Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (29 page)

He was living in the back half of the downstairs part of Gunter Grove, in his subversive ratty way – and all for nothing, no rent, and there was no ‘thank you’ for that either.
He wasn’t in control of himself but that didn’t mean we had to put up with that and endure that. It was piss-poor ugly. Wobble had many points to make. Once he twigged what
Keith’s problem was, he wouldn’t let him alone. There was no saint in any of this.

I’d have to be constantly in between that situation, to the point where I missed an awkwardness between Jim Walker and Wobble,
which was an equally wrong situation
developing there – Jim Walker feeling bullied. It wasn’t working out quite how I felt it was supposed to be, where everybody was appreciating each other.

So it was out of the frying pan, and
totally
into the fire. I’d picked all these people, and kind of left it leaderless. I thought, ‘People will work things out.’
Unfortunately, it doesn’t go like that in real life. At some point, you have to stand up and say, ‘Stop that!’ Then the lines are drawn and a parting of the ways is usually the
end result. It was the same as when I was young, dealing with the daycare kids, or my little brothers.

Initially, the anger issues fed well into the songs. The creativity was thriving off those personal vendettas and animosities – much like my first lot! But that isn’t how I wanted it
to be. You can’t change it. When people really, really resent each other it’s just got to stop. It’s just a matter of timing. And all the way through this, the record company was
consistently on my back, saying, ‘You should get rid of Blah-Blah . . . Blah-Blah isn’t good for you . . . you should work with . . .’ ‘No, I want to stick with my friends
and see if we can work this through, and I don’t want no record company telling me to just get rid of people willy-nilly, not allowing me to find a sense of loyalty in the home turf.’
Ouch! Punishing, hard times.

In August, before the release of ‘Public Image’ as a single, we were due to make our first TV appearance on a new Saturday evening music show on ITV called
Revolver
. Keith had
decided to travel up to the studios in Birmingham independently, with his new friend Jeannette Lee. Jeannette had just broken up with Don Letts – they used to run Acme Attractions together, a
shop on King’s Road, not far from Malcolm and Vivienne’s.

Apparently, they ‘didn’t want to be with the crowd’, so off they went, and I got a bit angry about that, because they didn’t even say, ‘See you later’, or
anything like that. Somebody shouted, ‘Let’s go to Camber Sands instead!’ So that’s what we did. We didn’t turn up at this show at all, just went off and had a cold
blustery day by the
sea in Camber Sands. I’d never seen the place before, so it was kind of thrilling. We had a real laugh and a hoot running around the sand dunes,
being nutters.

For my mind, someone needed to be taught a lesson there about good manners. Separating themselves from the band in that way – well, here we are, we’re the band, so fuck you! You want
to travel separate, we’re going somewhere else. It turned into one of the best drinking parties I’ve ever been to, with myself, Wobble, Jim Walker and my two mates John Stevens and
Youngie. The pressure was gone of sitting there worrying about doing a silly TV pop show. Every now and again, you’ve got to say that what really matters is the well-being of not only
yourself but the proper people around you, and at that time that was Wobble. He was my mate, and he took offence to this an’ all, and he had every right to. With Keith’s neglect of us,
it was all ‘his show’, he wanted nothing to do with us. How’s that ever going to work out on live TV?

Frankly, if you’re walking into an imminent disaster, best knock it on the head. I’m possibly making excuses. But I’m not, I’m telling it as it really is. And I’m
very happy to know, Keith came back finally, with his tail between his legs. When you behave like a spoilt brat with us, that’s how we’re going to treat you. We’re not gonna tell
you we’re not gonna turn up, we’re just not gonna turn up! Rather than resulting in fisticuffs, which I’ll always stop, this was the better behavioural plan – a passive
resistance to what was fast becoming a serious problem in PiL, which was Keith’s ego.

When the single ‘Public Image’ came out in October, it opened up a lot of people’s minds about my capabilities. I wasn’t just a one-hit saucy boy wonder, but then for
some mysterious reason Virgin decided to hold back our album. What they really wanted, of course, was just the Sex Pistols Mark Two, and that was never gonna happen. They said they didn’t
know if there was a market or a niche for it out there. For a while there were actually leaked bootleg cassettes of the album doing the rounds at various record shops, and that forced their hand to
release it as soon as possible.

