Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (10 page)

So, there I was in mid-Hackney at 3 a.m., and I had to run the gang gauntlet to get back to Finsbury Park. That was a death walk, a
serious
death walk, particularly how I was dressing and
how I was. I gave a toss for
no one
. I knew what was coming. Even local Arsenal boys, they’d still have a reason to row with me, just because of my attitude, and I – don’t
– back – down. In them days, you get stabbed on the street, ain’t no one opening the door to help, because you’re not local. Seriously dangerous stuff, but I made it home
somehow.

Anne Beverley had the most peculiar relationship with poor old Sidney. It didn’t feel like a family. She never offered me anything, not once, not even a cup of water. It was religiously
true, over and over again. There were other nights when there were others from the gang-of-Johns there who’d come over to stay, and they all remarked on it too. ‘What, don’t we
exist?’ ‘No, I’m afraid not.’ Strange, strange woman. She wouldn’t accept Sid having friends at all; she didn’t accept any of us. At the time, Sid’s other
best mate was a guy called Vince. He said the same thing – ‘Bloody hell, that’s a house of ice.’

I told Sid, ‘You can’t live with a mum like that. Look at her, Sid, she’s giving you devilled kidneys with heroin sprinkled on top, do you really need this?’ Sid had
actually been anti-drugs when I first met him, but you know what drug mothers do? It was in the food. Insane, right? She’d go, ‘Here’s your food, Sid, make sure your friend
doesn’t eat any of it.’ Sid’d go, ‘Okay, Mummy’, and then we’d go into his bedroom, and he’d go, ‘Try some of this, John, what on earth’s she
giving to me?’ And I’d go, ‘I’m not hungry, mate.’ So that was Sid’s inheritance.

His new abode, the squat, was round the back of Hampstead Station, so I went over there and asked, ‘Can I move in?’ and he
went, ‘Great!’ He was
there all on his own, with nothing to do, so now there were two of us with nothing to do. Somehow two are much better at doing nothing than one.

There was no electricity and no hot water, but the toilets flushed, so to me it wasn’t that grim – that’s what was available, and quite frankly it was of a similar standard to
when I was younger and we lived in Benwell Road. But this place had an indoor toilet, so I was one up on the Richter Scale.

The whole block was squatted by old hippies and Teddy boys, and we were the flotsam and jetsam that fell into the generation gap. Squatters united many different ways of life, because squatting
was essential at that time. The government were doing fuck all in terms of housing. You couldn’t get a flat anywhere, and what was available was overpriced and just not worth it. There were
enormous amounts of unoccupied old housing; flats with nobody in them, nothing happening. So you weren’t depriving anyone of a place to live, you weren’t pushing out a family. They were
just unoccupied and semi-derelict. There’d be the signs up front: ‘Derelict building – do not enter.’ Great, I’ll live there. In we go. That was the promotional
flag!

I was on the dole for a very short time, for about two weeks. I didn’t want to be lining up in the dole office. I hated that place, didn’t want nothing to do with it. I didn’t
feel I belonged there. The two times I turned up, I bitterly resented it and I swore I’d never go back there. I really didn’t like the whole format of it, or the institutionalization it
entailed, or the way they make you feel somehow guilty about it all. That’s your right – you’ve worked, or your parents have worked. If the state can’t provide jobs, then
what the fuck are you supposed to do? In many ways I completely understand people taking to illegal activities, because frankly there’s no other way to make any kind of money at all, or get
yourself out of the dumps. For me, personally, I could never get involved with theft, I can’t do it. What’s not mine, I don’t want – that’s what Mum and Dad taught
me.

Job-wise, I’d do anything, whatever I could get. One was in a shoe factory – I loved that, boxing shoes. Another was at Heal’s, the furniture
store-cum-department store on Tottenham Court Road. At the top was a state-of-the-art vegetarian restaurant, and me and Sid were the cleaners.

The thing to do was to experiment with what vegetarian food was, because there’d be leftovers, you see. That was my first taste of a nut cutlet. In them days vegetarianism was a very new
thing, a trendy fad for very wealthy people. And utterly tasteless. It was about colours and shapes, really, rather than any flavourful content. Very amusing. Not much to clean up, actually. A few
chopped peanuts on the floor and that would be about it, but we’d make that last two hours every night, because that’s what you were paid for.

