Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  Everybody was arguing about money, everybody wanted more. But when there isn’t more, what can you do? I had my mate Dave Crowe in there to try and run some kind of accounting, because he was very good at Maths. I didn’t even have a bank account, really, or a credit card, or anything at all up until PiL, but then it became necessary. The wages side, I didn’t have direct access to, what I wanted was for Dave to control that, so there wouldn’t be any suspicions that I was going and pilfering on the sly. Money is the root of all evil. If there’s any there to be had, everybody else wants more. And there’s not much of a way around that, I’m afraid. That’s the original sin.

  Unfortunately around this time Dave Crowe stopped working for me because, let’s just say, he had his own problems. It was too risky that the financial side was being orchestrated by a chap who would forget to go to the bank on Friday and leave us all broke over the weekend. That’s all he had to do: walk 150 yards, because there was a Barclays Bank right around the corner from Gunter Grove, and he just somehow couldn’t seem to make that. That made me feel like a fool, because I’d be the one that would have to explain to everybody else why there weren’t no money this weekend. There was money in the bank but I couldn’t do sod all about it.

  This was before 24-hour ATMs, and there was no alternative. I didn’t even have a chequebook. I just didn’t see the need for such things. I’d be quite happy on ten quid a day, I still am, but you can’t be like that when there’s other people expecting their wages, whether earned or not. It is your obligation, and that sense of responsibility is very serious and must be taken serious. So there it goes, I had to let Dave go, and we’ve never really talked since.

  My problem is that I’m intensely loyal to the people I work with. I say three strikes and you’re out, but in the end I’m always there for four, five and six, because I believe that in the long run loyalty gets you better results than ‘hissy-fest fights and then separate’.

  With Wobble, too much rubbish got in the way. He made himself uncomfortable to be around. I’d had enough of it. There were too many manoeuvres going on that I thought were sly and underhand. While we were recording Metal Box, he was secretly taking the tapes of some of our backing tracks to use on a solo album he was making for Virgin. One time, I actually caught him in the act. One of my best mates! We’ve never properly made up on that. I said, ‘We have to part our ways. You’re my mate but this is the end of the line for you in PiL. It’s dead, it’s not working. We’re not mates in the band, and that’s a tragedy. But let’s stay mates.’ And that’s how, for me, it was left.

  So now it was down to just me and Keith. Everything was far from on an even keel in the PiL camp, but there was something that brought a little joy to our hearts. Pretty much as soon as we got back from America, Malcolm’s Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle was finally hitting the cinemas.

  I was very, very happy, because it was excruciatingly bad. Me and Keith were over the moon at how rubbish it was – over-long and full of Malcolm pontifications. There were various Nazi outfits and rubber masks, for no reason at all that I could see. The best scene in it was the opening sequence, with the hangings and the burning of the effigies. That was great. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going somewhere. This has got a real, deep message I’m going to be terrified of.’ But no, then he threw it away. It just became an exercise in sticking pins in a voodoo doll – i.e., me.

  It was ineffectual and very limp-wristed really, because he wasn’t replacing me with anything. He wasn’t grasping the bigger issues of what that band really was. He was just trying to trivialize it in order to make himself look bigger. The Ten Commandments according to Malcolm: ‘Oh, and then I thought . . . And then the idea occurred to me . . .’ – in that pompous voice! Who do you think’s gonna listen to that, Malcolm? Now we know why you locked yourself in your office for so long – because you were perfecting that!

  It was everything I wanted it to be, because now Joe Public could see what it was I’d escaped from. And, by contrast, what it is I’m actually capable of – please judge me thereon. If you think I should be involved in a world of swindle – well, fuck you!

  I felt like he was taking everything backwards into shyster. It wasn’t done well, it was trivial, it was mockery with no good intent. A classic example of Malcolm when he was left to his own devices – a disaster. That film, that album and all of it, it wasn’t searching for any good in it. It was all on a superficial fairy-dust kind of trip.

