Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (41 page)

It also helped us to get PiL finally established as a live act, and we hit the road through the latter half of 1983. Little did we know we were swimming against the tide of where music was
heading at the time. Video production was where all the big money was going, and live performances were neither here nor there to the bigger outfits of the day. Once the wool had been pulled over
your eyes and you’d committed to buying anything by those kind of outfits, you didn’t know what the possibilities of real bands were. So shambolically ridiculous light shows convinced
you that that’s what music was all about.

We started working with a set designer called Dave Jackson, who’d orchestrate lighting for us, but our way was very different from everybody else. He put together our ‘toilet
set’, where the backdrop was white tiles and urinals. An absolutely clean approach! Shame on my brother Jimmy, because when we ended the gig at Hammersmith Palais in November, he wandered
onstage and pissed in one of the urinals. He presumed they were plumbed in!

So I can be accused in my big bad life of having fake urinals. The idea was that out of the antiseptic environment of public bathrooms could come great ideas. The toilet’s an incredibly
boring thing to have to deal with, getting rid of your waste, but you can let your mind wander and possibilities do arise. It’s that, or you play with your pud. I mean, I’ve had many
great song ideas while sitting on the shitter. I won’t name them for you, because that would spoil them – I don’t want to put the vision of a big macca in anyone’s head.

Around that time, we played live on Channel Four’s
The Tube
. I had the worst flu. Whenever a TV slot like that comes up, it’s
usually towards the end
of a really hard, rigorous tour and I’m completely drained and flu-ridden. The Eurythmics were on as well, and their guitarist, Dave Stewart, was coming across a bit stroppy – a
self-proclaimed genius. All’s well that ends well, because Annie Lennox sent over a bit of an apology for his gruffy-ness. She’s a lovely person. I’ve got great respect for her
– big time! From ‘Sweet Dreams’ onwards, she had me, hook, line and sinker. Yippee! I’ll lay down and take your pervy rollercoaster, baby!

At our regular gigs, we found that there was a dark, one per cent element out there, absolutely out to hurt – really seriously hurt – us or anyone in their path. I don’t know
what you would call those kinds of people – stalkers, fanatics, psychos – but they make the presumption that you aren’t what they believe you should be. They can do you some
harm.

At the Paradiso in Amsterdam, somebody came up with a screwdriver and tried to stick it in my back. Luckily it was blunt, but it left a mark there. And of course on came the Hell’s Angels
security making arses out of it. There’s nothing uglier than huge physically over-developed oafs running around the stage like Clampetts and things getting confused. The reason I actually got
stabbed in the back was because one of the security guards grabbed me. He was trying to protect me, but by holding my hands down I couldn’t manoeuvre, so he accidentally made me an immobile
unit – a dartboard. I was furious about that.

It’s quite serious when you put together all the attacks that Public Image as a band have had to endure – much more so than the Pistols. Listen, I was moving on, I was advancing my
stuff, and these were people that wanted me to stick to my past. It’s always been the problem. If you don’t like what I’m doing, fine – leave it alone, move on, don’t
hang around and demand that I go back ten steps and mollycoddle myself in the safety of my past. That’s just not going to happen. You’ve got to bear in mind they paid good money to
attend in the first place. I’m always insistent: unless they really push it, don’t throw them out, but the more magnanimous
you are, the more volatile they
become, and then it becomes a free-for-all and it gets misunderstood as, ‘Oh yeah, go to a PiL gig – you can boo the singer and throw things and try to stab him, it’s
great!’

Wowzers, what kind of a world are these lot living in? None of the fellas that do this kind of stuff are what I’d call hardcore. These are all lonely bedsit bastards that have somehow
justified their activities as saving the world from the likes of me, with the wonderful excuse that I’ve apparently ‘sold out’, whatever that means.

The concept of selling out all seems to have grown from the Who’s album,
The Who Sell Out
– their glorious piss-take of advertising. The photography on the cover of the first
PiL album was a nod and a wink to that – our version of Roger Daltrey sitting in a tub of Heinz baked beans! That was a very advanced thing to be experimenting with, the idea of
anti-promotions. Sometimes some of us in this world of creativity get a little too far advanced for the mental capacities of certain members of the audience. And aye, as Shakespeare would say,
there’s the rub.

