Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (23 page)

There was a time there where punk was really exciting. X-Ray Spex, the Adverts, the Raincoats, the Slits – those bands had different approaches that were fascinating to me. They had the
feminine influence, which is interesting musically. It was different social learnings going on, different sharings of thoughts, which would normally have been closed to music. Fellas and girls in
the same bands, it was an amazing thing. They came across as level – it wasn’t just, ‘Now sing something pretty over the top.’ They were full-on equals, very entertaining
and it opened up so many possibilities in the songwriting. What a great time! And that side of it wasn’t competitive, none of us were competing against each other. To me that was punk
properly developing into something really awe-inspiring.

For some reason, however, the Clash started setting themselves up as our competition. There was a headline in
Melody Maker
from Joe Strummer: ‘We’re going to be bigger than
the Sex Pistols!’ It was infuriating, and I talked to him about it. When direct quotes come out that I think are divisive, then something needs to be said because I don’t want to see
any of us divided. What attitude is that? None of us are doing this for that kind of chart competition, competing for places. When we start those internal wars amongst each other then that opens
the floodgates for the arseholes, and whatever you’re doing creatively, you’ve got to keep a hold on the arseholes.

There was some rubbish war going on between Bernie and Malcolm, friends falling out, and Bernie was trying to use his band as a weapon to get back at Malcolm. All very stupid stuff, and there
I was, a young person watching adults behave like that. What made it all the worse was that certain members of the Clash were actually responding to that rally.

Bernie was feeding them a lot of politics and Joe would come round to the various houses I lived – even one I had way out in Edmonton – and he’d always have a Marxist book in
his hands, and he’d be studying it and writing down notes. Then: ‘Oh, the
Six O’Clock News
is on, I’ve gotta watch it!’ Rather than be able to take the BBC with
a pinch of salt and be able to read between the lines, he’d grab the headlines and ‘be inspired’. That’s what fuelled ‘sten guns in Knightsbridge’ and all of
that nonsense.

It’s not my way. I liked Joe, and I liked Paul, and Mick Jones was such a happy-go-lucky fella, but Bernie was feeding them all that college-union, ‘declare war on society’
stuff. If you wanted a good night out, to meet interesting people, backstage at a Clash gig wasn’t the place. That was full of studious learners: ‘Yes, hmmm, yes, I’m with this
programme. Yeah . . .’ DULL! FUCKING DULL!

Joe had always been so friendly, but as soon as he took the Clash too seriously he became
unfriendly
and indeed got involved in squabbles with some of my friends. He began to lack a sense
of humour about himself. He took himself way too serious as purveyor of some kind of weird socialism, and was definitely out to grab himself a crown. He went too far, in the same way that Hemingway
would overdo it. Or, you know that Rodin statue of the man frowning? The ‘Oi’ve bin finking’ statue, as I call it? That’s what he self-consciously turned into. His was a
conceit that was very repulsive to me.
Phwoar
, what a pose. But one thing I’ve learned: we’re all just only humans, we’ve all got our warts.

The Clash had a very middle-class approach to everything, and their audience shared it, and the smug journalists loved them, and of course they set the scene for all the deadbeats, all the bands
that just wanted to do everything at a hundred miles an hour and scream and shout. That lot were of no interest to me.

Through them, punk grew into a standardized uniform, with the charge led by the mass media. The
Daily Mirror
would put out articles: ‘How to dress like a
punk’. Then those kinds of arseholes would turn up, and the whole thing just turned upside down. Many of the bands that came along then thought that the whole idea was to try to out-Rotten
Rotten. And so violence crept in, and before long you had the Sham 69s, propagating violence through ballet. Just arseholes. Dumb, moronic,
smashing-their-heads-off-walls-to-show-how-tough-they-were fools. They weren’t listening to nothing. They were incapable of learning, or growing with a thing, or seeing any hope or prospects
for the future.

We were saying ‘No future’ in ‘God Save The Queen’, because you had to express that point in order to have a future. No, this lot really didn’t want one. It’s
like runaway horses. Once the stampede starts, how do you get them back in, into the herd? And indeed, why should I? If that’s really what that lot wanted, then fine. Go, charge! And when
you’re over the next hill and I can’t see you any more, all the better for the rest of us.

