Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (35 page)

I love Shakespeare live, if it’s done well. I’ve seen James Earl Jones do Othello years ago – phwoar, wow! I love the audacity of just walking in off the street to some lesser
playhouse, to see something that looked on the billboard like complete crud. Like fringe theatre. It’s thrilling, the embarrassing closeness to the actors, then realizing what it is
they’re going through, to be able to pull that off. It’s kind of a really good cheer-up for me, because that’s what live gigs are. So I understand it from that point of view, and
I listen, I suppose, more intently than the regular audience.

The nightmare of everything like that, though, including modern dance, is that the audience let the performers down. One time, me and Nora got taken to see
Swan Lake
, the ballet, by
Caroline Coon, the punk journalist – back when she was hanging out with Paul Simonon, from the Clash. Paul’s warm, I like him, and that night, the four of us had great laughs.
Caroline’s line was, ‘You’re so into
Swan Lake
, John – there’s even a bit of it in “Death Disco”, so you’re going to love it!’ It was
her wicked check on me.

So Nora and I went over there, got in the cab, and there we are stood outside the theatre – we might not even have known beforehand. Bloody hell, you took us to
ballet! It was astounding, but, I tell you what, I got bored really quickly. I couldn’t help it, the bar looked more enticing. When you see ballet on TV, as boring as that can be, you just
see the leaps and the pointed toes and all of that, and that’s barely endurable, but when it’s live, with a live orchestra in the pit, you can barely hear the orchestra.

But when forty girls jump up and down on their pointed toes, you can hear that like hob-nailed boots at the back of a terrace. It’s like an invading army of hooligans. It’s really
loud; the wooden floor echoes and reverberates. I thought, ‘Urgh, that’s bloody discomforting!’ That’s the other thing for the spectator: the pain involved in that,
it’s pretty hard to watch. Nora would tell me stories. Her sister took ballet when she was younger, but she wasn’t good enough, because she was slightly bigger-boned, shall we say? She
later ran a ballet school in Germany. It’s a sad thing. When I saw her sister’s feet, just how that big toe is nobbled into something really, really ugly. And the arthritis and the pain
in later life. Now, at least, I understand the work ethic.

But the audience at these things is vile and snobbish. When they’re too trendy, and too involved in their own arsehole back scene of it, they’re missing the point.

When you’re talking about missing the point, though, the majority of punks win the prize! They just got involved with the clothing, rather than the content. They certainly missed the
politics, didn’t they? America’s interpretation, from their early days of poetry-reading punk, to absolute violence punk – just awful, both aspects of that were too much, and too
ridiculous for me. I don’t want the over-simplification of either end of that. I want an absorption of all of it, but a good sense of right and wrong about it. Don’t go too far into
anything, it gets you wrong.

Listen, I know I’m swinging left, right, and all over the place, but it’s all roots to dig into, and that’s the correct procedure, ultimately. I can’t do this
all
chronologically.

T
he title of this chapter comes from a poster that Poly Styrene, the singer from X-Ray Spex, gave me while I was living at Gunter Grove. They used
to lock her up occasionally and take her off to the madhouse. She’d break out and always make a beeline for my house. They even came for her at Gunter one night, so she bought me that poster,
because it was kind of relevant. Double negatives, I love ’em. Apparently, much later, Kurt Cobain turned that idea into a song lyric. Maybe he got it from a picture of my living room at the
time.

The sentiment, coming from her, was really charming – wonderful, from a nutter! Nothing wrong with you, Poly! It’s the shitstem around her that was wrong. I thought she was
borderline genius, really – the songs, everything about her was just hilarious! She may have been inwardly very depressed, but outwardly she was good company, a fun person. She was good fun
until the ambulance turned up for her, with the police. And I had a house full of natty dreads at the time. Don Letts and some of his posse had come around too, so they were panicking. They thought
it was a police raid. No, no, lads, it’s just the nutter squad.

