Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (13 page)

They were trying to do early rock ‘n’ roll, but it
weren’t right
. The notes were wrong, but the patterns were right! The emphasis, the energy on it, was excellent. I
loved listening to it, nothing to do with discordancy, or accuracy of notes, and obviously the wrong placement of fingers – it was, the energy was right, and Paul Cook always had brilliant
timing. And timing is EV-ER-Y-THING. If your drummer is out of time, nothing makes sense; it’s the root core to music. From that point on, I listened attentively to Paul Cook, and I had my
anchor.

That night I went up to the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park and tried to repeat what they’d done. I’d watched where they put
their fingers, and I remembered
the hand positions – really simplistic stuff now, but for me that was thrilling. It was like, ‘Wow! I’m beginning to understand the chemical formula!’

The first time I met Malcolm in the shop, I didn’t know if he liked me or disliked me. He was never a friend, he never in any way related to me, and possibly only
introduced me to Steve and Paul as an act of spite. I never got to grips with any of that, but somehow or other he must’ve assumed that I was a character above and beyond the band’s
very dull activity up to that point. He almost certainly saw something in me that he didn’t have in himself. But how far that thing could go, to Malcolm’s vision, wasn’t too
clear. But he did, he backed me in that agenda: I was an ideas fella, and I always will be.

I came in with the concept of lyrics and that punchability, to break the boundaries of dullness. Without me, I suppose they might’ve been a Small Faces imitation band, at best, possibly a
pub-rock band, and they might’ve liked it that way. And Malcolm might’ve liked that, because of his love of the New York scene, which at the time was all happening in very small clubs
– places like CBGB’s were tiny. It was all so precious – ‘Oh, we’re the creators, we’re special, nobody else counts!’

Well, I’m sorry, I’m a fairground attraction. I like the funfair, I like the chaos, and I like the aspect of being able to break into the larger majority of people, to challenge.

I’m not sorry, actually. I resent that I actually said ‘sorry’ there. I’m not sorry about that at all. What I’m sorry about is that most people actually don’t
understand how to change, and readily accept the formats that are given to them. And Malcolm – and the band to a minor extent, because he was their mentor – were fully loaded with that:
‘All we gotta do is wear nice clothes and look ridiculous, and we’ll make some money, right?’ And that’s what it would’ve become. Steve, love him. Paul, love him.
Glen, love him. But their attitudes were not one of the bigger picture. Not at all, ever.

QT Jones and his Sex Pistols became, upon my entry, the Sex Pistols. Rehearsals, for me, were: no monitors. There’s them bashing and playing away on their amps,
making an enormous noise, and they cannot hear me. They’ve got no idea what I’m like, except that Steve would decide, ‘You can’t sing!’ I’d go, ‘What do
you base that on?’ ‘I can’t hear ya!’ ‘Well, I’d like a microphone then.’ We get a microphone from the pub downstairs, then I also realize I can’t
sing, but Paul Cook stood up for me. ‘Oh, you know, you’ve got to give the guy a chance . . .’ Paul was very friendly, and helped a great deal in that respect.

You could say, however, and you’d be dead right: ‘What a fucking weak heart! Why don’t you get a proper singer, who walks in with a monitor system all of his own?’ But
they didn’t, they stuck with me, and Paul stuck with me – he secretly backed me. Against all of it. That made me more crazy, wilder. I’d start to turn up in the clothes I really
wanted to be in. I’m no drag queen, right? I’m full-on, hardcore, a lunatic male, and it’s like nothing that had been happening in pop music at all, since I don’t know when
– since maybe the Teddy boys invented themselves? And, by the way, I have a huge affinity with the early Teddy boy movement. Or any street gang movement, or street culture. I understand
completely what that is.

At the time of those first rehearsals in Chiswick, I was wearing a ladies rowing jacket. I only found out later that’s what it was – it was white, so I always thought it was a
cricket jacket. No. It was a woman’s jacket, and I dyed it pink accidentally by putting it in a cheap washing machine with a pair of pink trousers that I bought at Vivienne’s shop. So,
I wrote ‘GOD SAVE OUR GRACIOUS QUEEN’ all over it. That eventually put me in mind of, ‘Hmm, that’d be a good song title . . .’

