by John Lydon
Why do you think we signed the A&M record deal outside Buckingham Palace? Even then they were a farce, a fiasco, and that’s why we were there—to ridicule the whole thing. The Sex Pistols getting a record deal was as deeply ridiculous as those old fucks living in that bloody stately mansion in the middle of London. What do they do for anybody? They’re like Vivienne Westwood, OBE—they “merely go with the flow.”
The royal family makes Britain seem preposterous and prehistoric. Before the Pistols, it was unheard of to slag off the queen in popular music. That’s the tragedy of the British; they’re so apathetic that they don’t question these things. Somebody had to take the first step, and as always with Britain, you’re hated for making that first step even though they may agree with you eventually. Afterward they’ll want you to go away because you remind them of how foolish they were originally.
It’s extremely sad that, economically, “No Future” is even more relevant and timely today than it was when the Pistols first played it. I’m not very happy about that at all. Frankly, I would have liked for “Anarchy in the U.K.” to be seen now as a joke.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Look at the doom and gloom this fool Rotten predicted. And here we are happy.”
That’s not the case, is it? I get no pleasure or joy out of that! But most important, I’m not Nostradamus, I’m not predicting ahead. It was a down-turned social condition I felt was running rampant at the time, and it’s a shame that it’s gone on and on toward a downward spiral—not of my making, I submit. Of course I was idealistic when I was young. That was the whole point. But, sadly, today things have just gotten worse. I’m using the same rusty old tools of my trade, but the problems seem ten times compounded. How can I take any joy in exposing how bad things are? It’s not very enjoyable at all when what you’re saying is actually saddening.
All my life I’ve been told that because of the class system I’ve been born into, that makes me a lesser human being—and supposedly therefore stupid. Corruption is less inherent among the working class. People just want to get by. Their problem is apathy. Families run away from self-education and self-respect.
As for me, I don’t care. I don’t like structures.
The royal family has been brought up to believe it’s God’s will for them to be where they are. That’s what I find so disgraceful. That upper-class stuff is intolerable, going back to feudalism and the Norman conquests. They were nothing but invaders who stole all the land and declared themselves better than the rest of us. Their ancestors are thieves, murderers, bullies, and crooks—medieval Mafia by any other names. The original gentlemen were knights, psychopathic murderers, who went out and killed peasants for no good reason. They were a law unto themselves.
Think back. The only group of knights that did good were the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar. They were all exterminated because they gave up money, power, and position. They were like early Franciscans, and that could not be tolerated by the British Establishment, and they were slaughtered to a man. What would you call them? Early communists? Their love of humanity above the love of selfishness attacked the Establishment by their very existence. They fought all their wars and were a pre-SAS, the top assassins of their day, but they gave up all worldly goods, too frightening for the powers-that-be to tolerate for too long. Now I’m certainly no Knights Templar, and I’m not out looking for the Holy Grail. All religion to me is deeply wrong, and I see any organized religion as fundamentally wrong. The word fundamental these days implies intolerance, protectionism, and selfishness.
Which brings us back to the royal family. The French got rid of theirs. I would like to see the end of British royalty. It’s not what makes Britain interesting; it’s what make us antiquated, quaint, and doomed. It doesn’t work. This is the modern world; get rid of those old problems. Brave New World, please.
The middle class is a deep confusion to me.
American middle class is equivalent to our working class in Britain, but the middle class in Britain strike me as a strange bunch. They don’t necessarily come from money; they can also be poor—with non-working-class occupations like schoolteachers and nurses. It’s very peculiar, and it doesn’t make sense. It’s ill defined. Statistically you live not in London, just in the ’burbs. You go to a nice school, sire 2.4 children, and you’re basically boring.