My mum and dad were very supportive of me through all the vilification that was poured on me, but it was very hard on them. The negative reviews would really upset them. They weren’t great
lovers of the noise I was making but they knew the negative press about me being a bad person wasn’t right.

Mum always wanted to know what my world was – it was a bit of a mystery to her – and so I showed her that it wasn’t deep dark and secretive and a wrong ’un. I took her to
see some gigs – Alice Cooper, Gary Glitter, anything that was going on across at the Finsbury Park Rainbow – and yippee-aye-oh, she was well up for it. She was just proud that I, with
no apparent talent, could somehow manage to find my way into that world. Because there was no indication for them until the first day I started in the Pistols that I had any interest in being in a
band or writing songs or singing at all.

I’d be more than happy to bring my friends around, oddball collection that they were. It used to always make my mum and dad
laugh – my dad, in a deeply
sarcastic way – but I always had strange friends. Probably they were the only ones that would talk to me. They were all in their own ways in similar positions, socially. None of us could
really find a niche in society.

I’d have to ring my parents up and beg them – beg them – not to do interviews, and warn them that they’d be chiselled. ‘Oh, wi
feel
wi need to stand op fer
yi!’ ‘Please, don’t! You’re just gonna make it worse.’ They did one interview with the
Islington Gazette
which was a particular hatchet job. They gave them all
these photos of me when I was young, and none of them were returned. Terrible, and a very spiteful article.

I instinctively wanted to protect my family from the public circus. With the Pistols I was thrown in there, way at the deep end, and I didn’t think my family had the tools to cope with it.
It’s very hard to come to grips with the world that you used to view as important and relevant and caring and real – i.e. journalism – when it actually turned out to be a savage
vindictive opinionated bag of bile.

Thanks to the press, we were involved in this huge quagmire of misinterpretation and Chinese whispers via the media, which start out as a tiny lie, spread into an enormous one, then explode into
an atomic bomb with no reality in it at all. And it’s very hard to hunt it down and correct it.

The media doesn’t exactly chastise itself for getting things wrong. And where do you go? Who do you ring up and go, ‘Oi, you can’t write that about me! It’s a fib,
it’s a lie!’ ‘Oh well, you have to prove that.’ ‘With what money?’ There was no money in our pockets at that time. We weren’t earning, couldn’t play
shows, couldn’t do anything.

All of this created a wedge between us, because these situations separate you, they don’t bring you together at all. I think it’s a device that the media are not aware of, but it
definitely has the end result of destroying you –
if you’re weak enough
. We were weak, but not too weak, because we kept the ship afloat somehow. But again,
Malcolm went into hiding, not talking. You couldn’t find him; there’d be a load of people wrapped around him, all his old college cronies: ‘Malcolm’s got a
headache at the moment,’ or, ‘Malcolm can’t come to the phone, he’s busy.’ On and on and on.

I never quite figured out what drove Malcolm. A very fertile mind, but prone to being poisonous from time to time. Self-defeating, actually. He’d create wonderful situations but he’d
fold back on them. He’d light a bomb, but he wouldn’t want it to explode, so he ain’t no Guy Fawkes. He’d like the idea of Guy Fawkes more than the reality.

After Grundy, he became emasculated, he had his balls cut off, and he did that to himself. He lived in fear rather than fearlessness. Too much education, so the intellectual process just ends up
in self-doubt, because you over-think a situation to the point where you’re killing the joy of it and you’re killing the instinct. We do things in life to put ourselves into a position
where our instincts can take over. Not with Malcolm. Instinctively he was correct, but then the intellectual process would negate that. I think first, then I act. Or, in Malcolm’s case, he
withdrew.

Malcolm wasn’t an out-and-out crook or a thief, but what he’d see as important to spend money on wouldn’t necessarily be what I’d be agreeing to. Malcolm’s leanings
were always artistic and madcap, whereas for me the motivation was, ‘I need somewhere to live, give me the money!’ Malcolm’s argument would be: ‘Well, if I put it in my
name, the transaction will go through ever so much quicker!’ A great deal of problems arose for Steve and Paul, because their flat was in Malcolm’s name. I could see that problem
coming.

