Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (37 page)

Years later, up came a chance to do Tom Snyder again. I sat down with him and had a really bloody good talk, during the interview and after. I’d call him a definite friend. I really liked
him. He started to send me all his old interviews and stuff, and also some really wacky music things, and then a couple of years later he died. So that was a terrible thing, because there were
plans to do things with Tom. He actually really ‘got’ the umbrella thing. It’s chaps like that, when you have conversations with them, you realize that age is irrelevant;
it’s the ideas that count. Sometimes you have to have an awful lot of patience until the situation is there for you. Tough tits when you’re young, though, the opportunities aren’t
there.

Keith’s understanding of our broadening company ethos was typically selfish: his sister was getting into knitting, and Keith wanted to introduce her into the umbrella of PiL as someone who
would manufacture knitted jumpers. ‘O-o-oh, GOD! Just,
no
!’

I mean, all of us baulked at the prices Vivienne Westwood charged for her mohair jumpers back in the SEX shop days. They were great, everybody wanted one of them, but
financially they were beyond most people’s reach. My mum made me one once, but without the holes. ‘You know, Mum, this I couldn’t wear in Alaska, it’d be too hot’
– really heavily made. She went, ‘Dem holes ar’ silly, who wants a jomper wit’ holes?’ ‘Me, Mum!’

But still – ‘No, Keith, we’re not taking up a knitting division . . .’ That’s where nepotism creeps in, trying to get your family involved. That won’t ever
work because it causes all kinds of problems. I didn’t see us as trying to make cheap imitations of something that somebody was already doing. It’s all right if my mum makes me a
jumper, but I’m not gonna set up a commercial line. This would be Keith all the time. He’d consistently come out with these wack ideas. That’s all well and good, but in the end it
gets you feeling like, ‘Oh my God, not again. Could – you – just –
stop – talking
!’

The police raids at Gunter Grove were getting ridiculous. In spring ’81 there were three in a three-week period, every Friday, and that was just too much to take.
They’d dismantle the place, smash the front door in, tear everything apart, then go, ‘All right, thanks for that!’ and leave. Or drag me down to the station for one reason or
another, and then let me go. They’d be dragging me in my pyjamas, barefoot. No lift home. Of course, not being fully dressed, I’d have no money on me, so I had to walk back down Fulham
Road in my bare feet, pyjamas, and red dressing gown. Many thought I was copying Bob Geldof’s band’s keyboards player, Johnny Fingers, wandering around in me jim-jams. Very
embarrassing. It was shouted out, ‘Oi, Fingers!’ Oh, for shame!

Then I’d get back, and of course the front door is off its hinges. It got to the point where I had to leave a hammer and a fresh set of screws, latches and nails by the door, ready for the
next one. In modern times, you’d have a complaints department to ring up, and get the damage taken care of. In them days, you had to fork out
yourself. Luckily, I
still had Paul Young living with me. He was a carpenter on the building sites, and would just bang it back up into place.

The only explanation given for the intrusions was that it was a drugs raid. Suspicion of illegal activity. What would be the evidence? ‘An IRA flag in the back window.’ ‘Er,
actually, that’s the Italian flag.’ My neighbours had given that to me – the ones that asked me not to play the reggae too loud after midnight – because I had no curtain on
the back window. ‘We can see what you’re doing, and we don’t want to!’ These days, of course, it would be cameras akimbo. Life was different, then, people tended to help
each other out, so you had a respect. You’d say, ‘Ouch, sorry, I won’t play it like that at 3 a.m. again.’ Or, in this case, ‘Yes, I’ll put up your flag, so you
can’t see my botty.’ I’d be perfectly happy with that. You won’t find neighbours bitching bad things about me, because I look out for them and they look out for me. To me,
that’s a very important part of life.

The police unfortunately had a different attitude. It got to the point where I started to know them. I knew them from hanging around the pubs I’d be in. They’d be there, supposedly
under cover – I don’t know, maybe waiting for a gun or drug deal to go down. Oh, for God’s sake. Let’s put it this way: the police in them days had a vicious intent and a
suspicious attitude for anybody that was outside of the norm and was an easy target and unprotected by the alleged society at the time – which I definitely was, at least according to the
scandal-mongering of the newspapers.

