Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (40 page)

I couldn’t accept that the film, as it would be seen in cinemas, was uncontrollable by me. What ends up on the cutting-room floor could be my best bits. That’s frightening. I know
this about myself: I can’t work in any environment where I don’t have a say in the final creation. I have to be involved in all of it, all the way down the line, and anything
that’s predetermined by other people’s interpretations, it’s not gonna work for me. I don’t view myself as one of the tools. I’m not a tool! Actors may self-aggrandize
and get awards, Oscars, whatever, but really they’re no more important than models are to the clothes they’re trying to sell. That’s all you are: a coathanger of sorts.

So I shut the door on acting, but then a whole bunch of offers came in. Oh my God, you know what, I turned down
Critters
, which was a cheap and nasty knock-off version of
Gremlins
.
I was really pleased – crisis averted! How could I do a film like that – fighting these alien fur-balls!

There were heaps of other offers, but let’s just say, the acting side of me dwindled. I’d be blatantly rejectful, and I didn’t see the potential of a great many offers that
came in. I shouldn’t have done that. It was a mistake. I’ve made many mistakes like that over the years. I fancied myself as playing a lead romantic role, in the style of Cary Grant,
maybe. This is what I’d be saying to the agents, and – errrrrr, door closed!

Now here’s a thing – yippee-aye-oh, my absence for the film inspired Keith to get out of the doldrums. He actually came up with some really good ideas for tunes and
songs for the movie. One
of them, ‘The Order Of Death’, which had a lot of Keith’s work in it, was so good that it became a potential theme song for the
film.

Finally we were proving that we were now working in different areas, yet it was still PiL, and it all came back to the same centre force. We provided the producers with plenty more music, but
they were very wary that Johnny Rotten and his band would take control of the film if it went too far, so none of our material was used in the end. It was a film with the seriously famous Harvey
Keitel, and they didn’t want an upstart like me who can’t act dominating the scenario. Instead, they got Ennio Morricone in to do the soundtrack, who at the time wasn’t really
respected. People thought he just made trash noise for Italian cowboy movies – laughable, sneered at! – but here we are a few decades later and he’s seen as somehow rather
genius.

So, anyway: wow, the beast had awoken. Keith was back in action, and there was a short burst of really good and interesting energy. Jealousies had been lurking in there: he thought I was getting
too big for the ‘PiL umbrella’ situation, swanning off to star in an Italian movie, and therefore he felt he might be losing some kind of control. Maybe he thought I had just abandoned
them, which wouldn’t have been my way at all. But I understand that insecurity, because I’d been in that position, where my band abandoned me. I get it, but I don’t get it. I
thought we were closer friends than that, and he should’ve been more open. And, in fairness, there was nothing else going on.

Oh, and here’s the laugh of all laughs: when I was filming in Rome, Jeannette came over with her friend just to hang out for a couple of days – they just turned up. That was good,
because she was grasping the PiL thing with it. It would’ve been a perfect opportunity to film what it’s like on set, but she forgot to bring her camera. Or maybe she
did
bring
it, and we just forgot to look at what she did. I think that’s closer to the truth.

I want people to understand, always with Jeannette, it was a working relationship. I’m not one for loose-arse affairs, that’s not
my way. In that respect, I
think me and her worked really well together, but looking back on it she was put in the middle there to try and save my friendship with Keith, but it was hopeless, it just didn’t work. I
can’t actually remember where it all ended with her. It was something about her falling out with Keith. There was certainly no big problem between her and me; she even used to come to the
gigs for a while thereafter. It just wasn’t gonna happen any longer.

Keith’s resentments run so ludicrously deep, and they’re so pointless, and back then everything just always seemed to end up revolving around his drug problem. As I said at the time,
maybe he had too much blood in his drug-stream. If he was having a bad time because he couldn’t get a fix, we all had to suffer. And how much of that can you take? I’ll put up with
anything from anyone if they’re creative, but when the creativity lulls it’s really hard to endure. To me dependency is a great form of foolishness. The lack of self-discipline and
control in it. You should never get into that condition.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m being hypocritical here. I’m far from innocent myself but I’ve never been dependent. The bottom line is, you’ve got to be in
charge, or else what’s the point? You
gots
to be in charge.