  Of course, part of me was thinking, ‘I’m trying to get PiL going here, and by inevitable association they’re dragging us back into this idea that everything we do is a con.’ That caused an enormous amount of damage for me, because people assumed that to be the truth of it. All they had to do was listen to any of the words I wrote, any two sentences I’d strung together, to know that I wasn’t doing it for the money.

  And then they’re auditioning singers to be Rotten – hahaha! – and you know where they auditioned them? At the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, right by the flats I was brought up in. How we laughed.

  Overall, we were really chuffed. It was a happy little period for me and Keith. That summer of 1980, however, Richard Branson invited me over to his canal boat in Little Venice in north-west London. He’s since built a studio out of it, but he was living on it at the time – no doubt it was a trendy thing to do, while he was waiting for his new castle to be established.

  So I went over there, in good faith, but I was really appalled and annoyed and disgusted when I realized that the meeting was all about this agenda of his wanting me to reform with Steve Jones and Paul Cook. They were now calling themselves the Professionals, and Branson played me a rough cassette of these awful, duh-duh-duh tunes, that they expected me to write some words for. No songwriting, no direction – just terrible.

  I still had all the pressures I was going through with the court case. God, my head – how I coped with it, I don’t know. And Steve and Paul were still siding with Malcolm, who lest we forget had stolen my name and was trying to end my career.

  I became very bitter about this whole meeting, because I’d invested wholeheartedly in PiL. I’d made the right decisions for Public Image when we started. It was the right decision for me. It was comfortably uncomfortable. At this point, we may have been at a crossroads, but it was still the right decision, and I wasn’t going to take two steps backwards into that kind of nonsense. That would be so wrong. Tail between the legs.

  The answer, obviously, was ‘Fucking no!’

  WHO CENSORS THE CENSOR #2

  SWANNY TIMES

  It worries me that this book may get too linear. My biggest fear is that I’ll come over lecture-y. The written word is a dry thing, without the emphasis on certain words in a sentence. I think musically, and I talk musically, and that’s the way I formulate songs. If you read the lyrics on a piece of paper they don’t have the same clout as the pronunciation there in the music.

  I love oratory. I loved voice projection at Kingsway College, learned how to really read and project the meaning of a thing. It was something I was shy of up until that point, and it became suddenly really interesting. I looked forward to having to stand up and read what I was writing, or read what we were studying in front of the class. A very nerve-wracking thing, but totally enjoyable when you’re explaining it properly.

  My most entertaining thing to do was always read Shakespeare with an ‘ooh-arr’ yokel’s accent. Then it becomes not the language of pompous rhetoric – it becomes real. ‘Owt, owt, breef carndle! Loife is but a warrking shadow . . . conspoiring wi him outta lord an deff!’ Then it sounds like someone in a pub talking, which is what Shakespeare really meant. He didn’t want this to be confusing to the masses. By the time the likes of Oxford and Cambridge got hold of it, they changed it into something else.

  The same goes for a lot of classical music, too. The harpsichord parts are now played on grand pianos, with thumbs. This is something a music teacher taught me once: if yo
u’re going to try to be in any way accurate about playing piano pattern lines, you can’t use your thumbs, because thumbs were not part of playing the harpsichord. In fact, there was no place to put them. Fascinating. I took in that lesson more than any other thing. The actual playing part was boring. But the thesis and the theory behind it always fascinated me.

  The same with art. I could listen to people talk about what they were interpreting a painting to be to teachers, and I found that infinitely more fascinating than sitting there and trying to do an angry brush-stroke on the count of three. ‘All together now. Got your brushes ready? Anger! I want to see anger on the page . . .’

  Years later, when I went to Cologne in Germany, there was an art exhibition that some of the local Germans wanted to take me to. I went, and there was a Captain Beefheart segment. Really small things, but I really understood the anger, and the Beefheart way in his paintings. To look at the real things rather than on album covers was fantastic.

  Phwoooar, I wanted one of them paintings. I also wanted a Blue Peter badge, from the BBC TV kids’ show. But I never wanted a Crackerjack pencil. Everybody wanted a Blue Peter badge because it was a great thing. It may well have been plastic, but it had that beautiful three-masted ship printed on it. Plastic was very modern at the time and therefore incredibly exciting. It was like a medieval shield, a tiny little thing, but impressive. White with the blue ship on, that’s the one I wanted.