The very last, raid, the ‘Johnny Fingers’ one, actually happened on a Monday morning, but that was the worst of the lot. Barking angry Alsatians, the whole thing. And do you know
what they pulled me on? When they burst the front door open, I came down brandishing one of them antique swords, and I came at them. I didn’t see their uniforms. However, that was viewed as
an assault on a police officer. So that was the scam, that time. The laws are somewhat different these days and they’re more protective of the
house owner, and indeed
they always should be. To my mind, whatever you do behind your own front door is entirely your own business. Entirely. I could never agree to or justify those kinds of raids. Ever.

This was very early Monday morning, at the crack of dawn, absolutely exhausted, tired, but we had nothing incriminating in the house, save for a teapot full of herbal – which they never
found, which was bizarre because they even kicked a speaker over that was behind it. They never twigged! This has a lot to do with Satan, the cat. Satan bopped about, terrified of all the barking,
and one of the dogs went for him, knocked the pot of pot over, but didn’t really notice it because it only had eyes for the kitten. How odd: they don’t even know how to do this stuff
properly! Poor old Satan was so terrified of the dogs that he ran away and never returned.

The police attention was too much; it was overwhelming. It meant, for instance, that I couldn’t go up to Finsbury Park and hang out with friends, because there’d be
that
following me. They’d be there making everybody feel uncomfortable, and therefore I’d be at fault for bringing that into the manor. It destroys you socially, and for what result? I
can’t imagine how much money they were spending on putting together a police raid. Surely it doesn’t come cheap? And a lot of time wasted, and a lot of this pertaining back to the fact
that I had a £40 fine for possession of amphetamine sulphate.

It was very intimidating, and the clear implication to me was that they were trying to run me out of the country. There’d been the three raids in a row, and a couple before that. It became
apparent that they were bored with what they were doing. They made it clear to me that they were just following orders – ‘Don’t take it personal, John.’ We were on first
name terms – as I said, a couple of the officers that came in had been following me when I’d go to pubs in Notting Hill. Keith Burton, who was working at Virgin at the time, and
actually a few years later became my manager, recognized the police straight off one time I went to a pub near the
label’s offices. He went, ‘Oh my God, look,
your shadows are here!’

It just felt futile staying in this unprotected environment. There’s nothing in the media to back me up, or save me, or declare this to be unjust detention, or unwarranted. The tabloid
press only wanted to report bad things about me – and so, time to go.

It was Keith who went to New York first, around that time. It was all to do with this idea that we’d be an umbrella of thoughts. Well, maybe the umbrella was a fish-net. With hindsight, he
was obviously following a similar route to Sid – the availability of heroin in New York being famous at the time. Anyway, he’d allegedly gone there on a jolly, and once he was out there
he’d found out about this new system of cameras and screens that were being installed at a nightclub called the Ritz. The end result was that we all went out there to work on that too, and we
never came back. We lived there for about three years, all told.

The months before I left London for New York almost felt like a holiday. I was trying to gather my thoughts and work out my next move. To that end, I hooked up with Rambo and was going to stay
at his place. He’d said, ‘Gunter Grove is killing you. My parents are away and I’m staying at their house, come over and you can get your head together.’ He was going to
sort me out, because he was aware of the pressure I was under, so we were going to have a laugh together. We had been to Margate on a coach beano with a few of the lads that day. On the way home
we’d bought crates of booze and were going to party until the following week. First night, a phone call comes in. I still don’t know how they got Rambo’s number and I don’t
know who transferred the call – it must have been someone at Gunter. It’s Keith, all bouncy on the line: ‘Come to New York, we’ve got a chance to do a live camera display at
the Ritz.’ I went, ‘I’m round at Rambo’s, I can’t book a ticket.’ ‘Don’t worry, it’s waiting for you at the airport.’ So I let John down,
because we were gonna have a hoot together, but off I went the next morning.

