by Lydon, John
On the way to one of our first dives, someone had bought a newspaper, and right there on the front page was a story about a couple of poachers who had been attacked by a Great White while swimming. One was dead, the other survived. Jesus, that was an eye-opener for us.
We managed to arrange an interview with the survivor and went to see him in a shanty town in Gansbaai. When we arrived he was sitting outside one of the huts playing dominoes with his friends. It didn’t look a particularly safe place, so we got the crew – with the exception of an interpreter and a cameraman – to stay in the van while me and Rambo went and spoke to the fella. But they were all very friendly to us and welcomed us in. The poacher told us how he and his friend had been out swimming for abalone fish. It was a six-hour round trip, but they were so poor they had no choice but to do it. On the way back his friend was attacked by the shark. The chap that survived had seen it coming and had been shouting at his friend to drop the fish and swim away, but it was too late, it took a chunk out of him, then came back and finished him off. He kept shouting and shouting at his mate to drop the fish, but he wouldn’t do it. The survivor managed to get away but he then faced the daunting task of swimming back to the shore knowing his friend had been killed. Poor sods. It was a harrowing tale – I can’t imagine what that must have been like. Horrible. He told us he’d never poach again. The whole thing certainly put us on alert, because it turned out the scene of the attack was not far from where we were set to do our Great White dive.
Over the next few days we had more practice ocean dives and I was also given special permission to swim with Ragged Tooth sharks at an aquarium. I even got to try one of those old-fashioned diver’s suits with the big helmet and boots. How they ever ocean dived in those I really don’t know.
For the cage dive with the Great Whites we went to ‘Shark Alley’ just off Gansbaai. Me and Rambo couldn’t wait; this was the whole point of being here, and it was the pinnacle of my journey. Something that really appealed to me was the totally clear face mask with a microphone inside, so that they could hear me underwater. I didn’t know, of course, that the damn thing wasn’t working, so I was chuffed to high hell when I started singing the Morris Albert song ‘Feelings’ to the Great Whites. Magnificent TV. I came up and asked, ‘Did you catch it on film?’ ‘Oh yeah, mmmm.’ They wouldn’t tell us until we hit shore. I was furious! It would’ve been the greatest thing in my life’s work – singing ‘Feelings’ to sharks on television. Yes, I am self-indulgent.
The boat captain really reminded us of the captain character from Jaws. He was friendly enough but he had a bit of an attitude with us and was full of himself – it was really hard to stand there and listen to what was coming out of his mouth. And his boat! It was as if it was held together by plasters, the cage didn’t seem securely tethered, nothing really worked on board properly. But it did the job admirably.
After we’d done the really serious stuff out at sea, we were invited back to a dinner with our entire crew, and the captain and his family and friends. The whole thing was being filmed and the captain and his friends were beginning to show off for the cameras. During dinner, he stuck his fork on my plate, and Rambo had to grab his hand. There was almost a fork battle! He ended up looking like a dribbled fool – his own daughter even got up and slapped him.
The trouble was that this was a fisherman’s hut where they all go to drink. They knew we were coming and so when we walked in, it felt like we were being set up. There was a good fifty challenging fellas there and they’d all been drinking heavily, especially the captain, and so they were kind of trying to rough-house us, but it didn’t wash with us. As the evening went on, it became very unpleasant, but we dug our heels in. What made us leave? Not their nonsense. It was the first course. Can you imagine: snails in cheese sauce? Fuck that, let’s go get something proper to eat.
South Africa had its challenges, but we loved every second of our trip there. One afternoon we had some time off from filming so we hired a helicopter to Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, scene of two major battles in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war made famous by the film Zulu and later Zulu Dawn. When we landed in Isandlwana it was all but deserted except for a couple of tourists. The most impressive thing about the site was the silence. The deathly hush gets you into a trance-like state, as your imagination takes over.
