Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (20 page)

As the so-called King of Punk, I was almost getting too much sexual attention suddenly. Me being me, my reflex was, ‘Is it me you’re looking for? Or is it the pop star side of
it?’ At which point I withdraw, because I don’t like the feeling that I’ve been treated as a commodity. I saw the change as the Pistols started to happen. From, ‘Urgh,
who’s that ugly thing in the corner?’ to ‘Oh, ’ello, gorgeous!’ in, basically, a heartbeat. But listen, the humour of it wasn’t lost on me.

I first saw Nora at Malcolm’s shop in 1975. She came in with Chris Spedding, who was playing guitar with the likes of John Cale and Bryan Ferry at that time. He was very shy, and Nora
wasn’t. He was worried about his flamenco shirts not quite fitting. Nora was fussing around, and somehow the screen in the fitting room fell, and there was Chris Spedding with his belly
bursting out of a far-too-tight shirt. That was
very typical of Vivienne’s clothing. She would never make them to fit, so you’d always have to order them a
couple of inches bigger.

Nora already had a daughter, Ariane, who’d been born and brought up initially in Germany, where Nora originally came from. Nora used to promote gigs in Germany, people like Wishbone Ash,
Jimi Hendrix, and Yes. Then she ran away from the confines of German society, which was far too restricting and nosy. Everybody’s in your business.

During punk, Ariane became Ari Up, the singer in the Slits. Her father was Frank Forster, a very popular singer in Deutschland, in a Frank Sinatra way. Germany after the War was very influenced
by the American air bases, and that dictated a lot of the music that was popular. Over here, Nora brought up Ari really well, and got her to learn all sorts of musical instruments, which were
always lying around. Ari was only about thirteen or fourteen when I first saw her bouncing around.

Nora, I soon discovered, is a guiding light, and a creature of utter chaos. She was a very odd and different soul. Not at all like one of the average old hippie birds, who weren’t quite
sure what punk was about. There were loads of
them
. That, or working-class girls out of the estate, full of ‘fack you’s. None of them seemed like options to me. But Nora –
God, she shone in a room. From way across the other side, she shone, she
glowed
.

Nora loathed me at first sight. At least, that’s what I thought. It was because of what everyone was saying to her. ‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to him, he’s awful’,
propagating a myth around me.

She was short, sharp, brutal, and very intelligent with her remarks, and a lot of that was based on what people had told her about me. But Nora being Nora, she was inquisitive.
If people are telling her not to talk to anyone, she’ll talk to them, and I’m exactly the same way. I was told she was stuck-up, and so I found her deeply fascinating.
Once we started talking, all of that nonsense came to light and we realized we had both been lied to. Everybody told lies, then. Shocking.

I always loved the way Nora understands how to dress. She has a completely individual, incredible style, and that style is reflective of her personality. That drew me in. To the point that I
never smoked cigarettes until I met Nora. She used to smoke Marlboro, so I started smoking Marlboro, too. So the afterglow ruined me for life. But then Nora gave up smoking completely, and here I
am, still to this day!

It was a topsy-turvy situation, for sure. We didn’t waltz straight off into the stars of romanticism. There were all kinds of heated arguments, but in those heated moments we discovered
each other as human beings.

I’ve got to be honest, before we met both of us played the field, but we found the field to be full of moos. And those moos turned out to be nothing more than muses, and that’s
nothing to base a solid lifestyle on. It’s too vacuous. I don’t personally get the rewards of one-night stands at all. Just don’t get it, never did. I always left those situations
feeling empty inside, and rolling over and going, ‘Oh my God, do you really look like that?’, and knowing that’s exactly what they felt too.

I’d gone through the one-nighters period, but there was a point where it became a futile, boring, repetitive procedure. I didn’t know it at the time but what I was really looking for
was a proper relationship, and that was slowly forming with Nora. There were girls leading up into that, longer than a week, shall we say, but something really good happened and clicked with
Nor’, very seriously. We learned to really know
each other, and that’s the best that any human being can ever look for, I think – the right person who
truly accepts you for what you are, warts and all, and doesn’t make you feel ashamed of yourself for any reason at all. So self-doubt is gone, and that’s what the right partner teaches
you.

At first, Nora had a flat right near Chelsea football ground in West London. It was a basement, and it was cold and damp and dark and very unenjoyable. I never liked that place much, but then
she moved into a little house in South London, off Gowrie Road. That’s where things began popping. We were firmly bonding then, and that’s where the likes of young Neneh Cherry came
over from the States to stay, and hung out with Ari.