The British middle class look up to the upper class and down on the working class. The working class, unfortunately, have no one to look down on but immigrants—and the immigrants look down on who comes next. That’s British society and the upper class keep it this way because the confusion in the lower ranks is what maintains their stability. In England, if you vote Conservative, you’re generally conceived as middle class. That means you’re all right and you have a job, so why should you care about anyone else? Labour is working class, and why can’t we all have jobs, thank you? Royalties and the uppers don’t give a damn about any of that.
John Major came into power because Britain was sick of Thatcher. He’s faceless, which is a product of the middle-class thing. You rarely see these people and where they come from, but somehow they manage to put all their restraints on the social structure by the strength of their numbers. The middle class are the people who say that sex is awful and horrible. Everything is pornographic to them because they’re basically sexless themselves. They’ll ban something because they can’t understand it. They have no lives, nothing but a silly little cabinet in the corner with a few crappy antiques inside. That’s their universe, and they keep up with the Joneses; our lawn is manicured much better than yours. They’re competitive in all the wrong ways. They’re competitive in trivia, but nothing substantial. What would the neighbors think if they had an opinion? Many lead horrible, lonely lives—so utterly mediocre.
The middle class in Britain is a dead end. It’s what a lot of working-class people aspire to, and once they get there, they cease to exist. They develop a lack of communication among their neighbors and lose a community spirit you don’t find in Britain middle-class neighborhoods. You get that in working-class environments.
Which brings me to the point of all this social commentary.
In Britain, the Sex Pistols embraced all the classes—all ages, too. It hit right across the board. We really did. The punk thing absolutely wasn’t related to any one class at all—a combination of everything thrown in a dustbin, shaken violently, then thrown back out.
A lot of the middle-class kids outside London, like Siouxsie, Idol, and the Banshee types, would embrace the Pistols because they could wear new clothes, look weird, and frighten Mummie and Daddy. At the other end of the social scale would be the working class saying, “Oh, great! An excuse to go and riot!” Then the spoiled upper class suddenly realized there was no joy in driving around in a Porsche anymore. It was much more fun to be with a group of people your own age who made you think about yourself rather than just believing you’re better than everyone else. We appealed to all classes. The violent aspect from the working-class end was canceled out by the clotheshorsing from the uppers, who would all merge into one very strong alliance. An excellent time; but, like all good things, it had to come to an end. It had to move on. Tons of potential, but badly seen. The press moved in, and that was the end of it.
Again—and, please, I hate to have to keep repeating this—I have to put this erosion down to Malcolm as the Sex Pistols’ manager. He should have perceived this a lot more clearly. Sadly, his attitude would be, “Fuck the working classes! Everything good comes from the middle classes.” Who were the Pistols? He thought we became middle class because we were in a band. There you go—the old problem. The manager bracketed us, while my crusade was to break it down!
He lacked the instinctive compassion for all classes of people to understand the massive groundwork we could have laid.
JULIEN TEMPLE: I know that both Malcolm and John have firm ideas about what happened, and I see aspects of both elements being important. Of both subjective point of views, I
think there was more honesty from John in the end. The bitterness John feels is based on the out of control manipulation of the four guys in the band.
Malcolm wanted everyone to believe he was the instigator behind the Pistols, but if anything is to be believed, he was the destroyer of it. It went very well on its own until he decided that he was going to run the show, and that’s when everything went wrong. That’s when it become ridiculous and mean-spirited. Santa Claus turned into Stalin overnight.
CAROLINE COON: An artist absolutely needs someone around them. Otherwise, how can they find the time to learn their skill and craft, write their poems, songs, and melodies? The role of management is to give the artist space. Not only was John part of the punk triumvirate, he rode the wave of the punk times’ zeitgeist, and when he needed the space to be creative, he had the pressure of being hugely successful, an enormous star, and nobody was doing the shitwork for him. In light of that, he was having to put out product that can be soul destroying. I think that if you consider how self-critical and ambitious John was, you realize he really would have liked to have more time to sit down and put his intelligent thoughts on paper. But he didn’t seem to have the space to do it. Artists need time. There is this grieving in my heart—since you can’t change history—that the Pistols didn’t carry on. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if John had been guided by a real educated man, one who had been around men who had a real sense of their own sexuality, and who had been educated and trained by the theater rather than by a fucking shuttered barrow. If only John had come into contact with someone like Diaghilev, who was the patron of Nijinsky, a man who was older than him who had real understanding of art history, a sense of value of performance and theater, and who wasn’t hung up about sexuality. I think those young men had a real tough time with the ideas that Bernie and Malcolm were putting in their heads. Bernie and Malcolm were basically disappointed chauvinist pigs.