I do find great fun in irony. ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ was, for me, a continuation of ‘Pretty Vacant’. You know, I’m not pretty and I’m not
vacant. ‘This is not’ is actually ‘this is’. The idea was to oppose commerciality and greed, and so the juxtaposition inside the song is ‘Happy to have, not to have
not/Big business is very wise, and I’m inside free enterprise’, when my sentiment was the exact opposite. By saying one thing, you’re actually meaning something else. So
‘This Is Not A Love Song’ is really a love song.

What I’m truly very happy about is that I haven’t kowtowed to corporate dictation from Branson and Virgin. I haven’t written the songs that they wanted me to. I haven’t
become the commercial-success arsehole it would’ve been so easy to turn into under their watch. That way, I wouldn’t be the same person. I’d have had a lifespan of two years and
made so much money that I wouldn’t have to deal with anybody ever again. But that’s not interesting. At all. I just can’t do that; it has to come from the correct place.

‘Love Song’ wasn’t written deliberately to confuse people, but afterwards I did enjoy the scope of possibilities, and the intrigue that journalists can
find in these things. That absolutely thrills me, and I’ll always be the first to stand up and go, ‘Yes, of course!’ when really it isn’t ‘Yes, of course!’
It’s a song, what’s the problem with you? It’s there to provoke thought. I do like my bits of pop, but the words are there, listen to them and they’ll tell you the story.
It’s just a human being trying to explain his place in the world, and how he interprets his immediate surroundings. And irony will always be there because that’s the greatest
achievement in the English language, and that’s sadly lacking in other cultures. I happen to know for a fact that you cannot translate these songs directly into German, for instance.

Music had suddenly become very corporate. Around that time, Duran Duran launched a single with a video that cost around half a million quid. I might be wrong on the figures, but thereabouts.
They got that from nowhere, just straight at you. Videos and big productions were now just the norm. No learning curve in them, but at the same time, I’ve got to tell you, I loved
‘Hungry Like The Wolf’!

Years later, I met Simon Le Bon. It was an odd one: the Hard Rock Casino was opening in Las Vegas in 1995, and every musician was invited. I went because my manager at the time had all these
free passes and rooms. His name was Eric Gardner and, little did I know, all he wanted to be there for was to gamble. When I went there, even getting into the venue was very difficult. Simon Le Bon
spotted me having a problem there, and he went, ‘Don’t you know who he is?’ and that was it, I was in. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, it takes Duran Duran to get Johnny Rotten
into a building!’ I liked him as a bloke, and I like a lot of their songs. I like ‘Girls On Film’, and I can’t pretend otherwise. I don’t have hatred for different
forms of music, in fact I’ve got a great deal of love and openness to everything done by anybody. Christ, I have to: I’ve got two Alvin Stardust albums.

Anyway, for ‘Love Song’, we shot our video surrounded by the financial hub of LA. It was: get a couple of thousand dollars, rent a car, get a cheap camera,
film it, have fun and spend all the serious money on having a party afterwards. Always have done. I love making videos when they’re on the cheap – to me they’re the most fun. I
see these hundred thousand dollars pumped into other things, and I don’t think they’re anyway near as effective.

‘Love Song’ became a delicious issue with Virgin, because they didn’t want to release it as a single. They declared outright it was destined to be a commercial failure, so I
found a company in Japan that was interested in releasing it and, although it was going to put me into a dangerous situation with Virgin, well, if they thought it stood no chance of charting,
I’d go somewhere where they would be proved different. Of course, it turned into a big hit in the clubs of Japan. So I took that straight back to Virgin – ‘Whatever it is you said
it was, it isn’t. It’s actually a hit, now you have to release it, or take me to court and be proved wrong, because there’s the commercial success right in front of your
face.’ Bingo! It duly went right up the British charts and ended up Top Five. It was also a big hit all over Europe, including a Top Ten in Germany. Prior to Virgin finally releasing it, the
Japanese release had been heavily imported into Britain. There was a buzz about ‘Love Song’ before it even came out. We plonked it right in Virgin’s lap for them. What more could
they ask for?

That’s why, over the years, I’ve always gone back doing different versions and updates on ‘Love Song’ – it’s there as a reminder of the powers-that-be telling
us that songs like this are not possible. It’s a weapon of war, it’s as important to me as the Pistols’ song ‘EMI’ was.

