Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  All the pre-show excitement drained my energy. By the time I got onstage I was exhausted, and I hadn’t fully prepared. But we did good. My ‘fat, forty and back’ line seemed to go down well – a nod and a wink to that lovely old Tamla song, ‘Young, Gifted And Black’, trying to bring a sense of humour to it. ‘Hello, I’m not here pretending I’m seventeen. Get it right! But this is what I’ve been doing, this is what I’ve done, and I’m proud of it and nobody else has the right to try and step into these positions that we created.’ That whole Swindle nonsense of Malcolm trying to get someone not only to emulate me, but steal my position in life, steal my own work – that was always an issue with me. I will always come back and get vengeance for that kind of activity, and rightly so. I am what I am, and you will get my bitterness if I see you stealing my hairdos, my lifestyle, my clothing, my lyrics, my music. I won’t have much time for you, and I will say so. Other than that, I’m quite an easy fella to get on with.

  It was such great fun being onstage, doing those songs again. Doing ‘EMI’, after the label’s recent halting of PiL’s progress, I really, really hammered it in. I took no prisoners. I couldn’t wait to get to that part of the gig – that was, ‘Whhoooaaaarrrrghhh!’ I’d be holding back on some of the more excessive screaming tones, and saving them for that. I made the delivery oh-so-vicious and attacking. Which is exactly the way I wrote it.

  Them songs, still to this day I don’t know how I managed to record the vocal lines all in one go. It was always hard to do live, and the longer I’m at it, the more astounded I am that I ever could get up to it like that in the first place.

  A couple of weeks or so after Finsbury Park, we played a smaller gig indoors at the Shepherds Bush Empire, which prompted Alan McGee, then the boss of Creation Records, to pay for a full-page ad on the back of the NME, praising us to the heavens. That was all his doing; he felt really bloody angry that people were trying to slag us off or put us down, while ignoring our history. Very nice and neat of him, I thought. And nothing at all about a working relationship – that was never ever discussed with him, even though he was a big fan.

  It’s ironic, but it’s delicious too, that, gosh, we’ve got a lot of enemies – and if I may say so myself, fully deserved. But that just makes us better, every one of us. What is it about us, or me in particular, that seems to annoy? Just telling it like it is. When it all comes down to it, that’s my crime. I tell it like it is.

  Once we properly got into the tour, there were bitter arguments. I’m the singer and I don’t go on a tour bus unless there is an open window. I can’t sit in there with air conditioner. It totally fucks up your musical instrument – your voice – and then you can’t do the gigs. This is just a natural fact. The only instrument I have to fine tune is my tonsils. I can’t ask a roadie to repair them when I’ve been dehydrated for twelve hours on an overnight bus ride. You end up with all kind of medical problems from that, ripping your tonsils out due to nothing more than the lack of an open window.

  Of course, this made me a spoiled brat. Certain members of the band found it annoying or precious, on my behalf. But these would be the same guitarists that insisted on employing someone to put the strings on their instruments. Well, an open window is the strings on my instrument.

  It’s the same with hotels: I have to have a room that has a window that opens, or preferably a balcony door, whether it be freezing or not. That’s the kind of thing, for me, that keeps me going. Otherwise I start getting ill, I start getting run down, and then strep-throat comes in, then you need doctors and then it gets into Vitamin B12 shots. It becomes a downward spiral, and physically you become drained because of it. An open window isn’t the perfect answer but it’s nine-tenths the solution to the problem.

  Then jealousy can creep in if the only open window is at the back of the bus – well, that’ll be where I sleep then. And too bad if you wanna sit around there chatting. But I’ve got to tell you, too, a lot of the time that’s a problem in itself, because tour buses are very rattly things. When you have an open window, the sound of the wind rushing by – and the rattling and the banging – it’s like being in an aircraft engine, and you’re in a state of sleeplessness.

  You can see how the rock-star private-jet phenomenon came about. You get there quick, you get it over with, and then you can stand next to your open window in a hotel room for eight hours. Rather than ten hours on a motorway, arguing.

