Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (34 page)

My problem is that I’m intensely loyal to the people I work with. I say three strikes and you’re out, but in the end I’m always there for four, five and six, because I believe
that in the long run loyalty gets you better results than ‘hissy-fest fights and then separate’.

With Wobble, too much rubbish got in the way. He made himself uncomfortable to be around. I’d had enough of it. There were too many manoeuvres going on that I thought were sly and
underhand. While we were recording
Metal Box
, he was secretly taking the tapes of some of our backing tracks to use on a solo album he was making for Virgin. One time, I actually caught him
in the act. One of my best mates! We’ve never properly made up on that. I said,
‘We have to part our ways. You’re my mate but this is the end of the line
for you in PiL. It’s dead, it’s not working. We’re not mates in the band, and that’s a tragedy. But let’s stay mates.’ And that’s how, for me, it was
left.

So now it was down to just me and Keith. Everything was far from on an even keel in the PiL camp, but there was something that brought a little joy to our hearts. Pretty much
as soon as we got back from America, Malcolm’s Sex Pistols movie
The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle
was finally hitting the cinemas.

I was very, very happy, because it was excruciatingly bad. Me and Keith were over the moon at how rubbish it was – over-long and full of Malcolm pontifications. There were various Nazi
outfits and rubber masks, for no reason at all that I could see. The best scene in it was the opening sequence, with the hangings and the burning of the effigies. That was great. I thought,
‘Oh my God, this is going somewhere. This has got a real, deep message I’m going to be terrified of.’ But no, then he threw it away. It just became an exercise in sticking pins in
a voodoo doll – i.e., me.

It was ineffectual and very limp-wristed really, because he wasn’t replacing me with anything. He wasn’t grasping the bigger issues of what that band really was. He was just trying
to trivialize it in order to make himself look bigger. The Ten Commandments according to Malcolm: ‘Oh, and then I thought . . . And then the idea occurred to me . . .’ – in that
pompous voice! Who do you think’s gonna listen to that, Malcolm? Now we know why you locked yourself in your office for so long – because you were perfecting
that
!

It was everything I wanted it to be, because now Joe Public could see what it was I’d escaped from. And, by contrast, what it is I’m actually capable of – please judge me
thereon. If you think I should be involved in a world of swindle – well, fuck you!

I felt like he was taking everything backwards into shyster. It wasn’t done well, it was trivial, it was mockery with no good intent.
A classic example of Malcolm
when he was left to his own devices – a disaster. That film, that album and all of it, it wasn’t searching for any good in it. It was all on a superficial fairy-dust kind of trip.

Of course, part of me was thinking, ‘I’m trying to get PiL going here, and by inevitable association they’re dragging us back into this idea that everything we do is a
con.’ That caused an enormous amount of damage for me, because people assumed that to be the truth of it. All they had to do was listen to any of the words I wrote, any two sentences
I’d strung together, to know that I wasn’t doing it for the money.

And then they’re auditioning singers to be Rotten – hahaha! – and you know where they auditioned them? At the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, right by the flats I was brought up in.
How we laughed.

Overall, we were really chuffed. It was a happy little period for me and Keith. That summer of 1980, however, Richard Branson invited me over to his canal boat in Little Venice in north-west
London. He’s since built a studio out of it, but he was living on it at the time – no doubt it was a trendy thing to do, while he was waiting for his new castle to be established.

So I went over there, in good faith, but I was really appalled and annoyed and disgusted when I realized that the meeting was all about this agenda of his wanting me to reform with Steve Jones
and Paul Cook. They were now calling themselves the Professionals, and Branson played me a rough cassette of these awful, duh-duh-duh tunes, that they expected me to write some words for. No
songwriting, no direction – just terrible.

I still had all the pressures I was going through with the court case. God, my head – how I coped with it, I don’t know. And Steve and Paul were still siding with Malcolm, who lest
we forget had stolen my name and was trying to end my career.

I became very bitter about this whole meeting, because I’d invested wholeheartedly in PiL. I’d made the right decisions for Public Image when we started. It was the right decision
for me. It was comfortably uncomfortable. At this point, we may have been at a crossroads, but it was still the right decision, and I wasn’t going to take two steps backwards into that kind
of nonsense. That would be so wrong. Tail between the legs.

