Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (31 page)

The idea of it was, it would numb you, absolutely flatten your resistance, just wear you out with its omnipresence. I think we got there.

I was fiddling about a great amount of the time on a Yamaha keyboard, which I just loved. It was a cheap nasty thing, but it was one of them earlier ones that had swirly and swishy orchestra
sounds, if you twiddled with some of the knobs. I just loved that. In fact I used to play that thing to the point where my wrists would develop these cysts, these lumps, which were very worrying at
the time – I didn’t know what it was. You know when you keep doing a thing over and over again relentlessly – day in, day out – how the lactic acid builds up in your hands?
It may have been Jeannette Lee, who was lurking around with Keith, who said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard if you hit the cyst with a heavy book, it will burst and go away.’ The only heavy book I
could think of was the Bible. And one good whack – oh yeah, it went away, but the pain! Ouch!

So I realized keyboard-playing wasn’t going to be my future. But it gave me a great deal of fun and intrigue – how to suss out a song in a completely different way, so I could weave
in and out, snake-like almost, with the vocals. I loved that.

We had no real rehearsals for
Metal Box
, we just didn’t have the money, so I’d be writing in my head, and thinking of different formats for myself. A looser agenda, less of a
hold on the reins vocally, and pushing myself into really challenging ways of singing and presenting it. And of course when we came to recording, it was about compromising the vocal presence,
because I wanted the music to be so powerful, to declare us on a way interesting level playing field, where you don’t really need the vocals to be so upfront, which was the pop way at that
time.

You have to strain a bit to hear the vocal on some of the
Metal
Box
tracks, but that’s the point. It will creep into your psyche slowly but surely, where
you’re almost unaware, or you’re lulled into a false sense of security – or a false sense of
insecurity
. Either way, it’s getting into your mindset and it’s
affecting your perceptions of the world around you. At least that was my ambition: making you think bigger things.

We were largely responsible for our own productions. It was the art of balance to get the kind of heavy bass we wanted. This didn’t just involve reggae: a lot of ’60s mod music was
very heavy-bass-y – the Yardbirds, the Animals, they had that deep sound in there – and funk and disco. But to get the kind of bass we wanted, something had to be sacrificed and so
smart-arse me sacrificed the vocals. We dropped the vocal a notch to push the bass up, because it was about the aural tapestry of the whole thing, a
tour de force
on all levels. You
didn’t need the vocals to be way out front and all the music to be pulled backwards. We wanted the complete impression to be overwhelmingly exciting.

Often, there were obstacles to achieving that, such as whenever Virgin sent down any big-name producer to ‘help us’. There was one who’d worked with the Rolling Stones, and
that was a serious problem. We’d gone up to the Manor to do one or two songs, and he was just arguing that you can’t have that much bass on a record. Ridiculous. ‘Yes, you can.
This is how.
This – is – how!
’ The man kept on arguing, so I got up on the desk and walked across it in my steel toe-capped shoes and broke every button. ‘I’m
not here for you to tell me what to do!’

Trying to wrap us around in tried, tested and proven formats was the wrong thing to do. We weren’t in the mood to put up with that, or be wrongly motivated and misled. That would be
record-company intrusions creeping in there. And all done in very nice ‘I thought it would be good if we brought in Blah-Blah.’ ‘Okay, I’ll give that a go.’ Twenty
minutes later – ‘There you go, I broke his studio.’

Playing-wise, Keith was on fire. Quite apart from his guitar, he
was very into collecting oddball pieces of electronic equipment of a musical leaning, which many a time
paid off really well. Other times, it was like, ‘What are you turning up with? This is impossible. What do you want us to do with
that
?’

At the time we were fairly obviously an analogue band, but one day he dragged in a Fairlight, the digital sampling synthesizer – fair enough, but this is before there was anything that
could ever possibly work with it. It was just a keyboard-looking thing with a computer, but we had nothing that would sync up with it. It was ahead of its time in many ways, and I do believe it
ended up with Kate Bush and her Heathcliff.

