Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  I don’t like flamboyance, I don’t like people with over-elaborate flashy cars and jewellery, because I think deep down inside they’re a bit of a cunt. It’s all about an audience they’re looking for. Hello. I don’t even drive but one of the first cars I ever bought was for Nora, and it’s a Volvo. We love it, and we still drive it. It’s falling to bits, but it’s damn fast and it’s relentless – a T5R turbo, yellow, with a go-fast wing on the back. I watched it in all the rallies around that time, ’93/’94 /’95/’96, when Volvo were really doing well in world racing. I just loved the shape of it, it looked like a pram! No sleek curved lines, this thing was right angles, boxy, built round a steel cage for safety. Fantastic. Two major accidents that car’s had, and neither of them our fault – the last one Nora got hit by a concrete mixer truck. That would probably kill you in most other cars. All we needed to do was replace some panelling. Wonderful. These are the kind of things in life that impress me, the practicality of it.

  If I want to drive a Ferrari – and I love the idea of those cars, too – well, I’ve got Real Racing 3 on my iPad. Somebody’s got to buy ’em, I suppose. Myself, I can’t drive at all. I know! I keep putting it off. My dad set me up for a driving test once, but I turned up for the first lesson like a complete arsehole, drank eight very large Heinekens before I got in and drove straight under a lorry on Gunter Grove. So that was my driving experience. God, was that instructor furious! It was quite a bill I racked up on that one! That was a lesson, a serious bad lesson.

  The shame of it was that it didn’t end there; he thought that I might’ve still been capable of making it round the corner, and indeed I did, and drove down towards the gas works in Chelsea, and there was a huge empty acreage back out there in them days. He was trying to teach me how to manoeuvre, and it was hopeless. I was so not interested. It all seemed really pointless. The hand and leg coordination wasn’t in me at that time. There’s a great many problems I have with learning in these kinds of situations. I’m really slow. I get there in the end if it’s at my own pace, but I can’t be pushed into it, it doesn’t work. I have an auto-resist button, I don’t know what triggers it; it’s one of the few things I’m learning to try and control – you know, an auto-rebel.

  Back in LA, without a music career to attend to, what I learned to do instead was boat driving. Nora and I really learned that through necessity. Living on the ocean, the draw was overwhelming. Initially we rented big yachts and filled them with friends, and went off for a couple of days to the islands, to Catalina, just as a party of friends would. Instead of going to a nightclub, we’d do it on a boat with bunks. And that was great fun, and Nora and me really got into it. Loved it.

  Aaah, I’ve always loved the sea. It all started with rowing out to catch herring with my granddad – my mother’s father in Ireland. He always had row-boats in the yard, all rotting and God knows whatever. He hardly spoke to me, barely even sentences, but we’d row out into the Irish Sea – actually no, it was the bloody Atlantic, because they were in Cork – and throw out some breadcrumbs and wait for the herring to come. You’d throw out a huge net and there’d be your dinner.

  The sea clears your head. If you look at the ocean, when there’s nothing but ocean all around you, it just wipes your mind of all the rubbish. When I was very young, when the TV stations would close down, I’d just stare at the screen, the static, even though my mum and dad would belt me across the back of my head going, ‘Ye’ll mayke yerself go bloind’ – but that’s what the ocean feels like to me. That wonderful static. Brainwashing, in the most delightful positive way.

  We eventually bought a boat called Fantasia. It’s small, 32 foot, and goes really, really fast! And we love it, we go deep, deep, deep out at sea, and the whole joy of me using the GPS, and knowing where we are, is fantastisch für meine Pussy-Frau. Nora’s incredibly brave with all of this, she’s utterly fearless. I’m the one trying to give her my tuppence worth of knowledge about, ‘That’s a big wave we’re heading into, I think if we went in the other direction it might help!’ She ploughs on through, but the bounce on the back side of that wave – oh, that’s earth-shattering and painful. It will hop out the water and – bang! – that’s ten and a half tonnes slapping the water – it feels like it’s gonna crack in half. For a boat, that’s not heavy.