Any of the gear we wore from the SEX shop we absolutely had to pay for. If not the full whack, then as close to it as possible, and no yelling at Malcolm, ‘That’s absurd, we’re
promoting your stuff, you’re using our name.’ The reply was always, ‘Oh, but I’ll try to
get you a slight discount.’ Later on, some of the
northern bands putting themselves up as punk would bitch about how it was easy for us because we were dressed by Vivienne. No, babies! And while I was paying through the nose for it, I’d tell
her what I wanted and didn’t want, regardless of her assumption of good taste. She’s a designer who needs to be told a thing or two from time to time, otherwise, like all of us, you
could end up crawling up your own big bottom.

Twenty or thirty quid for a jumper was a lot of money back then – huge money – but everything in there was a one-off. There might be a line on a similar theme, but every print was
slightly different, each one was special in its own way – but just don’t ever attempt to have it washed, because then the inks would all run, and the seams would come undone.

The stuff Viv made back then wasn’t exactly built to last. The buttons just popped off – they flew across the room like they were allergic to you. The necks of her T-shirts ended up
down between your breasts after one wash, because of the way they were cut, so a nice tight T-shirt ended up like a man-bra.

I already had the safety pins going before the Pistols, but now they really came into play. Actually, you can see in the old pictures, on everything I wore, I’d always have a set of safety
pins hanging off the collar. It was about fall-out, having an instant repair kit for when Viv’s goods fell apart.

There was never any sit-down discussion of direction with the band, or Malcolm, or anything like that. We were just shoved into a room, and bang, crash, wallop. No matter what Malcolm may have
claimed after the fact, it was just the four of us bashing it out in a room. All the hindsight in the world did him no good at all, because he wasn’t dictating our pace, tone or content in
any way – and he was miffed about that.

I was into Captain Beefheart and Can, but that didn’t mean that’s what I wanted the band to sound like. Not at all. At the same time, I’d be the chap telling you that
10cc’s first album was one of
the greatest things I’d ever heard – and that was so over-structured! I thought, by containment comes perfection. No, I had it
all going on, all of it. I had no expectations other than that’s what Steve’s good at, that sound, that angle, that’s his universe, and that gives me a lot to work with. It gave
me a huge kaleidoscope of possibilities. Things I’d not considered; things I’d never heard from my record collection or indeed anywhere else. That’s how I perfected myself,
really, through Steve and his apparent faults, which weren’t faults at all.

They would all give Steve a very hard time about his lack of musicality and I’d be telling him, ‘Sod them, there’s no such thing as a bum note. You’ve got the balls to
stand there and play the thing, that’s good enough – with time, all the rest will fill in!’ Malcolm was really pushing him in a wrong direction, I thought, it really screwed with
his mind. Steve needed encouragement, not smug dissatisfaction. In many ways he’s a bit like me, he can get very distracted very quickly and then lose the centre of a thing. I recognize those
things in him; those are traits we share.

He seemed a bit of a handbag snatcher to me – a low-rent thief, crooked. He had a really saucy sense of play. A completely untrustworthy character, a proper Dickensian street urchin, like
that Jack character in
Oliver!
– you know, ‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two!’

But at least that’s what he was. It was real. Malcolm was on his case all the time about, ‘Urgh, look at your hair, it looks like a perm!’ And indeed I was too, because it did.
It really did! He looked like an old woman with that curly hairdo. A curly mullet was a crime. Against nature! You know, ‘We don’t want Robert Plant in the band, thank you!’

Steve had had a hideous upbringing, but we were all damaged goods; we were all soiled kittens. By that time, all of us had been locked up for one thing or another.

On the surface, Steve was a bit of a fly boy – but not too fly, and not too bright either. He wanted to give the impression that
he was onto something. But
he’s forever trying to get away from being asked a question – very non-committal, slyly judgemental, and difficult to get close to. We’ve had our moments where we’ve been
very close and had a great laugh, me and Steve, but he would swing straight back into that alienation thing in a heartbeat.

