Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  You know for sure that as a singer you’ll be judged more harshly. I’ve no idea if I’ve got what it takes. I’ve gone through all the self-interrogation, which is more than enough for me to have to endure, but if it’s there then I’m gonna take the challenge. I can’t resist the challenge. It’s harsh on me what I do to myself, but if there’s something where I risk facing complete and utter humiliation and degradation, then I will waltz into it. I find that irresistible. That’s what life is, a series of superb challenges, and in none of these aspects am I talking about selling my soul or copping out or denying my past, my present or my future. What I’m talking about is there’s a work thing here. A way of presenting whatever my message is in different ways.

  I suppose that’s what I was looking at, for the first time seriously in this period, since PiL was at a stalemate with Virgin. There was a thing flirting around for a while there with Channel Four in Britain about presenting their Friday-night youth-culture programme, The Word. But in that case, why on earth would I give up what I do in music. That would’ve been the kiss of death. I would view being a TV presenter on a pop show as terminal cancer. What do you expect to get out of that when it ends? I’m well aware that there’s many things I could take on, but obviously Celebrity Squares isn’t going to be one of them.

  Another interesting project that emerged that year, and brought in a welcome influx of cash, was a series of ads I did for Schlitz beer. They sent me heaps of crates and, surprise surprise, I liked it. There was no huge money for doing it, but it was good enough. I’ve noticed in life: something can come along that you least expect, and you’ve got to be smart enough to be able to take it on. It has to be the right thing, though.

  The ads themselves were a junkified approach – a collage of events put together in a poster, based around my rubbish. There was a story going around that Bob Dylan had called the police, because the contents of his dustbin were being raided by this so-called counterculture scholar, A. J. Weberman. So there’s the modern world for you. Thank you, hippie! Even our trash cans need padlocks. It might be articles we discard but it’s still our own business. While I’m paying tax for dustbin men to collect the garbage, that’s my business.

  In amongst all these peripheral things, the notion of the Sex Pistols touring again slowly bubbled away. I agreed to it as an idea. I thought it was important that we as four people should not allow the band to have been broken up for good, for the wrong reasons – the subterfuge and the innuendos and the back-scene chatter and banter, being misled by a sarcastic management. After the court case, it was free of all that now, so there was room for manoeuvre, finally. For my mind, it was a matter of either putting an end to it, or taking it so far it would be impossible to continue. Either way was very interesting to me.

  The first person I had a real serious phone conversation with was Steve Jones, and it was about Glen Matlock. It turned out that Glen was in LA, and they’d met up. Steve was trying to convince me: ‘Oh no, Glen’s not like that any more, he’s all right now. He doesn’t drink like he used to, he’s approachable. At least, I found him that way.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, where’s this going?’

  Steve convinced me to meet Glen with him in LA. They came down to meet me in Venice Beach, and we had a walk around the marina. I pointed out the boats, and the things I liked in life and, miracle of miracles, we got on!

  I thought that if two people like Steve and Glen could come together on a project, then that boded well for the rest of us, because those two have never seen eye to eye. Not ever. There was never a time where Steve has not mocked Glen, or disliked him – it’s always been that way. And the other way round. It wasn’t all me: those two would create tensions that rippled throughout the work relationship with all of us. Paul would always side with Steve because they were so close. But if the band was going to get back together, I didn’t want a different bass player. Since Sid was obviously no longer available, I myself wanted Glen.

  So, it was a good meeting, and we were as usual very open with each other. There’s not much subterfuge going on with us lot. The contempt is there right at the surface and can therefore be easily cleaned up. It’s a much healthier way than burying it all and pretending we’re all good friends. I’d rather have brilliant working relationships than friends, in these situations. Friends are important but not with this band.

  We tried to ring Paul back in England, and left answerphone messages, then went out for food, and meanwhile he’d left messages in return. When I eventually got hold of him a day or two later, his approach was very friendly. I had long talks with him, and that pulled me back in, to the belief that there was something there to save and rescue.

  The pressure was gone from the ugliness that we’d had to endure back in the early days. It became a valid thing to do. I thought, ‘I really like this, I don’t want to let them down. We can rescue it, but not for ever – just an affirmation of the quality that came out of that situation, and that the root core of all the problems of the band unfolding and imploding was down to the management, which was no longer involved.’

  And so it was supposed to be a ‘free I-self up’ situation, as the Jamaicans would say. Still, I was horrified at the prospect, in all honesty. One big angle of the conversation was, I just did not want the word ‘reunion’ to be in this. I said, ‘That’s the first thing that the arse journalists are going to present to us; they’re gonna call it a reunion.’ So I went through my dictionary of words to find every other possible vocabulary route around that. I didn’t see it as a reunion. It was re-nothing. When it’s on, it’s on. When it’s off, it’s off. Reunions are deeply unhip, and in our case would’ve invited the accusation: ‘How dare you? Why don’t you just go away, the world has had enough of your sort.’