This is what people don’t realize: Nora’s really the ‘Punk Mummy Warrior’ figure. Without Nora, there wouldn’t have been the Slits. She’s the one that funded
it and held it together, regardless of what anyone else has to say. And Nora has been like that with many people and many situations. We’re not talking money here, we’re talking
benevolent guidance.

You’ve got to bear in mind that none of us were conceiving of the concepts of punk as such a lasting force. Or indeed what a contrivance it has become for the lesser mortals who now dabble
in it. We weren’t doing this for titleships – it’s just the way it was. Common sense prevails, and so, a very well-led house.

Ari was only fourteen or fifteen when the Slits started up. It was very much like watching a St Trinian’s film. You know, hooligan schoolgirls – fascinating! Oh, I love the lyrics,
because only two of them spoke English with any skill. Palmolive and Ari, by contrast, were a contradiction, language-wise: Palmolive had more Spanish than English in her, and added to Ari’s
cross-juxtaposition of badly-learnt
English, badly-learnt German, and even-more-appallingly-learnt Rastafarian patois, it made for very bizarre songs. I know that Nora
helped out there, too. Deeply, deeply hilarious.

I was always very proud to have Ari as . . . well, she’d call me Granddad! I was always very chuffed by it; it felt we belonged to each other, even though later on we rowed like cats and
dogs over sillinesses like religion. Can you imagine religion dividing the punk movement? Anything is possible. So I always got on with Ari; me being with Nora was never really a problem, and Ari
rated me because I wasn’t a parasite. I came fully-loaded.

So, Nora had been around, and I’d been around, and good things came of that – a slow progression into something incredible, and that’s the best way. It doesn’t all happen
at once always, and particularly when you’re connecting with other human beings, it’s best to spend some time on it, as I’ve learned with various band members . . .

Y
ou couldn’t miss me in a crowd. I was wearing that pink women’s rowing club jacket, the one I’d scrawled ‘GOD SAVE OUR
GRACIOUS QUEEN’ all over, a leopardskin waistcoat that I ended up giving to Sid, and a pair of grey pants from Vivienne’s shop, which ended up on Paul Cook. That’s how we were,
mix and match. On top, I had a spiky ginger hedgehog going on.

What I
shouldn’t
have done is gone out for a walk in all that clobber with a packet of gear. It was just into the New Year – 1977 – and we were still all over the
newspapers as a result of Bill Grundy, ‘Anarchy’, and being bumped off EMI. We were rehearsing in Denmark Street, when I nipped out with Nils Stevenson, who worked for Malcolm. I had a
mental lapse. I thought, ‘Well, if I leave the speed behind somewhere, even if I hide it pretty well, Steve Jones’ll find it.’ He was very good at ‘finding things’,
that boy. Steve always wanted to know everything about anyone. He was a continual rooter. We should’ve nicknamed him Drano, or Domestos, in that respect.

The bust was a very odd one, because the emblem on their police helmets wasn’t one I recognized. They had pythons on
them – like, what the hell is this lot?
They were mercenaries, a little bit more hardcore than the usual bobby. This lot were a notch up. I later found out they were some kind of special patrol group.

They sat me in the back of the van and drove around until they’d arrested enough people. I was sitting there, thinking, ‘I’m screwed, I’ve also got a knife, what on earth
am I gonna go down for now?’ I was looking, in my mind, at a long, long term inside. And then, bearing in mind the record I’d put out recently, I knew that weren’t gonna bode well
in court with any bloke in a wig and a long dark cloak.

I didn’t consider myself particularly criminally minded, but the police were heavy-duty in those days, and the slightest infraction would get you round the neck. I was given a choice:
‘What are you going to go down for – the drugs, or the knife?’ I thought, ‘Easy, the drugs!’ A very stupid move, in the long run.

The main officer put the gear in a plastic bag, stuck it in his back pocket, and then sat on it. They then drove around Soho for a while, going, ‘Look at that one,
whurr-urr
,
let’s grab him!’ So, what would the amphetamine sulphate do, next to the heat of his sweaty flesh? Given my detailed knowledge of speed, I was fairly sure it would evaporate. Therefore,
as the minutes went by, I knew my charges were diminishing.