In all seriousness, I deny all responsibility for the bootlegs. It really jeopardized our initial kickstart, because they ended up releasing the album a week or two
before Christmas – the best place to lose a completely different approach to music. At that time of year, people want happy holly songs and greatest-hits compilations. Anything else gets
buried.

The first album cover is a satire of all those ‘serious’ magazines, like
Time
, which filled the racks at the newsagent’s, faces glowering out at you. The album itself is
to me sensationally acidic. Cutting and biting. I suppose it was the anger of having to deal with Pistols fallout, and the court case, and what was already going on in PiL. They were abrasive
songs, because they were
scathing
and necessary in their production. Stuff like ‘Theme’, with Keith swishing razorblades all through it – fantastic!

I’d become incapable of caring about writing a song for the Pistols and felt like, I’ve achieved as much as I can in this environment, but it didn’t stop me writing songs. It
wasn’t, ‘That’s it, the genius has expired!’ I don’t analyze what I do in that precautionary way. There’s no brakes on my engine, it’s just full-on until
the day I die.

‘Religion’ was the only one that predated PiL – the one I’d tried to work up with Steve and Paul in America. It’s very much the last time I ever took a Sex Pistols
kind of approach in a song. It met with a negative there, so I moved it into PiL and shapeshifted it into a far more enterprising piece of work. I’d experienced the Catholic Church from an
early age, so I knew where I was coming from on this.

In PiL we could separate the music from the voice, and we did it with ‘Religion’, between the left and right speakers, so that you had the option of both together, or one at a time.
There’s all that echo on my voice, so it sounds like I’m sermonizing. Well, isn’t that what they do to us? They preach
at
us. Yes, it’s theatrical, but those are the
tools used against a congregation. Sometimes you just turn the gun around. Point the cannon in the other direction and see how they enjoy that. Hellfire and brimstone.

Jesus Christ and me, we know what these priests would be yelling and screaming at us from the pulpit when we were young, basically telling us we were filthy no-good
heathens and we were all going to die and rot in hell. And that’s just about where most of them sermons ended. Then a few hymns sung out of tune and that’s it. That was a waste of a
Sunday.

All demons come from religion, and the Catholic religion is the most serious demon of them all. ‘Annalisa’ is about a young girl who died when her parents allowed the Catholic Church
to perform an exorcism on her in a small town in Germany. That poor girl was fucked by the stupid environment she was in – a small town full of small-minded people – and I believe her
problems really were that she was coming of age as a teenager and she was coming to grips with all the things that teenagers go through – that sense of individuality and rebellion and indeed
sexuality. Her overtly Catholic parents were trying to stifle that and, after trying to punish her in countless ways, they starved her to death. ‘Purge the demons.’

The harbinger of death was their religion. If you’re force-fed a diet of this kind of stuff, you will convince yourself that someone is possessed. Rather than deal with reality, people
prefer to believe in gods, ghosts and demons. I’m so anti-religion. It’s foolishness and a bluff and a scam and a con, and it leads to great tragedy. I can’t see any good at all
in it. They’ve got to stop pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Those in power like that wool. It stops you thinking. It keeps you in a state of permanent mindless acceptance.
That’s the opposite of me, opposite to my nature.

It’s gut-wrenching and absolutely heartbreaking, the subject matters I started going into in these songs, but it’s all worthy of study and investment actually because it ultimately
makes me a better person, being able to see things from other people’s point of view, while it being also, at the same time, my own story.

People seem to think a lot of the rest of the album was just venting spleen about the Pistols’ demise. Not so, although I can see how it could be conceived that way. ‘Low Life’
was finding something
inside myself, a possibility that I didn’t like, a lust for attention, and I wanted to remove that permanently. It’s almost scream therapy,
although I didn’t know that at the time, I just thought of it as self-analysis. An argument with myself, just looking for what’s right.

‘Attack’, on the other hand – well, that’s Malcolm. ‘You who guarded all the loot . . . You who buried me alive’ – yep, I think that’s very clear.
There’s no stone unturned in that one.