  Then of course, all the young whippersnappers out there, being misled by the negatives, were in a world of resentment – ‘Uuuurgh, you old men! Isn’t that all something that happened ever so long ago?’ – without any of these sods paying attention to the fact that whatever freedoms they were now expressing, it was us lot that earned it for them. If you don’t want to listen to us, just shut your mouth, go away, leave us alone.

  Isn’t ageism a terrible nonsense? It’s back to poor old Pete Townshend again. He’s such a good fella, and such a good writer – but that ‘Hope I die before I get old’ thing has haunted him. And it’s so misunderstood. I don’t think Townshend meant it as an ageist thing at all, but the lesser thinkers out there hook onto that and then try to perpetuate the myth of ‘music is just for young dumb teenagers’, because that way, of course, the magazine culture and the record companies can force-feed you whatever they like, using identikit impressionables. Anybody that shows any longevity is obviously going to be giving the game away, and that’s not what the industry wants.

  So, don’t ask anybody to run away and hide and give it all up. Not when they’ve done any quality work – even if they just wrote one song that has crept into anybody’s psyche, don’t underestimate and don’t negate. That’s a talent, that’s a human being at work – respect to them! I committed that crime myself when I was young: ‘What do you think of the Rolling Stones?’ asked Janet Street-Porter, in a TV interview, back in the day. ‘I don’t,’ was my answer. It was quite true, I didn’t think of them at that point. I had my own thing to get on with – the Pistols. There was no hatred in it and I certainly wasn’t asking them to stop, although it did occur to me that the idea of running up and down the stage at forty might be slightly absurd.

  But I broke the forty barrier myself and I thought, ‘No, it’s not at all, you’re wrong there, John!’ Never surrender! There’s something terrible in British culture that teaches you this ‘Just give up, act your age’ nonsense. Once I firmly came to grips and analyzed all of that stuff, I realized that’s denying you your life! And you must live your life to the fullest you possibly can, until the very second your heart gives out. And don’t let no one take that away from you.

  It was fantas
tic. A hornet’s nest, that’s what we stirred up. No other band on earth would have to deal with negativity to the extent we had to. After the initial rush of euphoria, it became something of an endurance course. Of course, that bonded us together even more. In many ways, it was a great thing, you see – such a foul negative you can turn around on itself. There’s not much self-pity in the Pistols. In that respect, it was a very healthy outfit to have come from.

  At the press conference we gave at the 100 Club in March 1996, announcing our return, they were lining up to hammer us. It was a hostile atmosphere. In those situations you have to find a thought process that protects you on at least two sides. You put me down, so I cover myself left, right and behind. ‘Oh come on, isn’t it all about the money?’ they whine. I don’t want to run through my catalogue of answers, so I pre-empt them. ‘I’m fat, forty and back. Deal with it. Next!’

  It was a question-and-answer format, and I’m sharing a podium with Steve, Paul and Glen, and it becomes apparent to me within thirty seconds that these three ain’t got it. My own band, they couldn’t answer questions properly, so I’d have to keep interrupting, and shifting the agenda. I felt the band weren’t coming up to meet the mark. The questions were aggressive and negative and I just decided to body-slam them verbally. We had to make the point that the Sex Pistols was an ongoing force. Not that we were back again, but were still and always would be relevant. You know, game won.

  ‘Ooh, but are you only doing it for the money?’ these fools kept asking. For fuck’s sake, this is an accusation from a pop industry that only does it for the money. The idea that it’s audacious of us to expect to be paid for what we do! The most influential band in the world, at that point! Well actually, PiL had taken over from that, but you know what I mean? Asking us to explain ourselves, like we were in the dock at the Old Bailey, and these three wankers of band members actually going into waffling about it. Hideous. The cowardice of them was frightening.

  By the time we got into rehearsals, we realized we really didn’t like each other, all over again. Anita Camarata – who is Steve Jones’s manager but also represents the other two on Sex Pistols matters only – was going, ‘Steve doesn’t drink, so it’s not wise to have alcohol around.’ I turn up with two crates. Those are mine. What’s mine is mine. If I wanna drink, I drink, and if you don’t want to and you’re under AA, that’s your business entirely. I absolutely declared where the lines were.

  I was starting to re-familiarise myself with that old feeling of, ‘What have they done now that I don’t know about, but will find out soon?’ Hey presto, there was an issue, Steve’s manager had gone and got in a fashion advisor, to suggest what clothes we should wear. Hahaha, hahaha, hahaha! It went very well. I took it with great style. I thought, ‘Okay, this is not her fault, this fashion expert. There might be something in this for me’, and lo and behold, on those racks, there was! It was mental stuff, and that’s how I ended up wearing what was described as a Paddy’s donkey jacket, a grey-and-white check thing in nylon. There was a red jacket halter with a plastic front, too – loved that – but that fell apart after two gigs.

  So there were mad little pieces of clothing in there that I really fixated on and got into. What about the rest of them? ‘Uuuuurgh, where’s the jeans?’ They were right back at that basic problem that was always there right from the start with the Pistols: they didn’t know how to present themselves. They didn’t have self-confidence enough – apart from Glen, of course. Glen’s up there, in a quiet way. Ladies’ gear? Whoa, he’ll have it. Glen’s got a sense of style. It might not always be appropriate, but it’s style, and it’s him and therefore it is style. But as for the other pair? Basically, it was down to designer T-shirts and jeans. Ridiculous.

