Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  I got the impression, trying to talk to Keith around that time, that he viewed me as a parasite living off his genius. This is how it would be coming across in conversations in the short sharp smirkiness of his approach. That was just too ludicrous by half: sneaking off and wasting studio time and misspending money on his ideas, and his ideas were excluding me. In these moments when the light of dawn finally breaks on you, that’s painful.

  I was not going to give PiL up. I wasn’t going to let the likes of Keith and/or any member run off and claim it as theirs. Without meaning to be ridiculous about it – it’s like Ted Turner. I understand what CNN was when he started out, and I understand his fury at what it turned into, and his absolute rage that he was pushed off the board of that company. It’s a great tragedy – CNN is now a complete farce. I couldn’t let that kind of thing happen to PiL, ‘my own creation’.

  I did, though, consider making a solo record. Through a friend, Roger Trilling, I’d got very into an experimental scene surrounding the label ECM. A lot of the records would be solo cellists, going, ‘Pop, bing, twannngggg’ – lots of drawn-out, slow, melodious patterns, some of it completely pointless. In the loft, I liked putting these things on and letting it drift in the background while just doing normal everyday things. I found it a very comfortable way of using it, rather than to sit down and realize, ‘Gosh, this chap’s really crawling up his own bunty . . .’

  That led to me thinking I needed to put out a solo thing in this kind of direction. Avant-garde? Oh yeah! But not quite in that way, obviously. I was very thrilled that these people had the audacity, and I remember arguing with the musicologists at similar concert places at the time – they’d go, ‘No, this man studied at the Royal Philharmonic for forty years.’ But this is what he came up with – ‘Boonnggg!’ And why not? I was absorbing that that’s what these people found the most thrilling; they were exploring the tonal quality of abstract random plucking, for instance, or farting down a horn. They were so in love with the sound that musicianship and structure became pointless. A wonderful insight into the workings of the human mind. My record collection, if you come round my house, is very much like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a few dance things, but here’s the serious stuff . . .’ I can clear a room in minutes.

  Anyway, my grand scheme fell apart – the solo venture never came to fruition. There was just too much fractionalisation going on, so that I couldn’t actually sit down and have the time to do it alone.

  At the same time, Virgin were trying to make me write a hit single. ‘C’mon, Johnny, why don’t you pen us a nice love song, so we can all make loads of money?’ I’m like, ‘After all I’ve been up to, who or what is it you think you’re talking to?’ The core essence of me is, I think, that I write very good pop songs, but I don’t write them because I’m asked to or told to, they happen quite instinctively and naturally. To try to interfere with that process in me is never going to work, ever. I do what I want, and it just so happens that what I do is kind of really good from time to time. I don’t mean that to sound big-headed, it’s how it is. I’m not gonna disrespect my gift and misuse it by writing cheese.

  Thus came the idea of ‘This Is Not A Love Song’. Initially, those energies were dissipated because Keith had the audacity to go off and do something on his own with it in the studio. He’d decided I was a bad singer, but he didn’t tell me this to my face. You couldn’t actually get him to speak to you directly, not about anything, at this point. He knew damn well I was onto him. As soon as I looked into his reddened snitchy little eyes, I’d go, ‘What do you want?’ And so he’d avoid me.

  I’d be hearing second hand about his conversations in the studio, so I went down there, but he wasn’t there, and I said, ‘Well, where’s the tape? What’s he been doing?’ I heard it and thought, ‘Right, we can do something with that.’ And so, I put words to it – something I don’t usually like to do. I like to be in there at the outset so I’m fully involved in the song’s evolution, but in this case the song went from there. We had no bass player, so Martin Atkins brought over a mate from London called Pete Jones who played bass. He wasn’t great, but it helped, and some gigs came out of that.

  We never discussed anything like ‘musical direction’. Anyone I’ve worked with will tell you I never come at it with an agenda. Still, it got very negative because, with this music we were putting together, Keith didn’t respect what he was doing, he thought it was junk. It wasn’t. He just couldn’t appreciate himself musically. He viewed his guitar lines as throwaway when they were not. They were really thought-out pieces. He’d lost the plot. Ultimately all his bile and spite and resentfulness became unamusing. He really meant it. He was like gooseberry jam without the sugar.

