Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  The way the world is, people just move about. The blood that runs in my veins runs in every other human being on this planet. The same. One blood, that’s what we are, we’re one species. There’s no variants that make us not be able to mix and match. We’re not like, say, chimpanzees and gorillas. As long as we can have sex with each other, we’re the same. And if you want to call that mongrel, as in all dogs are the same really – well, that’s what we are. It’s that infinite variety which as a species will sustain us, constantly refreshing the gene pool. There is no other way. Very laughingly, you can look at the inbred nonsense of royal families, and you can see it in them – they are all kind of half-headedly dopey, aren’t they? Particularly the menfolk.

  But then our lot have quite a bit of German in there, via Greece. And Russia. Hello, Habsburgs, how are you doing? Thank you for being so non-English. Racial purity doesn’t make sense once you do any kind of study. Class purity makes even less sense. All that highlights is the greedy who don’t want to share their portion of the pie – a completely clear-cut nonsense.

  I understand my folk here much more than I do the attitudes of the landed gentry. There’s nothing really but a curse of education that separates working class from middle class. There’s an attitude in the education principles that teach a sense of superiority and inferiority. There’s not much difference other than that, there really isn’t. You can’t say that the middle class have all the money, not from what I’ve seen. Who’s creating these gaps between us and feeding us these false agendas? That’s where I’m looking.

  But I don’t call it immigration, I call it migration. As a species it’s very healthy for us to get up and move around the planet. Sometimes certain groups of people have to do that for economic reasons. Nobody’s doing it just to be spiteful. Everybody loves the idea of a homeland. I used to, but I’ve kind of got the bigger picture now. It’s a home planet to me.

  I’m as thrilled and feel as at home in Shanghai as I do anywhere else on earth. I love the vibrancy there and I felt proud to be a human being watching China develop. There’s many bad things in China – believe me, I’m not a fool about it – but I can see that the get-up-and-go they’re creating there is very interesting. That’s something where Britain has lagged behind. There’s no gusto any more. There seems to be a lot of laziness, idleness. I can’t bear to hear anyone say, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’ Of course there is. That’s bloody nonsense.

  We were in China with PiL for about a week in March 2013. Oh, their eagerness to learn! The government are starving them of information of what goes on outside their boundaries, so when you’re there it’s thrilling, trying to communicate with them. They’re very talkative and friendly and open, and they just want to know – what are the bits that are missing in the picture for them? Slowly but surely you’re putting into their minds the idea that they’re being manipulated and that’s surely a good thing. That opens them up, gets them to start thinking for themselves as individuals, when they realize what censorship has denied them. And how are my antics in the West not to be mentioned in the East? That’s a puzzlement to me.

  The government officials who have to approve your visa analyze every word in every song in your set list. Surprise surprise, they decided that, yes, we were okay. The trouble was of course that a lot of our records and my other work was completely unknown there, so what we were trying to do really was push through our latest album This Is PiL, and get people to understand that there were other strings to our bow. So the set involved a full PiL catalogue. It was quite a surprise to them. But when they heard PiL, they definitely got it. The textures, the tones, the progression in it, and the openness and the joy and the pain in the music definitely scored big points.

  We had just about no sleep with the excitement of it all. That’s how I am. We even rehearsed there because that’s where we were starting the tour. Beijing, I have to say, was not an eye-opener: the pollution was so bad you daren’t open your eyes. It’s catastrophic to expect people to live in that environment. Here I am in Los Angeles, where people moan about the pollution all the time and rightly so, but hello, it ain’t in the zero pointage in comparison. Beijing is so way off the map, it’s incomparable.

  Onstage, you literally can’t get enough air in your lungs to perform the songs properly. It’s like slowly choking. Very frightening, too, when you can’t get the air in, particularly in the gig because it was rammed to the rafters in Beijing – even less oxygen than usual, and on top of that everybody smoking, including myself!