There was a monument dedicated to the British and Colonial forces that had lost their lives in one of the worst defeats the British Empire had suffered. And there were piles of rocks where every soldier had fallen. We climbed up to a cave where one of the last British soldiers had made his stand before he was killed. It was all very eerie.
We then boarded our helicopter to Rorke’s Drift, which was about ten minutes away from Isandlwana, where a small force of British and Colonial soldiers had held off thousands of Zulu warriors. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded that day, the most in any single action. On our arrival we were greeted by dozens of African children – I don’t think they’d ever seen a helicopter before. They were very excited to see us and thought we’d flown all the way from England. There wasn’t much there except a small museum, which we visited, and the remains of the mission station and former trading post where the British forces held their line. We joined some schoolchildren on the grass and sat with them while one of the other children was describing and acting out the battle. John and John were back at school and loving it this time around. We then flew back to Cape Town to continue our filming.
However, from here, our itinerary was now to go into the jungle and mix it up with gorillas, which I dreaded, because I thought it might be the most compromising position I’d ever put myself into. I didn’t know how to think or plan ahead for it.
Rather than fly from place to place, we wanted to drive, and there are no proper roads outside of Cape Town, just dangerous dirt tracks – rickety narrow passes on mountain tops. All insane and mental.
As a precursor to meeting gorillas in the wild, we were invited to the Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary in the middle of Lake Victoria, near Entebbe, Uganda. It was a bit of a hassle to get there because that lake is pretty damn huge and it does kick up a good wave or two.
The Sanctuary was run at the time by Debby Cox, who was one of Jane Goodall’s trainees, the world-famous chimp expert. Debby told us that humans could learn a lot from chimpanzees. What I learned was: they’re bloody deadly dangerous! They are football hooligans, par excellence! They know how to throw rocks, as they did at us, and all the time they’re eyeballing you. We were told that after two years old you can’t go near them at all. You cannot train them, they will not have it. So maybe in that aspect we could learn a lot. But then I’m untrainable too.
The tension in their compound all stemmed from the fact that they were rescue chimps from the Congo, so they’d lost their family unit and they hadn’t grown up fed by their mother’s knowledge.
They were trying to stop them breeding. This one female, what a clever thing – it knew something was stopping it from having a baby, so it found a way of removing the contraceptive implant from the inside of her left arm. Every now and then they have to replace the implants, so they asked me if I would like to help carry out surgery on one of the chimps while being filmed. Then I was asked if I would carry her into the surgery, and I thought, ‘Ah, what a fantastic thing to do.’ They’d darted it, to put it to sleep – what could go wrong? I couldn’t believe the weight. They are so well built and dense. I’m by no means a muscle-clad human being, and this was a real struggle. The cameraman was wetting himself, while I’m near death with this bloody great chimp. And then of course it peed down my back.
The young ones were very bumptious and joyous. They bounce all over the place, and move like lightening and love swinging off you and making eye contact with you. Those moments were deeply precious. I felt we were making some real serious connections here. One of them tried to imitate me talking to it; he’d be trying to mouth the words. I thought that was just incredible. But the hooligan ele
ment is always just around the corner.
The night before, Rambo had raised the question, ‘What if one of them chins me? What happens if I chin it back?’ I’m in fits of laughter with that, but they will allow no such thing. They got all huffy – ‘No, you can’t hit them back!’ Then of course, in amongst the nippers, the next day one goes running up to Rambo, into his arms, and it’s all nice and cuddly, but this other one got jealous and took a lefter at him– punched him in the eye! They’ll get up on tree branches above you, and piss on you, it’s like they’re laughing their heads off at you. Little sods!
We were told not to think about going swimming in Lake Victoria, because of crocodiles and hippos – but worse than that were the deadly microbe diseases in the water, and also some weird snail that burrows into the sole of your foot, or your penis. Apparently, you don’t feel it when it’s doing this, but you know, you’ll live to regret it. So what do we do with an afternoon off? We see a rowboat on the dock and go out, and the bloody thing’s got a hole in it, hasn’t it? We were close to shore, but all the big chimpanzees were eyeballing us. So it was snails in the willy or being gang-raped by chimpanzees!
