too busy playing the circus ringmaster. He missed the point and had to settle out of court, which made him give us everything. It was like a poker game. We both had empty hands.

  Although I had rights and all those wonderful things on my side, they don’t mean shit in a courtroom. Didn’t mean crap. That just means it will go on for ten fucking years with everything frozen. Malcolm tried to take the name Rotten from me. I was legally obliged not to use it for one or two years. I had to get that out of the way first. By then the press got used to calling me Lydon, anyway.

  All this is very odd. The British financial press were not interested in the court case at all. They never, ever reported on the details. The music press was not interested in my case. They would only write minor pieces about it without bothering to be accurate. They were very flippant about it because that’s the system. It was an interesting situation, but they didn’t want to pursue the subject of musicians’ rights. I can’t think of any other reason. Again, the music papers work for the Establishment, not the other way around. They don’t like it when a musician threatens the Establishment, and Malcolm as the manager was part of that Establishment. Malcolm was part of the system. The press is the system. They’re all connected. They don’t like to see bands in any position of power. Particularly when the artiste wins! It turns it all on its head, then it’s not in their control anymore. The whole lot of them work hand and foot together. If the musicians were in control, it really wouldn’t leave much place for them since they’re all part of the same old school-tie network. I know it sounds like paranoia, but it’s deeply connected; the management system, the business world, the editorials. There was no value to them in me winning the court case. I thought it would have made marvelous press, certainly worth splattering over the worst tabloids. But no. Very odd.

  I loved being in court. It went on for three days, just reading these silly affidavits. We made a motion to get it all into the witness box. That would have been the crunch. It would have been great seeing Vivienne in the witness box.

  “I think it should have been Sid.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  Still, it should never have come to a court case. It dragged on for fucking years. Figures from accountants. Not getting replies. The tax bill was increasing dramatically. Eventually my accountants had to settle the tax bill out of Glitterbest’s assets. My case should have been settled as soon as we separated, eight years prior. But that wasn’t the way Malcolm wanted it. As far as he was concerned, I wasn’t owed a penny by anybody.

  I was on the edge of bankruptcy many times during the years after the Sex Pistols. That made it extremely difficult to form PiL. There was no money, so I had to do everything on a shoestring. I would go to Richard Branson, but that would only be for very small amounts. I would cut recording costs with
PiL down to the minimum.

  Being paid back all that money owed to me for such a long time barely covered all the debts I’d incurred over the years. Whatever there is now is split between us equally—myself, Steve, Paul, and Sid’s estate. During the recording sessions, we paid Glen Matlock as a hired musician—not a songwriter. Whatever he gets in royalties goes through Sid’s mother. It’s because they both played bass, the one instrument most people don’t listen to in rock music. There it is, a bone of contention. How typically Pistols that is!

  Since the breakup I hadn’t received a penny from the Pistols until the court case was settled. Then all of the bills came streaming in. I never thought there would be any money at the end of the Sex Pistols court battle. There wasn’t much to speak of in the end result, but taking it out of Malcolm’s hands was good enough for me.

  SEGMENT 20:

  NEVER MIND THE LOLLING ON THE SAND, HERE’S THE AFFIDAVITS/A LEGAL PIE FIGHT

  On September 20, 1976, the Sex Pistols entered into a management agreement with Malcolm McLaren, AKA Glitterbest Limited. The management agreement was drawn up by Steven Fisher, Malcolm’s solicitor, who was appointed a director of Glitterbest. By January 15, 1978, the band was for all intents and purposes dissolved after the final performance in San Francisco. On November 9, 1978, I initiated legal proceedings to freeze Glitterbest’s Sex Pistols assets and holdings, shouldering all the legal costs. The original cast read as follows:

  John Lydon—Plaintiff Versus

  Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren/Glitterbest Ltd—First Defendant

  Stephen Jones—Second Defendant

  Paul Cook—Third Defendant

  Sid Vicious AKA John Beverly—Fourth Defendant

  My claims were that the management agreement was so one-sided as to be legally unenforceable, that Glitterbest had not properly accounted to us for money it had collected on the group’s behalf and that Glitterbest had not paid the four of us what we were entitled to under the agreement. Malcolm and Glitterbest, of course, denied that the agreement was unenforceable, that they had failed to account or that they owed us any money. Malcolm and Glitterbest also countersued, claiming that I breached the agreement by failing to comply with management’s directions, not participating in Malcolm’s film, authorizing Don Letts’s film, and leaving the group to set up PiL.