Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (38 page)

So this alleged fracas was actually pretty hilarious. There was virtually no damage whatsoever to the screens or the cameras. The police were laughing, they even sat down and had a beer with
Johnny Rotten. They were just, ‘Hey, are you that guy John, man? You’re wild and crazy, that must be really disappointing, that was only a pussy riot!’ Maybe I was the precursor
to that all-female band from Russia, after all.

The grand delusion and illusion of New York, wrapped around the ready availability of chemical highs and lows, was not at all why I wanted to be in New York. I wanted to be
there because it was cheaper, and we could actually get gigs there. They were seemingly readily available, and we could earn money.

For a while after the Ritz fiasco we stayed in small hotels, at cheap prices. We’d share two rooms between the lot of us, but soon we started renting a loft for not a lot of money. This
gaff was on West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th, almost exactly opposite the Roxy nightclub-dash-roller rink. It wasn’t Midtown, but it wasn’t Downtown either. It was a nondescript
area aptly known as
the meat-packing district – we were surrounded by container trucks wheeling in and out meaty corpses, 24/7. There was a bar right around the corner
called Moran’s, where they did brilliantly cheap stuffed clams and the proper imported draft Guinness from Ireland. Delicious. There was even a women’s prison behind the loft. In
summer, the women would be screaming at us out of the cell windows. The truck parking lots around us were gay cruising haunts. It was quite a place.

It was dirt-cheap and industrial and full of incredibly seedy gay nightclubs that were nothing like anything we used to know in England. These were middle-aged men with beards and no arse in
their pants, lots of bending over behind trucks, and wet beards – just full-on filth, pure decadent filth.

Underneath us was a chop shop, where they were welding iron plating on limousines for God knows what reason – never ask questions in New York. I knew it wasn’t for the government. It
was incredibly noisy, but that was to our benefit too, because they didn’t care about the noise we made upstairs.

The loft itself was absolutely amazing: it was 2,500 square foot, with one squalid little bedroom – mine – and one large back bedroom, which wasn’t really a bedroom, more an
office space, which I gave up to Keith and Jeannette. I took this little hole in between that and the kitchen, because I always wanted to be near the food. When Martin Atkins arrived a couple of
months later he took the front room, which wasn’t a front room, it was actually a stage. It must’ve been a venue of some kind at one time or another, because there was a little room in
between where a mixing board used to be.

The whole place was absolutely geared towards us creating a Public Image kind of space. But we never got round to it. I wanted to put in a DJ booth and a mixing desk, to turn the place into not
only where we slept at night, but a PiL kind of rehearsal-slash-live gig kind of environment. Naaahh. Couldn’t get Keith involved with anything. Wouldn’t see him for days on end, and
always Jeannette going, ‘Oh, you can’t talk to him at the moment, let him
get over it.’
Aaauugh!
She mollycoddled that fool terribly. It was quite
astounding because Jeannette was a hardcore girl. Jeannette would drive men crazy. A big flirt, and yet she had this connection with this idiot, which didn’t make any sense at all.

Underneath our block there was a garage, and the idea was that from there we could spring out into all the surrounding states, and play lots of nightclubs and theatres. We did that eventually,
but it took a while to ‘settle in’. When we finally got out there and did it, it involved driving there and back, but I liked that because it reminded me of the early Pistols, when we
used to do the dates around London, or go on raids up north. The problem now was, we were all going back to the same place. With the Pistols, at least we’d all go off to our own hovels. Here,
we were all hovelled together.

Still, it felt great to be there. I imagined that I wouldn’t end up in jail quite so frequently, and I could get on and do whatever I wanted to. I had no attitude of connecting with the
New York scene, and indeed all of us knew damn well that PiL wouldn’t fit in with that. So whatever it was that we were up to it was going to be outside of that. And indeed it was. The people
that did come over and wanted to speak to us were mad artists doing fabulously, stupidly, interestingly different things. New York’s full of that but it’s not a one-level town.
There’s so much going on in it. At least, there was then.

