Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (2 page)

Back in my late teens, I was definitely ready for something. I was fully loaded, and it happened in a most amazing way, because it wasn’t anything I was looking for. But as soon as
‘Would you want to sing in our band?’ came in, it was ‘Wow, yeah! Cor, now all the pieces fit!’ and I wasn’t gonna give it up too damn easy. I was very resilient even
with the others not turning up at the first rehearsals and all of the other negatives that befell the early Sex Pistols.

I didn’t arrive with notebooks full of lyrics, they just came straight out. I use my brain as a library. I like to keep notes but usually I’m very dismissive once I’ve written
things down. I can think quicker than I can write, so therefore I’ve got good storage space between the ears.

It felt bloody fantastic to be able to shout these things out. In all
honesty, it was not in my imagination to foresee quite the huge numbers of people that ended up
listening. I’d just seen the Pistols as a nightclub act, really. I didn’t see much hope in it. Because, like everything else, the music business was well and truly sewn up by then. All
of the free-loving bands from the ’60s, they’d grabbed all the top-notch seats and they weren’t making room on the bus for no one.

Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like
to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a
voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.

I was discussed openly by councillors and parliamentarians, who angrily cited the Traitors and Treason Act. That was a deadly thing to be brought up against. It was a very old law, and actually
from what my lawyer was telling me, it still carried the death penalty. Ouch! What? For using words? To dictate from a government point of view what you think your population should or should not
be doing is absurd. We’re the ones that vote them in – not for them to tell us in return what
we’re
doing wrong. They should be emphasizing what we’re doing right.
Civil rights for us all, I say. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

The whole fiasco aroused that naggy little git in me, the idea that words are actually weapons, and are perceived as such by the powers-that-be. What a thrill that became. Absolutely –
wow! It was justification for me. It was hardcore and serious, it wasn’t done for a laugh. I utterly resent all forms of government. This one was telling me I wasn’t allowed to say
certain things – in other words, I wasn’t allowed an opinion. And so I discovered that I really am toxic for the powers-that-be.

Not many ‘pop singers’ push it that far. I mean, you’ve got Pussy Farts in Russia now, and I’m so much on their side. I do love
bravery. But before
them mine was the most extreme predicament I’ve heard of any pop star ever being in. It was the most political, and the most dangerous, and I laughed all the way through it. Our so-called
manager, Malcolm McLaren, shit himself, as did the rest of the group. That’s basically why we started falling apart: they were terrified of being dragged into what they viewed as scandals.
For me, these were the questions that needed to be asked. It was absolute public research. What can you say, and what can you not say? Why on earth is ‘bollocks’ a word you can’t
touch? Who’s to tell me that? That’s what set me off on the road I now follow. Tell it like it is. And never back down.

I saw a live video of Iggy Pop once, just one song, and he was doing, ‘Down In The Street’ and I was just so impressed with the bravery of the racket – in no way at all being
weak, just FULL ON. There he was with his long, blond,
luxurious
hair, and mascara – Iggy! And it worked for me, because the man wasn’t shying away from what his message was.
I’m here, get used to it. The sheer relentless bravery of it.

You can’t always expect to be accepted and sometimes it’s equally beneficial that you’re not, but either way, once you’ve had the bravado to stand on that stage,
it’s
yours
. Do not run from it. And I do
not
run from it.

I never allowed myself a big pat on the back for what I’d achieved, even though I’d come from nothing, because the next problem was already plonked on my lap, and then the one after
that. This is not a trophy hunt for me. These were just things that I felt needed to be stated.

I’d said my bit. The political restraints and presumptions of being British – I thought I’d dealt with them in the Sexy Piss-ups, so then what you do is you move on to the next
thing which was internal politics – sort
myself
out, and find out what’s wrong with
me
. Before you make your career of pointing fingers at others, you’ve really got
to sort out what might be going wrong inside your own self. So that’s how I used my next band, Public Image
Limited – PiL, for short – to stop being a big
head, with the complete faith that we would all go into this as equals.

That way, we managed to get some great work done. Really important stuff and thrilling to this day. I love my Pubic Hairs Limited. We totally challenged what everybody considered music to be at
that time. It fundamentally changed the concept of music forever. In fact, I changed music twice.

It’s difficult to remember the details, but somewhere back in the ’80s or ’90s, it was communicated to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be a nice idea if you got an MBE?’ I
suppose they thought I was becoming tame, but you see, they weren’t really listening to the content of
Metal Box
and
Album
. The vocals were presumed to be not as insightful, but
they really were. The subject matter was internal rather than external, therefore it was presumed that somehow I could be cosseted into the shitstem and Johnny don’t go that way. I am very
wary of those self-aggrandizing titles; I don’t find them necessary. I am actually rather fond of pomp and ceremony – I just don’t want a place in it.

And yet, I recently had dealings with the American government while applying for US citizenship, and they told me the British still keep an open file on me, to this day. Go figure!

All I want in life is clarity, transparency, so I know who is doing what, and to whom, at all times. My only real enemies in life are liars, and they’ll do everything to stop me because
they want the contamination to continue, because it’s comfortable for them, or completely ignorant mindless fools who believe every word they read in a daily rag.

I know damn well that the people who will draw most entertainment from this book will be the haters, and practically every second line is going to be justification for their contempt. Well,
that’s fine. That is somewhat also part of the point. As long as they are thinking, even negatively, at least it’s thought! Anger is an energy, remember?

So, here’s
My Life Uncensored
. There should be a caveat to that –
Even Though They Try
. Censorship is something I’ve
always been against. It’s the kind of ordinance that comes down from people that don’t like to think very hard and aren’t prepared to analyze themselves, just judge others, and
are scared of the future. The future’s unknown, let’s leap in, see where it takes us. There’s an old quote but it’s absolutely true: ‘There’s nothing to fear but
fear itself.’

