Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (36 page)

However, I soon got embroiled with Jock and his nonsense, because he’d fallen out with Paul Young, who was still at Gunter. Jock’s brothers were friends of mine, and Jock would turn
up with them to try and intimidate me, and they’d go, ‘No, Jock, we’ll beat you up first – John’s our mate!’ This kind of silly nonsense.

My brother Jimmy is a year younger than me, and we’re very close. We’re incredibly different, and that’s probably what makes us so close. I’m the quiet one, the elder
one, the responsible one. But I’m also Johnny Rotten! Jimmy’s a saucy fella, he’s non-stop comedy, like a stand-up. Everything in life, he finds a laugh in it. I suppose we both
do, so it must be a Lydon thing, even though both our parents were so quiet. Maybe we just grew up learning to use words to entertain ourselves, because Mum and Dad hardly spoke.
We’d just bugger off and get up to all kinds of hell, and even though I’m the eldest, any troublesome situation we ever found ourselves in was Jimmy’s fault.
I’m not saying that spitefully, I’m just saying Jimmy has a knack of finding, you know,
catastrophe
. He can’t help it. And big brother was there to try and sort it out.

Dublin was a good example – a classic case of, ‘Another fine mess you’ve got me into, Stanley!’ I was out there in October with the 4" Be 2" and their travelling army of
friends and family, all out for the beano.

I got myself into a whole heap of trouble when me and a friend went for a quiet drink in the afternoon. We were in a pub called the Horse and Tram down there by the river next to our hotel.
I’d just bought a drink when the landlord seemed to take offence to me. I don’t think he liked the way I looked or sounded. I guess I stood out like a sore thumb. Something was said and
someone snatched the pint out of my hand. A few of the locals – at least one of whom it later turned out was off-duty Garda – decided to make themselves busy and join in. They were
definitely playing a bully game on me – they thought I was some kind of English eejit. One thing led to another, and a bit of a scuffle ensued. There was a lot of shouting and fists began
flying. Just not mine! I’ve said before, I attacked two policemen’s fists with my face. That’s pretty much the truth of it.

I went back to the hotel to change me clothes and was followed by one of the off-duty coppers, who promptly arrested me for assault. It looked like I was only going to get a slap on the wrist,
as I was let out pending charges. But that all changed later. I went off and met the 4" Be 2" at Trinity College and then went back to the hotel for a drink, when the police arrived and took me
away. There had been a radio show with my brother Jimmy and the gig in between. Perhaps somebody in the authorities had listened to the radio and had me arrested again after realizing who I was. I
don’t know. The whole thing was a farce.

I found myself in court the following morning on a charge of
‘Common Assault’. They refused me bail despite the fact one of my friends, Johnny Byrne, had
offered to put up the £250 security. He also got me my lawyer. Jock McDonald helped too. £250 was a lot of money back then – thank you, Johnny, it’s not been forgotten
– but they refused it point blank. Despite the fact that the guy in the dock before me had been given £50 bail for hitting someone with a hammer at the 4" Be 2" show the previous night.
The prosecutors had tried to claim I’d called the bartender an ‘Irish pig’. My lawyer made a point of telling them I was Irish and both my parents were born in Ireland. My case
was adjourned until the Monday and I was taken to Mountjoy – a notorious prison filled with IRA and UDA terrorists and all sorts of psychopaths.

On my arrival, the warders decided to make an example of me. They stripped me, threw me into the yard and hosed me down. But you know, you can strip me, cover me in flea powder and laugh at the
size of my penis, it doesn’t matter. It – does – not – matter. Over the years I’ve noticed that when these institutions get hold of you, the one thing they’re
trying to embarrass you about is your nakedness, and your penis. Let me tell you, Johnny’s got a perfect penis to laugh at, and he don’t care. That’s not ever going to be a
problem.

Inside there, it was tough – really, really tough and hard – a punishing regime. I tried to have a routine but they made it impossible. The warders would wake me up all night long
with their truncheons and make me stand by the bed. With hindsight, what you learn is, when the institution has got a hold of you, then you quickly have to learn to adapt and blend in and try to
merge into the shadows. Which is, of course, impossible for me. So ignore my advice, and ultimately just be yourself. That’s all I was.

