Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  I used to have a bit of a thing about Pot Noodles, but I’ve gone way off them. I actually stopped it on tour, because I’d have one when I’d come off. Now, I can’t bear the chemicals in them – I can literally taste them. How on earth did I ever manage to eat that amount of salt and sugar . . . and God knows what else, what powdered substance.

  At home I cook, but not anything you would call a set menu. It’s really just whatever’s available. If it takes longer than ten minutes, don’t bother. No need, because if you take longer than that, whatever you’re cooking, you’re killing. Unless it’s a turnip! I love turnips – I really do. And swede – swede is my favourite, even though I always used to call them turnips. They take forever. You cannot possibly eat one unless it’s been boiling for forty minutes.

  I’ve always had a firm love of Brussels sprouts, particularly having been called one by my father, which I now realize was somewhat of a compliment. But I love the taste and the texture, all of it, and that’s without salt, butter or any condiments. I always used to watch my brothers scream at the prospect of them. You know, ‘What’s wrong with them? Yum-yummies!’ Mini-cabbages, I used to call them.

  I never forgot the taste of blood from that ordeal with the Polish dentist, yet I’m absolutely one for a good rare steak. I eat meat very rarely now, and it’s not because of any health agenda or stupid diet cause, it’s that I find I don’t need to. Every now and then my system will go, ‘Oo, we’ll have a bit,’ but after that I won’t need to for a while. I quite naturally now follow my instincts and that leads me to maximum vegetables, which I am absolutely in love with.

  At the moment, I’m experimenting with my moles. I got an iPad last year, and I’ve fallen in love with it. I was looking up on moles. I found a home remedy to file them down so you take off the top edge. So of course I did that – I gave one of mine a good sanding, with sandpaper – and it bled like I’d opened a vein. Now every day I’m putting apple cider vinegar on it, and it seems to be working. Where I just had a mole before, I’ve now got this huge pusy septic thing. I’m beginning to worry that it might turn into a cancer. Like, ‘Oh fuck, what have I started here?’ But I’m going to carry it on to the bitter end. How stupid, huh?

  But don’t you dare go praying for me! I’m not having that. What an awful thing to do. Let’s hope I’m around when the book comes out. Left to my own devices, there’s every possibility I won’t be. For God’s sake, there was no mention that it would bleed like that. It really is quite literally like an open vein. It’s horrible. I’ve had it all my life, but I just open-mindedly one night thought, ‘Oooh, why not get rid of it? Really, why not?’

  I’ve always been quite proud of it. ‘Does my mole annoy you? Good!’ It used to annoy Steve Jones very much. He’d always go, ‘Urgh, that’s horrible, that is, you want to get rid of that!’ ‘No, I don’t – not any more!’ I don’t get rid of things just to please other people. I’m very self-determined about my moles in particular, and now I’ve determined that they have to go. There’s only room for one face, and it’s not gonna have a cauliflower on it. Or a bloody stump. That’s what it’s actually started to look like, a broccoli stump.

  But yes, I remain Rotten to the last – a reluctant toothbrusher. I know it’s a stupid move but there it goes. I won’t have a toothbrush on my tombstone. In fact I won’t have a tombstone, I’m very spooked by that whole body-in-a-casket burial thing. I’m thinking cremation, or selling my body to scientific research. Have a bang of this number, baby!

  Apparently, I don’t have anything like liver damage. I’ve had full medicals and in that way I’m remarkably healthy. You would presume otherwise, but no. I’m physically very, very fit. It can only be the singing. It keeps the lungs inflated.

  12

  YOU CAN LOOK TO THE FUTURE WHEN YOU’RE CONFIDENT

  I did the Pistols tour for many reasons, but one of the most important to me was a promise from Virgin. I’d just completed my solo album, Psycho’s Path, and the promise was that if I did the Pistols tour and withheld the release of the record until afterwards, so that they could fully back the Pistols momentum – in return, they would help launch Psycho’s Path in a much bigger way. To me, that sounded like a good deal. Stupidly, I believed them.

