Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (24 page)

Still, there was that yobby image that was being cast out there about me, and I’m not like that. I’m a quiet, contemplative kind of soul, the deep thinker, and oddly enough very
rational. That wasn’t what was being put out there into the publicity machine, and that was a pity. I tried to do my bit to correct that when I did radio shows and played music I liked. There
was one on Capital Radio in London, with Tommy Vance, which got a lot of attention. I played Can, Beefheart, Culture, Neil Young, Peter Hammill, Dr Alimantado – and all I got from Malcolm
was, ‘How dare you? You’re ruining punk!’ ‘What?
Excuse me?
’

That was the beginning of the end, where we were virtually no longer speaking – that issue – because for me it was an opportunity to play all the music I loved and adored, and
explain the reasons why and what it is I’m doing right now and where I am in the scheme of things in the world. And he was just furious, because Malcolm’s presumption was that punk was
the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, the Ramones – but the Ramones didn’t exist for me at that point, because I had Status Quo! And the Flaming Groovies were never top of my chart parade.

It was just him trying to tailor us like we were some new silly T-shirt he’d come up with. Control freakism. Did you think I’m some kind of packaged hamster you just purchased and
put a sequinned neck-choker on?! You daft cunt, telling me what I do and do not like. Fuck off! I was really angry –
really
angry. We’ve got to learn to stop thinking in terms of
categories as a species. This is that and
that’s that. No, there’s cross-pollination all the time. And I don’t believe in six degrees of separation, I
believe in a continuum.

That’s where a split began and quite a serious one – a land-mass separation of what is punk and what isn’t punk. I’m sorry, I’m on the correct side of this,
fighting this backwards thinking of trying to justify yourself by trashy aversions to things. And that’s no shame to Iggy or the New York Dolls, who I love and adore – they fit very
nicely in with my Todd Rundgren. It’s people who experiment in life that interest me. Not just, ‘Wham bam, thank you, here’s a pile of trash, and look how junked-up I
am.’

I didn’t want the junkie image thing to creep in, and of course Sid bought well into that and wanted to live the New York lifestyle – so there was Malcolm’s hook on that one.
Malcolm was very enamoured with New York.

We finally persuaded him to book us some gigs in England for August. We ended up having to advertise ourselves under assumed names like the Tax Exiles, Acne Rabble, and S.P.O.T.S., which stood
for Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly.

Having to go out incognito was at the same time ridiculous and challengingly refreshing. It turned into the world’s worst-kept secret. But it kept the authorities off our backs. Whether or
not we were banned outright is a moot point – maybe it was all part of Malcolm’s alleged masterplan. I don’t know what it was that some of these local councils thought we’d
be getting up to, all the riots that would ensue, but it never really happened in that way. The only negatives that we ever really faced was from apparent ‘music lovers’, hahaha.

On that tour – which was only half a dozen gigs, so it never really felt like touring – it became a close thing with local audiences. Very warming, but it seemed that every time
anything was working in a really good comfortable way here, for us and the audience, Malcolm would find a way of sabotaging it, like he was scared of it actually being successful.

He got very scared of the long arm of the law who were eyeing
us with malevolence, and he backed away into the fiasco of his movie – called
Who Killed
Bambi?
, at that point – as a light-hearted escape from the reality of what it was we were actually all about. He was also very fearful of dealing with me in any verbal confrontation
because he knew damn well that I had the artillery.

In many ways it became a power play. A very odd situation was unfolding: I was being blamed by Steve and Paul for bringing ‘that arsehole Sid’ into the band. Malcolm stirred all that
up and got them two very angry – and by such a scene isolating me – and then tried to create a friction between me and Sid. Because Sid and Malcolm oddly enough
were
communicating. So he was playing both sides, Malcolm, with me losing out in all of these scenarios. And those situations then developed into the nonsense that they became.