He can be hilarious, but he doesn’t like another comedian in the room. And, well, if I’m there, it’s gonna happen, innit? And then with people like Sid around – well,
that’s just too much for him. If he’d just bothered to open his heart, we could’ve helped each other along there quite brilliantly, but it wasn’t in him and we were young.
Oddly enough, we all viewed Steve as the older member. He was a year older than Paul; they weren’t in the same year at school. So he was like the elder influence that, well, really
wasn’t an influence you wanted at all.

Glen was, the – quote – musician of the band, and so his approach was, ‘You can’t do that, that’s not music!’ ‘
Pardon?
’ Right from the
start, there was an argument with him, because he wanted us to be these dandies, these Soho ponces, a throwback to the mods. That was never going to work, pretending to be something which we
plainly aren’t, so I laughed that one right out of court. ‘Look, we’re not dandies, why would we want to fake being that?’ For me it had to come from a real hardcore, felt
emotion. You can’t just pluck a fantasy out of thin air and think you can cover yourself in that and that’ll be good enough for the rest of the world. That’s contemptuous
behaviour, for me.

Unwittingly, Glen was very helpful. You do need negativity thrown at you, it’s a great driving force, and it makes you work harder. When this flummox of a situation started to weld its way
into tunes, it was fantastic. Our attempts at other people’s songs, particularly the Who, were great. I really started to feel like I was in a band, and I loved that feeling.

We could have, and should have, hung out more together socially, but that never happened. If Malcolm came to rehearsals it
would only be to pick up Steve and Paul, and
possibly Glen, who usually had something better to do. He’d take them off to these very nice eating clubs that he was so prone to going to himself, and I always understood and knew that I
wasn’t even considered as part of that. So I never really bothered to ask after the first one or two rejections. Listening to the fumbly-arsed lies about, ‘Oh, uh, no, there’s not
room for one more,’ or whatever, you get the message and you move on.

I don’t think Malcolm ever liked music at all. To him, it was just the noise that accompanied his exotic-clothes future for the human race. He didn’t quite comprehend its importance
or its social significance at all. And indeed, why should he, because really there wasn’t much of that at all up until we arrived. What would songs of social significance up to the Sex
Pistols mean? It’d be some dreary-arsed folk singer prattling away on an acoustic guitar. Oh God –
urgh!

There was one meeting in a pub at the top of Tottenham Court Road. We were having an argument, and Malcolm introduced us to Bloody Marys. ‘Wow, they called a cocktail
that
? And it
tastes great, you don’t have to suffer the vodka tinge, but you get all the effects.’ Brilliant evening! But in the background was John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’,
and I knew the song well. I said,

‘There! That’s social significance, proper, my style.’ And then he started to grasp it, what I was coming from. I don’t know if that left a good impression on him. From
there on in, we never really spoke – very odd. He really didn’t want to move mountains at all, he wanted to rearrange piles of glitter.

I, meanwhile, homed in on the lyric-writing almost immediately. That’s what Steve gave to me, that burst of energy. He was like a diamond to me. Stunning, gorgeous, brilliant, beautiful
opportunities. I was quite the dynamite once the doors had been opened to give me the chance to sing. I really went at it. I went straight into the writing and just wrote all the time. The words
just flowed out of me, all this pent-up stuff that I’d had no place to aim at before,
that I had no ambition with, suddenly found its mark. Fantastic! Magnificent!

There were many, many things I was toying with. I don’t remember this, but apparently one of the first things I tried out was about the Archangel Gabriel, slagging off the Catholic Church.
I might have done something like that, but what was released is where the energy and effort was. Everything else I view as the scrag end, best left on the cutting room floor. Anything that
hasn’t been finished is that way for a very good reason.

The first one we actually rehearsed, I think, was ‘Mandy’. I’d been at this girl Mandy’s house for a party, and she made a punch-bowl using Southern Comfort, Martini, and
some kind of fruit juice which also had alcohol in it, a liqueur, and ice. I drank so much of it that it took me two days to wake up – John Gray, Dave Crowe and Sid dragged me back to my
family’s house. I can from time to time be a creature of excessive stupidity. I’m well aware of the warning signs and yet I’ll dive in and just go with it, but overdo it. I tend
to lack subtlety. Maybe in later years I’ll catch onto that one, the idea of being subtle. But anyway, that was the subject of my first song – best left unrecorded, eh?