  I struck the deal with a fella I really liked, who was in charge of my file at their LA office. I didn’t see the two projects as being equal and opposite in the way that the record company obviously did, but I thought, ‘Okay, that’ll work out. I’ll put my solo album back a year.’ Of course, when the Pistols tour ended, I found out the guy had moved on to another job, without passing my file on to anybody else, or informing anyone of the agreement we’d had. Nobody at Virgin seemed to acknowledge me, and, in fact, their whole staff seemed to have changed. And they didn’t do such a good job backing the Pistols either.

  That left me between a rock and a hard place. There was no one holding that album or taking care of it, so when it finally came out in July 1997, it was a minimal release with virtually no press coverage. They all but buried it. Insane. But at the same time, they also destroyed the Pistols live album of the Filthy Lucre tour through lack of promotion. Most people never knew it even existed.

  Psycho’s Path really came about from building a studio at home in LA. Having my brother Martin living in the out-house was extremely useful, because he’s very technically minded, and he practically built the whole thing himself. Back in Gunter Grove days, he was very into radio. He’d bring old radios around, stick nails into them, form little pirate stations and start all manner of chit-chat with other like-minded people. Very early on he was into computers. Anything technical, anything with a serial number – he’s got it down.

  I can’t remember my own phone number, but he can sit there and blather away the serial numbers of every computer model that’s ever been released since the beginning. He can’t really read or write to any great skilful level, but by God can he understand a manual – that’s a skill process all to itself. If I stare at these serial numbers of things – 20 megahertz, blah blah blah – my brain just freezes. He’s very good for those intricate, complicated electrical details.

  And he loves all the little boxes that go ‘Blink!’ So we just built up a collection of odds and sods – sound effects and a mixing board, a 24-track thing – pony, by most people’s standards, what you call cheap and cheerful, garage-stylee, but that’s the way I like it.

  By the time we got to make Psycho’s Path, we’d made the whole thing digital, because I was always thinking about getting into film soundtracks, which is obviously extremely hi-tech. The idea of putting music to scenes has always been very interesting to me. I wasn’t just geographically well placed for it, I was also mentally well placed for it, because I view things somewhat with an artistic eye, like an artistic photographer, and I love to paint. Whatever it is I do musically, it is a tapestry of sorts, rather than just the words alone. Words alone can be fairly empty and open to misinterpretation, as we know with the Koran and the Bible. And, indeed, the Sun newspaper.

  I also used that very fine studio we’d built for some quite odd and amazing things. We made an advert there where I sang a version of ‘Route 66’ for a soda-pop drink called Mountain Dew. Because we were up to date with the equipment, we could do it digitally, which was what was required. It’s great fun, working on things like that. I did voice-overs for all manner of cartoons. I had a syndicated daily radio show in the States called ‘Rotten Day’ where I took a sideways look at the history of music. I also had a four-hour online talk radio show in the early days of the internet. In fact, I did many weird things that you wouldn’t think I’d be into at all, but anything I think will offer some kind of creative ‘new’ to me, I’m bang-on into.

  Martin had started a family. He’d met a young girl out here called Renée, of Mexican descent. She’s got Japanese in her family, too, so, very international. Once they started having kids, to be honest, it became a bit wearing – too many souls clonking around the
house all the time. I’m not being mean here – I loved the kids, I loved them running around – I’m just saying it can be overwhelming when you are trying to work.

  We’d also have record company people coming down, constantly begging me to do this Pistols tour, and that’s deeply frustrating when you’re so involved in a project. From that point of view, Psycho’s Path became very difficult to make. It was an album fraught with problems, but somehow we got it together.

  Martin actually played little bits and pieces on the album – we all did. The producer, Mark Saunders, played little bits. One day, he brought in a very strange guitar. He was a difficult fella to fully comprehend or understand. The draw for me was he’d worked with Neneh Cherry, and Neneh and me, we’re mates. We know each other from way back when, from even before Bruce Smith, who was married to her briefly in the early ’80s. When Neneh first came over to England, she stayed with Nora at Nora’s place and hung around with the Slits. She kinda grew up around us – she was only thirteen or fourteen – and so I always viewed Neneh as family. And so: you’ve worked with Neneh, this must be good.