We had nothing but two teacups to bail out the water with, because we brought a little picnic hamper. Debbie Young, or ‘Dobbins’ as we affectionately call her, the director/producer, was in a state of mild panic. But it all worked out, because that’s what you do in life – make fun of things, and get through.
Leaving the chimp sanctuary we sailed back to the mainland and drove to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, still in Uganda. We eventually got to the campsite for the mountain gorilla expedition close to nightfall.
The next morning, the serious hike began. We had a fantastic guide called Moses. I think the world of that man. Such fun, and all around just an excellent human being. I was like, ‘C’mon, where are they?’ and he went, ‘Oh, just over there.’ Well, ‘over there’ was seventeen miles away, up and down mountains, through forests and jungles – really seriously challenging to me. I’m fit in that I can howl my head off all night long, but not that kind of stuff. The only thing to save me was Rambo constantly going, ‘You can’t stop now, the camera’s on you!’ There really is no business like show business. Pride is quite literally what dragged me through it.
The gorilla expert we were with, Ian Redmond, one of Dian Fossey’s protégés – the woman from Gorillas in the Mist – was a chirpy fella, and constantly babbling on about his endless pit of knowledge. You knew this bloke was building himself up for a stupid pratfall. We got close to an old gorilla nest – they have to move every night, because their shit is full of fruit, and it attracts serious amounts of flies and siafu ants. Now, siafu ants are like warzone material: they’ll eat you alive if you’re stupid enough to hang around – and so the gorillas have to move.
Anyway, this fella goes into the nest, and of course – here’s the killer about him – he doesn’t wear boots! He has a machete, and he goes through the jungle in a big floppy hat and khaki shorts. The whole Crocodile Dundee approach. When he got into that gorilla’s nest it was heaving with them ants, and he was screaming as loud as you could ever hope to imagine. They got up into his shorts, too, and I think they were even having a good old go at his jewellery.
At the border from Uganda into Rwanda, where we were going to see the silverback gorillas, we were seriously held up. Inefficiency is the order of Africa, that’s how it works, or doesn’t – basically, they’re waiting to be bribed. Until that happens, you ain’t going nowhere, hour after hour. Soon this gang of little youngsters started to build into a sizeable force around us, and all they wanted, these poor little things, was pens. They can’t go to school without a pen. We stripped our van looking for anything you could write with, and from there on in, we just bought huge boxes of Biros to give to kids wherever we’d run into them. Unlike the spoilt bastards in our country, these kids want to be educated. They want to get out of their dilemma, they want to improve themselves in the world – aah, it breaks your heart. There were quite a few kids with their arms half-hacked. Very hard to come to grips with that and sad they had no hope of hospital treatment.
Meeting the silverback gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park was an incredible experience. And it is a meeting – you go into their company and you behave politely, because it’s their house, and they were very welcoming to us. We got into their clique, and the big silverback male is sitting there, about 30 foot from us, and his big hand flopped out.
You’re warned beforehand never to stare them in the eye because they’ll see that as a challenge. That’s all well and fine, but when you’ve got multicoloured stripes in your hair, they’re gonna stare at you. They’re trying to say hello to you. There’s always that moment where it’s outside of the realm of a text book. A lot of the time, these people that study so thoroughly actually miss nature at work.
Before we left, we threw a barbecue party for all the local kids and sent the message out to the villages. Only we didn’t know that these villages had been at war with each other – that bit of information was missing in our plot. But at the time, there was a lull in hostilities between the Hutus, Twas and the Tutsis – three tribes who used to hack at each other. Nor did we know that the black-and-white-striped penitentiary outfit that I’d chosen to wear was actually the colour scheme of one of the tribes. I wore it especially, because I thought, ‘Ha, no one will have this.’ ‘Well, two hundred kids over there do, John!’ Luckily at that point, hostilities had ceased. As soon as they saw Johnny Rotten being Johnny Rotten, it was a giggle-fest. We started sing-a-longs, and all these kids started mixing.