  Steve, of course, was so conscious about his weight. What he’d done – oh, so foolish – was that he’d ordered a load of clothing from Vivienne. But he was shy about what his real waist measurement was, because Vivienne was a real cow for this. She’d be the first to tell you, ‘I don’t make clothes for fat people!’ So Steve lied about the waist and the chest and every other proportion, so everything that arrived, he couldn’t get into. It must’ve cost him the earth. The only thing that fitted him was this stupid hat.

  There you go, that’s the fashion front dealt with. Do the public deserve to see what Steve looked like at the time – a mountain of butter wedged on two cowboy boots, with a Vivienne Westwood floppy cap? NO! I’m not a fascist dictator here, each to his own and all of that, but when I know that it’s all down to a complete lack of consideration, and he’s being almost cynical in his presentation, that’s not gonna happen.

  Once we hit the road, at one of the very early shows, this happened: you know when you get to your room and your luggage goes missing? Well, a case of Steve’s went missing. He rang everyone up asking about it. It almost felt like he was accusing people, that’s how it seemed to come across, making people feel really uncomfortable. It finally turned up and, lo and behold, he had just left it in the lobby! Was he expecting us to carry it for him? That vibe kind of set the tone for the whole tour.

  My big stipulation for the tour was that Rambo would handle our security. He was an ex-army British paratrooper, an ABA boxer, and an extremely tactical and organized individual. I’d had enough of bouncers ruining gigs, and it was very foreseeable that occasionally morons would be in the audience. There’s always that one per cent of haters that you have to be aware of, and take precautions against, because they tend to hurt the innocent people.

  I hadn’t seen Rambo in years, but he turned up to see PiL at the Reading Festival in 1992, and he very clearly saw through what was going on: we’d worn ourselves out, and we were all very separate. The next time I saw him was about a year later, when I hired him at the signing launch of my No Irish book in New York, which he took charge of, and handled very well. I made a promise that the next time I went out on tour, he’d be on it.

  Now we were doing a Pistols tour, I had to have my own man, someone I trusted, not a bunch of meat-mountains with walkie-talkies. Rambo wasn’t there as a bully boy, but as a mate and an ally. He was brought in as my personal security, and was also the band’s security while on stage. He would literally stand on stage throughout the set. Keeping an eagle eye that the venue security were not getting heavy handed with the crowd. He was there to prevent trouble before it started. As I have documented already, there are a lot of people out there who want to hurt me. I’ve been attacked on stage many times, so I was taking no chances – we knew there would be arseholes out for trouble. Rambo would make sure runners did not get on stage and disrupt the set: stopping monitors, mic stands and the likes getting knocked over and just letting the band get on with things. Over time his job progressed to other stuff like making sure the monitors weren’t low, so we wouldn’t have to interrupt the gig to get it fixed. I like to hear me! He’d check the time, song by song, so we didn’t overrun and get the plugs pulled. And he’d clear the stage of unnecessary crew people; he likes to keep a clean stage. It immediately felt very different, and very good, having him there.

  I think a lot of people think we only played Finsbury Park and that’s it, but we did something like sixty or seventy shows covering the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and South America. It was a massive commitment. We called the tour ‘Filthy Lucre’, because that was one of the accusations from the newspapers when we were being paid to leave EMI and A&M, back in ’77. My mate, Dave Jackson, who’d done our stage design in PiL, came up with the set idea of having all them sensationalist hateful headlines printed on a massive sheet of paper across the front of the stage, and us then bursting through it. It came at great expense, but there we were, smashing up the headlines – what part of that aren’t you getting? These headlines are lies. We’re not. And ultimately, if you don’t even understand any of the infusions of the Sex Pistols in modern culture, please at least understand that we broke through the bullshit barrier. We survived Maxwell and Murdoch!

>   After all the media cynicism, the actual response at the first European gigs was just incredible. We were finally getting that respect. It was overwhelming and emotional. And the thrill of that and the audience absolutely being there right from second one, is that you don’t have to become a parody of yourself. You’re with it as much as the audience is. They give me as much as I give them.

  The third show was a massive one for me – outdoors in Finsbury Park, actually in the park itself in front of something like 30,000 people. It was a very difficult gig to do, because my family were all there and close friends and everybody from the neighbourhood, and they all want your attention. There were lots of pop stars and footballers whizzing about backstage, all wanting to talk to you.

  The whole gig, however, turned out fantastic, one of the very best days. It was right in the middle of the Euro ’96 football tournament, which was taking place in Britain, and a couple of the England team, Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate, came down. They were specifically warned not to come by the England manager, Terry Venables, but they came anyway, so of course I gave them my full support, and asked them to introduce us onstage, which they did. Some of the audience were not over-exuberant in their appreciation of them, they were just puzzled as to what the connection was. ‘Hello, we’re giving you proper England, you fools!’