  What you’ve got to do there, and in Russia, is you’ve got to not come down hard on the bootleg side, because that’s the only way they really have of discovering you, through illegal trade. Although there’s gangsters there somehow profiting off that, that’s the only way they can get the information. You have to grin and grit your teeth. You’re being ripped off, but at the same time you’re passing on information, which is far more valuable. If ever I did any of this just for the money – well, I wouldn’t be in China, would I?

  I suppose places like China are the new frontier for Western music, and their innocence towards us was equally shared, because I was as naive about them as they were about me. That’s where the talking can begin. You’re both equally puzzled but you’re intrigued and fascinated, and it leads to excellent situations in dressing rooms. Normally, I run away from those kind of scenarios, but when it’s in new and unexplored territories, I’m up for that. All night long. Because that absorption of information gives you the energy to do the next gig, way more than sleep – being able to walk out of these things and know you’ve done something good, and you’ve learned so much.

  I’m thrilled that other bands were turned down by the Chinese authorities. They were all the ones that joined in on those student union complaints about ‘Free Tibet’, or whatever. Well, we should be freeing ourselves first. And I don’t view Britain particularly as a free society. It still faces censorship, and if that don’t work, then you’ll face mockery through the press. For so long there’s been a media culture there that’s been swaying people into believing that music has no effect any more, so why bother? I say, look to the owners of those publications. Need I say any more? All of those papers and TV channels that push that agenda of, why bother? That’s because they’ve got their pile, haven’t they? So it’s back to trying to keep us stupid, it’s back to religion in another guise. Never give up. There’s nothing to give up for.

  I believe in changing things, but not at any cost. I agreed with the Poll Tax riots in 1989, for instance, but I didn’t understand the rioters then attacking a McDonald’s. What the hell was that? The riot was about specific things: ‘Let’s go and solve those specific problems with the Poll Tax.’ How does a cheeseburger come into this?

  The Tottenham riots in 2011 were equally foolish. The point and purpose of it were lost to the mob, which you might assume to be out of control. But there are manipulators in there that run private agendas. In any crowd situation, be very wary who you follow so willingly. Don’t be jumping behind the banner of the loudest mouth in the crowd. Make sure you know who that fella is and that you agree with his agenda. That’s just common sense to me, but that’s something you learn being brought up with football. We’re not easily led to go charging down a street by the first arsehole that says, ‘This way, chaps!’ You’ve got to have earned the right to my support.

  So I’m dead against that kind of senseless rioting, particularly when it ends up with innocent people being murdered. There was one situation in 2011: why on earth were those idiots wrecking up this woman’s little hairdresser’s shop? The viciousness had been hoodwinked into other things, and none of them solve any problems. I’m telling you: I don’t believe that violence solves anything, it just opens the door to the lowest common denominator to manipulate the mob and the end result is always stupidity. Always. Whatever cause you had to be demonstrating there in the first place is at that point gone, lost forever.

  So they just
ended up looting plasma-screen TVs. Once again, we’re back to the power of advertising. That’s the ugliness of it: the message through advertising is, ‘Everyone must have one of these.’ So, everybody went out to get one. They can’t earn it by fair means, so it becomes by hook or by crook. An invite to thieves, and nobody relates it to what started the escalation.

  Police shooting people on the streets – my God, that was a big, big issue that kicked off the Tottenham riots. It says a lot about Britain that the rioting was widespread because everybody in the country realized at that point that the police force was a headless chicken, and no one was in charge of anything and they didn’t have the means to stop it. Which is useful information to people like me, but then it was thrown out the window with ‘I want Adidas and Samsung!’ Pah! The masses!

  Some of the racial tensions I notice when I’m back in London these days are so unjustifiable. Your poor Polish chap that gets off the plane, he’s there to work and to make money. His attitude to me is proper working class. I don’t see him as stealing anyone’s job. He’s not the enemy, it’s the government that’s created that agenda and deliberately wants to set you up against these folk. Where actually they’re the same as us, they just want to do the best they can for their families.

