Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (14 page)

In rehearsals, someone would play something, and I’d go, ‘Oh, I’ve got some words for that’ – an absolutely open-minded, spontaneous approach, which, I’m well
aware, can also hideously not work. But for us lot, it did, and I’ve kept that methodology ever since. It used to be like that in the Pistols, you know, for a good two weeks. There’d
always be somebody in a corner playing something from their heart and soul, and I’ve got the ears for that moment. And I’ll zoom straight into that and go, ‘Empathy with
that!’ I write with a melody in my head, and I’ll just try and stand there and sing it, right off the bat. Sometimes it’s impossible to sing what I write, and I’ll scratch
for any idea that comes into my head.

Of the early songs, ‘No Feelings’ was a character analysis, satirizing the way rock ‘n’ rollers were trying to present themselves, as being hard and above it all, and yet
being a bunch of wimps in
reality. There were these nitty-gritty bands flirting around, all trying to make themselves out to be harder than they were. I wasn’t
presenting myself as a hard man, just a full-on honest one, and dealing with people telling you things that they’re not. Liars. Liars will always be a good subject matter.

‘Lazy Sod’, which later got more tastefully retitled ‘Seventeen’, came from a Steve Jones idea. The lyrics killed me! Sorry Steve, but to this day, I didn’t mean to
humiliate you, but you should have felt humiliated, those were bad words. Fabulously dumb lines, like, ‘I’m all alone, give a dog a bone’! I suppose he was writing about a
self-pity kind of thing and not being able to find a proper attachment to another human being. A good idea, but I wasn’t ready for that kind of wimp-out, so by the time I got to it, well,
look what I did.

‘I don’t work, I just speed’ – that was all I needed in life! It was very much an anti-hippie thing, drawing up the battle lines with them. ‘Let’s all live in
the forest together!’ ‘Fuck off!’ Listen, I’m well into passive resistance, I understand that’s a vital way of bringing down empires, but the hippie thing of peace and
love was vacuous. It didn’t actually mean anything, and it was never conjured into anything solid.

When I went to the festivals, I’d watch them squabbling over where to park their Volkswagens and pitching their designer tents and arguing about peg-holes. Come on, where’s your
peace and love now? But in all of that there were generous souls, and they tended to be the people that weren’t wearing the uniform. The ‘velvet loon pants’ lot would never help
you.

On ‘New York’, I used the New York Dolls as a reference point and played around a bit. Personally speaking, I’ve got no problems with the New York Dolls at all, I thought they
were great, but we’d already had men dressed up as tarts quite a lot in British rock. And then, my God, when they came over – what a mess! There was a band that fell apart. The other
New York bands – Television, the Ramones – we couldn’t believe how old they all were, and how
much more loaded. They could afford the things that we
desperately wanted, but had no taste, so they’d come over from New York and they’d look terrible. They’d be trying to dress down – black and leather – just depressing,
trying to look dirty. And yet at the same time I never knew an American that came over that didn’t have a walletful. I thought we were better than that.

Chrissie Hynde tried to help me on the music side. She used to hang around the shop a year before I did, maybe even a couple of years before. She and Vivienne used to be close but they fell
apart. One of the most delicious lines she said to Chrissie one day was: ‘The thing I don’t like about you, Chrissie, is you go with the flow – well, the flow goes
that-a-way,’ pointing to the door. Chrissie would be in fits of laughter. The delivery was so funny, that she had to go, ‘Fine’. Vivienne can definitely deliver a good one-liner
– no doubts about that mouth.

I can’t remember what the brawl/row/scene/whatever was. But –
ooff!
– when women decide to not like each other, wow, us guys have got lots to be proud of, because we
could never take it to that level. Well, actually I know a few guys who could. We’ll talk about them later.

But Chrissie – what a lovely nutter! We never had a physical relationship but mentally we were very attuned to each other. I respect many, many things about Chrissie – a very smart
girl, who went through all manner of trauma as a child, and was wayward in her youth, shall we say. She’ll always be an awkward person to get on with, she’s very difficult, but I think
she deserves your space and your time, because in that difficulty she’s looking for answers. And she does find answers from time to time, and that makes her to my mind a very important person
in the world.

