Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  It certainly wasn’t easy for my new band, coming into this situation – the punk kick-back. None of it was helpful to the agenda of getting started up again. Actually putting the new line-up together was straightforward, to my mind. It wasn’t like running an advert in the newspaper this time, I was thinking in terms of sound, and kindred spirits, and some personalities who might actually get on. The people you meet backstage, the people in other bands, the ones you chat to, the ones you get on with – they stay in your mind.

  So, after Album, I went back to London and found John McGeoch. He’d been the guitarist in Magazine, who I was a big fan of. And wasn’t he astounding in Siouxsie and the Banshees? We fell into each other in a really great way; we were already very good friends. John sadly passed away in 2004, but hanging out with him was always hilarious. His humour was, ‘Where’s the bar?’ He’d start with a double Martini, he couldn’t care less if it was shaken or stirred, and onwards and upwards from there on in. He could be a difficult person – he was a Scot, indeed – and he had a lot of emotional wreckage going on inside him, but I don’t mind working with difficult people when they’ve got the goods.

  I will always think the world of John – just superb guitaring skills, and in different styles from what I was used to. I was used to more rhythmic styles and approaches. John was more of a note-y kind of guy, with the jazz chords every now and again. And it turned out he was a beautiful, beautiful person to work with.

  Bruce Smith I’d known for ever, really. I first met him at a gig with his first band, the Pop Group, and for some weird reason we Pistols thought they were threatening us. They thought we were threatening them, and they were terrified – but there was about seventeen of them! He went on to drum with the Slits. He’d been trained as a reggae drummer, and played on soul records, done jazz – quite a lot going on in there. He’s a happy-go-lucky, amicable guy, but I soon found out he’s a bit of brilliance in a rehearsal format. He’s very rhythmically structured, and has this personality that can blend all these opposite forces together into something cohesive – which, frankly, is a quality I tend to lack from time to time.

  Bruce brought in Allan Dias on bass, because they’d done the odd bit of session work together, and I trusted Bruce’s faith in him. Allan became one of PiL’s longest serving members – things don’t always end up negatively. Allan was so easy to get on with, very good fun, and a ladies’ man without a doubt. He has a certain quality of confidence where girls just fall all over him. A sexpot. This is PiL, we cater for everything, and everybody.

  Lu Edmonds, on keyboards and guitars, came from another strange meeting in London. I had forgotten completely that he was in the Damned, and I didn’t recognize him as such – and I didn’t hold it against him. There he was in his fisherman’s cap doing his little roll-up cigarettes, looking just like a professional social worker. He’s one of the most easy-going, greatest people to get along with. It’s so strange, his brain and body are disconnected. His body is so uncoordinated with rhythm and yet he plays more superbly than I have ever heard from any human being ever. He loves ambience, sonorous rhythms, fractures, tonalities, chaos.

  With those four in place, there was a bunch of people that are all incredibly different from each other, but I thought, ‘This could work, finally.’ No single one of us was dictating what the next vibe would be. It was a real sharing of talents, very generous, no dictatorship going on. It was a massive breath of fresh air for me, because up till then in retrospect, it had been like suffocation.

  What these boys had to face on our first UK tour in May ’86 was just terrible – very, very difficult, and not just in Brixton. The opening night in Hanley, some idiot chucked a snooker ball at me. In Edinburgh I was hit on the head with a lady’s high-heel shoe, a stiletto heel. Wow, did that knock the sparks in my brain. In fairness, Richard Jobson from the Skids came back afterwards and said he’d talked to the girl responsible, and she was really sorry. She was only trying to say, ‘Look, here’s my shoe!’ – she meant it well, she wasn’t out to try and gouge my eyeball out.

  In Vienna, McGeoch got a two-litre bottle of wine lobbed on his head. He ended up with something like forty stitches. We also had problems at another festival in Holland as well. The deal was, if it came to that, then we’d just have to go off. The band are standing there trying to play and they don’t have a free arm to catch things. Myself, I got very good at catching stuff when it was thrown, and not skipping a beat. But it’s not a game. You can get seriously hurt there. It only takes one or two at some of them large festivals, where the stage was low, and it could get very, very dangerous.