  I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but Rambo and I, we have this laugh, to see how many cornices on the outside of Georgian buildings have been knocked off by Polish workers. Stripped down of ornamentation! Ornamentation is definitely on the way out!

  Beyond that, I bemoan the modern architecture in London. Some pieces I like but generally speaking I find it coldly indifferent and soul-destroying. The ugliness of steel piping on the outside, and temples of glass – it’s so impersonal. I can’t find a message in that kind of architecture that’s in any way friendly. In many ways, too, the old Georgian architecture was an imperialistic look down on us, but there was a beauty in it. It was at least something to aspire to artistically. There was effort in the stone work and attention to detail, which is always riveting. There’s somehow an aspirational quality to it.

  But oh God, that one that looks like a coffee percolator! Is it the Gherkin? Oh God, no! And that new glass ‘Shard’ thing that’s sticking up, scraping the sky. It looks so antisocial. To me it just looks like it’s tearing and ripping the sky. It’s a very evil piece of work. I want modern, and I want update, and I want new achievements, but I don’t want them to be at the sacrifice of the people that have to live in these environments. Pay attention to what our needs are and make it comfortable for us to live in, and make us proud to live there. And that’s not what’s happening. Modern architecture has somehow disassociated itself completely, as indeed modern art has. It just seems art for art’s sake. We’re completely uninvolved.

  Maybe they just build them as a tax write-off. They don’t occur to me as being proud monuments of a nation’s achievements.

  In terms of the policing and surveillance on the streets below, it’s all about protecting the very wealthy. You’ll probably get less for murder than you will for damaging their property. That’s telling you lots about where society has ended up. That kills creativity and when people can’t be creative and contribute, they use that extreme talent to other means. If one of them be crime, that’s how it ends up. If all roads are closed, you plough through the field.

  That sense of neighbourhood seems to be gone. I can’t speak for the young, but I can speak with them. Times have moved on and you’ve had a very cold-hearted Conservative government – a coalition in name, but it’s just two cunts for the price of one. Before that, it was an even more distant Labour government with Blair, that all combined has led to some serious problems. This Britain is slowly dissolving and unravelling and it’s not great to see.

  In many ways I look back at it and I think the Sex Pistols were a way, way early messenger of doom. Yet we were offering hope, because once you realize these problems and who’s creating them, you at least have a chance to change it. And then we’re back to censorship. It’s still there, as bad as it ever was, if not worse now. They learned from the likes of the Pistols and people of similar attributes, how to close us down. The media is a great tool for that. Them enquiries into phone-hacking and all of that – you find out the government’s in collusion with it, you find out the police are in collusion with it. It’s quite a bizarre truth but one that really has to be looked at.

  I don’t know what answers are going to come out of the investigations into this, and the trials. I saw Rebekah Brooks, that former editor of the News of the World, on TV and the Americans were laughing about it. She said in court she didn’t know that what she was doing was illegal and indeed she was found not guilty at the end of the trial. But I mean, come on, then, what chance do the rest of us stand? She was at the time going out with that Ross Kemp from EastEnders. My, oh my, what a wicked web we weave!

  Then there was the revelation about how she’d been lent a police horse for a couple of years and that David Cameron had ended up riding it. Oh my gosh. I wonder if that horse was ever used to dispel rioters. It’s intriguing: the tentacles of corruption, how high they go! Corruption in any country is from the top downwards, not the bottom up. So don’t be nicking my class because they’re flogging a few bits of gear at the end of the street. Have a word about those that have the money to import it, don’t set us up as the mugs. Or take the easy route: just answer the Daily Mail’s rallying call, and blame it on the oiks. In this respect we’re the oiks, all of us.