John Gray’s mother was a nutter. I liked her, but he felt embarrassed about her. I thought that was a bad way to be, because people are what they are, and
I’ve always found people who were slightly nutty to be highly entertaining and brilliant company. They view life a little bit differently. Two left shoes, maybe, but two left shoes are okay,
if that’s what you’ve got. I’m totally inspired by people who come at things in different ways, so lunacy to me is not a thing to run away from. It’s enthralling to be in a
lunatic’s company. If I had a job in a mental institution, it would be the best job ever, to me, the thrill of my life. I wouldn’t be able to tell whether I was the patient or the
doctor. Sometimes the two are the same thing, you know? I loved that Pete Hammill song: ‘The Institute Of Mental Health Burning.’ Burning!

Life at Gunter Grove, however, was starting to get me down. I was bored and fed up with it. I felt entrapped – trapped in my own house. It didn’t feel like my house at all. It had
become a common room for the flotsam and jetsam of London at that time. Very uncomfortable. I had no way of switching off, other than locking the door and moving out from time to time.

Martin Atkins, who’d joined us at the very end of
Metal Box
– I think he only played on one track and had been playing with us as our live drummer – realized very early
on that all this was stifling me. It wasn’t claustrophobia. I was getting dungeoned by a situation of my own making. He said, ‘Look, I live in a really boring flat in Kensal Rise’
– or somewhere like that – ‘Why don’t you come and stay at my place for a night or two, just to clean your head of the constant pressure?’ But I rejected it. I wish I
hadn’t, but I did. I was suspicious of doing that on so many levels.

I couldn’t give up the feeling that it was
my place
. Once I’d started accepting that my place was the problem, it was a hard thing to come to grips with. It was obvious that
my house
was
a problem, and the people living in it – by which I mean other band members.

I’d liked the idea of all us PiL-ites living under one roof. I’ve
always said that when recording a band should all –
all!
– stay together
in a completely abstract universe, outside of your regular commute. The end result, though, was that I had no escape at all. I couldn’t escape the dilemmas. All the others could go off to
wherever. I had nowhere to go to, because that was me, right there. That was everything I had, and I was very proud of the achievement of what I had. But what I had was turning bad.

I’d hardly ever see much of Levene. He’d lock himself in the basement. Weeks could go by. One time there was a really bad smell emanating from down there. I was half expecting a
rotten carcass, but it transpired that it was just a garbage can he hadn’t taken out. He never bothered himself with domesticities like that. It was all beneath him. But I thought he was
dead. An anxious moment, and I obviously over-worried it, so that created a huge row.

Then there was Dave Crowe down there too, beneath his hatch, with similar ‘lifestyle issues’, shall we call them. Maybe that house was haunted – he was in the same room where
Jim Walker slept on newspaper with a moose-head and no furniture. Strange things came out of that room.

When Dave stopped looking after the administrative side, that created even uglier situations. Jeannette Lee was floating around, through the Don Letts connection, even though they’d now
broken up, so it was, ‘Can you help us out here, because we do need some administration occasionally.’ That worked fine for a very short time, but then she’d start clique-ing with
Keith and we’d not see the pair of them for days on end, and nothing got done.

I don’t know if you can ever say what Jeannette’s role was. I’m sure she’d be mystified by it too. That’s the joy and the difficulty of being in PiL, it’s a
puzzlement as to what your actual role is, because there are no allocated specific technologies. Whoever’s available at any particular point to handle a situation must be capable of doing so.
Jeannette offered a kind of clarity to us. We couldn’t be handling the business side or some of them bloody boring financial meetings, because you were trying to write songs
and you just can’t cope with it on that level. I went a bit nuts there, trying to run an office and write songs, you can’t do it. Answering the phone all day long gives
you no time to think outside of that. Structure can be the antithesis to creativity. You need the structure in order to be able to create, but you can’t be creating the structure as well.

Jeannette and Keith had a dark relationship, but they were very close to each other, for whatever reason. Who knows? Jeannette could be a real distraction in the workplace. Fellas were mad for
her! Some of those fellas were ones we were working with, like Dave Crowe, who fell madly in love with her but kept it all to himself and expected her to know that. He put himself in a world of
ridiculous misery there for quite some time. Also, Joe Strummer would be lurking around. It was obvious that a lot of fellas were coming over because they fancied her. That’s how life really
is, you realize: everybody’s after somebody else all the time. It’s human nature. It’s just sometimes, if the situations in a working relationship get too intrigued, it has to be
stopped because then cliques form and separations open up.