You were allowed an hour of telly, and who came up but yours truly on the news! Then there was a programme about the history of music and yours truly was on that, too, with all the other inmates
surrounding me and looking at me. The embarrassment! I just wanted to crawl under the concrete. The prisoners were fine, though.

Just by being alive, the warders didn’t like me and that left some breathing space with my fellow inmates. ‘God, look what he’s got to go
through.’ A lot of the prisoners felt if they stood next to me or chatted with me, that they’d come under the glaring eye of the warders that were trying to make life punishing for me.
But I’m like, ‘Is that the best you’ve got to offer? You’re not gonna make me uncomfortable about being myself, I don’t care.’

I was back in court on the Monday where the judge sentenced me to three months in prison. Thankfully my lawyer got an appeal in, and this time I made bail. I immediately went back to England,
and the very next day started work on the
Flowers Of Romance
album.

When the appeal finally came up, months later in Dublin, I knew my career was on the line. I had to go back. It really was squeaky-bum time. If I’d lost that appeal, my sentence would have
been doubled to six months. As you can imagine, I was under massive stress at the time, but the case was thrown out of court in ten minutes. The judge saw right through the contradictions in the
two witnesses’ statements. They didn’t even bother to turn up, at least not till after the case had been dismissed. I was acquitted but not before I was
asked
to make a
£100 donation to the ‘poor box’. That’s Irish justice for you.

Through 1980, many people had found great entertainment in
Metal Box
’s claustrophobia. All well and good, but then comes the problem of a fan base that wants to
hear that sound on everything you do, forever and a day. If that’s what you want, I’m not your fella. I don’t like doing that.

By now, with Wobble gone, I was into stripping the bass out completely and researching drum sounds, using a collection of loops. I was really angry at the time with Keith
Levene’s despondency, his seeming unwillingness to put in any effort toward helping in the project, which was of course largely due to his predilections. Most of the time, he was upstairs
playing video
games. He’d just bought the model of Space Invaders, which came in a little black triangular box, and he’d become completely addicted to that. You
couldn’t get him away from it. That would be it, morning, noon and night, just gawping at these dots moving up and down a screen. To my mind it showed a very compulsive behaviour. He
can’t get out of things; he goes too far.

So I got on with it by making drum loops with Martin Atkins. He’d already committed himself to an American tour with his band, Brian Brain, however, so I only had him for a short while.
Once he’d gone off, I had to garner what I could out of those tapes, and formulate patterns which I then put vocals to. I had a great time doing that with Nick Launay, a trainee
engineer/tape-operator at Townhouse studios in Shepherd’s Bush. He was all that was available late at night, and thank God for him, a happy coincidence.

When Keith finally came down, oh God, was he snooty about it. He played a little bit and then would just vanish again, so I got on and finished it with Nick. We put together a sound based on
drum loops and vocals, and then I started adding things like bits of piano, bass and saxophone. That’s what we had to do to get the thing done. I could hardly call myself a saxophone player,
yet there it is on
Flowers Of Romance
. You turn the pressure into a useful tool.

I’m playing just about everything on the album. Keith came in for a very little bit and behaved like a sour pussy. For me, it was at that point my proudest moment, because, for the first
time ever in music, I’d done it all without any backing. I’d put things together completely on my own, without having to share the workload. I showed that
I could do it
. I found
my way instinctively around various different instruments, and ashtrays on pianos, and all of these things were firing left, right and centre.

I was so full of ideas, because I was free! The prospect of spending six months in Mountjoy – that was a bit of a harsh reality. If the charges were proved, that’s what I
would’ve gone down for.
And, dare I say, falsely accused. All of that trauma is definitely inside the music, somewhere.

There’s a song that particularly refers to the situation called ‘Francis Massacre’. It’s about notes that were being sent down to me from prisoners on the higher level,
who were asking me to pass them on to people on the outside. But that was impossible, as I was told I would have been searched, so I had to flush them. I wasn’t taking any chances. One note
from a guy called Francis Moran I made a song about – ‘Go down for life, Mountjoy is fun’. The song was inspired by a combination of all those notes.