Jeannette was particularly into opening up the activity of filming out there, because she was very interested in that and therefore we were very interested in her for that. We hoped that whole
thing would get going out there, but it didn’t. After the Ritz performance, nothing much happened really. All of us are to blame, but we all treated it as a vacation and started to indulge in
our own activities, and not jointly, and not sharing those instants, which is not so great.

Jeannette had a very outward character: she could make friends with anyone at any time, and just had a natural way of finding her
way into being an important member of a
scene, like the nightclub scene. She got to know all the doormen, God knows how. We’d go to clubs because of Jeannette’s activity in those areas. I wasn’t too enamoured with the
music scene in the dance clubs in New York. I was not that impressed. The hip hop thing was taking off and there were radio stations that played New York hip hop non-stop, but I never really got
into it. I thought it was all a little bit samey, with hideous keyboard noises that reminded me of when the Osmonds did ‘Crazy Horses’. That dreadful synth sound.

On the plus side, America had a hundred-odd TV channels, while Britain still only had three or four. How heaven was that? And if you missed anything, it was repeated on another channel later. I
viewed it as research. I absorbed myself completely in Americana, in American TV culture. I even found the TV advertising channels to be thrilling, trying to sell you any old bit of plastic.
Lessons in how to separate a fool from his money! I found them fantastic, and shocking that people could get so involved with that, and be so desperate as to buy a Glo-Mop at $21 – a mop that
glows in the dark. Why are you cleaning your kitchen in the dark? You know, there’s $21 you could have spent on the electricity bill.

America was way ahead. Everything in New York was late night. It was amazing to us, coming from England at that time, because it really was twenty-four hours. The only thing that would’ve
been equivalent to it in Europe was Berlin.

On the rare occasions I went back to England I’d be aware, from the airport in, how low the houses were. There were no skyscrapers and the whole thing seemed pitiful by comparison to a
Manhattan skyline. Shocking. I was well aware that I could’ve waltzed into the American attitude of, ‘Oh, you’re so quaint over here!’ but I understood from an American
point of view finally what they meant by ‘quaint’. Our version would be ‘rinky-dink’. But still I loved what I came from, because without that I wouldn’t be me.

Out in New York, there was an early reminder of London life, when the Clash came over to play at Bond’s on Times Square, for their residency in May–June
’81. So they followed me to Jamaica, now the fuckers had followed me to New York! I’m dealing with me PiL problems and in waltz this lot. I can’t remember how many nights they
played there – was it something like seventeen? – and apparently filled them out every single night. Bearing in mind that their songs didn’t have any content, and they really
didn’t seem to stand for very much at all other than this abstract socialism, they still pulled that off. So Bernie was a good manager after all.

I went two nights running, and I could’ve gone every single night if I’d wanted to, but my God, it was bad theatre to me – exactly the same procedure both times. As a band,
they had nothing to offer, character development-wise. Joe just ran up to that mic and screamed, ‘
Aaaargh!
’ in that exasperated strangulated way he had, night after night after
night. It was just a pub band – they might as well have been Eddie & the Hot Rods. And yet the masses thronged to it. And so whatever it is that I’m doing in this world, I’m
not for the masses, I’m absolutely not.

It seems to be, if you don’t have a clear directive other than some vague socialism, you’re gonna get problems because an audience will find you not easy to deal with. The Clash were
very easy to deal with; they weren’t offering very much at all. They never made you have to think about yourself and your lifestyle. In fact they made you feel comfortable. There’s the
rub. And poor old Johnny Rotten ain’t gonna ever make any of you feel comfortable.

There was a lot of cocaine floating around the New York scene. It was everywhere all the time. You couldn’t avoid it, no matter where you went. Just at the local Spanish restaurant
there’d be anything available over the counter. It was very open in that way, New York. Apparently a lot of it was mafia-controlled too, so that was keeping the crime side of it somewhat
curtailed. It led to excessive behavioural patterns on everybody’s part, and again, cocaine is not a drug for creativity. Not at all. For me, taking coke gave you thirty
seconds of high anxiety, and then three hours of the flu – until you did the next line. Then the anxiety was doubled and so was the down, and on and on it goes, until you find
you’ve done so much that you can’t come down, you’re just in agony. It was not my favourite thing at all, but I’ve got to say I fiddled about for at least a good year in
that area.

