by Lydon, John
I was now living in an apartment with Linda Ashby in St James’s, just behind Buckingham Palace, almost opposite Scotland Yard. Linda hung out with some of the Bromley Contingent. She was a working girl, basically, and all her friends were that way too. I really liked their company. I found them to be really open, honest people. Once they’d got the drudgery of sex, the daily grind, out of the way, they were great fun to hang out with, because you didn’t have to have any secrets about yourself with them.
We met through some of the girls who used to come to Pistols gigs, through the lesbian connection. There was always a great lesbian attachment to the Pistols, and I liked lesbians very, very much. They really are touchy-feely, warm people. I understand that what they give to each other is something men don’t give them. More power! It’s wonderful to be sitting on the sofa between two lesbians – you’ve never known such warmth in your whole life. It’s incredible how open that emotion can be. You know, where you don’t feel ashamed of yourself, that’s the key to finding quality people in life – always hang out with people that don’t feel ashamed about themselves, whether they be lesbian, gay, straight, black, white, whatever – fucked up, mentally insane, twisted, or just straight normal. If they mean what they say, and are what they are, it’s a very comforting environment.
I really, truly enjoyed Linda’s company very much. I loved her to pieces. We had no ‘relationship’ of any kind, other than equal nutters, I suppose. She was a lovely girl who got me into some really great situations.
For instance, Linda once introduced me to Jeremy Thorpe in the bar at the Houses of Parliament. He was the leader of the Liberal Party in Britain at the time, but his career was soon ended in a gay sex scandal. There was a late-night drinking thing in Parliament and she had access to it, so she took me and a couple of other people. A few pennies a pint – outrageous, brilliant, what a great place to drink! There we were, looking out at the River Thames under a brolly, the Houses of Parliament overshadowing us, surrounded by all these MPs who all day seem to squabble and hate each other, but there they were, discussing who’s going with what escort.
The idea of dirty MPs was always tenfold compounded into me, watching them when they were off guard. I suppose they thought I was a male prostitute, with a slightly different way of dressing. I’ve never dressed overtly sexual, so I’m lucky – I don’t attract that kind of attention. I’m just off-putting.
That night, I was free of MP gays. I certainly wasn’t what Jeremy Thorpe might’ve been looking for. And look at the scandals that unfolded just a couple of months later – for both of us! He was so famous for his tweeds – you know – British tweeds, that was his thing – and his silly little hat. When I wore tweeds years later in the Pistols in 2007, when I waltzed out in that outfit, I was thinking of Jeremy Thorpe in the back of my mind.
By the end of the summer, the gigs were getting very pressurized. The one at the Screen on the Green was full of music industry people, A&R men and what have you. It was a very strange gig, everything about it. I wasn’t happy with Malcolm’s idea of screening Kenneth Anger films before we went on. ‘Oh, bloody hell, it’s gay boys dressed up as Hell’s Angels sucking each other’s willies. Really, Malcolm, is that Art?’ But the Screen on the Green was run by a really nice fella called Roger, and that was his job, to promote these insane far-out movies. I suppose I’d rather they got an airing at a Sex Pistols gig than in between Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny.
I sat in the crowd, watching these films, wondering, ‘What are people thinking?’ People weren’t thinking anything other than, ‘Look at these old farts trying to be impressive.’ That was the general attitude of the youth crowd; it all looked somehow jaded, like a James-Dean-gone-wrong vibe. I remember saying all this to Malcolm. It was so funny. John Gray was sitting next to me, and he went, ‘Where’s the girls in this film, Malcolm?’
I had no concept of how you put record deals together at all. Of course, Malcolm was doing all this behind the scenes with his lawyer who I’ve never seen eye to eye with. From the start I had great doubts about the value of that EMI contract, me not being legally represented by my own counsel. I always kept that in mind as a reference point for later, that if problems arose I’d have some kind of legal backing here. That there were holes in the contract. I got it all wrong as usual, when it comes to the law.
