Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (46 page)

At the time, I had no way of explaining this in the media. They really weren’t prepared to listen and were more or less rallying the negativity. I was easy pickings, and I didn’t
feel that my record company was properly representing me with any sense of support, so that allowed a kind of journalistic freedom to unleash itself on me. At the same time, a negative review of,
say, Madonna when she was starting up, would’ve been treated with very promptly by the record company by, for instance, threatening to pull advertising. I had none of that support, and
therefore I was a free-range chicken, baby! Because my name was so up there and well known, wow, what a target. And not appreciated for that. Or for the music.

On that tour, we’d open the set with the Led Zeppelin song, ‘Kashmir’. I love that song, I really do. I don’t mean the Puff Daddy version that came out some time after. I
really wanted to sing it, but I never got round to singing it in rehearsals. I insisted the band rehearse it, and I insisted that we open the set with it, but every single time they’re
waiting for me to come on, and I’m standing at the side, and I never did it. I’d shit myself. I couldn’t get it together – the very thing I’d set up and wanted so much
– and it became laughable.

It was still a great opening song, a very lovely piece of music, and I got to like the idea of letting people hear it, unadorned by Yours Truly. ‘Hello, it’s not the Johnny Rotten
Show, check out that band!’

Deep down inside, I think I wanted to sing like Robert Plant. I love Robert Plant, a great fella. I’ve met him a couple of times. I’ve got nothing but good to say about him. He comes
at you with no preconceived us-and-them attitude. He’s very open-minded; he’s everything good in music. I really, really like him. I mean, I don’t like his hairdo, but so
what?

Listen, he came down the Roxy in the early days of punk, when we weren’t quite yet sorting ourselves out proper. The Roxy was
punk’s deep dark hole, the den
of iniquity, but he had the balls to come down there – I think he came down with Lemmy from Motörhead – and it was great! I just made a beeline straight for them, and went,
‘Hello, great to see you!’ Because it really was. What he was doing was giving us a pat on the back. Of course there were arseholes there, going, ‘
Ugh
, whatcha doing
talking to
that
? He shouldn’t be here . . .’ ‘No, don’t be telling me who should and shouldn’t be here. Punk’s open-minded!
Abso-fucking-lutely!’

After all the violence on tour, we PiL-ites were feeling trapped with this idiotic element in the audience that was causing it. The success of
Album
in Britain, however, meant that we
were very much back on Virgin’s radar as a commercial prospect. The pop mainstream at the time was a terrible place, and we really didn’t feel a connection with any of our peers. As in
wider society, the entire period was about materialism. I had to squawk through it, and I was hated for everything I ever did.

I was trying to write about human emotions and political problems in the age of Reaganomics and yuppies. More than ever before, it was all, ‘Yippee, let’s do it for the money.’
Many of my alleged music cohorts in different bands were all the time on my case, going, ‘Why don’t you just write a hit song?’ – exactly that same old bollocks I heard from
the first day I got into rehearsals.
No!
You write what you write, according to your experience and your humanity and your sense of understanding of the world, and if you try to step out of
that zone, well, yeah, you might make the cash, but you’re one lonely silly sod.

It struck me as deeply strange just how little music there was in the charts with any kind of relevance or political meaning. To me, someone like Boy George was the rare exception. All the
people I like in music are the ones that have done something completely original, with a touch of genius, and I put Boy George in that bracket. He came up with something really great and
challenging. At a time when punk had got staid and boring, out comes Culture Club. Fantastic. George would wear Indian menswear in a feminine way. The boy can
sing, and he
comes from the same background as me – the same hardcore rubbish. He’s someone that stood up for himself, no matter what he got into, and he’s intelligent, and therefore I like
him. More respect, more power. He was the kind of guy there wasn’t really enough of to make the ’80s bearable.

The world I wanted was going back to early clubs like Louise’s, where all manner of people would meet in the same environment and not cause a problem to each other, and not judge each
other, and all be very different for their sexual agendas.

The ’80s proved very negative in that respect for me, really just a bitter competition for who could make the most expensive video and show off the most. What a pity, such a shame.
Because, as I said, I love Duran Duran. I love ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’, but does it require hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of promo video? All that was created there was a
whole new monster of video directors, and they were arseholes to a man. The dictates that would come in from these people were just ludicrous beyond belief. The song wouldn’t matter, the
studio work, your lifestyle, your band, nothing. It would be, ‘I have an idea. All you’ve got to do is pay for it!’ The video was becoming more important than the music.