For years, them things were just too bonkers. Now I understand what they can do, but we were not computered up at that time. And indeed the technology wasn’t there. This instrument of
sorts was a control board really, and was too far ahead of its time and had no relationship to us. That would happen quite a lot with Keith: he wouldn’t understand how it couldn’t
actually work.

If situations were left to Keith, he would’ve spent every penny on some mad boffin’s dream of PiL making music for the third universe by investing in electronic telepathy.
These’d be the kinds of conversations he’d want to be indulging in. All well and interesting but that’s all they are – theories. There’s no reality for that to work
in.

Getting ridiculed for these things would of course send him off into a real sourpuss one. Keith was a very difficult person to sit down and talk about average things with. That stuff is really
important because it forms a bond, a friendship, that allows you to then move into the serious stuff. With Keith, it was always hypertension. Which is thrilling also, but frustrating when
you’re trying to curb the excesses.

Let’s face it, I’m not innocent here, and I’ve pointed it out to myself: if left to my own devices 100 per cent, it would be chaos. I’m always one for teamwork because of
that. I know I’ll go way over the top and out the other side of it. I’ll be the first to say, I
wasn’t excessive there, but I’m damn sure all the
people around me think I
was
, and have told me so. Rambo will often say, ‘John, you don’t know when to stop, you’ll tear the arse out of anything.’ It’s true.
All of us need our friends to be watchdogs.

Despite the tensions, there were all kinds of jolly romps going on, particularly at the Manor. I’m talking about pranks, most of them light-hearted, but sometimes a bit over the top, and
anyone was a target. I believe it may have been Karl Burns, who was a drummer for the Fall, who came down and crashed out one night on LSD, only to wake and find his bed was on fire. Actually, was
that him? Hard to be sure, but I think so.

This kind of nonsense would go on all the time. We’d be partying in the front room, and if you were foolish enough to think you could fall asleep in that environment, you were setting
yourself up. It was very much a ‘last man standing’ environment and that would be the thrill and the challenge of it, to see how long you could endure. And I’m not sorry to say
– I’m actually very happy to say, because I loved amphetamine at the time – that was an amphetamine-fuelled world, from time to time. Not every night, or when I was singing, but
you’d look forward to a special night when you could really – again, I know, a cliché – let your pants down. But you daren’t do that because you’d suffer the
consequences!

Against this jolly backdrop, I was losing my mum to stomach cancer – the worst and most painful one of the lot. I spent as much time as possible with her at the hospital, but not as much
as I should’ve.

One time I went down there, the local priest came round, this freakish Jesuit monk. He’d just come back from Africa – one of them people that touch you and you’re
‘healed’. To bring this into my mum was offensive enough, but then to turn around and say that the reason it wasn’t working was because I was challenging him – that was
despicable. I was really, really upset. I don’t like being victimized by conmen. Every analyst, psychiatrist, spirit
toucher, ghost hunter, psychic or priest on this
earth is there to do you wrong.

The greatest crime is that when Mum was actually dying, she wanted a priest at her bedside, and of course he wouldn’t come. It’s all about money. How do you drag a priest away from
the pub, and the young chaps? It was all very, very painful.

Mum had always been loving in a very quiet way. There wasn’t much said, but that’s all you need from your parents, the right kind of attention. Before she went, she asked me to write
her a song, which became ‘Death Disco’. I only got to play her a very rough version. She knew what I was up to. I had to curtail it a bit, because what I wrote is very directly about
death, so I wanted her to feel it was more about the challenge of an illness. A rough demo of it, with indistinct lyrics, would be slightly milder than the full clarity of ‘You’re dying
– urgh!’

It’s only by researching these areas of your psyche that you’re going to free yourself up. Don’t separate music from anxiety and pain, and thereby you’ll find a solution.
I’ve never come to grips with death, but through music I kind of found a way of dealing with it. I’m questioning myself very seriously in songs like that. It’s borderline mental
breakdown. It’s me howling in bitter agony. Grief, grief, grief, but at the same time you’ve got to give joy for those you’ve loved. Not wallow in the self-pity of it, but rather
celebrate the good things about them when they were alive.