Be very careful what you sign, everybody in the world! Even though you think you know what it’s all about, you’ll find out you didn’t know nothing! The wording in contracts is so riddled in tangles and lawyer-ese – it might as well be Vietnamese. What you think you’re clearly understanding is not right at all, it’s something completely different. You get caught up and tangled in these things and then for years later you’re trying to unravel them. You go through that and here it is, it’s your first record deal, and you’re absolutely thrilled. No two ways about it, you think you’re made, you’re set up for life. Yippee! Achievement Number One. But it isn’t. That’s what life is, a series of set-ups and kick-backs.
There was talk of other labels like Harvest and Chrysalis, which I’d loved when I was younger, but they were still very entrenched in hippiedom and obviously weren’t the place for the Sex Pistols. This is a whole different genre and you’d be asking everyone from the toilets in the basement to the attic storeroom to change everything to accommodate a completely different approach to life. So, a no-go, really.
It was very hard to tell what was going on, other than how jaded and old EMI was, and how lost. They had no concept of how to invest in a future. They probably just saw us as, ‘Oh look, that looks like it could be a movement. Let’s get in on it!’ We weren’t the first punk band to sign a deal. The Damned did that some time before us, which was bizarre – using our punk moniker and beating us to the alleged punch. I don’t know if they were very happy with their situation either. Not much was said.
I suppose EMI thought it would be a gigglefest and they really, really couldn’t cope with what it actually was. The hardcore edge just rocked them to their foundations, so it was get out of EMI quick. And in many ways it was great, because the recordings that we did for EMI were shit, really were, they were so badly demoed, we’d have buried ourselves into a hopeless corner. What came over was just talentless noise.
There was an infamous early version of ‘Anarchy’ that was such a balls-up. It never got released at the time, and thank Christ for that. It put our tails between our legs because we all felt ashamed at just how awful it was. So the next outing to record it, with Chris Thomas, was bang on – you know, ‘Get this tight, get this right.’ And you could do that with bum notes, it wasn’t about that – it’s the timing of the thing.
My voice went crazy in places: ‘Is this the I-R-Aayyeeaaaye’, but that was the magic of it. That’s exactly how I was feeling it at that precise moment, and it wasn’t going down well with the studio guys. ‘Iiiyiis thii-iis ver . . .’ ‘Oh no, you can’t do it like that, John.’ ‘I just did. THE END.’ One take is all I needed. And many producers, when I worked with professional producers, have insisted – or asked kindly, which is nicer – that I go back in and try it another way. But I haven’t got another way. That’s the way I wrote it. I’m not Roy Orbison. I found my own voice, my own way, and my own style, and my own set of scales, and I’m gonna stick to that because it’s where I feel healthiest.
When it came out, there was no change for us, no sudden influx of cash for yours truly. I paid no attention to chart positions or anything like that. I was just fully involved with the daily grind of trying to find the next sandwich. These sarcastic bastards would have us on TV shows – and this includes doing So It Goes with Tony Wilson, later of Factory Records – and there’d be an intellectual wit – Clive James comes to mind – absolutely trying to slaughter us before we did our rendition of our song live. So I’d have a verbal row with that fella, and point out what’s what, and I became known as ferocious in that respect. That’s how I am: I will stand up and defend what it is I do
. So rather than them admit that, you know, the boy’s making a good point, it went into foul-mouthed rants.
We didn’t even ask for the Bill Grundy Today show thing. It came as a surprise. We only got it because the band Queen cancelled at the last minute, and they were on EMI. Half an hour later, I’m in a TV studio, and I’m enjoying my days off here, and I’m challenged by this fuckwit drunkard. I’m not having it.
If you look at the Grundy interview nowadays, you’ve got to understand the context of it then, how disciplined everyone was, so overtly, Britishly polite, and everybody knew their place. That was the thing at school: know your place, you were always taught that. We didn’t know our place, and we were the real deal. There’s no showmanship in that, that’s an accurate portrayal of young men trying to make it in a world that’s absolutely dead set against the truth. If I do anything, it’s by truth. All’s I want is the truth. John Lennon. Thank ya!