  During recording, I discovered that a friend of mine knew Todd Rundgren. Todd rang me up and asked if he could come over. That was a great evening. We just sat there drinking, and I really liked him. I love Todd Rundgren’s records. I was basking in his glory, it was terrific to be in his company, and we swapped musical faves. I played him all different kinds of music, showed him what we were up to and, wow, hooo, haha – it was amazing, he gave me that pat on the back, like, well done, keep at it, this is different, this is what we want. Todd Rundgren has always strived to break the mould.

  I never thought about it like, ‘We should work together!’ That’s never the way it is because you’re always wary that it might take over the situation. I already had a gameplan in mind for the album, so it wasn’t even raised as a question or an issue. There were all kinds of possibilities of working with lots of different people. Steve Vai rang up, saying, ‘Look, if you need me, I’m more than willing,’ but I wanted it absolutely stripped down to the minimum. There’s only really three people in there – the producer, me and my brother Martin – and that’s how we welded it together.

  Frequently, we made music out of non-musical situations. The drums for ‘Sun’ – that’s cardboard boxes in the front room – cardboard boxes! I loved that sound! Or throwing an accordion down the stairs like a Slinky. You know, those coiled springs that can crawl down the stairs? That was the accordion Jebin Bruni from the mid-’80s PiL band gave me, used in a terrific way, I thought, and then stretched out technically – a completely different approach to music.

  ‘Grave Ride’, that’s completely non-musical in every way, shape and form. There was no set melody in it and deliberately that way. Let the ears pick up what they want, but nothing specifically played, like a rigid drum kit, or ‘the guitar part’. I was never saying, ‘Here’s the part, Steve Vai, where you play that bit.’ Nothing was like that.

  There were a lot of loops: we used a Kurzweil synthesizer to make loopy patterns, let them run randomly, and you’d sit there for hours listening to these loops, until they clashed in the right place. ‘Stop! We use that section!’ Very ‘amateur hour’, but that’s the most fun you could ever get putting a record together. THE MOST FUN! Absolutely ignore the disciplines of musicality, and you’ll get the better results.

  The only problem was that most people didn’t know that the album was even released. It could’ve done something, that record. I loved ‘Sun’. To my mind, selfish though I am, it’s one of those festival anthems you hear over the PA when the roadies are setting up the next band, like T. Rex’s ‘Life’s A Gas’, or Dave Bowie’s ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’. That exhilarating happy vibe like when you’re going to have a party and the sun is going down.

  An escape from Alcatraz, is what the whole album was. The lyrics are odds ‘n’ sods of curiosities. The song ‘Psychopath’ is based on John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer – the famous one, the clown. How many hundreds he must’ve murdered. In my darker moments I’ve thought, ‘But for some kind of inner sensibility, I could quite easily be that way. I could go and kill people, aimlessly and pointlessly, and take some kind of gratification.’

  I’m analyzing myself here and seeing that it is possible to be a serial killer, as indeed it is possible for any human being to be exactly the very thing that you think you hate and despise in someone else. What you’re really doing when you’re over-judgemental about those things, is you’re taking it out on yourself because you know your inner possibilities. We all are capable of the most ultimate evil. And because we are also capable of analyzing that, that is exactly why we’re better.

  Once the album was finally coming out, I put a band together to go out and promote it. We were due to start the American dates in August followed by Japan in September – where Psycho’s Path had actually been released a few months earlier than everywhere else. I had Rambo back on board for security and he was becoming more and more involved in the day-to-day running of my work. I’d rehearsed the band for a good three weeks, and then, a few nights before we were due to fly to New Orleans for the first date, the drummer, Robert Williams, pulled the same stroke as Martin Atkins back in 1984 – ‘I want more money or I’m not doing it.’ This time, rather than try to iron it out, I just told him, ‘Go home, goodbye – I’m not going to be blackmailed twice in the same position.’

