Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (28 page)

I’m the one that rang them up. I’m the one that asked them in. No one came to me with any ideas in that way. They were all skirting around unemployed, and so – bingo!

With no minor difficulty, I tracked down Keith Levene, who I’d known from hanging around with Sid at the Hampstead squat, back when amphetamine was the new buzz of the day. He’d
since been in the Clash, at the very beginning. I knew he’d worked hard inside that band, but I also knew he didn’t fit in with them. Their
manifesto was too
limiting. He’d come backstage to a Pistols gig one time, and told me how deeply unhappy he was working with them. His attitude was, ‘Look, I do all the work, I write all the songs, I
get no respect. That awful rubbish, listen to them.
Aaargh!
’

So I kept that in mind. Whenever you ran into Keith, he never had a good word to say about anybody. That thrilled me no end – I’d never known such a professional misery. When
you’re young, you can find that entertaining about someone. But once you get into your twenties, it’s not so entertaining, because he hasn’t learned from it. I look at myself in
all of this too. I used to love the word ‘dismal’. ‘What do you think of that?’ ‘It’s dismal! I’m bored!’ I don’t think I ever meant any of
that, I was merely perfecting the art of dissatisfied youth.

After the Clash, Keith had been in a band I’d put together called the Flowers Of Romance. It was a good collection of people, just mates floating in and out, having fun, and so I gave them
the name. I liked Marco Pirroni from Adam & The Ants anyway, I knew him from hanging around, and Chrissie Hynde, and it was a good idea for them to be forming a collective, and see if that went
anywhere. Keith and Sid and Viv Albertine all passed through, and how it ended up is utterly beyond me. There was another name, the Moors Murderers, which may or may not have been a different band.
It was a vague, unimportant thing, but showed good faith in breaking the tethers of punk cliché. And that was definitely where Keith was coming from.

Keith is acerbic. Basically, he’s a bottle of vinegar, so you chuck that into the crisp bag and you’re gonna get all kinds of flavours. Keith’s musical background is
interesting. He has flirtations of Wishbone Ash lurking in his previous history; he learned to play from that kind of music. He told us that he’d had guitar lessons from Steve Howe of Yes. I
would hate to find out that was all a fabulous lie. It kind of made sense: Keith had a different insight there, to what was currently going around. He was outside of punk clichés.

Once we got together, Keith’s playing astounded me. The idea
was around back then that after Jimi Hendrix no one could ever play the guitar again. There was no
point, the instrument was finished. But to my mind Mr Levene’s playing absolutely proved that to be not true. I thought it was very creative and very different, kind of discordant but at the
same time always resolved itself musically. Very trance-like. It wouldn’t skip a beat, but it would soar off in many different directions without ever losing its focus. I found that intensely
riveting and very, very inspiring. A sense of, he played like a rhythm guitarist, but he took the rhythms to such extremes.

So the landscape was a lot broader than some people’s little nail varnish appliers would lead you to believe. There was room for expansion, in an incredible way. All we needed was a
drummer. We auditioned a bunch of them, but Jim Walker was the best by a mile. He’d come over from Canada, just to get himself into a punk band – well, my God, he picked the best one in
the world, didn’t he? Coming from abroad, he was an unknown quantity, but he absolutely stunned us all. I thought, ‘Wow, the inflections are really grabbing me and exciting me. Cor,
they’ve got my corpuscles bouncing!’ Disco, African, a bit of everything really – almost a Ginger Baker kind of approach.

Jim had a very open mind and he didn’t come at you like a muso. He was excited by the craziness of it, and indeed as it came to pass, he was way bonkers himself. Way out there! He
didn’t have anywhere to stay, so I gave him a room in the basement at Gunter Grove, and gave him money to get furniture, and he spent it all on a moose head. When I saw his room when I
finally went into it, there was nothing in it but newspaper on the floor, and the moose head on the wall. He had no interest in comforts of any kind. I don’t know how he slept in it or what
he
did
in there.