We had to be there at four, then wait around – the show aired live at six. The green room was full of free alcohol, and I’ve got to say, Bill Grundy led the charge. ‘Drink up, everyone, drinks for everyone!’ He had a few himself, and he wasn’t shy of overtly leering at Siouxsie Sioux and the Bromley girls, because we’d rung them up and said, ‘You wanna come to this?’ We turned it into a party, thought it would be a bit of a hoot, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of hoot that we needed – a severe dose of, ‘There may be trouble a-head!”
It was actually me that swore first. Grundy goes, ‘What was that?’ ‘Er, a rude word!’ I didn’t really want to be the first arsehole out the door with it, but there you go – he goaded me into it, so there it is. ‘You asked for it. It’s not my fault at this point onwards, your honour. I am innocent.’ If you really understand the way the conversation’s going, it’s deeply fascinating. It should be in a psychology course, because of all the different things going on in all of our minds at the same time. It amounts to this Harold Pinter kind of scene.
Quite frankly, you look at it, and you see the spots on my face? You see how deathly white I was? That’s telling you I’d been up for two days speeding. Poster boy for amphetamines!
Grundy, on the other hand, was the representative of the moral majority, and showbiz. Let’s just say he was robust in his cynicism, and yet very corrupt and clearly not giving four working-class lads a fair shake of it. And he should’ve done because he was from that kind of background, and so in the long run his bitter resentment towards us really just renewed the public’s faith that we’re all right after all. We weren’t up there selling you no crock. We weren’t trying to pretend we were from outer space, or flogging you an esoteric angle.
Malcolm totally shit himself in the studio. He said, ‘I overheard they’re going to call the police. Quick, everybody run!’ Ha! From what? I’ve always known Malcolm to be a back-down coward; he’d never meet that final hurdle. And maybe that’s because his ambitions were different. Maybe I’m being a bit unfair to him there, but he wasn’t prepared to go to the lengths I am, and Steve clearly at that time was more than able for it. He was magnificent on that show, his confidence was superb.
Afterwards, all the phones at the studio were ringing off the hook, and we all piled into a car and drove off. They dropped me off at the nearest tube station and probably went to a party or whatever, but I wasn’t invited. I had to squeak into the car just for that lift, otherwise I would have had to walk down the high road outside.
But it was all exploding and I soon realized I couldn’t be anywhere at all. There was some girl I knew who lived off the King’s Road, so I went and stayed at her place. I had to stay out of the press’s eye, because the paparazzi were fully onto us and I always say that was the birth of the paparazzi, British-style. There were hordes of them from there on in, wherever you went. It absolutely ruined any kind of social life. You couldn’t be normal, couldn’t sit in the local pub with friends. There’d be twenty arseholes there rewriting a story, always unfavourably, whatever, looking for a scandal where it didn’t exist. A total nightmare.
I don’t normally read the press, but around that time it was astounding what was being written, and I would gleefully read through it, thinking, ‘But I’ve done nothing, and you get all this! Who needs to pay publicists? You can get all these lies for free.’
Overnight, though, things changed into a chaotic mess, because we didn’t have a good captain at the helm, and so it spun out of control. Chaos is a very fine tool but it’s one that you have to craft well. Just bubbling along, and bouncing from one incident to another, which is what I felt was happening, was not right for me.
Here we were, capable of making really big significant social changes to many things – not just the wonderful world of music, but to society itself, which was suddenly paying attention – and Malcolm was messing that up. He was scared of that next level, and he was always scared of being arrested and locked up. All of those foolishnesses, that when you’re young you’re kind of looking forward to. You’ve got your brave on, you’ve got your youth, and you’ve got your kind of ignorance too, because you’re not fully aware of the consequences. With me I felt I could take whatever was coming ’cos I could justify it. I could stand up and back up what I was doing.