Dealing with Keith was a nightmare at the best of times. He insisted that he be on the front cover of
Second Edition
, for instance, but then he didn’t like that picture –
appropriately enough, they were like distorted mirror images, but he didn’t get the fun of it. He wasn’t on the same page on the art side at all. He’s just not happy with any
visual representation of himself. I get that, but you’ve got to move on and get over your big bad self, and be able to laugh at your own silliness.

I put together the cover for our
Paris Au Printemps
live album, and I put one of my own paintings on the front. If you look at it, that’s me at the top, old honky donkey, and Keith
and Jeannette underneath, as a pair of poodles. The cover was seen as great fun by everybody except Keith, who absolutely resented his cartoon portrayal. He shouldn’t have, I thought it
grasped his character rather well.

His heroin problem was becoming a
real
problem. There was a selfishness in the way he went about things, compounded by the drug of choice. There was one particular
incident where I tried to get him to go cold turkey, obviously hoping to get him off the stuff. Ever since then, he held a resentment towards me. It seems to be that when you help out an addict in
those situations, they don’t blame themselves for the position they’re in, they blame you. It’s deeply unpleasant for the self-made ‘victim’, of course – i.e.
Keith – but it’s incredibly hard on the helpers – that is, me. When the addict comes out of it, they’re just sneering at you. Oh, business as usual. I suppose with a
character like Keith, you couldn’t really blame it all on the drugs. He’s just genuinely nasty, anyway.

We’d do our best – all of us, Jeannette, Dave, everybody that was around in the house – trying to help him out with it, but you wouldn’t get much joy out of him.

The world beyond our front door felt no more welcoming to me. Everyone seemed to know that I lived at the house. I still had the tabloid reporters on my back, horribly so. There was always
someone flirting about outside Gunter Grove with a camera. To an odd extent, I’d go out and have a chat, and I got to know a lot of them. It kind of became all right then, because
they’d be like, ‘You’re just a regular bloke, we all know that, and we’re not out to scupper you.’ And so I could continue my lifestyle somewhat unabated. Fair play,
because Gunter weren’t no nun’s convent.

The fans were a different matter. They’d be carving lyrics into the front door, and scribbling all over the exterior walls. It got weirdly continental. The fan base changed from local
punks, to UK punks, to kids from Italy who would demand that they be let in. It’s just too much at a certain point. With the SEX shop around the corner – now called Seditionaries
– I was obviously on the punk tourist trail.

I actually used to let fans in all the time. ‘Hello!’ ‘Oh hello, in you come!’ But it got nutty because the emphasis shifted into psychotics, clingers, and just
out-and-out intolerable selfish weirdos.
That’s what happens. All the open-mindedness in the world really doesn’t work the second that one evil cunt who wants to
kill you comes in. You let them in and they turn nasty in a heartbeat for no good reason. Unbelievably hard for me to accept and tolerate. Trying to find some passive way of kicking them out of the
door is never easy, but you learn from it.

Another worry at Gunter Grove was a warfare that was going on with Jock McDonald, who was a friend of my brother Jimmy’s. They had a band together called the 4" Be 2", which was very much
an Arsenal hooligan mayhem kind of approach. There were a lot of football firms that started to put records out – the Pistols opened a lot of doors.

Jimmy and Jock just wanted to have a band, and Rambo and Paul Young were in it too. I was very vaguely involved, when I sussed that it wasn’t a nasty joke. They were trying at one point to
take themselves seriously, and that’s when I’ll offer any help I can. My dad even got in on it – well, they used his name, saying, ‘Produced by John Lydon’. My dad
went, ‘Well, that was my name before you started using it.’ ‘Okay, Dad, that one’s yours.’ Otherwise, I’ve not much idea what they were up to; I just know that
when the taxman came a-knocking, it weren’t me what did it.