  I don’t know what Keith wanted, but somehow he didn’t want me involved and presumed that it was his band, so I had to put the knockers on that. There was no one single thing that ended it, just a collection of incidences up to about May or June 1983. The most pressing issue at the time was, we had some dates booked for July in Japan. There’d been problems getting him a visa, but he knew he couldn’t survive the plane journey. He couldn’t even survive a van journey from New York to Pennsylvania, which is three or four hours.

  To this day, I feel clean with the break from him. Back then, it was almost like a switch that went on, because I was free of the bondage that some of them ex-members had become. I just wanted to go out and earn my wings, exercise my chops and grapple with the tension and fear that is live performance, and is ultimately to my mind the biggest reward of being in a band.

  All I needed was the band. The commitment to Japan was already made, and the tour had to go ahead. I scouted around for whatever possibilities I could find, and ended up with a bunch of fellas that Martin Atkins and our producer Bob Miller found working hotels and bars in New Jersey, playing cover versions. There wasn’t anyone else readily available that wasn’t coming in at an enormous price that I could match, and along came these fellas with shiny suits and mullets, and I thought, ‘Wow! This could work!’ There was such an image danger that there was an appeal in it and, as fellas, I liked them very, very much.

  I went up to see them in Atlantic City, and it must’ve been the Holiday Inn there, because that’s what I was saying at the time: ‘Look, I’ve gone and got myself a Holiday Inn band.’ I wasn’t being disrespectful; I just thought this was definitely going to challenge an audience, judgemental fucks that they can be. For me, the only thing that’s ever going to be bad for my image is a lousy live performance. I thought, ‘Well, we’re not going to be that lousy,’ and indeed a great time was had by all.

  They were just thrilled to get to a place like Japan, after being stuck in New Jersey. In terms of musicianship they were miles ahead of me, but at the same time miles behind, because they couldn’t quite come to grips with the way the songs were anti-structured and deliberately let loose, so we had to shape-shift around what the set would be. Which was fine, because at that time I was into tormenting pop songs – very much so – working within the restraints of verse-chorus to see how I could manoeuvre that into something exciting.

  We even started playing ‘Anarchy In The UK’ – with boys with mullets. Fantastic! It was a matter of ‘Are people actually listening to the song, or are they judging us by our hairdos?’ The Holiday Inn chappies were terrified of approaching ‘Anarchy’, but at the same time they loved the balls of it. The lead guitarist, Joe Guida – there he is in his tight jeans and white sneakers, legs as wide apart as possible, and a mullet, and he’s banging out his gruff guitar riff – fucking great! You know? If you’re going to write a song like ‘Anarchy’, it has to be understood that it’s not just for the fashionably elite, it’s for everyone. I was magnanimously sharing that message.

  Virgin pressured us into releasing a live album from Japan, but I was appreciative that it would go some way towards paying off our debt to them. It’s keeping the business rolling, and keeping the record company interested in you. I don’t blame Virgin
for everything; I do understand that I’m a very difficult person to get along with. I challenged their sense of economics on almost a daily basis.

  It also helped us to get PiL finally established as a live act, and we hit the road through the latter half of 1983. Little did we know we were swimming against the tide of where music was heading at the time. Video production was where all the big money was going, and live performances were neither here nor there to the bigger outfits of the day. Once the wool had been pulled over your eyes and you’d committed to buying anything by those kind of outfits, you didn’t know what the possibilities of real bands were. So shambolically ridiculous light shows convinced you that that’s what music was all about.

  We started working with a set designer called Dave Jackson, who’d orchestrate lighting for us, but our way was very different from everybody else. He put together our ‘toilet set’, where the backdrop was white tiles and urinals. An absolutely clean approach! Shame on my brother Jimmy, because when we ended the gig at Hammersmith Palais in November, he wandered onstage and pissed in one of the urinals. He presumed they were plumbed in!