When we released ‘Death Disco’, it caused great confusion. Was it a dance record? What
was
it
?
It certainly didn’t mean ‘death to disco’, as some
people interpreted it. In fact, when Morrissey came out with ‘kill the DJ’, I thought he was making a misguided reference. Me? I’d loved my nights down at the Lacy Lady in Ilford,
and all the music that went with it, but you can’t be laying down a bog-standard typical disco pattern. It doesn’t mean you need to imitate or duplicate. You advance or destructuralize
or whatever it is you need to do, in order to adapt the journey to the content. And Johnny don’t sing in Michael Jackson stanzas.

I was very pleased that ‘Death Disco’ launched all manner of intrigues about what it was we were up to. I was fascinated when I heard
Record Mirror
put
us at Number Eight on their dance chart. I thought, ‘Cor, what are the soul boys going to think when they hear
that
?’ But it really did make it onto turntables in clubs, no doubt
helped by the fact that we put out various different mixes of it.

To our punk followers, it was saying, ‘Look, why are you lurking in the shadows, boys and girls, get out there under that glitterball. Here’s your opportunity! And get a load of it,
you’re dancing to the death of my mother, you bastards!’ That’s a lot of hardcore tasking going on.

It didn’t get on the radio, of course. It wasn’t on Tony Blackburn, or even John Peel – for all his apparent open-mindedness and celebrating the wonderful world of music, it
was quite a narrow agenda that man had. In many ways, as my Jamaican friends would say, ‘Dis free I up.’ We didn’t have to consider playlists.

Still there’d be one or two at Virgin going, ‘Why don’t you just write a hit song?’ ‘Hello! I’m writing songs, I don’t know whether they’re hits
or not, and I don’t care!’ Everything I’ve done has always had a very good turnover and that’s just the fact of it. The problems arose when either there weren’t enough
pressed or there wasn’t enough backing. Those are the two major issues of why records don’t sell. If you don’t tell people they’re available, they might as well not exist.
That’s the record company’s job and the way record companies were changing at that time, it became less and less their job. The idea of outsourcing – promotion would be purchased
independently of the record label by the artist – was becoming the order of the day.

So there was less and less support, and I was cast out as eccentric – a lone wolf – not in touch with the psyche of the population. Well, sod off! Is there any reason I should be? I
don’t write to patronize, I write to deal with issues or problems that directly affect me, and thereby, to my way of thinking, affect everybody.

Put it this way, I sucked eggs for no one. I knew damn well it wouldn’t go down too well when I went on
Juke Box Jury
. This was an old BBC
TV format of mindless celebrities reviewing the latest pop releases.

On the one hand, I was still dealing with the punk hanger-on sorts, who got stuck in the original foothold and weren’t prepared to take the next step, and they tended to be the most
bitter. ‘That’s not punk, you’re selling out!’ ‘Oh, for fuck-off sake! I gave you the boots, you’re wearing them, but now learn to walk in them. In fact,
actually, change them – here’s a new pair!’

At the other extreme, the Beeb were probably hoping for another F-bomb outrage, but I wasn’t going to give them that. I willingly went on there, but only after me going, ‘No!
Grrr!’ and whoever was around going, ‘No, you should, it’ll be good.’ I was also aware that by doing it I was going to annoy certain members of the band who’d think I
was hogging the limelight. There’s that element, always. But I’m very good, I think, in them open forums. I think I excel in them. You’re not going to get what you expect –
you should be expecting better, and that’s indeed what I give.

I went on in a rather fetching red silk suit. I had two of them, one in red and one in green, both made by a designer friend of ours, Kenny MacDonald, who used to have a tailoring store on the
King’s Road. I really liked his approach to clothing. He was a Jamaican-parentage fella, a serious nutcase, hard and tough, and his clothing was very original, and very mental. All of our
early visual statements were coming from Kenny: the grey check suit that I’m wearing in the ‘Public Image’ video, for instance, that was one of his. He created the red fur coat I
used to wear, that everybody thought was a dressing gown. He also made me one in white where I looked like a polar bear. He used to make very bizarre cuts of tweeds and things.

Anyway, this red silk number was a fairly sensible cut, but in wack-arse fabrics. Very, very good fun. I liked Kenny a lot, but I heard he’s been in jail for many years. We have
patience.