The PiL house – which is what Gunter Grove had become, because Keith moved in an’ all – was very much centred around what’s on TV and what’s on
the record player. Jim said he didn’t need to be upstairs with us – his room was in the downstairs part – because
he could hear the bass rumbling through
the floorboards. So he’d be down there in the dark. Very odd. As I keep saying, I’m attracted to oddities in life. Him buggering off to London on his own from Canada reminds me of
coming out of hospital and having to blend back in at school. I appreciated his sense of adventure.

We had no real concept in advance of how we wanted to sound, other than, ‘We’re going to do something different here’, because none of us wanted to imitate our pasts, and
would’ve been uncomfortable doing that. The sound really formulated itself from the first rehearsals.

Very early on, we wrote the song ‘Public Image’, which was the freest moment, like escaping the trap of the Pistols at a stroke. The writing and envisioning happened down by London
Bridge, in a rehearsal room south of the river. Wobble was getting the lilt of the bassline, Walker was just exceptional, cracking away at the groove, and Keith was really bang on it and really
enjoying what we were doing. We were formulating a different approach and doing it quite naturally and things just fitted so well together, and the words just flowed.

I was so proud of each member’s contribution, and they gave me a great space in there to shapeshift my voice, to try something different and go with the sentiment of what it was we were
all trying to put together here. I wanted to declare where we stood in the world, and, ‘Don’t be judging me by the publicity machine and all that nonsense that I had to put up with in
the Pistols.’ I was about taking a completely different step aside from that, and I knew there would be consequences. I knew there would be resentment from the alleged punk world because I
wasn’t staying inside the confinements of the box. But that’s their fault, not mine. Punk to me doesn’t accept them kind of authoritarian approaches.

This bit was important: ‘I’m not the same as when I began/And I will not be treated as property.’ It’s just saying, ‘Who are you telling me what is and what
isn’t? You can either pay attention or
you can get stuck in that hole in the ground that you’ve all buried yourselves into. Well, pull the soil over the top.
Goodbye.’

It was a great, great song and, just in case any member wasn’t aware of it, ‘Public Image’ belongs to me.

Only joking! I wasn’t referring directly to the band. It’s about: Johnny Rotten, that’s me, don’t try and take him away from me, and don’t rewrite his history.

It was very cheeky of me to begin with ‘Public Image’, the name of the band. I’d taken it from a beautiful book called
The Public Image
by Muriel Spark – her wot
wrote
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. A very small book, but it’s a great storyline, about how the publicity machine turns an average actress into a monstrous diva and she wrecks
everyone around her. I didn’t want that happening with me or my imagery.

In Public Image Ltd (aka PiL) I wanted to keep the Johnny Rotten side of things well out of it. I’d moved fully and very comfortably into the persona of John Lydon, who didn’t need
scandal to flog a record. It wasn’t so much that we would earn our rights wherever we were in terms of sales, but by the quality and the content.

The ‘Limited’ part of the name was about limiting our public image, to not allow the scandal rags access to us. To keep our private lives private, thank you. Keep a definite distance
away from a scandal-mongering publicity machine. Which would’ve been what Malcolm was treasuring and I found to be detrimental. It’s bad for your health that angle, it really is.

The double entendre was very deliberate, though, about setting up as a limited company, which I did with Brian Carr’s help. We wanted to be completely free of all attachments and
dictations, running ourselves. The idea was to try and break into all areas where you could possibly earn money, but to offer quality goods. And to break away from fear of the corporate, to have
our own version of what we wanted the idea of ‘corporate’ to be. A co-operative, meaning all working in it, all together, all doing different things but all for the ultimate good of
everyone – a
kingdom without a king, a republic without a president, based logically on a premise that common sense would prevail.

The idea was to broaden out and work with creative people in other areas. The first move in that direction was calling in Dennis Morris, who was involved in artwork as well as photography, to
collaborate with us on coming up with a PiL company logo. I took my inspiration from the chemical company ICI’s logo, but we made it look like an aspirin pill, funnily enough. It was
something I remember from my childhood, passing the ICI building on Millbank in London, which had a big round logo on the front. I was always impressed by that, the power behind that cold corporate
imagery. It would be a novel approach for freedom fighters.