  So I can be accused in my big bad life of having fake urinals. The idea was that out of the antiseptic environment of public bathrooms could come great ideas. The toilet’s an incredibly boring thing to have to deal with, getting rid of your waste, but you can let your mind wander and possibilities do arise. It’s that, or you play with your pud. I mean, I’ve had many great song ideas while sitting on the shitter. I won’t name them for you, because that would spoil them – I don’t want to put the vision of a big macca in anyone’s head.

  Around that time, we played live on Channel Four’s The Tube. I had the worst flu. Whenever a TV slot like that comes up, it’s usually towards the end of a really hard, rigorous tour and I’m completely drained and flu-ridden. The Eurythmics were on as well, and their guitarist, Dave Stewart, was coming across a bit stroppy – a self-proclaimed genius. All’s well that ends well, because Annie Lennox sent over a bit of an apology for his gruffy-ness. She’s a lovely person. I’ve got great respect for her – big time! From ‘Sweet Dreams’ onwards, she had me, hook, line and sinker. Yippee! I’ll lay down and take your pervy rollercoaster, baby!

  At our regular gigs, we found that there was a dark, one per cent element out there, absolutely out to hurt – really seriously hurt – us or anyone in their path. I don’t know what you would call those kinds of people – stalkers, fanatics, psychos – but they make the presumption that you aren’t what they believe you should be. They can do you some harm.

  At the Paradiso in Amsterdam, somebody came up with a screwdriver and tried to stick it in my back. Luckily it was blunt, but it left a mark there. And of course on came the Hell’s Angels security making arses out of it. There’s nothing uglier than huge physically over-developed oafs running around the stage like Clampetts and things getting confused. The reason I actually got stabbed in the back was because one of the security guards grabbed me. He was trying to protect me, but by holding my hands down I couldn’t manoeuvre, so he accidentally made me an immobile unit – a dartboard. I was furious about that.

  It’s quite serious when you put together all the attacks that Public Image as a band have had to endure – much more so than the Pistols. Listen, I was moving on, I was advancing my stuff, and these were people that wanted me to stick to my past. It’s always been the problem. If you don’t like what I’m doing, fine – leave it alone, move on, don’t hang around and demand that I go back ten steps and mollycoddle myself in the safety of my past. That’s just not going to happen. You’ve got to bear in mind they paid good money to attend in the first place. I’m always insistent: unless they really push it, don’t throw them out, but the more magnanimous you are, the more volatile they become, and then it becomes a free-for-all and it gets misunderstood as, ‘Oh yeah, go to a PiL gig – you can boo the singer and throw things and try to stab him, it’s great!’

  Wowzers, what kind of a world are these lot living in? None of the fellas that do this kind of stuff are what I’d call hardcore. These are all lonely bedsit bastards that have somehow justified their activities as saving the world from the likes of me, with the wonderful excuse that I’ve apparently ‘sold out’, whatever that means.

  The concept of selling out all seems to have grown from the Who’s album, The Who Sell Out – their glorious piss-take of advertising. The photography on the cover of the first PiL album was a nod and a wink to that – our version of Roger Daltrey sitting in a tub of Heinz baked beans! That was a very advanced thing to be experimenting with, the idea of anti-promotions. Sometimes some of us in this world of creativity get a little too far advanced for the mental capacities of certain members of the audience. And aye, as Shakespeare would say, there’s the rub.

  I do find great fun in irony. ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ was, for me, a continuation of ‘Pretty Vacant’. You know, I’m not pretty and I’m not vacant. ‘This is not’ is actually ‘this is’. The idea was to oppose commerciality and greed, and so the juxtaposition inside the song is ‘Happy to have, not to have not/Big business is very wise, and I’m inside free enterprise’, when my sentiment was the exact opposite. By saying one thing, you’re actually meaning something else. So ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ is really a love song.