  We toured way too long. I realized very early on that I couldn’t write a song for them any more. I didn’t feel it in that way, and every time a song idea came up, I was always thinking, ‘PiL!’ That would be something we could experiment with in a PiL way, not here, because this would be ten steps backwards, like a re-enactment really, and I don’t do those.

  I enjoyed shape-shifting the old songs. I also enjoyed revisiting our anti-format of that time, and how we put those songs together. Fond memories – it would be there in the back of my mind how these things came together, as I was actually doing it live. Fantastic, really rich rewards in that. But then animosities started to creep in. Again. Sometimes, they deliberately wouldn’t give me that cue for a verse or whatever, that musicians ordinarily do. Then you’re standing there in front of thousands of people, wondering, ‘Where’s the singer supposed to go here?’ I caught them doing that more than a couple of times. I’d look round and go, ‘Where’s me cue?’ They’d all have their backs to me in an idiotic Status Quo impression, Steve and Glen doing this arse-waggling back-turn to me. Stuck in their little jam session bit. Ludicrous, lu-dick-erous.

  Very early on, in Paris, I was in my hotel room, watching, of all things, George Formby doing ‘when I’m cleaning win–daaaahs’. I heard this rustling under the door, and I thought, ‘What’s that? Is that room service again?’ because I do love my French onion soup every twenty minutes. That’s one of the greatest things about the French. Wow! French onion soup – I’d die for it. But anyway, no, it was a cassette and a little note attached going, ‘Do you think you could put some words to this?’ That was the general gist of it. What?!

  They’d gone off with Chris Thomas, the producer of Never Mind The Bollocks, and laid down some basic tracks without involving me at all, and then presented this cassette, not to my face, but snuck it under the bloody hotel door. ‘Just put the words to it.’ I exploded on that one – to me, that’s just, ‘What, after all these years, you don’t think I’m good enough to be involved with the initial songwriting of these tunes? You didn’t even invite me to that?’ No. ‘Just put some words to it.’ To this day, I’m very bitter about that. Not hateful but just, I’m sad for them that they thought that would ever work with me, because they know me deep down, and they knew that would hurt very, very deeply. So unfriendly, and just not the thing to do, and a kind of ‘You’re not one of us’ attitude. Smug and pompous and, at the same time, going, ‘Go on, put the money-earner on top of this dross.’

  Rambo eventually talked me into listening to it, and it was awful. It was hideous, it was rubbish. Nonsense. Old lazy-arse strumming . . . bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bah. The dullest thing. We never worked that way ever in the past and I didn’t understand why it was being presented in that way to me now.

  That’s when I categorically knew: it’s impossible for me to write songs with them ever again. From that moment on, it was compounded: ‘Who do you think you are, saddling up with Chris Thomas?’ He had recorded Finsbury Park for our live album and was also recording the sound in Paris, you see. Again, their idea. I thought, why not? He knows the Pistols sound, but he actually didn’t. But that’s neither here nor there. They could have these little cliquey set-ups, and the bottom line was, however much was spent doing that without my attendance, I ain’t paying for it.

  Amazing, isn’t it? Yet I still put up with them, but by God, that hurt. It really did, it hurt deeply. It was a very bad thing to do.

  Some of the gigs were terrific, really excellent, but I kept feeling all the way through that I wasn’t in the mood to wr
ite new songs for this, in THIS part of my life. That time had gone. More than happy to celebrate THAT part of my life, but not for it now to be a part of my present. There’s nothing better for me than to get up onstage with them fellas – we wrote those songs together, so that’s the proper presentation. Offstage, I spent a great deal of time not hanging out with any of the band at all. I was 24/7 with Rambo – quite frankly, it’s the only way it really lasted as a tour.

  Security passes were something I never felt the need to wear, particularly when coupled with Rambo. The way we were viewing it was, ‘If our hairdos aren’t our pass, well, we’ll pass on the gig, thank you.’ Rambo and I got into so much wackiness with clippers and dye. No regular mohawk for me or John, it’s not our way.

  I always like a line down one side of my head, from the top to the back, but Rambo came up with some amazing wacky things on me – like the idea of ‘castle-ing’, so the top of my head looked like the Tower of London, with checker-board, black-and-white squares on top. All manner of squiggles and different designs – a gorgeous mass of matt colours. Rambo wanted 666 on the back of his head, and I eventually managed to do it well with some nose-hair clippers. So it all went up a notch from the local hairdresser.