In November 1982 Keith actually got married in New York – a marriage that lasted about all of two weeks, and then he came crawling back to the loft apartment, alone. It was insane, weird,
ludicrous – a situation I never understood at all, even though I was their best man. Her name was Lori Montana, and she was the bass player in a band called Pulsallama. He met her out there.
She was a lovely little girl, and she was absolutely innocent and openminded. Kind of hippie-chick-y. Very odd, for him. It was all, ‘Oh, she’s got me clean, everything’s gonna be
great!’ Well, that soon stopped. Game over.

All the time, through this nonsense, I had this thought in the back of my head: that guy’s got something incredible to work with.
But he refused to deliver those
goods after a certain point. I don’t know why. I think he doubted himself, and yet I never doubted him. But that information never seemed to get into his psyche, he never understood my
backing.

I got the impression, trying to talk to Keith around that time, that he viewed me as a parasite living off his genius. This is how it would be coming across in conversations in the short sharp
smirkiness of his approach. That was just too ludicrous by half: sneaking off and wasting studio time and misspending money on
his
ideas, and his ideas were excluding me. In these moments
when the light of dawn finally breaks on you, that’s painful.

I was not going to give PiL up. I wasn’t going to let the likes of Keith and/or any member run off and claim it as theirs. Without meaning to be ridiculous about it – it’s like
Ted Turner. I understand what CNN was when he started out, and I understand his fury at what it turned into, and his absolute rage that he was pushed off the board of that company. It’s a
great tragedy – CNN is now a complete farce. I couldn’t let that kind of thing happen to PiL, ‘my own creation’.

I did, though, consider making a solo record. Through a friend, Roger Trilling, I’d got very into an experimental scene surrounding the label ECM. A lot of the records would be solo
cellists, going, ‘Pop, bing, twannngggg’ – lots of drawn-out, slow, melodious patterns, some of it completely pointless. In the loft, I liked putting these things on and letting
it drift in the background while just doing normal everyday things. I found it a very comfortable way of using it, rather than to sit down and realize, ‘Gosh, this chap’s really
crawling up his own bunty . . .’

That led to me thinking I needed to put out a solo thing in this kind of direction. Avant-garde? Oh yeah! But not quite in that way, obviously. I was very thrilled that these people had the
audacity, and I remember arguing with the musicologists at similar concert places at the time – they’d go, ‘No, this man studied at the Royal Philharmonic for forty years.’
But this is what he came up with –
‘
Boonnggg!
’ And why not? I was absorbing that that’s what these people found the most thrilling; they were
exploring the tonal quality of abstract random plucking, for instance, or farting down a horn. They were so in love with the sound that musicianship and structure became pointless. A wonderful
insight into the workings of the human mind. My record collection, if you come round my house, is very much like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a few dance things, but here’s the serious stuff
. . .’ I can clear a room in minutes.

Anyway, my grand scheme fell apart – the solo venture never came to fruition. There was just too much fractionalisation going on, so that I couldn’t actually sit down and have the
time to do it alone.

At the same time, Virgin were trying to make me write a hit single. ‘C’mon, Johnny, why don’t you pen us a nice love song, so we can all make loads of money?’ I’m
like, ‘After all I’ve been up to, who or what is it you think you’re talking to?’ The core essence of me is, I think, that I write very good pop songs, but I don’t
write them because I’m asked to or told to, they happen quite instinctively and naturally. To try to interfere with that process in me is never going to work, ever. I do what I want, and it
just so happens that what I do is kind of really good from time to time. I don’t mean that to sound big-headed, it’s how it is. I’m not gonna disrespect my gift and misuse it by
writing cheese.

Thus came the idea of ‘This Is Not A Love Song’. Initially, those energies were dissipated because Keith had the audacity to go off and do something on his own with it in the studio.
He’d decided I was a bad singer, but he didn’t tell me this to my face. You couldn’t actually get him to speak to you directly, not about anything, at this point. He knew damn
well I was onto him. As soon as I looked into his reddened snitchy little eyes, I’d go, ‘What do you want?’ And so he’d avoid me.