Caroline Coon is a little too romantic in this respect. We knew the Pistols’ time had come and gone, and that was it. You give it a rest, approach it differently, and go on to something else. The last sixteen years in between have been years of deep confusion, but I think it’s important, too. There’s no answers because there’s no real questions. There’s no center or focus. You can’t pinpoint. There’s no one big baddie and one real goodie. These days we have a seesaw effect on a completely level playing field. I prefer the yin and the yang of a more rugged terrain. You have to have the choice and the variety, otherwise you get blandness.
Musically, all this disco stuff we still hear has managed to stifle the energy. Heavy metal has become as safe as safe can ever be. Get out of the middle. Go left or right. Rave is today’s disco dance fodder. It’s easy to escape into, and it draws a herding instinct. Everybody does it. That’s a reason? Maybe people like Johnny Rotten have had their day. Maybe I’m a prehistoric monster by being an individual. It’s highly likely. All I offer to others is their own individuality. Grab it! The rave crowd call it freedom. They pay a fortune for the drugs to maintain this idiocy, and it’s all manipulated by seriously bad promoters and evil-minded deejays. It’s hypnotic, trancelike. It’s enjoyable, but not the be-all, end-all. Unfortunately the kids will come out the other end very frustrated and will not make a better world. Unlike the Pistols, it’s about running away from the issues. This does not get you employment or self-respect.
The Pistols were a band that actually sat down and worked out their message. Nobody works anything out on a rave dance floor. It’s a pile of computers sampling, ripping off other people’s work. Make your own culture and don’t live off others. Rave cultures are parasites, they’re fleas, an infestation. No wonder they all huddle together and rave. They cling.
Most missed the point on many levels. Journalists never came to grips with the fact that the Pistols, without deliberately sending out a manifesto, broke so many barriers by just doing things instinctively and naturally. We didn’t have barriers between men and women, black and white, gay and straight. Women up until that point didn’t have a say in anything.
During the Pistols era, women were out there playing with the men, taking us on in equal terms. Sexy became not the old cliché of long, blonde luxurious hair, mild-mannered and sitting in the corner. Quite the opposite. Punk women were hounds from hell. Excellent. It wasn’t combative, but compatible. Loved it.
If I was a kid today, I probably wouldn’t be into music at all. I’d be into something completely different. I don’t think I’d want to be a part of the modern music that’s currently fashionable among teenagers at all. Products are much more mass-produced today. What they wear in Texas, they wear in Paris practically the same day it hits the streets in Los Angeles. It’s that organized and structured. They dance to the same records, and there’s no cultural expanson in areas, just mass fodder all across the board.
Meningitis is still the highest killer of children in Britain, more than any other disease. I know what it does to you. Personally, I think it’s a class disease that has a lot to do with with poverty and poor housing.