She was great fun to hang out with. She’d take me to Clapham Common, and we used to walk for miles talking about music, and our understanding of things. She tried to teach me how to play
guitar. I’d moan about being left-handed, but of course her line was: ‘Jimi Hendrix was left-handed, that’s no excuse.’ ‘How about
this excuse,
Chrissie – look, I had a bottle jammed into my wrist!’ Which was true, I had two fingers that had to be sewn up, and I’d lost a lot of control in my left hand.

I was hanging out with Paul Cook one night, and he took me to see some of his friends out in Chiswick, and a couple of them took offence to Paul because he was in a band. And a fight ensued, and
it was all chaos and very hard to remember, considering the amount of booze we had plied into ourselves. We had to walk from Chiswick and eventually ended up at the Hammersmith Hospital, where I
had to have my hand stitched up, because the fingertips of my two pointy, fuck-you fingers were ripped to the bone and bleeding profusely.

That’s what you get when you’re left-handed. The first thing you stick into an affray is your left. It’s the hand no one expects, because everybody’s expecting a
right-hander to come in.

So, yes, I’m left-handed, and playing is difficult on that level, but beyond that I’m not the kind of person who could ever sit down and learn how to – and I use the phrase
correctly, in a negative way – ‘play an instrument’. I don’t have the time or patience. Actually I don’t have the mathematical brain that can absorb that kind of
thinking. Making it in the wonderful world of music in any way is something of a really out-there achievement. I’ve managed to break through that barrier, I’m still capable of putting a
song together without any of those – what shall we say – laws of logic?

Chrissie really had her work cut out. It’s just a shame I didn’t feel I could ask for guidance amongst my so-called colleagues in the band. Right from the off, things got really
harsh between Glen and me. It shouldn’t have got that way, but when Glen dug his heels in, it was very difficult to deal with him.

Malcolm had this notion that Glen was ‘the musician’. He also must’ve identified something positive in what I was doing, because one day he took us two to the pub to patch it
up and write songs together. Legend has it he gave us twenty quid to spend, but we
were smarter than that – we wanted twenty quid each. Then he went off and left us to
our own devices.

We giggled. We were on the same plane at that point – there was a moment of truce. Although we were really bad enemies, the commonality was, ‘What’s
that
one
about?’

And we had a great evening. We knew that we’d have to work something out here. If there was going to be any progress in the band, it would have to be coming from us. It wasn’t going
to come through Malcolm and his alliance, because that was a dead end intellectually. We really got on with each other, and ‘Pretty Vacant’ was one of the ideas we put together.

On his way out, Malcolm had said, ‘I’ll give you some ideas – submissive, as in the bondage theme, if we could have that kind of topic?’ Me being me, I took it literally
for a laugh and then put a twist in it. I called it ‘Submission’, but the line went, ‘I’m on a submarine mission for you, baby’. Anybody who suggests things to me,
I’ll sneer, but I’ll see a possibility in it. And off we went.

We knew full well what he was doing, trying to use us to flog his new S&M line in the shop. They’d ousted the Teddy boy stuff and gone into the full perv – from two people,
Malcolm and Vivienne, who were eyeing the world of perversion like the odd couple from Tring. It was just a means to an end – they weren’t actually part of a pervert scene. They were
observers, then praising themselves that they were somehow manipulating the wonderful world of fetish, when really they were just floggers – clothes floggers. They’d always be on the
wrong end of a whip, and we knew full well they wouldn’t like what we came up with.

In fact, we never really got a comment on what we wrote. There was no conversation at all with Malcolm and me. From the initial outburst and a sense of backing, to suddenly nothing. Just cut
dead. And I suppose he eyed me somewhat as being a problem to his art-movement theories. His interpretation of the artistic leanings of the band – mine, or indeed anyone’s – were
very different. I didn’t think we needed to try and skillfully craft an image. For
me the words were creating that, and my own persona. I just expected the chaps to
stand up, and they could be whatever they wanted to be themselves, just so long as it was genuine and not crafted.

That night in the pub, Glen and I both understood that we had to amalgamate our two different perspectives without concessions into something even better than either one of us had conceived
independently. I think we did that, and I know I wanted more of that, and I know Glen wanted more of that, but again these other issues kept creeping in.