The tour we’d set up to promote ‘Anarchy’ became anarchy! A pointless futile mind-game, with no results. Just being banned everywhere, and Malcolm being quite incapable of backing us up on that. We should have gone for it at that point, and really flooded the networks and the media with ‘Why aren’t you backing us?’ But we didn’t look for allies. We felt like we were in the Moonies, some secretive religion rather than an accurate, well-oiled machine – broad, wide-open, transparent.
The original idea had been to pair up with a circus, and tour that way. I loved that idea and had a great contribution in it. I loved funfairs and circuses when I was young, loved watching the Teddy boys who worked on them. To me, that would be the next level. There was an agent who was very interested in pushing that but it fell apart. Again, Mr Manager let it fall by the wayside.
Instead, it was three weeks of uncomfortable coaches, gigs cancelled left, right and centre, and the prospect of no hotels whenever we got anywhere. That was because we’d have to wait for the money from the gig to pay up, but then if the gig was cancelled, we’d have to drive on to the next one, try to blag ourselves into a hotel by telling them that we’d pay in the morning – knowing full well there was no money!
Because there were other bands involved on that tour – the Clash and the Damned – it became like we couldn’t have a camaraderie vibe about it amongst ourselves. The other bands became competitive in their attitude – all except the Heartbreakers who weren’t like that at all. They were just looking for the next fix, and the further up north we got, the less possibility there was of that.
Very soon the Clash were travelling in another coach, and bits of the Damned went that way, and that was that. It started out all together but it went pear.
At one gig in Caerphilly, there were choirs singing outside, and presuming that we were quite literally the Antichrist. ‘Hello? No! I’m actually viewing myself as a bit of a saviour here, I think you lot have got it wrong! The real Antichrist is religion!’ It’s very hard to make people understand that, when they’re manipulated by newspaper headlines and read no further than the first big block-letter words with a well-chosen photograph that puts you in a bad light. The press really would write what they wanted.
There was such a worthwhile lack of activity on the tour, that I actually tried heroin. Indolence creates incredibly negative situations, as we know from any teenager’s experience.
I never wanted to see heroin wrapped around any band. If you like music as much as I do, then you’ll see all these problems coming way in advance, because you’re learning from the escapades of famous rock stars, and the calamities they get themselves into. Try as you can, you can’t get the people off it. It’s the kiss of death, and it was something I watched happen to Eric Cla
pton. I wasn’t basing my aversion on fear of the unknown. I was basing it on, look what happened to that burnout.
Sitting around with nothing to do, I thought, ‘I want to know what the big taboo is. I know all the warning signs, but still I can’t be preaching against it unless I’ve sampled the goods.’ So I tried it with Jerry Nolan, the Heartbreakers’ drummer – I thought, ‘With a name like that, he must be the Irish one, I can’t go wrong here.’
I hated it. It makes you sick. What’s the point of that? ‘No, man, if you keep taking it, you get over the sickness.’ Why would I want to get over the sickness? Others have told me that they go straight into it and they love it, they love that false sense of security that heroin creates inside your brain. That’s a lovely thing, but what you’re really doing there is running away from creativity. It absolutely kills that aspect. You make yourself pointless. You have no love of the world any more. All your attentions 24/7 are drawn into where’s the next fix. And that to me sounds a hell of a lot more drudgery-bound than any possibility of working nine-to-five. And then ultimately you’ve got to face the dilemma of, how are you going to pay for this situation you’ve become so accustomed to? That’s where a chap like me will go, ‘Well, it ain’t for me.’
The ‘Anarchy’ tour gigs that did go ahead were horrible. In Plymouth, there was a war going on in the city at the time between the local boot boys and the sailors, and so of course our gig was used as a backdrop for that. We’d waltz in and we’d take the gyp as if we instigated a riot and it would be far from the truth. I was there to try and make these warring elements take the night off. Start enjoying yourself instead of squabbling and being divided.