Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (66 page)

Presumably because I’d been in
I’m a Celebrity
I got an offer to do a thing called
Celebrity Circus
. I dislike circuses intensely – that’s an A1 route to
cruelty to animals. I also have an absolute hatred for zoos – I see them as prisons for wildlife. It was like they hadn’t paid any attention to the content of the nature programmes
I’d already done. You get really angry with them, but at the same time you
have to sit down and explain to them why this is horribly wrong. And you know at the end of
the day they’re still not listening. You’ll get some ridiculous remark, like, ‘Well, we can put more money in.’ Sorry, no, I mean what I say.

And it’s not like I could go and raise money myself for a TV production, because I’m obviously going to put anything like that into making music.

That’s when the advert for Country Life butter came along, for British TV. I understood all the pitfalls in it, and hummed and hawed about taking it on – it just seemed so nutty. It
was a case of, ‘What? They’re prepared to put their faith in
me
to help sell their butter?’ From the first meeting, the respect coming from the ad company, and from Country
Life themselves, was almost overwhelming. They were taking a real risk with me, and were going to give me pretty much a free hand to be myself, without much tedious scripting. They were really
upright and correct and professional with me, unlike anything I’d experienced from a record label. There was no dishonesty, or bribing you, or forcing you into situations you didn’t
like. No trickery in the contract wording. So refreshing.

Then I began to see it from their point of view, and saw the fun in it. It began to seem so perfect, so utterly, mindblowingly right – the most anarchistic thing I’ve ever been
presented with – a butter campaign! Wow, what a challenge! How was anyone going to cope with that? But then, after the initial shock, you look at it and think, ‘What’s going on in
this? Well, I do
eat
butter, I do
like
butter, and you can’t make a good curry
without
butter – or without ghee, which is clarified butter. Ever tried eating baked
beans on toast without butter?’ Hmm. By God, these boys had got me.

This wasn’t the same thing as using an old Pistols song to sell cack, which would ruin that song forever and erode its seriousness in many fans’ minds. I was very happily buying into
the line that we were going to promote British farming. Indeed, that’s exactly what we did, we bolstered British industry! The ads were about buying British, and I thoroughly enjoyed larking
about in the fields
in a country gent’s tweeds – in fact, I found those to be much more practical for protecting yourself against freezing, drizzly British
conditions than any nylon skiing gear. The rapport with the people involved became mind-alteringly open, in what could easily have been a corporate debacle. I think we turned it into something
really impressive. Fortunately for the British farming industry, it did them the world of good too.

The ads went so big, so quick. It almost felt like I’d lost the reins, it just became so enormous. Of course there was the negative hatred, and again this thing of ‘You’ve sold
out’. I’ve had to face that nonsense all my life in making music. There will always be the naysayers out there but, at the same time, you’ve got to say, Mr Rotten managed to put
up British butter sales by 85 per cent. ‘So there is an audience out there!’ People are aware of me, and I am respected.

Then, lo and behold, I found myself in the middle of a butter war with New Zealand Anchor, putting out all manner of insults over the internet. Even Ireland’s Kerrygold had a dig at me:
‘If you claim to be Irish, you should’ve backed Kerrygold!’ Well, you know, none of them asked me. Suddenly, I’m a valuable commodity!

You take on something risky like that, and then one thing leads to another. Suddenly a huge opportunity in your creativity opens, and all of a sudden people are paying attention again. I was
still at a stalemate with record companies, and any time I tried to get anything off the ground I’d always run into a financial barrier that you had no way of overcoming.

So every penny I earned from those ads went straight into reactivating Public Image Ltd. There was enough there – not an enormous amount, but a bulk lump sum – that I could put up to
get a band together and into a rehearsal framework. From there, it worked out that we could actually survive on touring, and get enough together to record, and make an album our way without having
to have a record label. In the end, it worked out fine: we’re now our own label, PiL Official Ltd, and we have our own publishing company. All that freedom, thanks to those ads.