Then over the summer holidays, John Gray got me a job in a daycare centre in North London. I’d be looking after kids of seven, eight, nine, ten. I could play with the younger ones, that
wasn’t a problem at all. The problem was the institution that ran these places: they didn’t like the idea of someone like me near little kids. In a world of Jimmy Savile! That’s
the bitter irony of it, because I’d be the last person to bugger about with children, yet you’re so readily and easily labelled, and so wrongly too. People can’t see through to a
man’s heart and soul, their character.

We’d make balsa-wood aeroplanes – biplanes or triple-wings. Everybody wanted to be the Red Baron, so that was the favourite one to make. I had woodworking skills, from technical
drawing and woodwork at school, and also from working on the building sites. I’d double up there with the site’s carpenter, and he taught me lots.

So, instead of saws and hammers, the tools were tiny little Stanley blades and balsa wood. But the principles are the same, and kids love being involved. It’s what I loved, so that’s
all you do. You want to quieten them down, you want violence to stop? Get them interested. All kids love to create, and feel like they’ve come up with something on their own, and achieved it
through their own means. For instance, when any child asks you a question, do not shy off
from giving them that answer, because they’ll resent you forever for not
telling them. At least this one did, and will.

I realized my teachers had forced me into a caricature of myself that actually wasn’t me at all. They made me uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable anyway, just trying to deal with life, but
they made me feel unwanted and resented for being there, and I of course responded to that. I don’t think any child is born like Mr Nasty or Mrs Badmouth. That comes from what you’re
taught by example. And I think I’ve turned all those aspects into positives. I’m not a self-pitying, nasty piece of shit, I’m not criminally minded. Thank God, they gave me the
tools: how
not
to be.

To get by, me and Sid had to sell amphetamine sulphate. We had to do a bit of small-time dealing, one way or another. Money was hard, times were tight.

I’m not the druggy sort, but I like to stay awake – the alertness that certain chemicals can give. In them early years, your late teens, you’re well up for it. You don’t
want to miss anything that’s happening anywhere at any time. Indeed, you want to be involved with everything all the time. Then when there’s nothing going on, and just indolence all
round – grrrr! In those early days, whenever I’d get these attacks of colds and flus and any kind of allergies, and they were coming on me big, the amphetamines that were around at that
time would blow them right out of my system. It seems to be very useful that way.

It’s not any self-aggrandizement going on in your skull, not with proper amphetamine. It just makes you more alert. I don’t think there’s a high comes off it at all, it’s
just you’re able to activate yourself. I treat it as a key to the box. Or I used to.

My trouble was, you know how they say a salesman should never sample his own wares? Here’s one that did, so I wasn’t very good at selling anything. I’d sit by a big bag and
feel very glad of myself until it was gone and not think of moving. Speed doesn’t make me get up and run out around the world, it makes me sit down and think and enjoy whatever it is
I’m doing. Even if it’s cutting my
fingernails. I’m enjoying it. It get me into the state of not being constantly tired, which again is all back to
meningitis.

I suppose they’d call it self-medicating nowadays. My normal existence at the time would be one of inactivity – just zero, run down, lack of iron in my blood. Genuinely, my brain
couldn’t handle too much going on, and physically everything was just too much to endure. Except, oddly enough, on the building site. That was a good ten-hour day of solid manual labour, and
I never found that a problem. But I always found a problem of repairing a window sill, or fixing a toilet. I’ve learned later that you can turn those things into great adventures. But not
then; I used drugs a bit differently. It wasn’t so much recreational as a necessary thing to do, to give myself any get-up-and-go. I was very prone to depressions, after meningitis, right up
through my twenties.

Amphetamines had been around on the streets for years. It was a throwback to the mods. It definitely kept you up all night and you could go to many clubs and all of those things. In them early
days what I loved about it – I didn’t like the soporific downside of alcohol and the speed would definitely take that away, so you could drink as much as you liked, and somehow not be
drunk. I really love the flavour of beer. I’m not a cocktails person – unless you count beer and speed as a cocktail. We bad rock ‘n’ rollers are all at it! But then, joy of
joys, so are all the football hooligans, or they were then, so we had common ground.

