Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (32 page)

The presenter of
Juke Box Jury
at that time was Noel Edmonds – Mr Condescension, obsequious to the last, a man whose daily condescending was truly on its way
down the staircase into the basement. What he does is a con, descending.

Joan Collins was on that week – I mean, who the hell is she to tell you what’s what about music? Also there was Elaine Paige, who was sitting next to me, and whom I got on with
famously, oddly enough. People like her are not my enemy, but the pretentious pop lot are. She sings in musicals. She was great fun. She was just, ‘You’re so funny, but right!’
I’m a sucker for that chat-up line. She grasped that where I was coming from was actually a sense of fun in all of it, rather than trying to be deadly serious about the frivolity of pop
music.

You were meant to hold up a little disc that said ‘Hit!’ or ‘Miss!’ for each record they played. One time I just held it sideways on – it’s neither a hit nor
a miss,
it just is what it is
. Then that stupid bloody host with the beard was expecting me to like a particular record because it was made by my alleged fellow punks – a Siouxsie
Banshee thing. ‘No, that isn’t how it works, I’m not a cliché and I won’t be pigeonholed into doing the expected just because that’s what they want of me. I
will express my true feelings and you can like it or lump it.’ For my mind that’s the presumption of why I was invited onto that show, you’d get an honest response.

At the end, you were supposed to do a handshake thing, and wave to the camera – this was all set up beforehand. ‘No! That’s false, that’s Joan Collins’s universe,
not mine.’ I wouldn’t get involved with the sociability side of it. I ostracized myself and walked off. Maybe sometimes I go a little bit too far, ahead of the norm, but slowly but
surely it does have an influence –
Juke Box Jury
got shelved after that series. Good work, John!

Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that our next Public Image Ltd single, ‘Memories’, didn’t do well commercially. The song itself jumps backwards and forwards from one texture
into another, we thought, in a very poignant way – from brittle to warm. I loved it,
but it wasn’t a hit because it was nearly five minutes long and we knew it
wouldn’t get any airplay because of that. Keith and I were in total agreement on this: neither of us knew where you’d cut it, or what you’d cut out, and what would be the point?
It was the length of it that got the true emotions across. You can’t cut out the last chapter of a mystery novel just because it has an extra twenty-five pages. But what that does, though, is
it alienates you to playlists. Which honestly has never really been a problem for me.

The tracks getting longer was something that evolved quite naturally: ‘There isn’t any point in stopping this, because we haven’t run out of ideas yet.’ It wasn’t
any great analytical study about it: ‘Oh, I think we should do a ten-minute one!’

‘Albatross’, the one about Malcolm’s cowardice, ended up at that length, if only because that’s all we could fit on the record. It deserved that length. You let the song
dictate the pace and the time, rather than you trying to master it and control it and make it all note-perfect. I find those kind of approaches to be stifling, a contamination.

It’s not how I feel a human being actually physically and mentally works. When we sit down to relax, or agitate ourselves, and/or whatever, we use music almost as a backdrop to our own
ramblings, our own thoughts. We were giving you something there to work at that with, where you don’t have to be focusing on counting the beats, and ‘What are the dance steps?’
It’s more, ‘What are the mind-sets?’ Every time you play a thing like that back, it’s different, there’s another angle you come by, so you’re not trapped by the
precision of it all.

I loved the recording area in the Manor. Once I got in there and got over all my fears and phobias, I would be there for hour after hour after hour. What we’d do, we’d break it up
into sections, each person would have their own time in there to sort themselves out, to work alone, and then combine the efforts. That was interesting. You’d go in and you’d hear what
someone was trying out or fumbling about with or rehearsing on their own.

For me, I couldn’t get myself interested in going in until it was
way
late at night. Everybody felt that too, because it would be sunny out, and this was a
fascinating old castle-y type structure, and there’s acres of fields to run around in and things to suss out, and there’s a three-mile hike to a pub and that’s good fun. And the
old stonework, and ‘lording it up at the Manor’, and all the food and drink – I mean, you just can’t help yourself.