This book is basically the life of a serious risk-taker. Risk-taking’s in me. It’s what gets the best out of me. In early 2014, I pitched myself forwards for one of my biggest risks
ever – three months on the road in America playing King Herod in
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Yes, I know. I was well aware of the shock value in it, and the condemnation I would garner
– I love it . . .
love it!
– but that don’t matter tuppence compared to what I would get out of it as a human being. It was forcing myself to take orders, and follow a
script. The final challenge! Then a week before the show was due to open, it got cancelled without any real explanation.

But listen, I’ll try to be as accurate as possible without causing too much personal damage, because everybody deserves a chance to get back and repair themselves no matter how many times
they fall down. I’ve led a hard life here, and I don’t want it to be dragged down as an unnecessary act of spite against lesser players in the bigger picture. I’ll leave the spite
to those dogs and rats.

I’ll do my best to remember who the fuck I am. I may occasionally refuse to stick to my life’s chronology, but I want this to be honest, and open, and the whole truth and nothing but
. . . BUT!
I could be wrong, I could be right.

Everything in life is inter-related. Unpredictability is the story of my life. I make things safe for other people to follow in my wake. I am the elephant in the room. I’m a
stand-up-and-be-counted fella, the last man standing – but that’s in a world where nobody seems to be able to count.

‘T
rials and tribulations!’ I wrote in the early ’80s, trying to come to grips with the chaos and confusion in which I entered the
world. ‘When I was born, the doctor did not like me/He grabbed my ankles, held me like a turkey/Dear Mummy, why d’you let him hit me/This was wrong, I knew you did not love me.’
Three verses later you arrive at the conclusion that I was a very disgruntled baby.

That song, ‘Tie Me To The Length Of That’, I’m really proud of. At the time on TV, there were a lot of medical programmes where they were showing actual births. They were
breaking new ground about what you could actually show, so watching all these babies popping out all over the shop, I was like, ‘Look at that, they’re smacking that poor little
babby’s bottom as it comes out.’ They do it with good reason, but I was just thinking, how traumatic must that be, from the sanctity of the womb to, ‘There’s a good slap on
your backside, fella!’

My father was furious when he heard the song, because there’s a reference to him, the ‘stupid drunk – then the bastard dropped me’. This was a story my aunt told me, and
one my mum later reiterated, that he turned up drunk, the proud father. He’d taken a day
off work and, in the panic of it all, one thing led to another. I was born in
the early wee hours of the 31st, in the bitterly cold January of 1956, and he’d been ‘panicking’ all night.

He was furious at his portrayal. ‘It whaddn’t loike dat!
Well
. . . it moighta happened but not for da reasons yer t’ink!’ Poor Daddy. I wasn’t doing it to
be spiteful or get back at him. As I say, I was just trying to translate into song the emotions I must’ve been going through as a newborn. That’s why I love writing songs; it’s
absolutely researching myself to the nth degree.

There’s a picture from my own parents’ wedding which is of fabulous interest to me because there, in the far-right corner, is my Auntie Agnes holding a baby. The most likely
explanation is that this baby must have been me. So: I’m a bastard! In recent years, I’ve even had to deal with other children apparently born to my mum out of wedlock. I never could
get honest answers out of all of the relevant family members. None of them like talk, everything is hush-hush, and so everything is a mystery. Certainly, until I’ve sorted out the mystery in
my own life and my own position, I find it very difficult to deal with other alleged family members.

I had no birth certificate, and I suspected I possibly wasn’t born in London because maybe my father was worried about being drafted for National Service, so he had to duck and dive a bit.
For obvious reasons, I have to be vague about it, as indeed my mother and father were with information about themselves, or anything at all. It was like trying to get blood out of a stone.
‘Hello, am I a member of this family?’ ‘
Well
, ye know . . .’ that would be my mother’s sense of humour, which was very hard to grasp when you’re young. It
kept me in a constant state of alertness – to come back at things from another angle. So many games of noughts and crosses your parents can play, teasing their children. It all becomes very
useful in adulthood.

It taught me to be sharp. Rather than them just ignore you, and tell you about the tooth fairy – it was a higher level than that. They’re not plying you with fantasy. It was obvious
in our house
that if Santa Claus tried to come down the chimney, one, he’d be burnt, and two, he’d be beaten to a pulp as a very suspicious character – a
priest of child-molestation quality!

In them days, it was a little bit different to now. You didn’t trust no one. Mum and Dad were very backwards folk – not dumb, they were clever in their own way, because they were
survivalist – but as to how situations in England worked, they always felt manipulated.

My dad, John Christopher Lydon, came from Galway, and he was used to working on all manner of heavy-duty equipment. He came over to London at fourteen, looking for work on the building sites,
and he quickly got a licence so he could drive cranes and things. He’d never seen himself as a shit-shoveller.

His father was a violent, brawling,
weird thing
. He came to England before my father, and he lived nearby, but the two never liked each other very much. My dad was always over there at
his place, trying to connect somehow. It was very grim. We used to call him the ‘Owl Fella’, as in the Old Fellow – he never looked much like an owl. He was a prolific smoker. He
used to smell of cigarettes all the time, and he always had a fag butt sticking out at the corner of his mouth. He talked very guttural, and it was hard to make out what he was saying, because he
was obviously a fully fledged alcoholic, and a definite playboy for the prostitutes. It was very odd watching their relationship.

My mum, Eileen, was very loving, but in a very quiet way. There wasn’t much said. That’s all you need when you’re little – attention from adults, but the right kind of
attention. Mum always had something wrong going on health-wise. They were only seventeen or eighteen when they married and started having us.