  In Vienna, it was a support band responsible for throwing the bottle at McGeoch. They’d gone to the back of the bar and nicked these empty bottles and that’s what they were slinging at us. It was like, who’s stopping that? I’d go, ‘Police yourselves. Who’s doing that?’ Generally speaking, a crowd would point them out and off they’d skulk. You’ve got to do something, and make a stand.

  At the time, I had no way of explaining this in the media. They really weren’t prepared to listen and were more or less rallying the negativity. I was easy pickings, and I didn’t feel that my record company was properly representing me with any sense of support, so that allowed a kind of journalistic freedom to unleash itself on me. At the same time, a negative review of, say, Madonna when she was starting up, would’ve been treated with very promptly by the record company by, for instance, threatening to pull advertising. I had none of that support, and therefore I was a free-range chicken, baby! Because my name was so up there and well known, wow, what a target. And not appreciated for that. Or for the music.

  On that tour, we’d open the set with the Led Zeppelin song, ‘Kashmir’. I love that song, I really do. I don’t mean the Puff Daddy version that came out some time after. I really wanted to sing it, but I never got round to singing it in rehearsals. I insisted the band rehearse it, and I insisted that we open the set with it, but every single time they’re waiting for me to come on, and I’m standing at the side, and I never did it. I’d shit myself. I couldn’t get it together – the very thing I’d set up and wanted so much – and it became laughable.

  It was still a great opening song, a very lovely piece of music, and I got to like the idea of letting people hear it, unadorned by Yours Truly. ‘Hello, it’s not the Johnny Rotten Show, check out that band!’

  Deep down inside, I think I wanted to sing like Robert Plant. I love Robert Plant, a great fella. I’ve met him a couple of times. I’ve got nothing but good to say about him. He comes at you with no preconceived us-and-them attitude. He’s very open-minded; he’s everything good in music. I really, really like him. I mean, I don’t like his hairdo, but so what?

  Listen, he came down the Roxy in the early days of punk, when we weren’t quite yet sorting ourselves out proper. The Roxy was punk’s deep dark hole, the den of iniquity, but he had the balls to come down there – I think he came down with Lemmy from Motörhead – and it was great! I just made a beeline straight for them, and went, ‘Hello, great to see you!’ Because it really was. What he was doing was giving us a pat on the back. Of course there were arseholes there, going, ‘Ugh, whatcha doing talking to that? He shouldn’t be here . . .’ ‘No, don’t be telling me who should and shouldn’t be here. Punk’s open-minded! Abso-fucking-lutely!’

  After all the violence on tour, we PiL-ites were feeling trapped with this idiotic element in the audience that was causing it. The success of Album in Britain, however, meant that we were very much back on Virgin’s radar as a commercial prospect. The pop mainstream at the time was a terrible place, and we really didn’t feel a connection with any of our peers. As in wider society, the entire period was about materialism. I had to squawk through it, and I was hated for everything I ever did.

  I was trying to write about human emotions and political problems in the age of Reaganomics and yuppies. More than ever before, it was all, ‘Yippee, let’s do it for the money.’ Many
of my alleged music cohorts in different bands were all the time on my case, going, ‘Why don’t you just write a hit song?’ – exactly that same old bollocks I heard from the first day I got into rehearsals. No! You write what you write, according to your experience and your humanity and your sense of understanding of the world, and if you try to step out of that zone, well, yeah, you might make the cash, but you’re one lonely silly sod.

  It struck me as deeply strange just how little music there was in the charts with any kind of relevance or political meaning. To me, someone like Boy George was the rare exception. All the people I like in music are the ones that have done something completely original, with a touch of genius, and I put Boy George in that bracket. He came up with something really great and challenging. At a time when punk had got staid and boring, out comes Culture Club. Fantastic. George would wear Indian menswear in a feminine way. The boy can sing, and he comes from the same background as me – the same hardcore rubbish. He’s someone that stood up for himself, no matter what he got into, and he’s intelligent, and therefore I like him. More respect, more power. He was the kind of guy there wasn’t really enough of to make the ’80s bearable.