We still couldn’t get gigs anywhere, remember, but the people at this place the Ritz were going to put us on for two nights, as some kind of live music-slash-video
production. The idea was to project multiple camera shots live onto one big screen. It was an interesting concept that I thought had heaps of potential, particularly bearing in mind that Jeannette
used to carry a camera around in a violin case, and how we were thinking, ‘Film, film, film!’ We realized how important filming was to the Pistols, and yet how little footage there was
of the actual events. We wanted everything to be catalogued, but also to think outside the box when it came to live performance with the band – not just us playing in the standard format, but
creating other kinds of situations. It could be many other things going on at the same time. Open-mindedness really, and . . . Bingo! A riot started. Or it didn’t. It wasn’t a riot, it
was a fiasco, but an enjoyable one.

The idea was that we’d stand behind the screens with a record playing. We’d make a few noises over the top, with some live drums to bolster the sound. We got a drummer from a music
store, a very old fella called Sam Ulano, who had a jazzy sensibility. His kind of music was Frank Sinatra. We could have picked any record to put on that turntable but I was insistent on it being
Flowers Of Romance
. I knew that would annoy Keith no end, because of his dismissive and withdrawn attitude during its actual recording. ‘You get what you deserve in this band, mate.
What – you don’t know the guitar parts? That’s because there aren’t any – you weren’t there, you were upstairs playing Space Invaders. Here it is now, deal with
it!’

So the album’s on the turntable, and Keith’s there with his guitar, going, ‘Brrr twang bang’, deliberately being awkward, and the old fella’s playing drums to it,
and it’s fitting in quite nicely, and everybody’s got a camera and they’re moving around the place, and all this is being projected on a screen in front of us. We’re on the
stage, so people are seeing the screen rather than us – a screen of loads of different images of each of us simultaneously, split-screen, multiscreen, every combination of cameras you could
imagine.

The control boards of the cameras were being manipulated by a very fun American chap called Ed Caraballo. He was converting all these images live for the screen, with
flashes of audience and-or whatever. Because I was behind the screen and seeing it all in reverse and up close – and my eyesight is not good – it all looked to me like a Tangerine Dream
album cover.

Then – oh dear! – the record skips, because the people leaning on the front of the stage are pulling the canvas mat that we’re standing on, jogging the turntable. A front row
of elbows is a powerful force – it’s almost like water bursting over the dam. And by that pulling, the record goes, ‘Skip! Skip!’ And suddenly: ‘Boooooooo! It’s
not a live gig! Fraud!’

It seemed I’d no sooner got off the plane than I was practically doing the gig – I had no concept that this had been advertised as a proper live show over the radio. That
wasn’t what I’d agreed to. I wouldn’t have turned up if I’d thought it was going to be some unrehearsed nonsense masquerading as a gig. I thought it was just a yee-haw, for
a crate of lager and a laugh. But for a moment there, it ended up like we were going to get killed. People were chucking bottles, the usual mêlée.

It was absolutely nothing I wasn’t used to. I may have goaded the audience a little – I’m Johnny, it’s my business. ‘Silly fucking audience!’ I told them.
That was the point where it got to the real boos and the hisses. That’s an instinctive response. If they felt cheated, then I felt cheated with them. And then oddly enough we’re back
to, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ – the last Sex Pistols gig in San Francisco.

You’ve got to take control at that point and explain through an aggressive stance that this is not what you’ve been misled into believing. But at the same time, ‘Come on,
it
is entertaining
– it’s worth the money. It is different! It’s an experiment into the future, and now if you look at every single one of the modern pop bands, they have these
enormous screen projections going on behind them, not to mention the turntables. That’s the idea we were
initiating. I’m not saying we invented screen
projection, but we invented the cut-up thing of it.

Security just fucked off, and people started invading the dressing room. The only person who buggered off very quickly was Keith. He just basically abandoned it, the very situation he was so
proud of, and suddenly it was all smiles again. Jeannette was great fun that night, she hung about. People were saying, ‘That’s the nicest riot we’ve ever been in!’

I suppose the casual way I approached it all was helpful. ‘Why don’t you all come out to the bar and drink with us?’ They went, ‘That’s a very good idea,’ and
did. Then the staff tried to close the nightclub early because they said they didn’t want a repeat performance of the earlier catastrophe. They closed the bar about half twelve, one. And then
cancelled the following night’s show because of the so-called riot.