So that was the backdrop for the Hampstead squat. For a while there, Mad Jane moved in with us. That crazy cow! She was like one of those voluptuous women from a 1940s
film noir
. Her hair
was wavy and long on one side, and she’d wear those dresses from that period. Very strange girl. Movie starlet from the ’40s kind of imagery, lots of that ‘come up and see me
sometime’, kind of Julie London-y – a very hard image to pull off in the shittiness of London Town at the time, so I admired her bravery. I don’t suppose we got on very well, but
well enough. And from time to time, future PiL guitarist Keith Levene would come round. There may
have been a chemical thing going on with him, but no worse than anyone
else.

Drugs were everywhere, probably because of the mods. The mods were very into uppers, and that passed on. The skinhead thing was a bit purist, but not by Arsenal way.

I’m not talking heroin here; that was a great unknown to most of us – it was just something the Grateful Dead did, and by God, didn’t they sound it! The dullest band I’ve
ever known. What a waste of four and a half hours! I saw them once at Alexandra Palace when I was young. No! No! I couldn’t relate to the crowd that would be digging that kind of stuff. To
me, it was life-threatening. Comatose.

These were very difficult times, in 1973 and ’74.
Everything
was flared. Please: how to avoid flares! We had no relationship to hippies, they just seemed to be spoilt rich kids.
That’s probably what drew me into the second-hand demob suits and the Paddy look. We were coming out of the ’60s, and that for me was more in keeping with the skinhead approach to
clothing than the hippie lot, so I headed straight into that one.

From an early age, I’d been hanging out on Sundays at the Roundhouse. John Gray lived in Kentish Town, and the Roundhouse is not far away in Chalk Farm, so what I’d do is, get the
bus up to Kentish Town, pick him up, we’d walk to Chalk Farm and then we’d spend all day, way into the late hours, watching about twelve or fifteen bands. As I got a bit older,
I’d probably been out since Friday night, so what a perfect way to end the Sunday.

It was astounding, the diversity of music. I’d see Roxy Music, Judas Priest, Queen (when they were very young), T. Rex, the Seeds, Mott the Hoople – the variety was fantastic, and
there was no snobbery about who was top of the bill or whatever. It was just whoever turned up at that specific time – they’d put their equipment on the stage, and off they’d go.
The audience was mostly hippie, lots of floral prints and girls dancing barefoot, and bongo players, the scent of joss sticks – all of that. I kind of paid no
attention
to that, I only liked what was happening on the stage, and I just soaked it all up.

Punk history later dictated that music was shit all through the mid-’70s. Not true, if you knew where to find it. It was the making of me. I could quite happily spend a whole weekend
–
alert!
– going around to all these late-nighters around town. The Roundhouse scene was full of insane bands. People like the Pink Fairies were full-on, hard, heavy, loud,
aggressive – absolutely the opposite of the hippie vibe. There they were with their long hair, but throwing it back at you in such a noisy destructive way. Fantastic!

Likewise, the Edgar Broughton Band had the longest, filthiest beards and hair, and dressed like bikers and sang songs called ‘Gone Blue’, whose classic line was, ‘I’m all
undone by the things she said, but I love that little hole in the back of her head.’ Hah! Wow! That topic for that time and that age was like – ‘Oh, they’re going somewhere
here.’ That’s not your hippie message at all, is it? And their album cover was sensationally hilarious – racks of dead cows hanging on hooks. I don’t suppose the music would
bear up too much today, but that isn’t the be-all-and-end-all.

Black Sabbath were the same – a very different approach to music, and different drugs, more on the up-all-night variety. Ooooh, yeah, you were completely aware what this lot were prepared
to do with themselves. When you listened to bands like that and the Deviants, you knew the chains were off. Rules are for fools – that’s what you were gathering from them. At least I
was. You know – ‘Oooh, don’t do this, it’s bad for you!’ ‘Bollocks! Go forth, create chaos, and begin in your own head!’ What’s wrong with being off
yer nut every now and then, you know? It’s a healthy thing. But these bands, it was a very youthful contingent – it was all about us young bloods who were made to feel unwanted by the
sit-down mob. I went to concerts to dance. I shoved as much down me neck and other areas as I could possibly get my hands on, and got up on the good foot.