Virgin had first option on signing us to release music, due to my previous contract with the Pistols. They took up on that and at the time it was, ‘Oh, thank God!’ Going out and
hunting down a new label, I didn’t have the energy for that. It would have set everything back a couple of years, because you were going to have to tour an awful lot before you got your
reputation back, in order to secure a proper contract. And because my direction was so changing from the Pistols, that would’ve been an uphill battle all the way. Any offers that were out
there would’ve been based on us delivering
Never Mind The Bollocks, Part 2
.

I only found out after signing the PiL agreement that that’s what Virgin really wanted too. That might be what they wanted but I gave them what I thought they
needed
, and they
weren’t shy of a few hits because of it.

We signed an eight-album deal, and got an advance of seventy-five grand. There were mounting legal costs from the court case with
that
lot, and it brought with it all manner of accounting
and tax bills outstanding, so financially I was heading for a really bad place as a future in all of this. But we prevailed. It was a matter of scraping by. We just got on with it and kept it as
cheap and cheerful as possible. In setting up the company with Brian Carr, I insisted that everybody get a weekly wage. I just thought that was
the right thing to do. Most
bands don’t do that because it’s a real economic burden. I thought that would keep us together better. You’re working, and you’ve got money in your pocket. I don’t
think you should have to deal with what happened with the Pistols – trying to barely make it on twenty quid a gig.

Before we went any further, I had to go to America to tie up a PiL deal with my new mate Bob Regehr at Warner Brothers. I asked if I could bring someone with me, and they were kind of surprised
when I turned up with my mum. She’d always wanted to go to America, and she’d been very ill – I’m like that, when anybody’s ill I’m Doctor John. It’s my
way – I grew up that way because of the necessity of having to look after my brothers.

She needed a break from the pressure of having been diagnosed with stomach cancer. At the time the doctors were plying her with all sorts of awful downer medicine. It was making her walk into
walls and things. They meant well, to take her mind off the situation, but it just made her lose the plot, so I took her away from that and she had a great time.

I borrowed the money to take her on to Canada, and meet her sister in Toronto. So there was a bit of a family thing going on there, and all very important. I gained so much from it too. I needed
to find my roots again before I burned myself out fizzling off into the wonderful world of ego and vacuous pop star celebrity, or infamy, or whatever you want to call it. You can get lost in it and
you can get out of touch with who you really are and what you’re doing all this for. The glare of a flashlight, it’s very much like a deer-in-the-headlights effect. When the press
surrounds you it’s easy to fall in love with that moment and think of yourself as more important and relevant than you actually are.

It was very necessary – I didn’t realize how much so, and for both of us.

Levene and Wobble, from day one, were at war with each other. Even at the very first rehearsal I was dealing with Keith’s contempt
for Wobble not
knowing how to play. I’d be backing Wobble on that. ‘Well, he’ll find out soon enough, won’t he? We’re all learners here; no room for another Glen looking down his
nose at everybody. Stop that!’

Keith’s a very spiteful person, and very difficult to understand – or indeed, eventually, to tolerate for too long. Gosh, I must be such a nice person because I managed to. There
were situations there where Wobble just wanted to kill him. Just kill him. Murder him. Tear him apart.

Keith was very bright and constantly setting himself challenges, which always impressed me. He was always fiddling around with some box of tricks to try and advance himself and be useful. What I
didn’t realize was that he hadn’t grown up at all, since I’d first met him. He would express himself in cowardly snipy ways: backbite-y, under-the-breath comments, the sourpuss
face, the act of deliberately making himself look uncomfortable in a nice friendly environment. He’d come up and sit in the middle of the room and try to make everyone feel unpleasant. That
kind of childishness, looking for attention. What a calamity, because all he got was laughter and ridicule.

Between me, you and everybody around at the time, what the boy was really doing was heroin. He was poisoned by chemicals, or a chemical imbalance in the brain, but it made that rat-arsed,
snarly, contemptuous cunt unbearable to put up with. It was otherwise inexplicable that he would behave from time to time so completely like a spoilt child.