People I admire: Christiane Amanpour, the CNN journalist. I love her because she stops the corruption of history in the making. Whenever she’s on TV, I find her riveting.
David Attenborough, because of his passion for nature, naturally. Gandhi is my ultimate hero. If you’re gonna have one, have one with absolutely no weapons other than wisdom.

For me, it’s the effort that counts, not results. Never mind winning cups and leagues, strugglers are worth more emotionally than achievers. I really admire strugglers, I have empathy for
them, people who are trying to make a change rather than sitting on the laurels of victory. That value is in all of these people. They put great trains of thought into your head and get your mind
spinning, and that’s wonderful.

I’ve got an open mind but a closed heart to politicians. And I have a definite closed door on all religions, especially new-age head rubbish. I can’t suffer that. All their psychic
leanings drive me crazy because it’s such a waste of good energy. They’re just advertising agencies, selling us the same cack regurgitated. This adoration of a higher power that
makes all the decisions for you. That’s ball-cutting stuff, and I like my testicles very much.

Anything that properly gets my brain twirling, negatives included –
especially
negatives, sometimes – is all to the power and benefit to me ultimately. Know thine enemy: the
more you get to know him, the more you realize he’s really your friend. You start having empathy – that word, again – and therefore the bitterness of us-and-them is dissolved, and
you find ultimately you can have common ground.

Of course there are philosophies out there that I could never contend with, racism being one of them. It’s absurd: we all come from the same bottleneck way back when. You judge a person by
their deeds, and nothing else really accounts for very much. The bottom line is: is that a good person, or a bad person? Is that a liar and a cheat and a fraud, or someone genuine?

Being brought up in a very mixed neighbourhood I never had to contend with, ‘Oh look at them, they’re all different.’ The thing was that we were all very different, but all
very much the same. We all had the same problems, all had the same kind of schools to go to, living in the same kind of housing. What’s the point in squabbling amongst each other over that?
For me, the focus would be on – putting it very nicely – the bastards what put us there, whoever’s responsible for our serious lack of opportunities. Because it’s not us,
we’re industrious, thank you. We want to get ahead in the world.

Of course, you’d always get the ‘Send ’em back’ brigade, and it’s still going on, isn’t it? And send who back? You tell me: who can really account for being
100 per cent British, and what does that really mean? It’s an island that has been very open to all manner of race, creed and colour, for pretty much as long as it has been populated. The
English language
itself is an adaptation of European languages, mixed with a bit of this, that and the other. If you’re going to go all the way back, is it Albion
we’re talking here? Just the Saxons? What about the Angles before them? The Celts? And who was there before the Celts? Where did all these folk come from?

The way the world is, people just move about. The blood that runs in my veins runs in every other human being on this planet. The same. One blood, that’s what we are, we’re one
species. There’s no variants that make us not be able to mix and match. We’re not like, say, chimpanzees and gorillas. As long as we can have sex with each other, we’re the same.
And if you want to call that mongrel, as in all dogs are the same really – well, that’s what we are. It’s that infinite variety which as a species will sustain us, constantly
refreshing the gene pool. There is no other way. Very laughingly, you can look at the inbred nonsense of royal families, and you can see it in them – they are all kind of half-headedly dopey,
aren’t they? Particularly the menfolk.

But then our lot have quite a bit of German in there, via Greece. And Russia. Hello, Habsburgs, how are you doing? Thank you for being so non-English. Racial purity doesn’t make sense once
you do any kind of study. Class purity makes even less sense. All that highlights is the greedy who don’t want to share their portion of the pie – a completely clear-cut nonsense.

I understand my folk here much more than I do the attitudes of the landed gentry. There’s nothing really but a curse of education that separates working class from middle class.
There’s an attitude in the education principles that teach a sense of superiority and inferiority. There’s not much difference other than that, there really isn’t. You can’t
say that the middle class have all the money, not from what I’ve
seen. Who’s creating these gaps between us and feeding us these false agendas? That’s
where I’m looking.