Rest assured, there will always be poverty in Britain because the excesses of the royal family will keep people poor. We pay tax for that shit. We substantiate and perpetuate it when we don’t look after our own. Our own is everyone—including the queen, Charles, Di, Fergie, and the lot. But I fail to see how my tax pounds should give these fucks skiing holidays. Why the fuck do we support monarchy? Who on earth gave them the right to dictate terms to me about what is right or wrong other than the bastard murderers of their ancestors? They give a sense of etiquette to the world and have a nice way of dealing with things, which I do admire. I don’t admire the monetary upkeep this tradition costs, and I certainly don’t respect a system that dictates alienation by fault of birth. There should be an English way for all of us, whether you come from a council flat or Buckingham Palace. Why shouldn’t we all go to the same schools and treat each other with equal respect? Why is there this nonsense of one education for them and a lesser one for the rest? It creates the multi-tier systems and keeps civil wars brewing. These are none of the things I want, and this is an unacceptable order to me. It is the humiliation of one mass of human beings dictated to by one tiny little amount. Greed of the highest order. Selfishness of the worst aspect.
I was raised in England, and I am English in this way. Romantically, I would like to believe I’m Irish. While I have some vague vision of pastoral eloquence, I know this isn’t real. It’s like a romance novel. I am British.
“We’re the flowers in your dustbin.”
They are good words, bitter words. Real words.
I never had much interest in keeping old mementos from the Sex Pistols era. I’ve given away all the old clothes to charity—usually for orphanages and things like that. I have a soft spot for small charities. Rather than throwing them in the bin, I tried to make them more useful. Somewhere dotted all over Britain are some of my sweaty T-shirts. If you stormed into my room and looked through my closets, you wouldn’t find any of the old Pistols clothes. I don’t even have photos. It’s all somewhere in the jungle I call a brain. I couldn’t be a sentimental Sex Pistol, now could I?
SEGMENT 22:
JOHN CHRISTOPHER LYDON, SLIGHT RETURN
JOHN CHRISTOPHER LYDON
During the Sex Pistols Johnny lived with us here in Finsbury Park on and off. When he really got into the music heavy, I had problems with television and newspaper reporters. It wasn’t once, it was every day, every evening. They never left us alone. The phone calls were nonstop, day and night. They all had different versions of the Sex Pistols story. One would say they were horrible. One said they were okay. Everybody had their own opinion. My opinion was that Johnny had done well. I didn’t mind what he’d done so long as he was happy doing it. It made no difference to me. I never tried to hold him back.
Throughout the Pistols days, we had nothing but problems with the police. Once when Johnny was living on Gunter Grove, he rang me up an
d said, “Dad, come down and see the house.”
I went down. He reckoned that ten police had come in. Instead of knocking at the door, they’d smashed all the jams with crow bars. They never apologized, they just broke the doors down and raided the place, looking for drugs. Johnny was always a target. They’d raid him regularly, about every two months. If he got two months of peace, he was lucky. And it was always in the middle of the night when they thought he was having a party. Johnny was a sitting target. That’s mostly why he lives so much in America. So much of the time they hassled him in London, I know the main reason he left Gunter Grove was that the police had his phone number and address.
That’s always been the Lydon way with the coppers.
Up to her death, Johnny would ring his mum almost every day. One day, not long before she died in 1979, he called to say, “Mom, I’m off to America.”
And she said, jokingly, “Can I come?”
And he said yes. Just like that. I didn’t mind her going, so off she went.
Johnny worked for Warner Brothers then, so he took her to New York and Los Angeles. They rang me every night from New York. Johnny’s mum had a fabulous time. She enjoyed every moment in America for three months. Bob Regehr, one of the executives at Warner Brothers, used to ring her to see how she was. When she was in Los Angeles, he would send a chauffeur-driven car for her and took her wherever she wanted to go—Disneyland, anywhere. Then Johnny sent her up to Canada to see her sister in Toronto. She had never been anywhere but Ireland, the Isle of Wight, or places like that. It was like she went to heaven before she died.
Eventually she came back home to England and died. She had cancer. We didn’t know until she went into the hospital for a check-up. They thought she had a bug in her tummy, gastroenteritis, but when she went in for tests, they said that they’d have to keep her there three days for observation. Then they wouldn’t let her out because they opened her up and found a malignancy in her lower bowel. They gave her eight weeks to live. She lasted ten.