Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (19 page)

Quite frankly, you look at it, and you see the spots on my face? You see how deathly white I was? That’s telling you I’d been up for two days speeding. Poster boy for
amphetamines!

Grundy, on the other hand, was the representative of the moral majority, and showbiz. Let’s just say he was robust in his cynicism, and yet very corrupt and clearly not giving four
working-class lads a fair shake of it. And he should’ve done because he was from that kind of background, and so in the long run his bitter resentment
towards us
really just renewed the public’s faith that we’re all right after all. We weren’t up there selling you no crock. We weren’t trying to pretend we were from outer space, or
flogging you an esoteric angle.

Malcolm totally shit himself in the studio. He said, ‘I overheard they’re going to call the police. Quick, everybody run!’ Ha! From what? I’ve always known Malcolm to be
a back-down coward; he’d never meet that final hurdle. And maybe that’s because his ambitions were different. Maybe I’m being a bit unfair to him there, but he wasn’t
prepared to go to the lengths I am, and Steve clearly at that time was more than able for it. He was magnificent on that show, his confidence was superb.

Afterwards, all the phones at the studio were ringing off the hook, and we all piled into a car and drove off. They dropped me off at the nearest tube station and probably went to a party or
whatever, but I wasn’t invited. I had to squeak into the car just for that lift, otherwise I would have had to walk down the high road outside.

But it was all exploding and I soon realized I couldn’t be anywhere at all. There was some girl I knew who lived off the King’s Road, so I went and stayed at her place. I had to stay
out of the press’s eye, because the paparazzi were fully onto us and I always say that was the birth of the paparazzi, British-style. There were hordes of them from there on in, wherever you
went. It absolutely ruined any kind of social life. You couldn’t be normal, couldn’t sit in the local pub with friends. There’d be twenty arseholes there rewriting a story, always
unfavourably, whatever, looking for a scandal where it didn’t exist. A total nightmare.

I don’t normally read the press, but around that time it was astounding what was being written, and I would gleefully read through it, thinking, ‘But I’ve done nothing, and you
get all this! Who needs to pay publicists? You can get all these lies for free.’

Overnight, though, things changed into a chaotic mess, because we didn’t have a good captain at the helm, and so it spun out of control. Chaos is a very fine tool but it’s one that
you have to craft
well. Just bubbling along, and bouncing from one incident to another, which is what I felt was happening, was not right for me.

Here we were, capable of making really big significant social changes to many things – not just the wonderful world of music, but to society itself, which was suddenly paying attention
– and Malcolm was messing that up. He was scared of that next level, and he was always scared of being arrested and locked up. All of those foolishnesses, that when you’re young
you’re kind of looking forward to. You’ve got your brave on, you’ve got your youth, and you’ve got your kind of ignorance too, because you’re not fully aware of the
consequences. With me I felt I could take whatever was coming ’cos I could justify it. I could stand up and back up what I was doing.

The tour we’d set up to promote ‘Anarchy’ became anarchy! A pointless futile mind-game, with no results. Just being banned everywhere, and Malcolm being quite incapable of
backing us up on that. We should have gone for it at that point, and really flooded the networks and the media with ‘Why aren’t you backing us?’ But we didn’t look for
allies. We felt like we were in the Moonies, some secretive religion rather than an accurate, well-oiled machine – broad, wide-open, transparent.

The original idea had been to pair up with a circus, and tour that way. I loved that idea and had a great contribution in it. I loved funfairs and circuses when I was young, loved watching the
Teddy boys who worked on them. To me, that would be the next level. There was an agent who was very interested in pushing that but it fell apart. Again, Mr Manager let it fall by the wayside.

Instead, it was three weeks of uncomfortable coaches, gigs cancelled left, right and centre, and the prospect of no hotels whenever we got anywhere. That was because we’d have to wait for
the money from the gig to pay up, but then if the gig was cancelled, we’d have to drive on to the next one, try to blag ourselves into a hotel by telling them that we’d pay in the
morning – knowing full well there was no money!

Because there were other bands involved on that tour – the Clash and the Damned – it became like we couldn’t have a camaraderie vibe about it amongst
ourselves. The other bands became competitive in their attitude – all except the Heartbreakers who weren’t like that at all. They were just looking for the next fix, and the further up
north we got, the less possibility there was of that.