Cocaine kind of numbed us out of being creative. It makes you feel guilty, whereas heroin apparently – well, I know so, from watching my friends on heroin – kills the guilt. Cocaine
actually accentuates guilt, makes you feel bad about yourself. It’s not an escapist drug. It’s the world’s biggest fucking foolishness. Unless you’re living up in the Andes
and you need something to give you the energy to go on, I can’t find a place for it. Let’s just say that, like most things I’ve ever dabbled with, I’ve done it to fucking
death. I put it in the same region as Southern Comfort – there’s something I won’t touch ever again. I can from time to time be a creature of excessive stupidity. I’m well
aware of the warning signs and yet I’ll dive in and just go with it, but overdo it. I tend to lack subtlety. Maybe in later years I’ll catch onto that one, the idea of being subtle.

Heroin, on the other hand, that’s the real killer, I’d rather deal with the things that agitate the hell out of me, than let it lull me into a false sense of security and then make
me desperate for the next hit. That one ain’t gonna happen.

A lot of bad drug scenarios went down around us, and created pointless, useless dead-end activity. It wasn’t so much centred around being creative as being selfish for self-entertainment.
For me there were always drugs about, in all various shapes and sizes, but I had a proclivity for the energy boosters. I was not one for the inactive drugs.

I knew Keith’s proclivities, of course, before I asked him to join the band. I was fully open-minded to that, but when you notice that withdrawal symptoms are regularly disrupting your
creativity, that’s got to stop at a certain point. You hope that they can see it
in themselves, and you try to gently manoeuvre them into a frame of mind where they
realize that they’re enforcing an incredibly selfish habit upon everybody else, and expecting us to – what? – sit around waiting for them to wake up from this lazy-arse
escapism.

People who find me difficult to work with say that I have very lazy behavioural patterns. I do when I’m recharging my batteries, but all in all I can’t stand lazy buggers.
You’ve got to be thinking, you’ve got to be using your brain, because you’ve only got one life to live and that’s my constant driving force. My brain doesn’t stop.
Dreamscape, we’re back at that. It’s very much like, well the body stops but the brain doesn’t. It’s all part and parcel of what I am.

The closest I’ve ever seen to what I’m talking about was a live gig I went to in New York around this time by Robin Williams, the late great American comedian. It was non-stop
free-form and funny. Utterly hilarious. I didn’t want to go, I was alone, but there was a ticket at the box office, and I thought I might as well. I hated that
Mork & Mindy
, but I
gave it a chance and he was fantastic live. A lot of the way he was free-forming the jokes and randomly jumping from one situation to another, then somehow or another they all seemed to make sense
eventually, is exactly how I feel about myself, how I think I am.

That would be the kinds of things I’d go to see. A lot of ‘Off Broadway’ productions, for instance. Someone who was very good to hang out with was Ken Lockie, when he came to
stay with us. He was always hovering around on the outskirts of PiL, but I didn’t really want to commit him to the band. I never saw him as a proper PiL kind of person – too quiet. He
didn’t have that get-up-and-go. A very studied musician, is Ken. He knows his way around all the notes and formats but that’s not to me a very useful tool. He was quite a respected
musician and friend of Keith’s, but as soon as he moved into our apartment, Keith didn’t like him any more, and so I’d end up hanging out with him.

One of the maddest things he took me to was a movie by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was trendy at the time. Off we trotted to
this cinema on the Upper West Side and it
turned out to be all about the gay sex scene in Berlin. It was about one man’s life, he was a school teacher, and he was explaining the cottaging scene and the toilet scene in Berlin.
Grr-r-r-r-raphically! You know the phrase, ‘I didn’t know where to put my face’? Wrong! It was a bit of an eye-opener. I’ve always known gay people, but it was very
challenging for us two to be sitting there watching this. We never talked about it when we left, it was so strange. Then a couple of weeks later, we were in some other social scene with a crowd of
people, and somebody said something, and I caught Ken’s eye and we both just burst out laughing. All’s well that ends well.