At the station I was strip-searched in front of a woman officer, which apparently they’re not supposed to do. But what are you going to say at that time: ‘Stop that, it’s
rude’? That won’t work. When you’re in custody, you tighten down the hatches and get wise with your words. You try to diminish yourself in stature, and lessen yourself as a
target.

When it came to bail, I didn’t know anyone that didn’t have a conviction of one kind or another, to get me out. It dawns on you just how under the cosh working-class people are.
Everybody’s guilty of something, according to the institutions. So that was a bugger. Malcolm could’ve got me out, but he didn’t show up.

I don’t know how my dad did it in the end, just to get me out
on bail. And then there was an error on when I was supposed to turn up in court – they got the
dates wrong. The form I had didn’t tally with the actual court date, so they raided my dad’s house and caught me trying to jump out the upstairs window, so I was done for evading
arrest. But because the report card was filed wrong, I got off. You can’t evade arrest when you’re actually not even supposed to be getting arrested.

For the hearing, Malcolm was given a specific time, and of course he turned up late. He couldn’t actually raise forty quid to pay the fine, so they set another pay deadline a few hours
later, and he turned up with it with minutes to spare. Otherwise I would have gone off and done time.

I don’t think I got specifically targeted as a direct result of all the fuss with the band. I just should’ve been more careful.

By now, I’d finally turned that ‘GOD SAVE OUR GRACIOUS QUEEN’ jacket into a song. I was waiting to go to rehearsals one day, and it was a long wait. In them days, I’d get
up about midday, and I sat at the kitchen table, made myself some baked beans, just took a piece of paper and wrote down the lyrics – a very rough guide to it, but the absolute crux of it was
there.

What I liked most about it was, there was no verse-chorus in it. I was impressed with myself when I read it back. The hook lines were really not about chorus effects at all. They were to
emphasize and set up the next set of lyrics. I think ‘God Save The Queen’ is a powerhouse example of how pop can be turned upside down, on its head, and still be pop. It breaks all the
rules of the pop song format.

Unfortunately, Glen misinterpreted ‘God Save The Queen’ as being a fascist song. He just picked up on that word, but he didn’t grasp the overall context. Where can you go with
that? It got really bad with Glen, he refused to play it onstage, and that’s where it all really came to a head. Before we went on, I had some chalk and I wrote on his Ampeg stack amplifier,
‘The Boo Nazis’. I mean, it’s obviously not favourable to Nazism, is it? But Glen took it as some
kind of right-wing statement. Oh Lord, lest we be
misunderstood! My kind of sense of fun and Glen’s are very different. For my mind I don’t think what I was doing was nasty and evil. That was me being really childish and silly –
it was supposed to be met with a smile.

At that point, me and Glen had both been in and out of the door quite a lot. ‘I’m off’ – ‘I’m gone’ – ‘You’re gone’, but I think
it was finally mutually agreed between Malcolm and Glen that artistically this wasn’t going in the right direction for Glen, and that’s how that was buried.

So, bingo, he had to go, and because we had nothing better to do, we shot a bit of film walking around town, and in it I was asked about Glen. I said, ‘If you look like a duck, and walk
like a duck and talk like a duck, you’re a duck.’ But I changed it from ‘duck’ to ‘arsehole’.

The real problem, with hindsight, was that we weren’t playing any gigs. We allowed the boredom to get the better of us and so we turned on each other. I should feel ashamed about being
like that.

When I first got into the band, it really shocked Sid. He didn’t know I had it in me. It shocked Wobble too. He didn’t know at all. Sid was fascinated by it and drawn to it and
became our biggest fan, but Wobble bitterly resented the band and was very violent in his approach to them, and they were quite frightened of him. He’d come over really, really hardcore. So
when it came to replacing Glen, I instinctively said Sid, although Sid was tone deaf.

I didn’t think they’d ever take me seriously on Sid, but at that point in the band I felt like I needed an ally on the inside. I felt like it was ‘them and me’, and that
was not a good position. You mustn’t be the knocking boy – you do need back-up. As friendly as Paul was – and I used to hang out with him on occasions – he’s swings
and roundabouts, he bobs from one thing to another, and his commitment with Steve was ever so deep. I always got the feeling that Steve would be the one to say, ‘I just can’t work with
him
any more,’ and that would be the end of that. And Malcolm gave Steve that power, because it was Steve’s idea to have a band in the first place. But that
wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that Malcolm paid Steve’s bills, and therefore Steve would let Malcolm do anything he liked.