Very soon the Clash were travelling in another coach, and bits of the Damned went that way, and that was that. It started out all together but it went pear.

At one gig in Caerphilly, there were choirs singing outside, and presuming that we were quite literally the Antichrist. ‘Hello? No! I’m actually viewing myself as a bit of a saviour
here, I think you lot have got it wrong! The real Antichrist is religion!’ It’s very hard to make people understand that, when they’re manipulated by newspaper headlines and read
no further than the first big block-letter words with a well-chosen photograph that puts you in a bad light. The press really would write what they wanted.

There was such a worthwhile lack of activity on the tour, that I actually tried heroin. Indolence creates incredibly negative situations, as we know from any teenager’s experience.

I never wanted to see heroin wrapped around any band. If you like music as much as I do, then you’ll see all these problems coming way in advance, because you’re learning from the
escapades of famous rock stars, and the calamities they get themselves into. Try as you can, you can’t get the people off it. It’s the kiss of death, and it was something I watched
happen to Eric Clapton. I wasn’t basing my aversion on fear of the unknown. I was basing it on, look what happened to that burnout.

Sitting around with nothing to do, I thought, ‘I want to know what the big taboo is. I know all the warning signs, but still I can’t be preaching against it unless I’ve sampled
the goods.’ So I tried it with Jerry Nolan, the Heartbreakers’ drummer – I thought, ‘With a name like that, he must be the Irish one, I can’t go wrong here.’

I hated it. It makes you sick. What’s the point of that? ‘No, man,
if you keep taking it, you get over the sickness.’ Why would I want to get over the
sickness? Others have told me that they go straight into it and they love it, they love that false sense of security that heroin creates inside your brain. That’s a lovely thing, but what
you’re really doing there is running away from creativity. It absolutely kills that aspect. You make yourself pointless. You have no love of the world any more. All your attentions 24/7 are
drawn into where’s the next fix. And that to me sounds a hell of a lot more drudgery-bound than any possibility of working nine-to-five. And then ultimately you’ve got to face the
dilemma of, how are you going to pay for this situation you’ve become so accustomed to? That’s where a chap like me will go, ‘Well, it ain’t for me.’

The ‘Anarchy’ tour gigs that did go ahead were horrible. In Plymouth, there was a war going on in the city at the time between the local boot boys and the sailors, and so of course
our gig was used as a backdrop for that. We’d waltz in and we’d take the gyp as if we instigated a riot and it would be far from the truth. I was there to try and make these warring
elements take the night off. Start enjoying yourself instead of squabbling and being divided.

On many occasions at them kind of gigs I did manage to do that. I gave them one particular target to all hate together equally. That would be Johnny Rotten. If needs be, that’s what you
do. You come out firing and you quite literally antagonize every single person in the hall. It stopped the brawling. To me that was success. The one thing I really feared when I got onstage was
silence from an audience. That’s the hardest weapon to fight against.

It all started from the gig in Caerphilly, I think, when all the Christian people turned up, with their religious ‘When The World Turns To Rottenness’ banners.
Suddenly our name came up in the Houses of Parliament. It was Tory GLC Councillor Bernard Brook-Partridge who led the charge. I watched him pontificate on the
Six O’Clock News
one
evening. ‘Erm-er, this has got to be stopped . . .
er-erm, it’s the downfall of society . . .’ And/or whatever else he said. What a foolishness. The
juvenility of it all.

The hilarity of it is that years and years and years later, I had a friend who joined the Freemasons, and Brook-Partridge was apparently leader of that particular chapter, and had nothing but
good things to say about me. It’s like all politicians, they get up on their high horses, but they’re actually talking red herrings. They don’t believe in nothing. We were just an
easy target, a bunch of saucy boys from the wrong side of town who were making a racket and were easy to shoot down.

Obviously this was after I’d paid the place a visit for late-night drinking sessions with Jeremy Thorpe. Maybe
that’s
what spurred this on, but the idea of Brook-Partridge
declaring us as public enemies and trying to plot our downfall was preposterous, because, actually, the laws they were discussing us under were so arcane. How can Parliament re-enact a
hang-’em-high Traitors and Treason Act in the late twentieth century? They couldn’t. So they backed themselves into a corner and looked pretty damn foolish for it. And quite frankly
gave more power to my elbow. Strongbow!