I’d be hearing second hand about his conversations in the studio, so I went down there, but he wasn’t there, and I said, ‘Well, where’s the tape? What’s he been
doing?’ I heard it and thought, ‘Right, we
can do something with that.’ And so, I put words to it – something I don’t usually like to do. I
like to be in there at the outset so I’m fully involved in the song’s evolution, but in this case the song went from there. We had no bass player, so Martin Atkins brought over a mate
from London called Pete Jones who played bass. He wasn’t great, but it helped, and some gigs came out of that.

We never discussed anything like ‘musical direction’. Anyone I’ve worked with will tell you I never come at it with an agenda. Still, it got very negative because, with this
music we were putting together, Keith didn’t respect what he was doing, he thought it was junk. It wasn’t. He just couldn’t appreciate himself musically. He viewed his guitar
lines as throwaway when they were
not
. They were really thought-out pieces. He’d lost the plot. Ultimately all his bile and spite and resentfulness became unamusing. He really meant
it. He was like gooseberry jam without the sugar.

I don’t know what Keith wanted, but somehow he didn’t want me involved and presumed that it was his band, so I had to put the knockers on that. There was no one single thing that
ended it, just a collection of incidences up to about May or June 1983. The most pressing issue at the time was, we had some dates booked for July in Japan. There’d been problems getting him
a visa, but he knew he couldn’t survive the plane journey. He couldn’t even survive a van journey from New York to Pennsylvania, which is three or four hours.

To this day, I feel clean with the break from him. Back then, it was almost like a switch that went on, because I was free of the bondage that some of them ex-members had become. I just wanted
to go out and earn my wings, exercise my chops and grapple with the tension and fear that is live performance, and is ultimately to my mind the biggest reward of being in a band.

All I needed was the band. The commitment to Japan was already made, and the tour had to go ahead. I scouted around for whatever possibilities I could find, and ended up with a bunch of fellas
that Martin Atkins and our producer Bob Miller found
working hotels and bars in New Jersey, playing cover versions. There wasn’t anyone else readily available that
wasn’t coming in at an enormous price that I could match, and along came these fellas with shiny suits and mullets, and I thought, ‘Wow! This could work!’ There was such an image
danger that there was an appeal in it and, as fellas, I liked them very, very much.

I went up to see them in Atlantic City, and it must’ve been the Holiday Inn there, because that’s what I was saying at the time: ‘Look, I’ve gone and got myself a Holiday
Inn band.’ I wasn’t being disrespectful; I just thought this was definitely going to challenge an audience, judgemental fucks that they can be. For me, the only thing that’s ever
going to be bad for my image is a lousy live performance. I thought, ‘Well, we’re not going to be that lousy,’ and indeed a great time was had by all.

They were just thrilled to get to a place like Japan, after being stuck in New Jersey. In terms of musicianship they were miles ahead of me, but at the same time miles behind, because they
couldn’t quite come to grips with the way the songs were anti-structured and deliberately let loose, so we had to shape-shift around what the set would be. Which was fine, because at that
time I was into tormenting pop songs – very much so – working within the restraints of verse-chorus to see how I could manoeuvre that into something exciting.

We even started playing ‘Anarchy In The UK’ – with boys with mullets. Fantastic! It was a matter of ‘Are people actually listening to the song, or are they judging us by
our hairdos?’ The Holiday Inn chappies were terrified of approaching ‘Anarchy’, but at the same time they loved the balls of it. The lead guitarist, Joe Guida – there he is
in his tight jeans and white sneakers, legs as wide apart as possible, and a mullet, and he’s banging out his gruff guitar riff – fucking great! You know? If you’re going to write
a song like ‘Anarchy’, it has to be understood that it’s not just for the fashionably elite, it’s for everyone. I was magnanimously sharing that message.

Virgin pressured us into releasing a live album from Japan, but I was appreciative that it would go some way towards paying off our debt to them. It’s keeping the
business rolling, and keeping the record company interested in you. I don’t blame Virgin for everything; I do understand that I’m a very difficult person to get along with. I challenged
their sense of economics on almost a daily basis.