  Then, for whatever reason, there was an alleged flurry of fisticuffs. I would call it more like a girly slap-fest myself, but he ran to the police screaming ‘criminal battery’ charges against me, which they immediately threw out. He then decided to take out a civil suit. Apparently at this point the producers of Judge Judy, a courtroom TV programme on CBS in America, somehow got wind of it and approached us. I was cynical about it at first, as it was Mr Williams who was pushing for it, of course – you get money for being on it, and you get publicity and these are all the things he was angling for. But what many people in other countries don’t realize is, Judge Judy counts the same as a proper court case, it’s contractually arbitrated: what she says goes. The whole thing just seemed bizarre but it was just too much of a wheeze to pass up. And what am I looking at in the press? ‘It’s a fake court case, it’s John Rotten just trying to get some publicity for himself.’ Well, no.

  This guy, Robert Williams, was someone who’d been recommended to me by my brother Martin. He’d played with Captain Beefheart, which obviously was fascinating to me. Then stuff like this happens; you go to the TV show, and you think, ‘What the hell is happening with the world?’ The whole thing backfired very badly on him. It was rather stupid of him to brag about being a black-belt judo and karate expert, and then declare that fat old Johnny Rotten – the world’s most renowned pacifist, with the philosophy of Gandhi – beat him up in the car park!

  My brother Martin let me down because he wouldn’t even appear, and my manager at the time, Eric Gardner, and the tour manager let me down because they hummed and hawed the whole way through – they were both very scared of the TV cameras, and nobody would make any commitment or tell it as it really was. Those two lemons could have dragged me down. Anyway, Judge Judy Sheindlin saw it for what it was. This Kung-Fu Kitty was a very, very greedy person jeopardizing everybody else’s work – an American and Japanese tour – and he lost and I won. It was a false accusation. I say to the world, ‘Believe what you will, but the truth will out.’

  As for promoting Psycho’s Path, all this nonsense totally fucked it in the head. While I was waiting for the ‘trial’ to happen, the tour went ahead. Luckily, I’d known a drummer called Otis Hays, who was hanging around the studio, an African-American fella, and he quickly got on it. ‘I can do all that stuff,’ he said, and he could! In Japan, however, Otis behaved like an insane person. He was young and very talented, but went mental around anything female and Japanese. When you’re being taken out to dinner by the record company – don’t do that! And he did it.
I can’t really blame him. It was all definitely a new experience for him, but he did a good job for us.

  Eventually, I had to knock the whole thing on the head. It was difficult, because Martin had asked to play live keyboards, and he wasn’t up to that, not by any stretch. Martin was great to work with in the studio, but not to play live – he couldn’t cope with the pressure, having to remember the sequences and the patterns. The flaws don’t bother me, or mistakes, but acting inadequate does. You must never show fear onstage – that’s pointless. Never back down – never, never! No matter what mistakes are being made, go with it, keep going, find yourselves, and don’t any one of you suddenly decide, ‘I don’t know what’s happening, so I’ll end the song.’ Wrong move.

  Finally, I really did think, enough was enough. I thought of just retiring from music for ever. That’s happened quite a few times. When it gets down to the malarkey of false accusations and career-hoppers and users and abusers, they really do leave their mark on me, unfortunately. They take away my joy and love of my fellow human beings. They smear and tar everybody else with that same brush, by that activity. I know it’s wrong of me to view it that way but I take it very deep. I don’t understand them.

  I certainly don’t consider the release of any record I’ve made as a mistake. I’ve always been proud of what I’ve done. I’ve tried to make the best of knowing I was stuck in these bloody record deals. All I kept hearing were the words ‘recoupment, recoupment, recoupment’, but I always kept my independence, never allowed them to dictate the content of any record, and I suffered accordingly.

  At this point in 1997–8, the power brokerage at the top at Virgin Records had shifted, and in came a particular duo who were from that ’70s flower generation, but were businessmen to the hilt while still wearing the Grateful Dead tie-dyes. I remember one particular absurdity: one of them had a Victorian toilet imported from England to the LA offices, one of the ones with floral designs on, very elegant, in the shape of a seashell. Hundreds of dollars for a loo to pee in? Oh, come on! I liked them fellas, oddly enough, although the Grateful Dead tinge was in there. A lot of them Grateful Dead followers are really all rather selfish lawyers and accountants, of the mind frame, ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you.’ And it’s very frustrating when you’re struggling to keep your career together and all of that, and expensive items like that are being shifted about into office spaces. That’s a waste of money.