But I don’t call it immigration, I call it migration. As a species it’s very healthy for us to get up and move around the planet. Sometimes certain groups of people have to do that
for economic reasons. Nobody’s doing it just to be spiteful. Everybody loves the idea of a homeland. I used to, but I’ve kind of got the bigger picture now. It’s a home planet to
me.

I’m as thrilled and feel as at home in Shanghai as I do anywhere else on earth. I love the vibrancy there and I felt proud to be a human being watching China develop. There’s many
bad things in China – believe me, I’m not a fool about it – but I can see that the get-up-and-go they’re creating there is very interesting. That’s something where
Britain has lagged behind. There’s no gusto any more. There seems to be a lot of laziness, idleness. I can’t bear to hear anyone say, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’ Of
course there is. That’s bloody nonsense.

We were in China with PiL for about a week in March 2013. Oh, their eagerness to learn! The government are starving them of information of what goes on outside their boundaries, so when
you’re there it’s thrilling, trying to communicate with them. They’re very talkative and friendly and open, and they just want to
know
– what are the bits that are
missing in the picture for them? Slowly but surely you’re putting into their minds the idea that they’re being manipulated and that’s surely a good thing. That opens them up, gets
them to start thinking for themselves as individuals, when they realize what censorship has denied them. And how are my antics in the West not to be mentioned in the East? That’s a puzzlement
to me.

The government officials who have to approve your visa
analyze every word in every song in your set list. Surprise surprise, they decided that, yes, we were okay. The
trouble was of course that a lot of our records and my other work was completely unknown there, so what we were trying to do really was push through our latest album
This Is PiL
, and get
people to understand that there were other strings to our bow. So the set involved a full PiL catalogue. It was quite a surprise to them. But when they heard PiL, they definitely got it. The
textures, the tones, the progression in it, and the openness and the joy and the pain in the music definitely scored big points.

We had just about no sleep with the excitement of it all. That’s how I am. We even rehearsed there because that’s where we were starting the tour. Beijing, I have to say, was
not
an eye-opener: the pollution was so bad you daren’t open your eyes. It’s catastrophic to expect people to live in that environment. Here I am in Los Angeles, where people
moan about the pollution all the time and rightly so, but hello, it ain’t in the zero pointage in comparison. Beijing is so way off the map, it’s incomparable.

Onstage, you literally can’t get enough air in your lungs to perform the songs properly. It’s like slowly choking. Very frightening, too, when you can’t get the air in,
particularly in the gig because it was rammed to the rafters in Beijing – even less oxygen than usual, and on top of that everybody smoking, including myself!

What you’ve got to do there, and in Russia, is you’ve got to not come down hard on the bootleg side, because that’s the only way they really have of discovering you, through
illegal trade. Although there’s gangsters there somehow profiting off that, that’s the only way they can get the information. You have to grin and grit your teeth. You’re being
ripped off, but at the same time you’re passing on information, which is
far more valuable. If ever I did any of this just for the money – well, I wouldn’t
be in China, would I?

I suppose places like China are the new frontier for Western music, and their innocence towards us was equally shared, because I was as naive about them as they were about me. That’s where
the talking can begin. You’re both equally puzzled but you’re intrigued and fascinated, and it leads to excellent situations in dressing rooms. Normally, I run away from those kind of
scenarios, but when it’s in new and unexplored territories, I’m up for that. All night long. Because that absorption of information gives you the energy to do the next gig, way more
than sleep – being able to walk out of these things and know you’ve done something good, and you’ve learned so much.

I’m thrilled that other bands were turned down by the Chinese authorities. They were all the ones that joined in on those student union complaints about ‘Free Tibet’, or
whatever. Well, we should be freeing ourselves first. And I don’t view Britain particularly as a free society. It still faces censorship, and if that don’t work, then you’ll face
mockery through the press. For so long there’s been a media culture there that’s been swaying people into believing that music has no effect any more, so why bother? I say, look to the
owners of those publications. Need I say any more? All of those papers and TV channels that push that agenda of, why bother? That’s because they’ve got their pile, haven’t they?
So it’s back to trying to keep us stupid, it’s back to religion in another guise. Never give up. There’s nothing to give up for.