The answer, obviously, was ‘
Fucking no!
’

It worries me that this book may get too linear. My biggest fear is that I’ll come over lecture-y. The written word is a dry thing, without the emphasis on certain words
in a sentence. I think musically, and I talk musically, and that’s the way I formulate songs. If you read the lyrics on a piece of paper they don’t have the same clout as the
pronunciation there in the music.

I love oratory. I loved voice projection at Kingsway College, learned how to really read and project the meaning of a thing. It was something I was shy of up until that point, and it became
suddenly really interesting. I looked forward to having to stand up and read what I was writing, or read what we were studying in front of the class. A very nerve-wracking thing, but totally
enjoyable when you’re explaining it properly.

My most entertaining thing to do was always read Shakespeare with an ‘ooh-arr’ yokel’s accent. Then it becomes not the language of pompous rhetoric – it becomes real.
‘Owt, owt, breef carndle! Loife is but a warrking
shadow . . . conspoiring wi him outta lord an deff!’ Then it sounds like someone in a pub talking, which is
what Shakespeare really meant. He didn’t want this to be confusing to the masses. By the time the likes of Oxford and Cambridge got hold of it, they changed it into something else.

The same goes for a lot of classical music, too. The harpsichord parts are now played on grand pianos, with thumbs. This is something a music teacher taught me once: if you’re going to try
to be in any way accurate about playing piano pattern lines, you can’t use your thumbs, because thumbs were not part of playing the harpsichord. In fact, there was no place to put them.
Fascinating. I took in that lesson more than any other thing. The actual playing part was boring. But the thesis and the theory behind it always fascinated me.

The same with art. I could listen to people talk about what they were interpreting a painting to be to teachers, and I found that infinitely more fascinating than sitting there and trying to do
an angry brush-stroke on the count of three. ‘All together now. Got your brushes ready?
Anger!
I want to see anger on the page . . .’

Years later, when I went to Cologne in Germany, there was an art exhibition that some of the local Germans wanted to take me to. I went, and there was a Captain Beefheart segment. Really small
things, but I really understood the anger, and the Beefheart way in his paintings. To look at the real things rather than on album covers was fantastic.

Phwoooar, I wanted one of them paintings. I also wanted a
Blue Peter
badge, from the BBC TV kids’ show. But I never wanted a
Crackerjack
pencil. Everybody wanted a
Blue
Peter
badge because it was a great thing. It may well have been plastic, but it had that beautiful three-masted ship printed
on it. Plastic was very modern at the time
and therefore incredibly exciting. It was like a medieval shield, a tiny little thing, but impressive. White with the blue ship on, that’s the one I wanted.

As an aside, this idea of what a singer’s voice should be or shouldn’t be, is revolting to me.
American Idol, X Factor
– they all expect singers to do all the trills and
all the runs, that singing instructors require – the gospel background. What a load of bollocks, man. Why can’t you just sing the way you FEEL? It doesn’t actually have to be what
you would call musical, just how you feel in the moment, communicating something. The concept of tune, or tuneless, to me is bizarre. I know when I hear someone, it doesn’t have to be a G
Flat Minor, perfect, but it has to be accurate. The emphasis of the words, and the tonality, and the
pain
in the sound that they’re procuring, and the message. If those things come
across, tuneless doesn’t exist.

Where being in tune counts very much, of course, is on boat cruises. That’s what
American Idol
is really trying to procure! Boat cruise singers! My God, hahaha! I always enjoyed
this story about the Cure, because the singer, Robert Smith – he can’t bear aeroplanes. So the band took the
QE2
to New York and the rumour – I don’t know what truth
is in it – was that they played on there. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I love the idea!

I’ve never met Robert Smith or talked to him or had anything to do with them. They’re complete strangers to me, and in an odd good way, I like that. Every time I’ve ever got
close to people whose music I liked, I’ve mostly found that I didn’t like
them
. Look at the range of music I listen to: it’s just about everything, right? I love what I
garner in terms of emotion from what I’m hearing in a record. Even when I describe it, I just go, Uuuuuh-huh! I get a lump in my throat,
because I love music, I love
listening to what people do, but I don’t love it when they think music has to be strict, and according to a certain sequence of notes, and perfection of those notes therein.