  As an aside, this idea of what a singer’s voice should be or shouldn’t be, is revolting to me. American Idol, X Factor – they all expect singers to do all the trills and all the runs, that singing instructors require – the gospel background. What a load of bollocks, man. Why can’t you just sing the way you FEEL? It doesn’t actually have to be what you would call musical, just how you feel in the moment, communicating something. The concept of tune, or tuneless, to me is bizarre. I know when I hear someone, it doesn’t have to be a G Flat Minor, perfect, but it has to be accurate. The emphasis of the words, and the tonality, and the pain in the sound that they’re procuring, and the message. If those things come across, tuneless doesn’t exist.

  Where being in tune counts very much, of course, is on boat cruises. That’s what American Idol is really trying to procure! Boat cruise singers! My God, hahaha! I always enjoyed this story about the Cure, because the singer, Robert Smith – he can’t bear aeroplanes. So the band took the QE2 to New York and the rumour – I don’t know what truth is in it – was that they played on there. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I love the idea!

  I’ve never met Robert Smith or talked to him or had anything to do with them. They’re complete strangers to me, and in an odd good way, I like that. Every time I’ve ever got close to people whose music I liked, I’ve mostly found that I didn’t like them. Look at the range of music I listen to: it’s just about everything, right? I love what I garner in terms of emotion from what I’m hearing in a record. Even when I describe it, I just go, Uuuuuh-huh! I get a lump in my throat, because I love music, I love listening to what people do, but I don’t love it when they think music has to be strict, and according to a certain sequence of notes, and perfection of those notes therein.

  I actually love vast amounts of classical music. I love Mozart, beyond belief. But I don’t think Mozart was too interested in accuracy over than emotion. He was a genius apparently, and a crazy fuck. Well, I think it’s the crazy fuck that I hear when I hear Mozart, and in particular when I heard him played in a North London pub after my father’s funeral. Wow! That was Requiem – dun-dun-nun, dun-dunnn. And you know why it got played? Not because that’s such a great tune, it’s because it was featured in the film Barry Lyndon – my mother was a Barry, my father was a Lydon. They put an ‘n’ too many in his name. But . . . It was fun to see what you would think would be the local hooligans and gangsters, and the Irish contingent, and the huge vast army, that us as a family and neighbourhood have collected over the years, listening to that, instead of – what was the current hits at the time? No Doubt, or In Doubt. More like, Doubt-Ful.

  I never met Gwen Stefani either. I’m going to contradict myself here, but I’d like to. Don’t know if she’s all right. You never know, and unfortunately in the world of showbiz, people tend to hang around with people who have equal amounts of money. There’s reasons for that, because you don’t want people parasiting off you, but money does dictate who your company is, so by default even rock stars run a royalty ring. They’re only up there with equal friends who’ve won Grammys also. You see this at the Grammys year in, year out. The Taylor Swift brigade, you know.

  Hold on for one second. Dada-da-nana-nana – tay-kee-laaaah! Oo, what a lousy drink. Someone bought me a bottle of it the other day, and I got completely sidetracked a moment there. Urgh. Actually, it’s Mezcal. My God, why don’t they just give me the mescaline and be done with it?

  You’d think after meningitis and all those hallucinations, a person like me would never dream of going near acid, yet I found acid very tolerable back in the day. At fifteen and sixteen, going to festivals and concerts, I rather liked it. Everyone around me was screaming, ‘Oh, it’ll do this, it’ll do that.’ No! I think from all that stuff that went on when I was young, I’ve learned to decipher what’s real and what’s not in my brain. I know when my brain’s playing up. I’m now able to go, ‘Stop that, that’s silly!’ I use a Monty Python reference there. I used to watch those shows rigidly, I learned so much from comedy. Norman Wisdom, all the one-liners – ‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’

  In my very young days in Benwell Road, we had a tiny black-and-white TV set. I got used to black-and-white, and couldn’t adapt to colour very well. We never had colour TV at home. I think I bought my family their first colour TV. The first one I had in colour, with a remote, was a Sony when I moved into Gunter Grove, and it had a remote inasmuch as it had three buttons: on/off, volume, and channel. That was complicated science back then! The trouble was, I never got around to putting a proper aerial in, so there was a coathanger used – the old Irish way! I grew up thinking that TV was automatically always disturbed by someone going to the toilet. I never related it to them blocking the signal; I thought it must be to do with the flushing.