On the down side, there was the screaming from Keith, and knowing that Wobble couldn’t control his temper beyond a certain point and was highly capable of mangling Keith – who in
fairness was a squealing ferret. Wobble would go into a freeze, like a silence, and I knew what could possibly be coming from that, and I knew I had to stop it. I have this constant attitude that
violence can’t solve anything. You cannot have it in your workplace. If anybody oversteps that line – that’s not a rule, that’s an absolute value – then they’ve
destroyed themselves.

Other times, there was a great sense of fun. For instance: ashtrays on piano strings! I’ve had a deep love of harpsichord music since I was young – stuff you’d see on TV, some
old Bach or Beethoven, done on the original instruments. It would absolutely thrill me, that sound. There you are in the studio and there’s a grand piano, and I’m out looking for metal
ashtrays to get that twangy metallic buzz going. What a racket, much more thrilling! And, on the piano keys – elbows only!

Keith, Wobble and I were all on the same page with this kind of experimentation. All our animosities were at personal levels, which was a shame. All these discordant resonances, these sonorous
tones that drift in and out, are just wonderful. They’re almost tune-destroying, but soul-wise very beneficial. You need lots of places, not only for the performer, but the listener to spark
free thought from. Of course, none of this would be considered proper work in the studio. But you get great results because you’re really intrigued by sound, at least I am – totally.
That’s the one thing of being an avid record collector. What you do is you build up this repertoire
inside your psyche of different sound elements. You’re not
imitating or copying, you’re advancing it. Or, as many musos would tell you,
destroying it
.

Lyrically, I was going to a very different place too. While Joe Strummer would be busy watching the news trying to assimilate political headlines, I’d be listening to the story of a young
girl raped, and I’d find the humanity in that to be much more interesting – to try and get across the great grief that girl went through. She had been captured by two men, blindfolded,
bundled into the boot of a car, driven out to the country and raped. If she hadn’t run away she might even have been murdered, and she remembered very little because the pain of all of this
was so overwhelming.

All she did remember was a tune played on the cassette deck in the car, and that’s how they caught the men responsible – when they traced the car, the cassette was still in the tape
deck. It was the tune she remembered. They never mentioned in the media what the tune was, but I actually found out that it was a Bee Gees song. Having a great love and affinity for the Bee Gees I
found that even more interesting. So, hence the line in the song: ‘And the cassette played poptones.’

And all this to perhaps our most hypnotic and uplifting track, with Keith in full flow. What a great way to draw the listener in to grasp that poor girl’s pain, and have a sense of empathy
for her. Every time I perform ‘Poptones’, that story is totally going on inside me. I’m completely that person, that victim. Same with ‘Annalisa’. It might be foolish
of me but it’s what I do. It’s an empathy for all victims. It’s not a great thing to do that, to put yourself in the position of a victim, it’s very sad and deeply hurtful.
But nowhere near as severe as the pain that the actual victim went through.

It was about dealing with different human emotions, the ones that normally get pushed aside. If it be Pandora’s Box I’m opening, I’m doing it with a hammer and a chisel. I
broke that padlock, I broke that fear of the unknown.

‘The Suit’, on the other hand, was about my mate Paul Young who went and borrowed my suit without telling me for some date he had with a girl from Totteridge
Park. He put it back afterwards and of course it was all smelled-up. And I loved that suit! I don’t mind sharing clothes, but it’s a bit much when it’s your best suit that
you’re saving for the right moment, and it’s got stains on it – and not all beer stains – and there you are like you’ve been rolling in the hay. He could have
dry-cleaned it, you know! Cheeky monkey, haha.

‘No Birds Do Sing’ is a reference to that Keats poem,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
– ‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,/Alone and palely loitering?’ etc etc.
It’s a haunting, ghostly kind of a poem, so I thought I’d apply that love-forlorn thing to life in suburbia. It’s quite an irritating song, but you try living in Tring.

I don’t think anybody, up to that point, had attacked synths quite the way we did, to create these tense atmospheres. ‘Careering’ is about the troubles in the North of Ireland.
The ethnic divides across the nonsense of religion, which later translated into gang warfare. I can’t support any group that believes that, by the killing of another, it improves their cause.
For me, once you’ve murdered someone, you have no cause at all.