  At one gig in Italy there was this big gang of travellers with young kids, all dressed mad, punky, spiky, and some of the crowd – I think it may even have been some of the travellers – were throwing bottles at us. We had these young kids we’d allowed to sit onstage, because they were young, but there were a lot of beer bottles flying around. I was like, ‘Why are you trying to kill us?’ Rambo moved quickly to get the kids cleared off the stage safely. I can’t understand that viciousness. When the mob mentality takes over, it’s hard to control. I managed to shut it up, and single out the leading elements – ‘Oi, you, you fat turd. You’re the man, are you?’

  Even more chaotic was the Axion Beach festival in Zeebrugge, Belgium. It was very exciting: my first time on Eurostar, and also Paul Cook’s birthday, which I didn’t know, so he bought some champagne and I bought a few bottles more – I wanted to, you know, be friends, quite genuinely, but unfortunately most of the champagne was left to me. I got a bit drunk, not mindlessly or violently, just a little tipsy. So after the two-bloody-hour drive to the gig from the hotel, we hung around – uuuuunnngggh! – went on stage, the gig’s halfway through, I was standing out on a very long runway, right out in the middle of the crowd, a good 20 feet high and some venue bouncers started climbing up the side of the runway to try and get on the stage – as explicitly forbidden in our contract. These were really large blokes, and you knew they were doing this just to cause trouble. Their excuse was ‘fans running onstage’, but Rambo was dealing with all that – there’s no malice in it, we’re not going to beat them up, just politely lead them back into the crowd, no harm done.

  It very quickly turned into a brawl, where they presumed that Rambo shouldn’t be on the stage – a major bad move on their part. I look around, mid-song, and there’s these enormous great long muscular blokes attacking Rambo and then a whole pile of them charging at him, so I dived in with the microphone and did the best I could to get them the hell off our property. By that time one of these big lumps had already been knocked out. It was an invasion at that point. And in that respect we won. We cleared them off, the band carried on playing and I said to the audience, ‘That’s what happens when security take their job too seriously!’

  The set went on, and I could see other bouncers still trying to get onstage and at that point apparently the band just stopped. The gig was over, it was going to turn into chaos and they left, but I was totally unaware and carried on singing . . . at least I thought it was singing, but in all honesty, I was croaking. Eventually Rambo came up and tapped me on the shoulder, and goes, ‘Er, John, the band have left the stage, they’ve all gone home’. Oh! Gig over. The band had literally gone back to the hotel in the tour van and left us with no way out. So he and I stayed and watched Leftfield and had a good chat with Neneh Cherry and a few others backstage. When we finally got back to the hotel at about 5 a.m., the police were there, and wanted to interview me over the incident. We informed them of what our contract stipulated, and that was it, no case to answer.

  Some of the gigs were spectacular. Others were ridiculous and weird, with cold indifference from the audience. Any time we played behind the old iron curtain was sensational, but you wouldn’t be getting anything like that kind of joy and celebration of a gig in, say, Switzerland. It would be back to, ‘What do you think you’re doing, then, go on, I dare you, entertain me.’

  Still, I got to wear some fantastic outfits. I went onstage as Pinnochio in Japan. I turned up in a bright yellow/green skintight see-through top, with my nipples showing, and red braces, extremely short shorts, big curled-up-toe shoes like Aladdin, and an undersized red trilby, looking insane. The band went, ‘Oh my God, that’s not punk!’ ‘Yes, it is, if I say so!’ Again, the audience go, ‘Oh my God.’ The Japanese are all dressed up, ‘punky’ style’, in what they think we’d currently be wearing. But clothes are to have fun with. Don’t judge me by my clothes, judge me by the clothes I choose and why I choose them and know that’s about something. It’s audacity. The clothes ultimately shouldn’t matter at all, but they are great fun. It’s absolutely hilarious to me that clothes can distract people away from what’s really going on. And that’s how you sort the wheat from the chaff.