The water of that whole relationship with Virgin was muddied further when Keith Levene sneakily tried to release an album of the stuff we’d been working on before he left. It was called
Commercial Zone
, it was incomplete,
some
of it was very scrappy and, to my mind, very painful to listen to.

I just thought, ‘What are Virgin now gonna make of this? Are they gonna come back at me and go, Told you so, that’s what you get working with those
loonies?’ Actually, they helped tear that one down, and quite rightly so. And then it went into trying to get the reel masters, and they were all a mess, so I had to rerecord all the tracks
for the album that became
This Is What You Want . . . This Is What You Get
. I felt I had to backtrack to get those songs back into the fold, and not let them be stolen away. I must agree,
though, that we didn’t manage to grab the intensity of the original demos.

I did it with Martin Atkins and a few other people, mostly at Maison Rouge studio in January and February 1984. That place was virtually under the stands of the old Shed at Chelsea’s
football ground, Stamford Bridge. I’d walk there from Gunter Grove, which I hadn’t sold off yet, but some nights there’d be a Chelsea game on, so in the back of your mind
you’d be thinking, ‘Oh God, here we are walking down the streets with an assortment of bizarre instruments – in the middle of football crowds . . .’ And in them days
there’d always be, ‘Rotten! You’re Arsenal, in’t ya!’ I never kept it quiet – you are what you are.

Some of the album was done at Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie studios. It was the closest we ever came to working together. He wanted to, certainly. The place was in Twickenham, right on the
Thames, and it almost flooded out a couple of times, because the river was overflowing. Townshend wanted to be involved, but I kind of shy away from those things – it might distract me and
set me on a pretentious course. When the moment’s there, if it’s right, then do it, but if that’s not the right moment, then don’t. Let your instincts guide you.

The problem was, Martin and I had learned how to have fun more than anything else. I loved working with his loops, but by strip-mining what we were recording, we left it threadbare almost. The
empty spaces in that record are kind of where the action is. The correct use of emptiness taken to the ultimate extreme.

I wanted to go further into a drum-and-vocal universe, full-on.
I had great respect for Martin’s drumming – he’s beat perfect, the fella – simple,
to the point, and that left you lots of room. But he had doubts about himself as a drummer, and didn’t want to do it any more. ‘Well, what the hell are you gonna play? Flute?’
He’s like me, he’s not very studious when it comes to understanding the ins and outs and intricacies of instruments. We see instruments as accoutrements, not as guiding forces.

There were songs on there called ‘Where Are You?’ and ‘Solitaire’. I suppose it felt quite lonely out there in the wilderness. The album title,
This Is What You Want .
. .This Is What You Get
, which comes up as a chant at various points, was an absolute tirade on what I saw was now going on in the ’80s. People were being force-fed a diet of vacuous pop
rather than content, and you couldn’t get content out there at all. If you had anything poignant in your lyrics, MTV would find a reason to cancel you out.

It was a world of amazing isolation. The relationship with Virgin at that point was one where we didn’t give a flying fuck about each other. Very hard times. Hello, I’m Johnny
– I’m a nurse by nature, and I’m nursing you into the future, and I’ve never said a word that’s wrong, really. I predict well and accurately. I had to dig deep to keep
my batteries running, in order for PiL to maintain or sustain any goodness that was in us, because it was a world of, ‘Boo, screw you. Here’s the latest video by . . .’ –
then you’d watch Simon Le Bon on a yacht. And no digs to Simon, he’s really an all right fella, but at that time the whole game was about the finances of video backing, and the more
money spent on a video seemed to mean the more attention. So, out the window went cause or point or purpose, and in crept, ‘Look what I’m wearing!’

I might have pushed it too far. But guess what? Here comes a hell of a lot more pushing. I don’t do this for chart positions, I do this to make the world a better place. I’m arrogant
enough to believe that whatever it is I do is actually to the benefit of mankind. I don’t really view it any other way. Every decision I make is always based on these principles and values.
Am I an anachronism? I
definitely began to get the idea that my approach to life was a dinosaur in the mid-’80s because nobody wanted to think about anybody but
themselves. What a great pity, to see punk unravel in that way. And pop music to accept any old palaver as long as a big-arsed name producer was attached.