  15

  Deeper Water

  I’d always wanted to reactivate PiL, but exactly who should be in the band wasn’t completely clear to me. When I think back to PiL beginnings, I’ve still got Jah Wobble in my mind, as being there in heart and soul. It’s not a puzzlement to me, it’s just my memories are fond of this fella. Not so much with Keith Levene, obviously. I can’t help that. I understood fully why Wobble couldn’t work with him. But I also knew that Keith’s attention to detail was exactly why he couldn’t work with Wobble. The two couldn’t be in the same room together, and it wasn’t easy having to pick one member over another.

  I simply didn’t want Keith in my life again. It’s completely clear: he’s a cunt. He’s very talented, but he doesn’t like himself, and therefore the rest of the world must suffer. You cannot deny the power and beauty of the guitaring in ‘Poptones’. It’s utterly wonderful, the juxtaposition of up and down. It’s flora! It’s tapestry! He’s a cunt that can play good – incredibly good – but he’s still a cunt.

  So I called Wobble, and gave him the option of, ‘Shall we work together again?’ Everything was fine on the phone, sort of. But then came the question of money, and his manager had extra-special ideas about Wobble’s big bad self, and how important he was to the whole thing, and he should get more than everybody else. I’m sorry, that ain’t PiL – goodbye! If you’re going to play them kind of games after all those years – well, where’s payback? All that investment that I put into this, from the beginning – that don’t count? And you still want to be paid more?

  Wobble was my mate and he always will be, regardless of the rows or inconsequential tittle-tattles that have gone on in between. Those aren’t going to change anything. He knew me before the band, and he should know me after. Hand on heart, I couldn’t work with him again, but that doesn’t mean that our friendship should stop. That’s his decision and good luck to him on it. But for me, people that I’ve ever hung out with and respected as friends, stay that way, regardless of the errors of their ways. You have to forgive your friends. That’s what friends are for.

  Still, it was impossibly, ludicrously funny for me to hear, in 2012, that Levene and Wobble – worst enemies! – had buried the hatchet, and joined back up again, and were declaring that I can’t sing. So what do they do about that? They go and get an X-Factor-style Johnny Rotten tribute act, to literally imitate me, in their new mock-PiL band. Exactly the thing that both of them said they couldn’t bear about me, they get fr
om a mimic! They’ve made a mockery of themselves in that. No progress in that at all.

  The people I really wanted in PiL, deep down, were Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, from mid-late ’80s PiL, as my guitarist and drummer respectively. I rang up Bruce, and I hadn’t spoken to him for maybe twenty years. He immediately went, ‘Hello, John!’ and I burst out laughing. It’s odd, because when I spoke to Wobble, I didn’t recognize his voice on the phone – he sounded like he was an infomercial trying to get all the words in very quickly. It felt wrong. But with Bruce, we were right there, as mates, instantly. I knew from that very moment that it was the correct thing to do.

  After his tinnitus problems, Lu had given up trying to convert Western computers to gamelan, and gone acoustic. He’d become a kind of cultural ambassador in former Soviet republics, and places like Kurdistan. He’d travel to different communities, bringing with him instruments indigenous to the region, and teach the locals their own lost culture. He’s the most wonderful, generous and creative person. I begged him to work with me, and his whole wall of rejection was, ‘Oh John, please don’t spend your own money!’ Aw, what a sweetheart. How could I not want to work with a man who cared that deeply? He didn’t want to see me lose, and viewed himself as a risk or a liability. I pleaded with him to see it differently and he did, and now here we are – PiL, back again.

  Then, bass-player-hunting we went, and through our then tour manager, Bill Barclay, we found Scott Firth. His CV ranged from the Spice Girls to Stevie Winwood. Wow, that’s an open mind! Or at least it’s someone who knows that sometimes you have to work with chavs and slashers. You knew that he had a work ethic. I talked to him on the phone, and I really liked him. It was clear right from the outset – he loves his wife, loves his kids, he’s got that area of his life sorted, and it’s all centred around that. Fantastic, I’m listening to a stable-minded human being!