‘Francis Massacre’, in my mind, is directly related to ‘The Cowboy Song’, the B-side to ‘Public Image’, in that it’s another yippee-aye-oh clippy-cloppy
bunch of noise. I find those things to this day refreshing to play, because I’m aware of the situations I was involved with at the time, and that to me was the best interpretation –
screaming angst and cacophonic jagged edges.

‘Flowers Of Romance’, the song, is at the opposite extreme. I loved that song as much as I love ‘Sun’, which is a thing I did more or less on my own too, for my solo
album,
Psycho’s Path
. They’re
my
anthems, they’re in a happy-go-lucky pop format, but to my mind they fit into the same context as, say, T. Rex’s
‘Life’s A Gas’, which will be forever a guiding light to me. Those are my versions of anthemic festival music, and this all goes back to seeing the Who live at the Oval cricket
ground in 1971, with the Faces and Mott the Hoople supporting. Aynsley Dunbar was the DJ between bands – I loved his stuff, he was a great DJ – and he put on ‘Life’s A
Gas’. This audience thought of themselves as hardcore rockers and, you know, ‘Boooo!’ to anything T. Rex, which they viewed as pop trash and a sell-out, but it cut through them.
Glorious to hear it over a PA system! It’s just an open, happy thing, as is ‘Flowers’. Other people may hear a darkness in there. Well, musically, I’m something of a gypsy,
I’ve got to travel.

‘Four Enclosed Walls’ has a very Muslim call-to-prayer vibe. What I was doing lyrically was understanding that anything you’re
blaming on these
latterday martyrs for the Muslim cause, you have somehow to trace back to what the Christian crusaders did centuries before, invading their country with a religious nonsense belief, to explain away
the fact that they were out for filthy fucking destruction and thievery. So it’s a long, ongoing process. This is how far back terrorism goes, how the crusades can lead to a tragic
conclusion. The lines, ‘I take heed, arise in the West, the new Crusade’, are against all religion, because, praise be to Allah, He would be horrified with what the contemporary
followers are doing with his message. Listen, Allah’s me mate, so’s Jesus. Seriously, I won’t be swayed from that, because that’s what these religions were supposedly
offering you, a world of friendship. They’ve misappropriated it to a world of warfare and abuse and, like all religious wars, that’s mutual destruction.

My voice on this record had an amazing hollow sound that came from the stone rooms at the Townhouse and the Manor. The sounds could be so crisp, particularly with drums. I’ve always had an
appreciation for the Led Zeppelin drum sound, so when it came to
Flowers
, that was a yippee and a half, to be able to move into that area. I remember reading somewhere that Zeppelin would
record everything separately, and John Bonham would do his drums in his stone cottage. Fantastic. Sometimes the putting together of a song is not necessarily all in the same room at the same time,
or even in the same continent.

I suppose I could’ve just broken up the band at that point, but I thought, ‘That’s all right, I’ve got tolerance for that – because I’ve just got out of
jail!’ My energy zone was way rampant. I thought it was a great record. To this day, it thrills me to pieces when I play it. How bright and fresh sounding it was. Nothing like that had been
recorded in that way.

On the album cover, we introduced Jeannette as a member of the band, with the
best
picture of her. She looks like a girl having a cheeky party in Spain, with a rose stuck between her
teeth. It’s like an English-abroad kind of thing.

As a band, however, we weren’t able to go anywhere to publicize the record, which eventually came out in spring 1981. The ‘hard to get gigs’ side to
PiL’s existence had reached a total stalemate in England. So we started to think about looking much further afield to play, just to get away from this ridiculousness of promoters not wanting
to back us because they were fearful of riots. We felt like we were being cut out, being written off as unwanted. So, in order to survive, we had to think outside the box, and keep PiL a thoroughly
mobile artillery unit.

We were also trying to develop the idea of PiL as an umbrella organization for multi-media activities, but this was met with resentment whenever we mentioned it publicly. Keith and I had talked
about it on a couple of TV interviews in New York the previous summer, with Michael Rose, and then Tom Snyder. These people really gave us some gyp. We were talking about living outside of the
chart system, in a world of creativity that didn’t have to come cap-in-hand to any of the corporations or institutions, and how we didn’t give a tuppenny fuck about not getting a
Grammy. The Tom Snyder interview was particularly frosty.