I knew from there on in that these institutions we’re all so frightened of are pretty much headless chickens and there for the taking, if we ever formulated ourselves together accurately
enough. But it’s the dissipation and the personal animosities and jealousies that stop movements happening. I’m not talking violent movements here. I’m talking, if you want to
change a situation for the better, it is possible, it really is.

In many ways, you become ultimately fearless of it. At times you’d kind of be wary and you’d still be thinking, ‘Oh God, they’re gonna lock me up,’ or whatever, but
you know, learning from those experiences you reach the point where you don’t care if they lock you up or not. It doesn’t change anything, in fact it just makes them look sillier
– you know, don’t play the victim. And don’t allow yourself to be victimized or dictated to by what, to my mind, are ill-educated, spoilt children.

‘What are you going to say to me? Why aren’t you supplying us with jobs and a decent lifestyle, you fucks? You’re gonna tell me to shut up because
I’m finding the economic situation you put the country in a problem? And using that very thing that they just love to espouse in the West, democracy! Ooooh – the right to say what you
have to, to stand up and be counted.’ Wow. Didn’t I blow a hole in that bubble. And seriously, a BIG hole in that bubble. I found that to be an absolute non-truth. I wouldn’t
tolerate it. And still won through. So there you go, boys and girls of the world, Johnny did his bit for ya. Fucking say thanks, cunts.

I never lectured. Just pointed out the flaws in it all. A song like ‘Problems’ is telling you, ‘Too many problems/Why am I here?’ It’s all just problems, so, one by
one, resolve them. And you can’t do that by sitting silent on the sofa, or pontificating nonsense from a soapbox. Your songs have to be reasonable in the way you communicate the message.
They’re not lectures. And so my songs don’t lecture, they give you freedom of thought, inside of the agenda I’m pushing.

I think it was understood that Johnny Rotten weren’t no back-down cunt. This boy don’t surrender. And I won through. I did. I took ’em all on – this is my message to
these ‘punk’ bands who don’t quite understand it, and they’re so busy inter-fighting and trying to bash each other’s heads in through jealousy: the bigger enemy is out
there, go pull that one down, and fight the cause for all of us, not just your selfish little angles. It’s ever so much more fun. Listen, my enemies are not human beings, regardless of people
liking me or not, my enemies are institutions.

Punk opened the door on the universe of sex in a really nice, innocent, open way. I didn’t realize until then that sex was readily available. Literally from the very
first Pistols gig, it was, ‘Oh, hello?’

Going back a bit further, going to clubs like the Lacy Lady in them early days before the Pistols, it was the way you used to dress that was an attraction of sorts. It was also a problem of
sorts, because it could attract massive hooligan attention, and I had many of those agendas to deal with.

Girls found me interesting, and always – which is the way I like it – in a motherly way. I’m a sucker for the soft-bunny touch, even though my imagery, the way my persona came
over, was one of ‘cold, hard, spitefully indifferent’, so I’m six of one, half a dozen of the other, really. Girls seem to have a natural understanding that all the signals of
someone who’s trying to be an outsider are really the actions of someone that wants attention and love. This whole process reaffirms something in your psyche in a healthy way – that
you’re not really as ugly as you envision yourself. There is hope.

Once you were up there onstage with a band, you didn’t have to pursue any longer, and you didn’t have to feel embarrassed because you didn’t have the right chat-up lines. Very,
very interesting. Great nights on the early punk scene, lots of fun, and the girls were as tough as the boys in that world.

I once dismissed sex back then as two minutes of squelching noises. I was telling it like it felt. It was an honest statement. Or was it two minutes and fifty seconds? Yes, maybe it went up with
inflation. Well, sometimes it did. That was the round-about best-of figure, the average norm. But there wasn’t any depth in it, and therefore, ultimately, no interest. It’s the same
thing as: I can’t be a drug addict because the repetition of it would bore me to death. I’d die of boredom before I died of the drugs.