Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (25 page)

Many aspiring stars would’ve been broken by the experience, but not I! The sheer joy and privilege of being able to look out of that coach window and see America whizz by me was utterly
enthralling, and in particular because this was the South. It reminded me of the cowboy movies my dad made me watch as a kid. You could relate to the names of the towns, just through the
television. Bloody hell, it was great. After all the intrigues, I felt like a kid in those moments. The landscape of America impressed me no end, and I fell in love with the country. Regardless of
the piss-poor situation that was unfolding before us, there was still that joy there.

At the same time, I knew I couldn’t do anything about Sid. It was an impossibility that you couldn’t unravel because Malcolm was using it as a tool to unravel the whole thing anyway.
He had to destroy what he couldn’t control in his megalomaniac way, which in the current light of day was very childish of him. But that’s the absolute truth of him, that’s how he
was. He was a very jealous man, and if anybody came up with an idea that was something he wished was his own, rather than celebrate it and taking it on board, he’d work against it.

Little did I know that he was secretly taking singing lessons. He looked at Johnny Rotten and he thought, ‘I can do that!’ I just wish he’d have seriously gone into it, because
then everyone would’ve seen the lack of talent.

Although everything was falling apart between all of us, and the shows were horrendous, I tried to hook up with Steve. In fact, we spent a great night once. Steve had this shoe-box full of
marijuana.
‘Fancy trying this?’ Funnily enough, I did, and it was hilarious, but we had to deal with the problem of Sid who was two doors down hanging out with a
black drag queen. It was ugly and foolish and not a Sex Pistols-y thing at all. It was more a sad interpretation of Lou Reed, and wallowing in the problem of ‘Is there any heroin
around?’

It was hard on all of us, fighting from our own corners, but never grouping together properly. We realized that Sid wasn’t the problem, we all were. We just couldn’t get on with each
other, and that was that. It was pointless trying to continue it at that point, because the outside influences were just continuously poisonous.

The media were crawling all over the tour. Sid did an interview with
High Times
, who were following us about. Now,
High Times
was a drug culture magazine, but it was rumoured that
it had CIA connections. So really what it was doing was finding out what you do, who you do it with, who’s selling it to you, where it comes from and where it goes. And Sid didn’t have
the capacity to understand that you don’t get involved with those outside agendas. Plus, he’d be willingly waffling away his nonsense, his drug delirium, to these folk who were more
than happy to print it, and then we’d end up with the reputation as a smackhead band.

I didn’t write these songs for it to be that way, and when Steve first started this band I’m sure that’s not what he had in mind either. From innocent kids on the blag, so to
speak, to an arsehole out of his brain on heroin getting conned. And, oh yes, of course he had his money stolen by this black drag queen, who actually beat him up too. So it was like, ‘Ooooh,
this is just terrible.’

At the gigs, he’d be trying to out-Rotten Rotten. He’d compete with me onstage, and attempt to stand in front of me, make out that he was really tough and hard. He’d fight with
people at the front, and the sad thing is I know why, because I felt the pain in him. He was doing that really as a subterfuge, to cover up for his own feelings of inadequacy. He knew he
couldn’t make the grade, it just wasn’t there, he didn’t have it, and so self-destruction became
an emblem he could stand behind, because that’s the
easy way out, isn’t it?

It was terrible, to watch the demise of a very close friend; it breaks your heart. But at that precise moment in time, I was plain furious that he just wasn’t getting it. ‘Hello,
matey, you’re in the most privileged position in the world, people will be dying for this
power
, shall we say, and to throw it away and make yourself and everyone around you look like
an idiot . . .’ He was a controlled robot. You’ve got to learn in life, you’ve got to learn it quick and keep it for the rest of your life: pull your own strings, and have no
puppetmaster – and – habits – are – puppetmasters.

What broke my heart was that some people were watching him and actually thought that was the groovy end of heroin. Sid’s behaviour becomes an act of criminality against humanity, for me.
His example is one of self-destruction. How is that appealing? And then you’ve got a media ready to package that, because it takes away from the political content of them songs. Suddenly
there’s not a real serious social message, there’s just a drug addict.