  In Japan, I’d be throwing bananas into the crowd that I’d autographed, and the band took that very personally, that I was ridiculing the name of the Sex Pistols. Bloody hell, I was only having some fun. The crowd loved it. They literally went bananas. I was told some of them even tried to find a way of preserving their signed Johnny Rotten bananas!

  Some of the best times I’ve ever had were on that Japanese tour with Rambo. We were there for four weeks – a long time in a small country. We played a load of gigs, including a couple at the Budokan in Tokyo, but we had plenty of days off. I’m not a keen walker, but Rambo had me out wandering the streets. We met this mob of Japanese skinheads. It looked like, ‘Oh, is this going to go wrong’, but no, absolutely the friendliest chaps. Sometimes language isn’t a barrier. A smile speaks volumes.

  We travelled everywhere by bullet train, which was a pleasure every single time. You have a nice view, and you get there quick. Occasionally there’d be two or three days off, and you can get stifled out there. Our hotel in Tokyo had thousands of rooms in two enormous towers, and what felt like an underground city of shops and arcades down below.

  Rambo came up with the idea of going to a traditional Japanese hotel, so we two gathered ourselves together and took the train to Kyoto, where we’d booked this little place run by middle-aged geishas. It basically was a granny’s house, but with tatami mats. It was very other-worldly, very other-century. Nothing like couches or chairs anywhere – it was all kneeling on the floor at very low tables, and being plied with sake relentlessly.

  Yet again I’m forced to go out by Johnny Rambo, probably a little the worse for wear, but sake is a very energetic kind of drinking. It gives you a creative buzz, shall we say. So out ‘walkies’ we went in Kyoto, and came across a nightclub which, it transpired, was holding a punk night. ‘Right, let’s go in ’ere,’ says Rambo. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, John, I’m currently touring with the Sex Pistols, we don’t know where that could go.’ ‘That’s all the more reason.’

  It was fantastic, from start to finish. When we first went in, they were actually showing Pistols videos, but it was very quiet, and people were very polite. In Japan, they don’t just rush at you straight away and poke autograph books under your nose. They give you time, they wait for you to give them the signal – the signal being, I just looked over, and here they came like a herd of Japanese buffalo! Suddenly the DJ went bonkers and stuck a safety pin through his cheek, and everyone went crazy on the dance floor. I was signing people’s bodies, signing their shirts, signing the bar.

 
; None of it seemed show-offy or pop-starry, it all had a great element of fun and naturalness about it. It was one of those evenings where Rambo doesn’t have to be on guard because there were no nasties in the house. There was no one wanting to stick a knife in your back or screw things up out of jealousy. The most perfect evening, the kind of thing you live for.

  Back at the hotel, we were promptly ushered to our separate rooms, and shared our stories in the morning of how we were put to bed. We both had similarly horrible experiences – for me, I was practically stripped naked and pushed into the bath, which of course was too small for me, and then the same thing in the morning. They must stand outside with an earhorn, or have you on video, because the second you get up to go to the toilet, in they rush, roll up your bed, that’s it, it’s morning, it’s breakfast time Japanese style!

  When we played at the Budokan, there was an after-gig meal laid on by the promoter. The place he picked was a fugu restaurant. This we didn’t know instantly: we were expecting a Japanese menu, but initially it seemed to be what I call ‘Catering by Motörhead’ – cold soggy French fries and burgers. I was looking for sushi on the menu, but then I spotted fugu on there. Now I was well aware of the dangers of that – poisonous pufferfish! I’d never had it in my life, but was soon persuading Mr Rambo that’s what we should be sampling instead of stale buns.

  Now, it’s not only that it’s deadly and it can kill you, the taste of that stuff is horrid! It’s even worse when it goes down, as it leaves an – urgh – inexplicably bad taste. Not harsh, just mildly muddy. Then it’s like, ‘Rambo, let’s have another!’ We didn’t realize they were murdering these things out of a big fish tank. So Rambo goes out there, and the one he picked was called Lucky – the one that had been there for years, the longest survivor on death row. They had to have glass screens around where they cut it up because the blood spurts from them so high, and it’s deadly poisonous if it touches you or gets in your eyes. You better be trusting that chef!