  We had an instructor when we first bought the boat, but he was eighty-eight years old – Captain Something-or-the-Other. He was as dithery as they come, and we found out halfway out at sea – in very rough waters, in 12-foot swells – that he wasn’t too used to motor boats. He was a canvas man, himself. Yes, so it was sink or swim. In fact he ground the gears once: he was standing up on the helm leaning out pointing where we should go, and he accidentally knocked the gears out and the boat ground to a halt and a huge wash of water came over the back. We could’ve drowned at that very point – the boat would have just bubbled down to the bottom. From that you actually learn. You learn: that ain’t going to happen again.

  As soon as we moved to the coast, I loved LA. I didn’t like it up in Pasadena because it’s desert – baking hot, no breeze, and carbon monoxide. It’s very much like Beijing, but obviously not as bad. As soon as we moved down to the ocean, that was it. I realized – seriously for the first time in my life – how much I loved the sun. It’s a beautiful thing to wake up at five, six in the morning – sunrise! It does wonders for me. I love being alert in the daytime, and well tired and exhausted and ready for sleep at around 10 p.m. That’s the way I like it. I’m really not one for staying up and watching the late-night chat-shows. I don’t see any joy in them things, I see them as formats and incredibly dull.

  LA became the perfect place, because if you look at it on paper, you’d think, ‘Oh my God, there’s no reason to be in that environment at all. It could never work, it’s the last bastion of hippiedom and mellowed-outness and sensible “new-age food”.’ And I found it great, refreshing – the idea that you don’t need to stay up all night! It’s equally if not more entertaining, to get up very early in the morning. For instance, that’s when all the best CNN reporting goes on, before they censor it. That’s an absolute truth, to this day. If you catch the CNN news reporting early in the morning, it’s far more open and detailed than by the time it reaches the afternoon, because the censors have come in, clipping and editing so there’s less information in it. That’s equally as rewarding to me as noshing it up in a nightclub.

  Mainly, living here is all about the ocean. I just love the sound of the sea, and being near it, and also being wary of its terrifying power. Ocean-bound changed everything. We got into boats, from those short little cruise trips to Catalina. There’s nothing more glorious than, when everything just seems to be grinding you down, getting in your damn boat, going out, losing sight of land, and working your GPS all the way back to shore.

  It’s what’s needed, because the pressures of what my life has become can be overwhelming sometimes. Soul-shattering. Physical exhaustion is one thing, but mental stress and exhaustion, that’s something else. You just need to be reminded that you’re here to live. Not to work, to live. Work is a pleasant intrusion – keep it that way.

  It’s kind of like the weather’s too nice to be walking around pretending to be angry all the time. Let’s face it, aggressive clothing really is for colder climates. It’s really hard to go round being angry in flip-flops and beach shorts. Though I hate bloody flip-flops! And then: speedboats and sunshine – you show me a working-class kid who would say no.

  It was here in California that I got into my nature side, the love of the wildlife. If you just sit still and calm down and stop having to rush around the whole time, you’ll find that the bunny rabbits will come up to you! And that’s quite nice, because you don’t have to kill them, you know, because you don’t resent them.

  Then there’s all my little nature jaunts. I mean, I still love TV watching. I’m not out there admiring the dandelions all day long! You should never overdo any one stretch. Don’t make your life a
prison, and don’t get locked up in a routine, or else it can get like ‘Oh, I’m off for my nature walk again!’ Again and again, it can become a drudgery, when it should be an excitement.