I had made somewhat good amends with Steve in the middle of all this. Of course his angle was, ‘That Sid’s got to go.’ ‘No, that’s not gonna resolve it!’ From
there on, Steve and Paul started flying between gigs, and booking themselves into different hotels – it became ridiculous. I couldn’t, for days on end, in the middle of a tour, speak to
other members of the band, because ‘Malcolm’ was hiding them from me – really childish, silly stuff, that you wouldn’t think five-year-old girls in the playground would get
up to.

During a soundcheck in San Antonio, I wanted to try out a new song I’d written, ‘Religion’, and they just wouldn’t cope with it. Didn’t wanna know. Fine. Leave it
like that, then. It was all too silly for words, when you look back on it – pulling faces, ignoring me. Sid was up for fumbling around with it, but that wasn’t what I wanted. He
didn’t have the chops to get with it. So I kept ‘Religion’ on hold, and used it later when I started my new band, PiL. It was probably for the best that, at that time, no one was
talking about
making a new album – it never really came up as a thing to do. I’m really glad, because it would’ve been another major stress point –
how much can you take?

I don’t know if I really wanted to do it like that, in that same way, and I obviously didn’t, because even to this day, I can’t go back on that sound and try to repeat it.
It’s boring, and it would be wrong, and it wouldn’t work. For me, anyway. It’s like this: I know that’s where the money would’ve been, to put out a Part Two
that’s just like Part One. But no, money don’t come into it. If I feel that that’s challenging my sense of creativity, my creativity wins, regardless of the financial problems
that it can create for me. I will continuously take the risk because I don’t see it as a risk; I see it as the very point and purpose of what it is I’m doing. You only get one
opportunity in life and I got it with the Pistols and I intend to use it well. Use it absolutely well, use it to its ultimate extreme. Sink or swim.

Malcolm, apparently, wanted to get the loony cult murderer Charles Manson to produce our second album from prison. I’d be reading things like that but no one would have the front to say it
to my face. There were many, many rumours like that. Like, after the American tour, we were buggering off to Brazil to work with Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber. That was the whoremongering of
it, and none of that would ever be acceptable to me. It was just looking for cheap headlines and watering down anything serious or good that’s going on in this. Behind all that way of
thinking – it’s glaring to me and it should be to anybody reading this – that it was Malcolm’s resentment. He had no control, and so he was trying to take it back into a
world of silliness, where he would have a place. A world of cop-out.

So, by that last gig in San Francisco, I’d lost interest really. I’d become incapable of caring about writing another song for this outfit. I felt like, ‘That’s it,
there’s the full stop. I’ve achieved as much as I can in this environment.’ So that’s how it ended up with me saying, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been
cheated?’ We were a betrayal of what we started out as.

From my point of view, at that last Winterland gig, who gave a fuck about me? Well, they gave even less of a fuck less about Sid, other than they wanted to use him later
– and Sid was eminently usable at that point. Sid hooked up with Malc, basically for drug money, and of course I didn’t want anything to do with that. Malcolm was leading him into,
‘Yes, Sid, we’ll get you what you want,’ and then, when push came to shove a year or so later, abandoned him completely.

It was very clear to me, there was nowhere for me to be in this band, or with any of these people. And so when Steve and Paul snuck off to Brazil without even mentioning it to me, it was
perfectly fine – I expected it. It was a relief, actually, but then a puzzlement – ‘Where’s my ticket home? Why no money? What, my hotel bill here hasn’t been paid?
WHAT?!’ And then I ring up the record company, and the answer was, ‘Oh, we’ve been told that Johnny Rotten’s gone to England, so we don’t acknowledge you.’
Ridiculous. Insane.

The only person that paid any attention was Joe Stevens, who was a friend of Malcolm’s, and a photographer. I told him what was going on, and he was just puzzled and horrified by it all.
Eventually he paid for a plane ticket for me to go and stay with him in New York and clear my head. What a fantastic thing to do. What a fantastic fella Joe Stevens is.