From the beginning, Malcolm didn’t make a good job of the whole interpersonal thing within the band. He really should’ve been ashamed of himself. It was now all spiralling out of
control, but he would throw in spiteful digs and rumours that would cause all manner of trouble. No two of us were ever told the same thing. It wasn’t great fun to be yelling at each other,
and when we unravelled what he’d said to each of us, we’d realize the divisions all traced back to him. Then all of us would go, ‘Right, let’s get him to ’fess
up’ or whatever, and that’s when, of course, he’d be behind locked doors.

I remember Steve once smiling and happily saying to his face what a cunt he was, which of course Malcolm would smile at and take as some kind of achievement. So that’s how
their
relationship was working. You weren’t going to be able to move these unbudgeable nonsenses.

I just got on with being myself, until at some point after trying to share an apartment with Sid, I started thinking, ‘Well, do I really need to be in this band?’ The stuff I was
writing and thinking seemed to be beyond this now. I had bigger ambitions than just being involved in this domestic drama which offered no reprieve.

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
, the album, when it finally came out that October, was a nice end result, I have to concede. It showed to me
that Steve had great capabilities; he could be taking that guitar to all kinds of different, new, exciting and original places. It was like a guitar army, rather than just a messy noise, going,
‘That’ll do.’ He had a good learning curve on him, Steve. That’s how I viewed it at the time. Recording had gone on for ever, and it’d almost turned into a guitar
roadshow, but my God, I was liking it. The blending together of all those different takes had made a delicious end product – although, it left the band with something of a problem if you
wanted to reproduce that live.

Richard Branson did a great thing to promote
Never Mind The Bollocks
. He filled the Virgin record stores with these
Never Mind The Bollocks
posters, the yellow posters with the
blackmail lettering – particularly in Oxford Street in London, because he had two shops there, one at one end and one at the other – so we just blurted from the whole window all the way
round. Fantastic.

The same posters went up in stores up north, but the north had a different attitude to it – in particular, Nottingham, where they decided to take a local store to court for their
supposedly offensive window display. They were to be tried for the ‘Indecent Advertising Act of 1889’. So we had to go to court. Well, we didn’t
have
to go to court, but I
volunteered. And I wanted Malcolm to go too. We were gonna go and stand up for our right to use the word ‘bollocks’, which to my mind, reading the Oxford dictionary, is a perfectly
feasible Anglo-Saxon word for ‘testicles’. Malcolm backed out, of course, and so I was driven up there by some Virgin representatives, because they understood the importance of it. We
hired QC John Mortimer, writer of TV’s
Rumpole of the Bailey
, to prove ‘bollocks’ was actually derived from a nickname for clergymen.

I’m against the banning of any word, so I was more than happy to sit in the front row in the court room to hear what this judge had to say, telling me what word I could and couldn’t
use. I was
absolutely dying to get on a stand and give a speech. I had prepared one, I’d really,
really
worked on this, I hadn’t drunk for days, I kept
myself really sober – but they didn’t give me the chance, because the judge went, ‘We must reluctantly find you not guilty.’ So then we whizzed straight off to see some
friends of the record store people, who ran the local radio station, and had great conversations. I got another great chance to play my favourite records to back up the court-case victory. And of
course I immediately went into, ‘Where’s Malcolm? What a wanker, so I’d like to dedicate Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman” to him.’ I was enjoying this
‘ruining punk’ lark.

We drove home later in one of Branson’s buddies’ Aston Martin at high speed. Fantastic day. Virgin were backing me, they were supporting this. For me it was a personal tragedy that
not one of the band wanted to be there, or the management, and I really seriously felt from that moment on this was never ever going to be a unified group. Because they were lacking the courage of
commitment. By not turning up they were completely devaluing the Sex Pistols.

In early December we were all set to play our biggest ever gig in and around London, at Brunel University. Unfortunately, it turned into an ill-conceived nonsense, thanks to
guess who. We had no equipment that anybody could be hearing us on, just appalling, and Sid’s drug nonsense made the whole thing vile and difficult and painful to go through. The
cheapskatedness of it.

There were hundreds of people in Brunel that night, and hundreds outside, they came from everywhere – so we should’ve at least had a good sound system. I’m not blaming
everything on that, but it’s one thing for the band not to be able to hear each other, quite another to have to strain your ears out in the audience. An unforgivable lack of consideration.
But Malcolm wanted to create a scene of chaos. Bullshit, he just didn’t want to spend the money. He wouldn’t learn: you’ve got to give a lot to get a little.