I think there was a shrewdness on his part – like how adults tend to manipulate children. Even after all this advance money, we were still only on fifty quid a week. Everything was now all
being saved up to be invested in a Sex Pistols movie. This was a project I bitterly resented, because he was keeping it to himself. It was
his
project, it was all his ideas. Let’s just
say, that’s what somebody that
has an Andy Warhol complex can bring to the table. He was always very impressed with Andy Warhol’s ‘everybody has their
fifteen minutes of fame’ thing, and he fancied that for himself.

One collaborator he tried out for this masterpiece was ‘tit-sploitation’ director Russ Meyer. When I met him, I didn’t like him at all. An overbearing oaf – pig-ignorant
and obviously a perv. There was a very odd thing between him and Malcolm. I knew that these were two people that could never get on. Not ever. There was no common ground. Meyer was very brazen in
his approach to sexuality, and I suppose Malcolm was trying to scoop up the droplets from that. Malcolm would emblazon himself with other people’s efforts, so I suppose he fancied himself at
that point as a ladies’ man also. Russ would look at Malcolm and go, ‘You look like a lady, man!’

I actually put forward Graham Chapman from Monty Python for the job, because I’d seen his antics in a pub in Archway. He did a little trick with this small dog, where he’d lie flat
on the floor and pour a bit of cider on his genitals, and the dog of course would lick them. If Malcolm was talking about making a film about us, then I thought that’s the sort of person who
should be directing it. But he was not going to be tolerating Malcolm’s phoniness. Malcolm eventually would have to run away and hide from people like that, because you have to put your wares
on the table at some point. Anyone can talk up a storm, but you have to declare how big your guns are, and Malcolm’s weren’t sizeable.

Finally, I got Malcolm to get me a place of my own at Gunter Grove, near the World’s End in Chelsea. I was fed up with all this moving about, and I knew damn well it weren’t going to
last forever with a manager like Malcolm. At any point they could pull the rug from underneath me. I wanted something for myself to be fully grounded with. I didn’t care where, but Gunter
Grove was cheap. I think it was Stevie Winwood who actually owned it, and Island Records were selling it off for him. I got in there, and the best parties I ever had were there.

At the same time, the authorities were desperate to pin something on me, so that’s when the police raids started, and one way or another they never really
stopped.

I genuinely felt I was bearing the brunt of this ferocity. There was no back-up from my band, and definitely none from the management, so who the hell was backing me up? Some bored kid in a
bedsit, who I had no way of communicating with?

In fact, I actually took to responding to fan letters around that time. I used to do that quite a lot because that was my only real outlet. I never went on to meet any of my correspondents, as
far as I know or remember, but I do know that a lot of the letters were ‘thank you – thank you for making me able to think for myself’, along those lines, which is bloody
heart-warming stuff, and then two hours later your front door’s kicked open by the police! I’ve always had time for people that wanted to communicate with me in that way. Always.

Me having my own flat annoyed Steve and Paul very much. They’d be like, ‘Who do you think you are, hurr hurr?’ I’d reply, ‘Well, I’m writing the songs,
aren’t I? And who the fuck’s that cunt, Malcolm? That’s
your
mate,
your
King’s Road luvvie-duvvie. He ain’t mine, he don’t like me, he don’t
like anything I do, yet you’re all profiteering off it. Quite frankly, if “Anarchy In The UK” or “God Save The Queen” were with any other set of lyrics, they would not
have been what they were. They wouldn’t have had any direction, they would have been pointless, dull, rubbish. Just another trash pop band.’

Their ‘you can’t sing’ attitude stemmed from the fact that ‘boy band’ was ultimately what they all wanted. But to be brutally honest about it, if I can’t sing
then what were Paul and Steve – and Glen – doing? They wanted celebrity, I suppose. I was naturally attracted to the exact opposite of that, and by default got them to where they wanted
to be.

But because it wasn’t something they quite understood, the rebellious spirit etc., it was a problem and it would always be a problem
and it never got any better.
And it was never resolved, it was never openly discussed. The basic attitude given to me was one of disgust for everything I did. And out of that environment, of course, I quite naturally chose
Sid. Have some of this punishing number, baby! It was the better route. Poor old Sid, my mate, it destroyed him, and it breaks my heart to say it because he was pushed in at the deep end, but at
the same time he made the band better. It was never about nicely played melodies, and why the hell should it be? Nothing in rebellion is about gentle melodies. It just isn’t.