  What I’m truly very happy about is that I haven’t kowtowed to corporate dictation from Branson and Virgin. I haven’t written the songs that they wanted me to. I haven’t become the commercial-success arsehole it would’ve been so easy to turn into under their watch. That way, I wouldn’t be the same person. I’d have had a lifespan of two years and made so much money that I wouldn’t have to deal with anybody ever again. But that’s not interesting. At all. I just can’t do that; it has to come from the correct place.

  ‘Love Song’ wasn’t written deliberately to confuse people, but afterwards I did enjoy the scope of possibilities, and the intrigue that journalists can find in these things. That absolutely thrills me, and I’ll always be the first to stand up and go, ‘Yes, of course!’ when really it isn’t ‘Yes, of course!’ It’s a song, what’s the problem with you? It’s there to provoke thought. I do like my bits of pop, but the words are there, listen to them and they’ll tell you the story. It’s just a human being trying to explain his place in the world, and how he interprets his immediate surroundings. And irony will always be there because that’s the greatest achievement in the English language, and that’s sadly lacking in other cultures. I happen to know for a fact that you cannot translate these songs directly into German, for instance.

  Music had suddenly become very corporate. Around that time, Duran Duran launched a single with a video that cost around half a million quid. I might be wrong on the figures, but thereabouts. They got that from nowhere, just straight at you. Videos and big productions were now just the norm. No learning curve in them, but at the same time, I’ve got to tell you, I loved ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’!

  Years later, I met Simon Le Bon. It was an odd one: the Hard Rock Casino was opening in Las Vegas in 1995, and every musician was invited. I went because my manager at the time had all these free passes and rooms. His name was Eric Gardner and, little did I know, all he wanted to be there for was to gamble. When I went there, even getting into the venue was very difficult. Simon Le Bon spotted me having a problem there, and he went, ‘Don’t you know who he is?’ and that was it, I was in. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, it takes Duran Duran to get Johnny Rotten into a building!’ I liked him as a bloke, and I like a lot of their songs. I like ‘Girls On Film’, and I can’t pretend otherwise. I don’t have hatred for different forms of music, in fact I’ve got a great deal of love and openness to everything done by anybody. Christ, I have to: I’ve got two Alvin Stardust albums.

  Anyway, for ‘Love Song’, we shot our video surrounded by the financial hub of LA. It was: get a couple of thousand dollars, rent a car, get a cheap camera, film it, have fun and spend all the serious money on having a party a
fterwards. Always have done. I love making videos when they’re on the cheap – to me they’re the most fun. I see these hundred thousand dollars pumped into other things, and I don’t think they’re anyway near as effective.

  ‘Love Song’ became a delicious issue with Virgin, because they didn’t want to release it as a single. They declared outright it was destined to be a commercial failure, so I found a company in Japan that was interested in releasing it and, although it was going to put me into a dangerous situation with Virgin, well, if they thought it stood no chance of charting, I’d go somewhere where they would be proved different. Of course, it turned into a big hit in the clubs of Japan. So I took that straight back to Virgin – ‘Whatever it is you said it was, it isn’t. It’s actually a hit, now you have to release it, or take me to court and be proved wrong, because there’s the commercial success right in front of your face.’ Bingo! It duly went right up the British charts and ended up Top Five. It was also a big hit all over Europe, including a Top Ten in Germany. Prior to Virgin finally releasing it, the Japanese release had been heavily imported into Britain. There was a buzz about ‘Love Song’ before it even came out. We plonked it right in Virgin’s lap for them. What more could they ask for?

  That’s why, over the years, I’ve always gone back doing different versions and updates on ‘Love Song’ – it’s there as a reminder of the powers-that-be telling us that songs like this are not possible. It’s a weapon of war, it’s as important to me as the Pistols’ song ‘EMI’ was.

  The water of that whole relationship with Virgin was muddied further when Keith Levene sneakily tried to release an album of the stuff we’d been working on before he left. It was called Commercial Zone, it was incomplete, some of it was very scrappy and, to my mind, very painful to listen to.