We were dipping into all manner of studios to get the album done, always late at night, when the hire rates were the cheapest. There was one place in a basement in Chinatown called Gooseberry,
which a lot of the soul, reggae and pub rock bands used, because it was cheap and cheerful and very dirty. You crawled down the staircase in this basement and there it was, the same old filthy
brown carpet and stink of stale beer. A perfect place to just get on with it. You weren’t there for the décor. That’s where we did ‘Fodderstompf’ – the annoying
one that goes, ‘We only wanted to be loved’. We made that up on the spot there. We realized when we got into record mode that we didn’t have as many songs as we thought we had,
and anything would do. Anybody who had an idea would spur everybody else on.

With the album coming out right before Christmas, we had very little scope to promote the album live, to try and rescue it from its hopeless scheduling. There were a couple of gigs in Europe,
but when we were looking for a booking in London, I wanted to play the Rainbow in Finsbury Park so bad – home turf. The promoter said, ‘Well, there’s only two days available, and
that’s Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and as you know you can’t play then’. ‘
Is that right?
’ Those were the magic words; that was the genie out of the
bottle.

Hard as it is to believe, you couldn’t buy anything at Christmas, or on a Sunday, back then. You worked during the week, you get home late – Saturday, if you went to a football game,
it meant you wouldn’t get anything in – so you had no opportunity to buy anything or do anything or go anywhere or find any other
alternative. It was an
entrapment. Sunday was the Lord’s Day and it was a sin for people to sell you anything. And Christmas – doubly sinful! What? Says who?

I’d made it very clear, hadn’t I, through the Pistols, that I weren’t gonna be made to follow rules that I thought were written by fools, for fools. You can be as religious as
you like – no one is forcing you to buy a Crunchie bar on a Sunday, but don’t tell me I don’t have the right to do so. So we opened up the agenda, socially, for, ‘Why
can’t shops be open on Christmas Day? Why are we restricted to medieval law? Or religious doctrine?’

A lot of the sweet shops and off-licences were, and still are, run by immigrants whose religion isn’t necessarily Christianity, and they showed us the way and stood up to archaic laws. It
was good for them and it was good for us. Some people would go racist with it, but I’d go, ‘No, I want their religion please, I’ll have some of that – just long enough to
get myself a Twix.’

So, we managed to challenge all the laws of the time that you couldn’t perform or work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And it changed everything in England. The Lord did not come down on
us.

Our debut gig, however, was in Brussels – a riot, apparently, after Wobble kicked a security guy in the head. Of course, it was the bouncers getting out of control. Everything’s fine
if they just stay away but they tend to try to show off and use their physical stature for standing in front of the band and thinking that makes them look good. They’re wrecking the gig; this
isn’t the ‘bouncer show’. If it was, go sell your own tickets.

I’ve always hated bullies. Anyone who comes on like that and tries to tell us what to do, it’s gonna go down very badly for them. So, in that case, not quite remembering all the
details, I’ll back Wobble to the hilt. It’s our stage, and if you’re not meant to be there, suffer the consequences.

The following night in Paris, Wobble was felled by a pig’s head thrown from the crowd. Pigs’ heads are fairly cheap in that part of
the world, aren’t
they? The French swear by roasted pig’s head. My only complaint was, where was the apple in its mouth?

From the off, it’s quite amazing what we had to put up with. All the way, it was resentment: one, for being so different; two, for not being the Pistols; and three, wanting to attack the
Pistols thing – all in the wrong place and time, and not really understanding Mr Rotten at all. That’s the way it was turning, punk was turning into that voice of ignorance. The true
content and message was stripmined right out of it, more’s the pity.

Come Christmas Day and Boxing Day at the Rainbow, we filled the place, but there was a real problem on Boxing Day with some West Ham football oiks who came down and tried to disrupt the affair.
‘Hello, this is Finsbury Park, this is solid Arsenal, mate! If you’re looking for it, you’re gonna get it!’

It was the first night a pre-Rambo John Stevens ever officially ran the security for us, along with my brother Jimmy. You know, you use the local lads. We all kind of knew there’d be some
firm coming down to try and wreck it. But more fool them for not appreciating what it is we were getting together here. But at least they had a day out. Even the enemies can’t complain
– they were entertained!