Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (27 page)

The Jamaicans are so funny. They’d say to me in the street: ‘Are you a gunman? From May-hee-ko?’ But then U-Roy, the DJ originator, was like someone who’d just stepped
out of a Clint Eastwood movie. A great fella, mad as a hatter, but full-on with the Rasta thing, and I had lots of puzzlements. There was a hammock in the yard and I asked about it, and it turned
out that’s where his missus had to sleep at night, because when you’re on your period, you’re not allowed inside the house. That’s, y’know, grrr, kind of a
deal-breaker for me, innit? I’d see parts of that aspect of Rasta in other people we’d meet – the woman would have to walk behind the man by some distance.

I thought you can’t have those divisions and then rail against inequality in your music, because you’re enforcing it on other people yourself. So I saw a lot of problems with Rasta.
To my mind they’ve
got to bring the women and children in on an equal level with them. Room for improvement! And dangerous bugger that I am, I had to tell
’em!

Then we’d go into these very precarious ghetto areas and meet people like Tapper Zukie. He’d be very proud to show you his gang and their guns, and waltz up and down the street
waving them. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here, there could be a gun war at any second?’ That’s Jamaica, and these are very dangerous situations we got ourselves
into. Open-minded foolishness really was the only passport in and out of them. Sometimes, if you’re too aware of your surroundings, the good things might not happen for you, never mind the
bad.

We went to quite a few sound systems. Typical Jamaica, though – these things don’t start kicking up until about midnight, and you’re so stoned by then, to the point of barely
being able to speak or even stand. I’m sorry, but that pipe will knock you out. It’s a hard thing to become accustomed to, and being the white boy in the house, it’s shoved in
your face straight away. There’s your manhood challenge. I’d be mixing that up of course with Heinekens, and at that time beer was frowned on in reggae circles, but still it earns you
brownie points – two things to put you flat on your back, both at once. Well done, John!

My favourite people were probably the Congos, a vocal group who recorded one of their greatest albums at Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Black Ark studios. I loved them and their
families, and just their generosity in life. It was inspiring to be honest and really frank with them. All judgement went out of the window, as soon as you’d sit and talk with these fellas,
truly classic examples of passive resistance at its finest. Meant no harm to no one – superb, my kind of people.

We actually went to the Black Ark. I even tried to record with Lee Perry, but I couldn’t get to grips with him. Too many distractions, too nervous and too stoned. I was trying to fiddle
about with the Pistols song ‘Submission’, to do a Jamaica-inspired version of that. You’re trying to lay down a vocal, and there’s just too much
going on. There was a guitarist there called Chinna, and he had one of them wah-wah mouthpieces you put on a guitar. That was his big toy, and it was so distracting. It was a sound I
didn’t like.

On a lot of Perry’s mixes from that era, you hear this creaking noise in the background. I found out it was the studio door, the hinges were rusty, and it was just people coming in and
out, which they seemed to be doing most of the time. His equipment – or lack of – was very, very primitive but achieving outstanding results. Admirable. And it was all one-take.

Perry went mad not long after I was there and burned down his studio. He’d supposedly had an argument over money with Island Records, and apparently painted over all the masters with green
paint, so that they couldn’t take them off him. Rather than having his music stolen, he destroyed it.

When I was there, the bigger the bong, the more active he became. Don’t know how that works for them fellas. I still don’t know to this day how you can smoke the weed at all without
destroying your voice. It takes the top end right out of me, and all that flows out is a scratchy noise. I don’t have the pipes for that.

To be very honest, it came as a surprise when I was asked to Perry’s studio. I didn’t get my chops together. I wasn’t prepared for it. Ouch. Tail-between-the-legs time.

The funniest moments were probably with the bass and drum supremos, Sly & Robbie. They were fully affiliated with Island, so it wasn’t really about work, it was just social. They
really are like the Nile Rodgers of Jamaica. They ribbed Don no end. They ribbed me too. ‘C’mon mon, what you wearing dat big coat faaar?’ By the end, I was down to flip-flops,
shorts and a T-shirt, because that’s how it should’ve been right at the start. I was terribly self-aware of just how white and pale my skin was. I was looking like a cross between a
concentration camp victim and Dracula.