  I learned to ski, because Nora could ski already, and she said, ‘Oh, you should learn it.’ For years I put it off, then finally one weekend we just drove up to Squaw Valley in Nevada, and I loved it. I learned to fall down a mountain at various different speeds. There’s no sense of losing your dignity just because you fall over a lot. In fact, you’re making people laugh, and what’s wrong with that? I love it, because everybody, I don’t care who they are – they could be an expert all their life – they’re gonna end up on their arse at some point. We’ve been going for years now, and there’s no sense of improvement, and indeed no care for it either.

  With all these outdoors-y things, when you just leave the pressures of living in a town behind you, and all those daily business dealings that seem so overwhelmingly important, you become less anxiety-ridden, and you find the answers. In fact, you find a great deal of clarity just being an isolated nobody out there in the wilderness. It does work. I can well understand, for instance, not the weather aspect of it, but why people move to, say, the craziness of Alaska and live hundreds of miles away from anybody. I can understand that. I know what it is that makes them feel so content. But at the same time, too much of that would drive me crazy. Nora and I? We’re three days of isolation together, not three weeks. We quickly get that out of our system and then come back to the drudge, which doesn’t seem like a drudge any more, it seems exhilarating and exciting.

  I can’t seem to get a suntan to save my life, though. I’ll just burn. Two days, I’ll think, ‘Aw, that’s looking great,’ then it’ll start to peel off, and then I have to deal with freckles. I’m just naturally too pale for life. I suppose that may be why they liked me in Japan originally, just because I was so dead white. That’s their vision of beauty, isn’t it? Death white, with the blood drained out of you. I don’t suppose amphetamine stopped the pallor any. My only problem with amphetamines is, I never got around to doing enough of them. That’s been a terrible waste in my life. It leaves a sense of longing. He said laughingly. There’ll be some fool who’ll read that and take it literally. That’s the world we live in. Humourless fucks. Quite frankly I wish they would take it literally, it’d give me endless hours of entertainment. Much better than a line of speed itself.

  But, oh God, I still keep getting these colds. My next-door neighbour has just cut the grass, which has added to my agony. I get up very early and I’m straight on the bloody over-the-counter medicines. Because here in LA, if the wind blows, there goes pollen season right up my nostrils. There are times when I’ve got rips around my eyes, because they’re so teary and itchy, I just have to get my fingernails in there. I literally want to tear my eyes out.

  I tried all the usual nasal sprays, but what I use these days is mostly saline solution, salt water, just up your nostrils. That or a highly chlorinated swimming pool, that seems to work, it just burns it out. Dying my hair actually is a good way out of it, because you can’t help but breathe in the fumes of the bleach and that seems to be useful. So my nostrils are a lighter shade of pale on the inside! Prescription stuff never works, and it just makes me really down and tired and lazy, and I hate that because I’m naturally run down and lazy anyway.

  After Psycho’s Path it seemed pointless to try and be making records because there was nowhere for them to go, but I put out quite a lot of music incognito. It was mostly dance-y things, instrumentals, and I deliberately kept my name off them. I wouldn’t put my voice down: I didn’t want anyone thinking it was like, ‘Hope you like my new direction.’ I went through a period there where I thought my name was poison. But I love a good dance night – you know, going to a proper dance club. It was nice to hear some of my grooves were there rocking the dancefloor, and nobody knew it was me – there was a very nice enjoyment in that. Making people happy, but they wouldn’t have been so happy if they knew my name was attached to it. Now I might be wrong here, but that’s how I was feeling at the time.

  I don’t want to name names of tracks or anything. There were no major hits, but plenty of dancefloor hits. I liked the anonymity. In fact, that whole rave culture – the anonymity was what I loved most about it. It’s a shame it turned into superstar DJs, but them early-ish days were fantastic fun. And I could understand fully people saying it had a punk DIY ethos about it, that anyone can do it, and I loved it for that. And indeed anyone did do it. Hello, I can be anyone.