Musically it had to be so stark to achieve its aim, which is to make the listener aware. In all that Catholic–Protestant nonsense, for me, there’s ‘bacteria’ on
‘both sides of the river’ – I’m not gonna pick one load over another. I’m not going to be arguing with people over which ‘bacteria’ is better than the
other. Indeed, all religiously fuelled or politically fuelled situations are contaminants. There’s a manipulation that goes on there that the followers aren’t quite aware of, and they
should be. You’ve got to know when you’re being used.

That song caused me a lot of problems in Ireland, particularly in the South, where they thought I had no right to be dissing the IRA. Great shame. It’s the same with the song
‘Religion’: I was put down for making a direct attack on the Catholic Church, but I
think you need to. There can’t be any subjects in life that are
sacrosanct and untouchable, because these are the very things that lead to all the troubles. Armed gangs of murderers will never ever get my vote. And they’ll never ever lead to a world of
peace and happiness.

On ‘Radio 4’, though, I couldn’t fit in vocally, so I didn’t sing at all. I cut my bit out, to give the band some space. I was more than happy and pleased to break away
from the demand that you’ve got to be singing on everything. I’m doing lots of other different things, not just singing. There’s all kinds of recording decisions and producer
stuff and adding little bits myself here and there and whatever, so it’s a jolly good mix-and-match.

We wanted to break every rule, every discipline. It was like opening up a toy store to four toy-starved children. We wanted the deepest growl from the bass end, so it would almost shatter your
ears. Other places, what you might think is some kind of electronic gadgetry, is actually just the TV recorded onto a two-track, and sped up and down. It’s all fairly abstract, but
there’s always an underpinning of danceability – although, as many of my friends told me, ‘You need three legs to dance to that one, John!’

Every track was just, work it out quickly and bang it down. Often one of us would have to muck in on drums – Keith stood in on ‘Poptones’, and Wobble on
‘Careering’. I loved all that. I loved the fear. It was like a runaway truck speeding down a hill with no brakes. We were just hoping that there was a rise at the end.

Not long after the Pistols broke up in 1978, I did an audition for the Who’s movie
Quadrophenia
, because Pete Townshend asked me to. He wanted me to try out for
the lead role, the one that the English actor, that ratty character with the black hair, Phil Daniels, eventually landed. Come the time, the Who’s manager didn’t like me, and they
didn’t think that I’d be able to carry it through a movie. They were probably, frankly, dead right, because I’d have needed some coaching or education as to how a film was put
together at that point, and I just wasn’t prepared to listen to anyone about anything.

Throughout my career, Pete Townshend has always shown a favourable, helpful point of view. Our paths first crossed in the early days of the Pistols, when we were demoing at the Who’s
studio. Mr Townshend found out who was using it and said, ‘We won’t charge you.’ So I’ve got nothing but complete respect for him. He also did some favours for my brother
Jimmy’s band, 4" Be 2".

He’s one of those characters who’s not understood completely, but in the music/band side of things, many people, if they bothered to step forward, would tell you that he’s done
everything he can to help you, while keeping his name out of it. He’ll make studios available, he’ll talk to you, he’ll run through songs with you, and he’ll tell you
what’s missing in there. When he tells you Who stories, you get the feeling that you’re actually in the band. It’s not, ‘And then I . . .’ – he’s talking
as a band to you. So, meeting Roger Daltrey years later, that was the first thing we had in common. ‘Oh, you’ve been with Pete? Oh, blah blah blah blah.’ So we had a root-canal
conversation.

It’s impossible to catalogue it, other than you feel there’s a protective spirit when Pete’s around. It’s always favourable and open-minded, and if he doesn’t
understand what your ideas are, he will not tell you different. He will back you even on that, and that’s kind of father-like. I know he’s someone I could call if I wanted to, but
I’m an independent spirit and I don’t want to run it that way. But he would be absolutely without doubt available for anything. He’s just that kind of person.