In terms of the music I picked up, I got completely drawn into a whole area there called ‘Dread In The Arena’, which was the big thing at the time, and all the offshoot records that
were coming out
using that theme. It was fantastic, with lots of Johnny Clarke dub versions. When Front Line eventually put out Johnny Clarke records they didn’t have
that aspect, and that’s the very aspect I would have wanted them to have focused on – the pure dread of what dub was. It’s all about tripping –
mind tripping
. Just
free up yourself. You don’t have to dance correctly or know any of the right moves, you do what you like. Just as long as you know how to enjoy yourself. Fantastic. That’s what dub
was.

I grew up with reggae music; it was always around me as a kid, so it was fantastic to really feel it as it should be felt, actually in Jamaica. I loved it there. Jamaica became part of me.

Gunter Grove became my backdrop to get myself properly sorted out, and get a new group off the ground. It was at one of my parties there that I met Gloria Knight, who was
actually a writer for the
Sunday Mirror
, and was married to her editor. We kind of met through someone else in a roundabout social way, and it just seemed deeply hilarious to be hanging
around with anyone that had any connection at all with what I viewed as the gossip rags. They’d been making my life a misery for the last year or so! It was like this: Oooh, this
shouldn’t work. But it did. Good came out of it, and bad came with it. She suggested that I needed a lawyer.

There was some weird stuff going on around us while we were in Jamaica. McLaren had got some of his people out there, sneaking around trying to film me for his idiotic movie
The Great Rock
‘n’ Roll Swindle
. Also, Branson had Devo, an electronic band from Ohio who were signed to Virgin, out there, or at least some of them. He may or may not have been trying to get me
to be their singer. I certainly don’t think he ever asked me. Sometimes inebriations lead to foolishness. I know we caught one of them spying on us. He’d come down onto our balcony, he
was looking through the curtains, and Dennis frightened him off. That was really my only connection with them.

The idea of joining a band like Devo replacing the lead singer
would be an absolute no-no to me. It would make me very angry. That was Malcolm’s idea with the
Pistols towards the end, replacing me. You can’t replace the singer. It will always be the band for me – the singer. That’s the direction and the persona and the energy of the
thing, particularly with Devo.

I was constantly aware of people trying to codge off me, like parasites, using me to prop up the tuppence worth of talent or involvement that they’d never really had in the first
place.

Most importantly, Malcolm was trying to claim my name, Johnny Rotten, as his property, and that had to be stopped. How can you try and steal someone’s nickname?
Huh
? On what
grounds? There’s no doubts about it, I’ll see you in court, boy. Which I wouldn’t have bothered with previously. I would’ve just let it go, and moved on. But that kind of
spite to try and fuck me out of my own life, my own name, my own career. Very wicked.

So Gloria put me in touch with Brian Carr, a solicitor who specialized in the entertainment business. Not long after that, she and I seriously fell apart, when her paper went and wrote a story
that I was a recovering heroin addict. My God, talk about getting it all upside down. I could have revealed all sorts of her social errors but I’m not one for that kiss-and-tell kind of
gossip.

But Brian Carr, the solicitor, was hilarious. When I first met him, he looked like Abraham Lincoln; he had that same beardy thing, black semi-wavy hair, and sapphire blue eyes. He was a
weird-looking man. When he talked there was always spittle rolling out of his bottom lip onto his beard. So I found him to be, ‘Oh God, he’s so unlikeable, this could work!’ And
indeed, he was very good there for a few years; he’s the chap who really got the proper barristers to sort out the case against the Pistols’ estate and got everything set up the way I
wanted it.

I didn’t want to walk off with all the loot or anything. I made sure that when it came to a settlement, we surviving members would get equal shares of the spoils. Even though I was
harbouring a really serious resentment for the way Steve and Paul had behaved
against me, I didn’t want blood money or dirty money, as I would view it. I just wanted
what was mine, what Malcolm tried to take away from me.

Funnily enough, as we settled in at Gunter Grove, we became aware that Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, lived across the road – and Brian Eno lived at the top, in a converted
church. There was immediately a rumour that Peter Grant offered to manage me – again, one of those fabulous press rumours – although, after Malcolm, what a delicious rumour! I was
feeding off it a little – you’re always considering the options.