People don’t believe me, but we’d hardly ever see Malcolm in those early days. He wasn’t at rehearsals, and fair play, that would have been a hard thing for me. Too many people
in the room that are not actually contributing is a no-no. It would’ve been: if they need back-up then I’m going to bring back-up too, and then it would be my friends versus theirs. And
my lot would win, but it wouldn’t have got us anywhere.

On the rare occasions we did catch hold of him, he’d be like, ‘Oh, right, yes . . . Look, I’ll book some gigs . . .’

The early gigs were nerve-racking and terrifying. As a band, we all felt very inadequate and fearful. It’s that scenario – you’re facing judgement. Indeed,
negative
judgement was all we ever seemed to achieve. But we grew to really like that! Or at least I did, and I began to expect resentment just because we were so refreshingly different.
Although ‘refreshing’ wasn’t the word some of the audience members would be using.

The very first gig was at Central St Martin’s art college, in November ’75. It wasn’t even something Malcolm organized – Glen was nominally supposed to be doing a course
there, so he sorted it out. Kudos to him that he had the audacity to show us off in front of his friends. It was just across the street from where we rehearsed in Denmark Street – I’ve
gotta say, renting that place was a stroke of genius from Malcolm, right by Soho, in the heart of
town – but that meant it didn’t feel like a proper gig. We just
walked across the road with our gear, bit by bit, and bingo! That’s not exactly how you think it’s all going to begin.

Of course we were all nervous as hell, absolutely terrified of what was about to happen. Could this be sink or swim? It’s so fantastic when you come out the other side, and it’s swim
– although it probably didn’t feel like that on the night itself.

Bazooka Joe was the main band. They were terrible, exactly as you would imagine a band called Bazooka Joe would be. To name yourself after an American bubble gum was just –
eeuuurgh
! Nowhere to go with that one, boys. And they were matchy-matchy, in that they all wore Converse white sneakers. Hi-tops, at that. Even though Adam Ant was their bassist, it was
hardly surprising they took such umbrage at what we were doing.

I’d never sung all the way through for fifteen minutes. Well, it was probably more like twelve and a half that night, with all the nervous energy. And when you account for all the
Strepsils I was chewing for my throat, it was probably more like ten minutes. And then repeating the set, just to try and fill up half an hour!

I quickly realized you just have to rely at that moment on your ego resources. Stamina would be a word to pick up on, but not, ‘Oh yeah, I can walk ten miles, me!’ It’s not
that, it’s a mental stamina – that you can endure, no matter what the problems that come up, you’ve got enough going on inside yourself and enough self-belief to win through. And
all that without the normal approach to training and technique.

When you look back on it, our rehearsals were obviously some kind of training. Something was garnered from those moments that we took on the stage, and finally produced what we were doing in
rehearsals in front of a live audience. And how to deal with the first boos in a positive way, rather than go into woe-is-me mode. In that respect, I think I pulled the band through on an enormous
number of occasions. The more negative the response, the more positive my reaction. I never minded a bit of banter with
an audience. I could trade one-liners with the best of
them, all of which, I suppose, simply amounted to: ‘Fuck you!’

It went by in a weird haze, just trying to become accustomed to complete strangers staring and judging us. I felt very protective of my chaps up there. There was literally no clapping –
silence is golden – and there was a huge scrap at the end. There always was, but Christ knows what about. Most of the scrappy situations were always about the other bands. Always, there was
some sad-sack two-bob fucking jealous cunt going, ‘You can’t play, you’re shit, that’s not music!’ All those clichés! These days, they seem almost quaint, but
in them days, those were apparently insults.

After the gig, I just had to go home, there was nothing to do. We had no money, there was no great drinking celebration, no ‘yee-haw, us together’ about it at all. It was like a very
dull muff-dive into a solitary subway ride home. I might have had some friends there, but the thing is I was inside my own head. There were friends with me, but I wasn’t connecting to them. I
was really worried about all the things that weren’t right. I became for that moment very self-absorbed. Well, not self-absorbed, more like a commitment to making these things work
better.