I actually love vast amounts of classical music. I love Mozart, beyond belief. But I don’t think Mozart was too interested in accuracy over than emotion. He was a genius apparently, and a
crazy fuck. Well, I think it’s the crazy fuck that I hear when I hear Mozart, and in particular when I heard him played in a North London pub after my father’s funeral. Wow! That was
Requiem – dun-dun-nun, dun-dunnn. And you know why it got played? Not because that’s such a great tune, it’s because it was featured in the film
Barry Lyndon
– my
mother was a Barry, my father was a Lydon. They put an ‘n’ too many in his name. But . . . It was fun to see what you would think would be the local hooligans and gangsters, and the
Irish contingent, and the huge vast army, that us as a family and neighbourhood have collected over the years, listening to that, instead of – what was the current hits at the time? No Doubt,
or In Doubt. More like, Doubt-Ful.

I never met Gwen Stefani either. I’m going to contradict myself here, but I’d like to. Don’t know if she’s all right. You never know, and unfortunately in the world of
showbiz, people tend to hang around with people who have equal amounts of money. There’s reasons for that, because you don’t want people parasiting off you, but money does dictate who
your company is, so by default even rock stars run a royalty ring. They’re only up there with equal friends who’ve won Grammys also. You see this at the Grammys year in, year out. The
Taylor Swift brigade, you know.

Hold on for one second. Dada-da-nana-nana – tay-kee-laaaah! Oo, what a lousy drink. Someone bought me a bottle
of it the other day, and I got completely sidetracked
a moment there. Urgh. Actually, it’s Mezcal. My God, why don’t they just give me the mescaline and be done with it?

You’d think after meningitis and all those hallucinations, a person like me would never dream of going near acid, yet I found acid very tolerable back in the day. At fifteen and sixteen,
going to festivals and concerts, I rather liked it. Everyone around me was screaming, ‘Oh, it’ll do this, it’ll do that.’ No! I think from all that stuff that went on when I
was young, I’ve learned to decipher what’s real and what’s not in my brain. I know when my brain’s playing up. I’m now able to go, ‘Stop that, that’s
silly!’ I use a Monty Python reference there. I used to watch those shows rigidly, I learned so much from comedy. Norman Wisdom, all the one-liners – ‘There’s nothing wrong
with
me
!’

In my very young days in Benwell Road, we had a tiny black-and-white TV set. I got used to black-and-white, and couldn’t adapt to colour very well. We never had colour TV at home. I think
I bought my family their first colour TV. The first one I had in colour, with a remote, was a Sony when I moved into Gunter Grove, and it had a remote inasmuch as it had three buttons: on/off,
volume, and channel. That was complicated science back then! The trouble was, I never got around to putting a proper aerial in, so there was a coathanger used – the old Irish way! I grew up
thinking that TV was automatically always disturbed by someone going to the toilet. I never related it to them blocking the signal; I thought it must be to do with the flushing.

As I said before, I loved
Doctor Who
, but only when the Daleks were in it. The rest was stupid. ‘That’s not real!’ That’s why I don’t like science fiction; I
don’t think it offers too much. It’s a nice exploration of minds, but ultimately the journeys are fairly tedious, because it ends up in that
asexuality we call
Star Trek
. It’s one step outside of how human beings actually really do evolve, or how communities work, and it’s not a step worth taking. Science fiction doesn’t seem to
understand that. It seems to always come from the point of view of one man’s lonely journey, and therefore for me very judgemental. That’s how I view Asimov – judgemental! Not
great. There’s not an ‘us’ thing in it.

Whereas, again, Shakespeare, which you’d think would be bizarre to me, isn’t. It’s the language. He’s using words, and the sound of them sometimes, rather than just the
meanings, so the meaning becomes something else entirely; you just follow the poetic beat of it. And the pronunciation, you garner ever so much more information from that than you do by just
observing the words on a piece of paper.