Peter Grant earned a wonderful reputation when Led Zeppelin first went to America as this full-on hard fella. No back-down from him! That’s all well and fine, but I don’t want
bullies in my ranks. I don’t want anyone to turn around and go, ‘Do this, or else . . .!’ I’m never gonna have that, because Johnny’s an alpha male. It
couldn’t’ve worked, and wouldn’t’ve worked, ever.

The only way that I knew Peter Grant owned the house opposite was through something Dave Crowe said. We had a pet pussycat, which Dave named Satan. It was a young kitten that was abandoned, and
Dave told me that it was ‘abandoned by that bastard, Led Zeppelin’s manager from across the road. He kicked him out and I saved Satan.’

He saved Satan all right, but Dave went back into his cubby hole, and the cat litter tray was up in my place, right next to the kitchen. So I had to be the one to clean up the cat litter, even
though it was his pet. Poor little Satan, it was a tiny little thing, jet black, a mini cat – it must’ve had a growth deficiency. It looked kitten-like, even in adulthood, but it never
really bonded with me. It would go down the staircase and meow outside Dave’s hatch. By now, Dave had moved into the downstairs apartment, which was self-contained, and we never converted it
fully, we just knocked through a small hole with a hatch, to get up and down from one part to the other. But Dave would never open the hatch, and that poor cat was abandoned.

Meanwhile, I was trying to put together my new group. Jah Wobble was still one of my best mates, and he’d often been picking up Sid’s bass to have a go
– probably more than Sid did. Wobble was very much still a novice with it, but that’s not what matters: I wanted him in.

In subsequent years, Wobble’s been making out that what we were trying to do was some kind of dub band – and this is from a bass player who was barely learning at the time.
He’s looking through seriously warped lenses – maybe he’s trying to hoodwink his way into the current crop of ‘whitey does reggae’ bands.

That certainly wasn’t our angle at the time. At least, it wasn’t mine. I wanted something completely new and refreshing from what very quickly became the format of the Sex Pistols.
We were only together for a brief time but it did become a format – a format of writing which bored the pants off me.

Being open-minded to all kinds of music was Lesson One in punk, but that didn’t seem to be understood by many of the alleged punk bands that followed on after, who seemed to be waving this
idea of a punk manifesto. I’m sorry, but I never did this for the narrow-minded. I was horrified by the cliché that punk was turning itself into.

I didn’t – and still don’t – have too many punk records in my collection, because I never really liked them. Buzzcocks, Magazine, X-Ray Spex, the Adverts, the Raincoats
– those, I liked. They were skirmishing on the outside of it rather than the typical slam-dunk bands that drove me nuts, because they all sounded the same, all chasing the same carthorse.
I’m not impressed by macho bullshit bravado. It doesn’t have any content and it’s not actually aimed at anything other than trying to show off your masculinity. Failed!

You had all these males-only bands trying to out-threaten each other. To me that’s the lowest common denominator. There were so many of them all doing the exact same thing, all of them
completely stupid, not understanding Rule Number One: there are
no rules. And yet this lot rigidly adhered to rules and regulations. They became the new Boo Nazis.

For my part in it all, I’d opened up an entire new different genre and way of viewing music, and what happened when the door was opened? In walked all the flotsam and jetsam, who were very
proud of being stupid.

I was coming from the standpoint of sharing my life’s experiences, not to go into isolation, as punk was doing to itself. It narrowed its outlook – for me, propagated by poor old Joe
Strummer. In his mind, he was leading this political punk thing, with a vision of us all standing there like Solidarno
ś
ć
, waving banners, and that’s a load of bollocks. If
you’re not doing this for the poor old biddy that lives next door and can’t afford the heating in the winter, then you don’t count at all. Studded leather jackets for everyone is
not a creed I can endorse.

So my mindset was, ‘I can’t take no more of that.’ I was envisaging a consortium of like-minded loonies prepared to jump into the next universe without any tools, and find our
way that way, and be an exciting possibility. And indeed it was, because we were not playing to any set standard of musical clichés. In that way, the band can’t be revisioned in
hindsight into any one person’s schemes. We were schemeless. It was a free-form adventure and things like musical inadequacies didn’t matter at all. Not to me. I had a stomping ground I
could have stuck very safely to and just done Johnny Rottenisms, and that no doubt would have worked, but I wasn’t interested in it. Sorry, but I’m a big risk-taker, me.