It took about a week to get in touch with Bob Regehr at our American record company, Warner Brothers. He thought it was insane behaviour on Malcolm’s part too. He came and met me in a
hotel, to help sort me out, and right there, somebody laid a writ on him for some reason. Bonkers! I’ve no idea what the situation was, but obviously it really bonded the pair of us –
which really paid off for me a couple of years later.

I did an interview with the
New York Post
to give my side of the story. I didn’t want to, but it had to be done. I wasn’t in a right frame of mind to deal with it at that
precise point, but as Joe Stevens pointed out, ‘Look what this fuck Malcolm is saying about you,’ and it had to be responded to.

It was really wicked, really spiteful. He was just trying to make sure I had no chance of an ongoing career, trying to stick nails in my coffin kind of thing, rather than
just leave it alone and say, ‘Well, there it is, a parting of the ways . . .’ No, and that really reinforced my attitude about, ‘Right, I’m going to get you back, fucker!
Full steam ahead – as soon as I get back to England, straight to a lawyer . . . I want this fixed.’

To my mind they’d wrecked everything that was brilliant and glorious about the Sex Pistols, which was unity, and they tore the arse out of that through selfish shit. And it all ends up in
what? Celebrating a train robber? At my cost, my expense?

Then I have to run a lawsuit against them going, ‘Hello, don’t I count? Remember me? I wrote the songs!’ – at least the lyrics, and quite frankly, being real honest with
myself and everybody else, I don’t think anybody ever bought a Sex Pistols record because of the lead guitar solo or the drums or the bass – although I couldn’t have done those
lyrics without those three things. But I never got the respect and love that I think us as a band truly should have had for each other. So eat shit and die, you cunts. That’s my polite way of
saying, we could’ve been good.

Apparently there has been an old audio interview of me from 1978 doing the rounds lately online, where I’m talking about Jimmy Savile and basically saying,
‘Everyone knows he’s a child molester, but we’re not allowed to say.’ I don’t remember the interview. I’ve been told it was by Vivien Goldman, but I was speaking
dangerously out of hand, way before all of this became public knowledge. You have to tell it like it is, and how you really see it, and say what you have to endure behind the scenes.

People were calling me a filthy disgusting Sex Pistol or whatever. But what the fuck is
that
? Do you
not know
what is going on with
that
, that institutionalized, decrepit
pervert? He gets his OBE, then later he becomes
Sir
Jimmy Savile, but I don’t think there was any doubt at all about what he was really getting up to. In fact, I don’t think
enough of it’s come out. Everybody knew. It was common knowledge, but unspoken.

From a very early age, looking at him on
Top of the Pops
, you knew that he was just a wrong ’un. And he was always
having a smirk, and ‘letting you
know’. You could see it in the eyes what he was doing; you could read the body language.

So that was also how I knew about Savile – his eyes. I could tell he was deceitful, and harbouring something dark and ugly, and he was smirking about it in the knowledge, but not
declaring. The full-on audacity, it used to drive me nuts. That’s what I do, I watch a person’s eyes, and I know what’s going on with them from that. For me, the best actors or
actresses, they do all the telling in their eyes. Katharine Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Charlotte Rampling. You get so much depth in what they’re up to. They can go beyond the words.
It’s almost musical.

Radio DJs in Britain in the early to mid-’70s had become god-like. If it wasn’t young children they were abusing, they were definitely abusing something, because their power became
overwhelming and dictatorial. And they would propagate themselves there on BBC Radio as the purveyors of good taste, and careers could hinge on their negative impact.

It certainly took an awful long time for the BBC to spin a Sex Pistols record, and I doubt whether they have to any large extent to this day. Ever since, I’ve suffered all manner of
rigorous avoidance, all from these purveyors of good taste, who at the same time are up to horribly corrupting things. You had no option but to stand up against it and get banned outright forever,
or try to toe the line, which of course I couldn’t do.

A
t the time people in England wanted to live in tiny little boxy rooms that would be easy to heat in the winter. My front room at Gunter Grove, on
the other hand, was a wide expanse, practically like a ballroom, with a kitchen out the back, and two tiny bedrooms up top. That’s exactly all I wanted. I think the main room had probably
been used as an office space by whoever Steve Winwood had had in there, before I got my hands on it. I had other ideas.