  The world I wanted was going back to early clubs like Louise’s, where all manner of people would meet in the same environment and not cause a problem to each other, and not judge each other, and all be very different for their sexual agendas.

  The ’80s proved very negative in that respect for me, really just a bitter competition for who could make the most expensive video and show off the most. What a pity, such a shame. Because, as I said, I love Duran Duran. I love ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’, but does it require hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of promo video? All that was created there was a whole new monster of video directors, and they were arseholes to a man. The dictates that would come in from these people were just ludicrous beyond belief. The song wouldn’t matter, the studio work, your lifestyle, your band, nothing. It would be, ‘I have an idea. All you’ve got to do is pay for it!’ The video was becoming more important than the music.

  The biggest laugh in all of this era was – mullets. Again, it was, ‘We’re just having a laugh!’ ‘That’s all right, I don’t care what your hairdo of choice is.’ But how vacuous it all was. Having said that, I was changing my own hair a lot at that time – though hardly according to fashion! I was the precursor to how many Beckham hairdos?

  I’d started to stick bits of fur on the top of my head with superglue. I used fuse-wire to make certain fluffballs stand up high. They weren’t dreadlocks, more like bunny tails. I had so much metal in my head, by Jesus Christ, you try getting through an airport with that. The machine that went ‘Bing!’ would go ‘Bing-bing-bing!’ every time. The ‘hotwire to my head’ lyric in ‘Rise’ was a hairdo reference, while also being a poignant reference to South African torture methods involving electrocution.

  By default, I suppose what I was doing was protest music. I can’t help that. It has to be done. The truth has to be out there. That was a very untruthful period. Quite amazing.

  Politics has always been there in my writing. I can’t help it. I just feel naturally inclined to help the disenfranchised, and I’ll always feel that way myself. I know what those emotions are. I’ve never forgotten the endurance of my childhood, and so I have a great sense of empathy for people who suffer. To be ostracized from a society that should know better is not a great thing at all. So here I am. I will change society, I have changed society, I always will, and I’ll also be the first one shot because of that. That’s all right, I don’t mind taking the first bullet, because there’s enough people out there in the world of music, just music alone, who understand that, and that creates a great playground for the future. It’s my obligation to stand up and tell it like it is.

  When it came to making our next album, 1987’s Happy?, I was very pissed off with the world, and I went very wordy. Rather than sing melody lines, I thought, ‘I’ll shove as many words in here as I possibly can’, and loved doing it.

  After touring together, where we’d all got on so well, the rehearsals where we wrote the songs for the album together flowed amazingly. It really got me back to why I wrote songs in the first place. That’s why we called it Happy? – it was almost hard to believe how ‘right’ it was! – and it really surprised people, because it was a very confident step in another direction.

  There was a great sense of working together, and loving the work. I’d had enough of waiting around in New York for people to turn up. This was a room full of bright ideas which was heading towards a kind of pop sensationalism.

  ‘Seattle’ was an exceptional tune in that the band put it together without me. It normally doesn’t happen that way but what happened was, I was stuck in New York with tinnitus, which meant I couldn’t fly. The band went on to our destination, Seattle, and they had nothing to do for a week, so we agreed that they go in and record something, just a basic backing track. When I hooked up with them, they went, ‘Oh, this is just something we were messing around with,’ and I went, ‘What? It’s bloody amazing!’ I’ve still got the demo cassette they gave me. It just zinged, that song.

  There’s a lilt in there somewhere almost like an Irish folk song, so – bang, in I went, layering that sensibility into it. My favourite part of the song is the ‘palaces, barricades, threats meet promises’ section which is dealing with the rioting that was going on all around the world in the mid-’80s, from Broadwater Farm, London to as far away as India.