  The freedom in that was fantastic, so why go back and stir that pot? I thought I made a mistake when I did that record with the Golden Palominos, years before. I didn’t want anyone to know I was on that – it was a version of some old California-scene record. I was really annoyed when I got back to London, and I ran into Mick Jones of the Clash, who is always good company, and he went, ‘I’ve heard your latest release.’ I was furious! I didn’t want it to be known. It’s an attitude I have which I think is actually healthy. He’d bought it because he knew I was on it and that was kind of defeating the point. I was experimenting, but it was just the name that was the pulling power.

  It’s a dilemma of sorts: should I namedrop when I release a record and remind people of who it is, or what I am, and what I’ve done? I don’t know. You’ll always get the record company wanting to do that – and always the manager! For me, I was quite happy when I set PiL up proper in California, and it was presumed that we were just a brand-new California band – for quite a long time! Nobody out here had any knowledge of us having anything to do with the Pistols at all. It was utterly fantastic. But when that cat got out of the bag, then I started doing ‘Anarchy’ live, and I got bored with it, because I thought the audiences were coming in for all the wrong reasons. It’s amazing that I’ve achieved two entirely separate audiences in my life for two major bands that I’ve been in, that for quite a while there – particularly in the States and certain parts of Europe – people didn’t realize were fronted by the same singer. So I was both Johnny Rotten and Johnny Lydon.

  These were the things I was dealing with. How I could ‘get away with it’. Just that sentence alone, there has been an awful lot of that about me in the music press – thinking that this is all some elaborate hoax or joke on my part. Well, the joke’s not on you, if that be the case, the joke would be on me. I don’t see what I do as a joke at all. I see it, for me, for my own personal point of view in it, as insightful, not only into how I work and operate as a human being, but how you all do, too, by your reactions. By you, I mean the broad expanse called the human race.

  Of all the reasons that I stopped making music, the most important was the arrival of Nora’s grandchildren, Pablo and Pedro. In 2000 they suddenly came to live with us indefinitely. Their mother, Ariane, better known as Ari Up from the Slits, had been bringing them up in Kingston, Jamaica, and had more or less just let them run free. They were very wild, and they needed help and support. They couldn’t really read or write, or even swim, at fourteen and a half, when they came to us. They had no comprehension of speech or formulating proper sentences.

  When Ari would go on tour they’d be dragged about with her. If she had a new boyfriend in a different country they’d have to go and live there. They were in a permanent state of confusion about where they belonged. In Kingston they’d be surrounded by a changing line-up of women and boyfriends – a very confusing position for boys trying to grow up.

  They’d stayed with us before, many a time, and we were well accustomed to each other. Nora and I certainly hadn’t been planning on being substitute parents, but the bottom line is, the twins really needed help. You can’t have any kids in the house and not be paying attention to them. These two were especially needy. So you dedicate your life towards their life.

  The whole scenario came right out of the blue. Ari had moved them all to New York and a situation exploded. She had a huge row with them over money that had gone missing in
a New York apartment. I think a great deal of that was to do with the boyfriends and her own clique, and her having no sense of a regular dinner time or food or anything for them.

  Ari rang Nora and said, ‘I can’t cope with them, I’m throwing them out of the house!’ And Nora said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ We talked, and while Ari was still on the phone I said, ‘Send them here immediately, we’ll take care of them. I’m not having those young human beings abandoned because of your lack of care.’ It was a big row with Ari. It made life very difficult between me and Ari for a long time. But it always was difficult between her and Nora.

  My heart just broke for all three of them – the twins and Ari. The twins needed a family unit at this point, and God only knows where Ari would’ve sent them if not for Nora and me. They would have been cast off to one of her many distant friends. Even they were apparently all telling her that her lifestyle was incompatible with raising children. It’s very hard for a young mother to be a pop star – I use the term loosely – and pursue a career and, at the same time, particularly in Jamaica, ’fess up to the fact that you’ve got fourteen-year-old twins at home. You’re not twenty-one, regardless of what you tell the press. She would deny lots of things, and it caused great pain to the twins, as kids growing up.