  As I said before, I loved Doctor Who, but only when the Daleks were in it. The rest was stupid. ‘That’s not real!’ That’s why I don’t like science fiction; I don’t think it offers too much. It’s a nice exploration of minds, but ultimately the journeys are fairly tedious, because it ends up in that asexuality we call Star Trek. It’s one step outside of how human beings actually really do evolve, or how communities work, and it’s not a step worth taking. Science fiction doesn’t seem to understand that. It seems to always come from the point of view of one man’s lonely journey, and therefore for me very judgemental. That’s how I view Asimov – judgemental! Not great. There’s not an ‘us’ thing in it.

  Whereas, again, Shakespeare, which you’d think would be bizarre to me, isn’t. It’s the language. He’s using words, and the sound of them sometimes, rather than just the meanings, so the meaning becomes something else entirely; you just follow the poetic beat of it. And the pronunciation, you garner ever so much more information from that than you do by just observing the words on a piece of paper.

  I love Shakespeare live, if it’s done well. I’ve seen James Earl Jones do Othello years ago – phwoar, wow! I love the audacity of just walking in off the street to some lesser playhouse, to see something that looked on the billboard like complete crud. Like fringe theatre. It’s thrilling, the embarrassing closeness to the actors, then realizing what it is they’re going through, to be able to pull that off. It’s kind of a really good cheer-up for me, because that’s what live gigs are. So I understand it from that point of view, and I listen, I suppose, more intently than the regular audience.

  The nightmare of everything like that, though, including modern dance, is that the audience let the performers down. One time, me and Nora got taken to see Swan Lake, the b
allet, by Caroline Coon, the punk journalist – back when she was hanging out with Paul Simonon, from the Clash. Paul’s warm, I like him, and that night, the four of us had great laughs. Caroline’s line was, ‘You’re so into Swan Lake, John – there’s even a bit of it in “Death Disco”, so you’re going to love it!’ It was her wicked check on me.

  So Nora and I went over there, got in the cab, and there we are stood outside the theatre – we might not even have known beforehand. Bloody hell, you took us to ballet! It was astounding, but, I tell you what, I got bored really quickly. I couldn’t help it, the bar looked more enticing. When you see ballet on TV, as boring as that can be, you just see the leaps and the pointed toes and all of that, and that’s barely endurable, but when it’s live, with a live orchestra in the pit, you can barely hear the orchestra.

  But when forty girls jump up and down on their pointed toes, you can hear that like hob-nailed boots at the back of a terrace. It’s like an invading army of hooligans. It’s really loud; the wooden floor echoes and reverberates. I thought, ‘Urgh, that’s bloody discomforting!’ That’s the other thing for the spectator: the pain involved in that, it’s pretty hard to watch. Nora would tell me stories. Her sister took ballet when she was younger, but she wasn’t good enough, because she was slightly bigger-boned, shall we say? She later ran a ballet school in Germany. It’s a sad thing. When I saw her sister’s feet, just how that big toe is nobbled into something really, really ugly. And the arthritis and the pain in later life. Now, at least, I understand the work ethic.

  But the audience at these things is vile and snobbish. When they’re too trendy, and too involved in their own arsehole back scene of it, they’re missing the point.

  When you’re talking about missing the point, though, the majority of punks win the prize! They just got involved with the clothing, rather than the content. They certainly missed the politics, didn’t they? America’s interpretation, from their early days of poetry-reading punk, to absolute violence punk – just awful, both aspects of that were too much, and too ridiculous for me. I don’t want the over-simplification of either end of that. I want an absorption of all of it, but a good sense of right and wrong about it. Don’t go too far into anything, it gets you wrong.