  The part that goes, ‘Character is lost and found on unfamiliar playing ground’, is very direct, but the whole thing is considering so many paradiddles of thought processes. A paradiddle is what a drummer practises. Every drummer I know, they’re always in a corner going, ‘Paradiddle, paradiddle, paradiddle’, tapping their knees. That’s how intellectualism works too. And although we know that intellectualism is a big fraud and some of the biggest deceivers of mankind are intellectuals, it’s also a very viable place to be. Think! And then when you think you’ve sussed it out, think some more! That’s what that lyric is saying.

  The songs on this album were really good, I think, and meaningful. ‘Angry’ was a ‘look at yourself before you judge others’ song. ‘Rules And Regulations’ was on the ‘don’t tell me what to do’ theme – you know, lest ye forget, there’s still a Rotten in here. ‘Hard Times’, with its Charles Dickens reference, was an alarm-bell song about when national identity is corrupted into that siege mentality of us and them. Here I declare: we are them. All of us are them. We are us. All of us. And vive la différence!

  ‘The Body’ refers almost directly to a TV play by Ken Loach called Cathy Come Home, which I watched when I was very young and which really affected me. It’s about unwanted pregnancies, and the sense of almost criminality put on an unwed mother, and what she would have to endure – the abandonment, lack of family support and isolation. Terrible, terrible things. I was young but I felt it really severely. Years later at Gunter Grove, I went out and found somebody who had a reel-to-reel of it, and I played it back and just broke down and cried all over again. I felt so sad for Cathy, I just wanted to wrap my arms like wings around her. That’s how I am, and I make no apologies for it. That’s my basic approach to life.

  The final track, ‘Fat Chance Hotel’, was based on a true story in my life. Soon after the Pistols broke up in 1978, I was stuck out in LA, and I met the manager of Gwen Dickey of the soul/disco band, Rose Royce. The manager was English, and she had a child but no husband with her, and Gwen had nothing to do, so the three of us and the kid just rented an RV and drove to Mexico – me in full punk regalia, the tartan bondage suit, accompanied by a black gospel singer, for a want of a better word, and an English lady with a mixed-race daughter. We definitely turned a few heads.

  Unfortunately, I had some digestive issues with the local cuisine – tacky tacos. I would also advise anyone going there: don’t drink the water. So for a few days, I was stuck inside this dreary run-down hotel,
and the song has some quite poignant lyrics about being bored in the brain, out here doing nothing at all – with a ‘splattery botty’. To be able to find a way to write a song about having nothing going on except diarrhoea, I was more than pleased when I heard the final tape. It certainly shouldn’t turn you off a good holiday. It intrigues, with warning signs. There’s also a love of the desert in it. There’s something about the silence of the desert, which isn’t silent at all, it’s the loudest silence you’ll ever hear. So it’s a very enjoyable song; you just close your eyes and drift in its space.

  For me, the whole album was a very powerful co-production with Gary Langan, from the Art of Noise, with well-balanced results. Gary was nutty, a bit of a genius, but with a laugh and a smile, and he always did things for the right reason.

  At that time, Lu was obsessed with technology, and he wanted to somehow transfer modern electronic keyboards via the computer into the gamelan register. He wasted years and years on that, until he came to grips with, ‘Well, you don’t need to – just play the thing!’ We maybe went a little far into the banks of keyboards: I remember us all being very, very in sync with each other.

  It’s a serious problem for me, all this technology. The people who’ve used it best would be Depeche Mode. ‘Your own personal Jesus!’ Bloody ’ell mate, they got it! They were using the Casiotone effect and they wrapped a song around it, but they didn’t let it dictate to the song. That’s another tune I just absolutely love – I was so impressed with the bravery of attempting such a subject matter.

  The front cover of Happy? was a nod to the German artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose work I was truly impressed by. I don’t know nothing about him, I don’t want to. I just know that any time that man put something together I was completely interested. He did architecture, too, and it was always interesting, for instance using gardens on the floors of skyscrapers, and altering the shape of a building and making it interesting to the eye for the observer – as on our sleeve.