It was magnificent and the singing was out of this world – just embarrassingly good. Then someone grabs you and pulls you into the middle and you’re supposed to sing. ‘I can’t! After all these years, honestly, I can’t!’ As if that wasn’t bad enough a challenge, then it comes to dancing, and by God, they can dance. It became The Ministry of Silly Moves and Howling, and every tone out of my voice was just like shrieks of laughter. In many ways, they broke my self-control, and with magnificent results. This chanting started, and took off and echoed throughout the countryside – ‘Save – the – Gorilla’ – a healthy message, instead of trying to eat them and sell their hands as Chinese aphrodisiacs. Such, all too often, is their fate.
The crew for Shark Attack and Goes Ape was one of the best bunches of people I’ve ever worked with. It was such a happy collection, no hierarchy in it, everybody chipping in, all the time ideas flowing.
Working for the Discovery Channel on my next TV nature project, however, was a very different business. John Lydon’s Megabugs was a ten-part series shot mainly in the Southern States of America and, though I greatly enjoyed doing it, it was rather hampered by this ridiculous ‘wanting to stick to a script’ idea, which is absolutely not my way. And I mean, you’re dealing with Nature, for God’s sake, you never know what’s going to happen. You can vaguely have an idea, but from there on in, Nature has a way of doing what it wants to do – naturally!
If I’m to be a commentator on this kind of scenario, then I must be natural, too, but this lot would be handing me a script three minutes before shooting, and, ‘Quiet, everyone off the set.’ ‘It’s not a set, you’re in a swamp!’ ‘Can you do that walk again, but properly this time?’ ‘Piss off!’
In their deadpan, dreary way, what was I supposed to be here? A two-bob David Attenborough? No way, stop it!
My attitude with cameras is, don’t ever turn the camera off, and make sure it’s got a two-hour reel in it. Do not turn it off, not for any reason, and do not point it away, do not get distracted no matter what is going on – film it!
A fine example of this was when we went to Florida State University, where a very crazy professor showed us some of the deadlier spiders. One particular spider was a Violin Spider, aka a Brown Recluse – its bite will make your skin rot and fall off in huge, gaping wounds that never heal. The prof hands me two little glass containers
, with one spider in each, aaaaand . . . what does Johnny do? I put my head back and I put the containers on my eyes to look through the glasses like I was wearing lenses – only I tilted them wrong, and one crawls out and down my arm.
Now the cameraman should have been filming, but what does he do, he puts the camera down to brush the spider off me. I was furious! That would have been a great bit of film, the proper thing of people watching, going, ‘Oh my God!’
We had another run-in over filming tarantulas in the desert. They wanted to orchestrate it, make it contrived. I absolutely would not do that. I wanted the genuine article.
We soon discovered there was a whole business going on with experts dealing in insects, so we refused to participate with that on any level. It infuriated the hell out of me and we had a major blow-out with the production company, refusing to film one frame of footage until all that was stopped. Some TV shows fake these scenarios and fob them off to you as real. Sorry, but I think it’s just as easy to make it real. Go to any patch of desert in Arizona, and it won’t be hard to find a tarantula hole. The place is full of them.
I have this rigid set of values and I won’t alter them, not for anybody or anything, or any amount of money. Because of this, I’ve found it very difficult to get a proper spot on a TV network ever since. Well, too bad, because I don’t see the alternative as being acceptable. I would feel emotionally like a criminal if I went along with that.
Luckily, the science side of it had my attention to the point that I forgot we were supposed to be making programmes here. I enjoyed the experts, these nutty university types. The mosquito episode, I really enjoyed. To stop things getting stale, there was that constant need to rev things up, so Rambo said, ‘Why don’t you go in that cage?’ In a huge netted area, they had something like 6,000 mosquitoes, and they were starving them to study them.