The only respite was when we played two benefit gigs on Christmas Day for striking firemen and their kids in Huddersfield – a matinee show for the kids and an
evening show for the adults, which turned out to be the last gigs we ever did in England. It was great to do it for them because they were all broke and nobody gave a damn about them. These people
weren’t going to have a proper Christmas, so we laid it all on, flooded the place with cake and presents for the kids.

Here we were, the alleged most toughest band in the world, and at the kids matinee show we’d have to play to seven-year-olds! There’s an awful lot you have to leave at the door to do
that. To start with, I was thinking, ‘How on earth am I going to sing “Anarchy” here, with any sense of realism?’ Well, kids totally knock you into place with that.
They’re going, ‘You’re just one of us, John, a big stoopid kid.’

Then the cake started flying, and it went into absolute insane mental brilliance. Absolute slapstick. It showed our lighter side. It was
Carry On Sex Pistols
, with Steve as Sid James.
Kids can be such a good bounce back to reality. It knocked the stuffing out of Sid too. He was trying to be the hard rocker bloke, but how can you be tough with a Christmas cake in your face? It
reminded us that it all had got a little too serious.

As a band, that was probably the closest we’d ever been, but it had come to the point where Malcolm just wanted the band to cease to exist. We just wanted him to go away, but he carried on
with that poisonous behind-the-scenes stuff, and it became a total no-hoper. We were right on the brink of falling apart, but not before . . .

Can you imagine what it was like for us Sexy Pissups to have the opportunity to tour America? It wasn’t like nowadays, where any fool can stump up the air fare. Most
people could never afford plane tickets back then – ever-never-ever – and certainly not the likes of us.
Phwooar
, off to see John Wayne Land, yippee-aye-oh!
And be paid for the privilege
– absolutely astounding! It’s the major benefit of being in a band: you really do get the opportunity to do stuff you could never have
dreamed of. Sure opens your mind, I can tell you. Whatever happened, we owed it to ourselves to cash in our chips on this one.

America, to us, was
Kojak
,
Ironside
, and dare I mention
Starsky and Hutch
, a show I only remember for the car. America was all big-arse cars, just like in the films.
They’ve actually downscaled in that respect these days, so you would think there would be more room on the freeways – no, there’s just more cars.

American rock, though, was in desperate need of a shot in the arm. It was just West Coast banality. Mellow, drippy blancmange like the Eagles –
aaargh!

I love me musics. I like to know the be-all-and-end-all of ALL of it. In fact, sometimes I’m more fond of the things I hate, they’re oddly more rewarding. But the Grateful Dead were
so moribund and boring.

The idea of us ‘conquering America’ was fantastically hilarious. Before we could get out there, however, I was having proper serious problems getting a visa, thanks to my speed
conviction. The only thing going in my favour was that, one stupid night not long before we were due out there, I went to a club with some of my escort friends – Linda Ashby and her crowd
– and I was stretched out on the staircase when someone tried to rob the cash register. They tried to run up the stairs, but they tripped over my foot, fell backwards, knocked themselves out,
and suddenly I was accoladed in the press for stopping a robbery.

Suddenly I was the hero of the hour. Ouch! At the time, I was rather spooked by it. It was nothing I wanted mentioned at all, and denied all responsibility of it. I thought, ‘Look, my
friends aren’t going to like me for this one.’ But it boded well for getting the visa to America. Eventually, the authoritarian figure who interviewed me at the American Embassy said,
‘Well, you’ve done things for society.’ Wow, is that how you viewed it? But it paid off,
it got me my work permit. Although that soon came to be
regrettable.

Malcolm, in his wisdom, had decided that we wouldn’t play in the big cities on the coasts, like New York and LA, but instead would play to ‘real people’ in the South. Now
Malcolm, there was a man who didn’t understand the working class. So, on a preposterous schedule, we criss-crossed America in early January 1978, amid the ice and the snow, on what was
basically a school bus.