The biggest laugh in all of this era was – mullets. Again, it was, ‘We’re just having a laugh!’ ‘That’s all right, I don’t care what your hairdo of
choice is.’ But how vacuous it all was. Having said that, I was changing my own hair a lot at that time – though hardly according to fashion! I was the precursor to how many Beckham
hairdos?

I’d started to stick bits of fur on the top of my head with superglue. I used fuse-wire to make certain fluffballs stand up high. They weren’t dreadlocks, more like bunny tails. I
had so much metal in my head, by Jesus Christ, you try getting through an airport with that. The machine that went ‘Bing!’ would go ‘Bing-bing-bing!’ every time. The
‘hotwire to my head’ lyric in ‘Rise’ was a hairdo reference, while also being a poignant reference to South African torture methods involving electrocution.

By default, I suppose what I was doing was protest music. I can’t
help that. It has to be done. The truth has to be out there. That was a very untruthful period.
Quite amazing.

Politics has always been there in my writing. I can’t help it. I just feel naturally inclined to help the disenfranchised, and I’ll always feel that way myself. I know what those
emotions are. I’ve never forgotten the endurance of my childhood, and so I have a great sense of empathy for people who suffer. To be ostracized from a society that should know better is not
a great thing at all. So here I am. I will change society, I have changed society, I always will, and I’ll also be the first one shot because of that. That’s all right, I don’t
mind taking the first bullet, because there’s enough people out there in the world of music, just music alone, who understand that, and that creates a great playground for the future.
It’s my obligation to stand up and tell it like it is.

When it came to making our next album, 1987’s
Happy?
, I was very pissed off with the world, and I went very wordy. Rather than sing melody lines, I thought, ‘I’ll shove
as many words in here as I possibly can’, and loved doing it.

After touring together, where we’d all got on so well, the rehearsals where we wrote the songs for the album together flowed amazingly. It really got me back to why I wrote songs in the
first place. That’s why we called it
Happy?
– it was almost hard to believe how ‘right’ it was! – and it really surprised people, because it was a very
confident step in another direction.

There was a great sense of working together, and loving the work. I’d had enough of waiting around in New York for people to turn up. This was a room full of bright ideas which was heading
towards a kind of pop sensationalism.

‘Seattle’ was an exceptional tune in that the band put it together without me. It normally doesn’t happen that way but what happened was, I was stuck in New York with tinnitus,
which meant I couldn’t fly. The band went on to our destination, Seattle, and they had nothing to do for a week, so we agreed that they go in and record something, just a basic backing track.
When I hooked
up with them, they went, ‘Oh, this is just something we were messing around with,’ and I went, ‘What? It’s bloody amazing!’
I’ve still got the demo cassette they gave me. It just zinged, that song.

There’s a lilt in there somewhere almost like an Irish folk song, so – bang, in I went, layering that sensibility into it. My favourite part of the song is the ‘palaces,
barricades, threats meet promises’ section which is dealing with the rioting that was going on all around the world in the mid-’80s, from Broadwater Farm, London to as far away as
India.

The part that goes, ‘Character is lost and found on unfamiliar playing ground’, is very direct, but the whole thing is considering so many paradiddles of thought processes. A
paradiddle is what a drummer practises. Every drummer I know, they’re always in a corner going, ‘Paradiddle, paradiddle, paradiddle’, tapping their knees. That’s how
intellectualism works too. And although we know that intellectualism is a big fraud and some of the biggest deceivers of mankind are intellectuals, it’s also a very viable place to be.
Think!
And then when you think you’ve sussed it out,
think some more!
That’s what that lyric is saying.

The songs on this album were really good, I think, and meaningful. ‘Angry’ was a ‘look at yourself before you judge others’ song. ‘Rules And Regulations’ was
on the ‘don’t tell me what to do’ theme – you know, lest ye forget, there’s still a Rotten in here. ‘Hard Times’, with its Charles Dickens reference, was
an alarm-bell song about when national identity is corrupted into that siege mentality of us and them. Here I declare: we
are
them. All of us are them. We are us. All of us. And
vive la
différence
!

‘The Body’ refers almost directly to a TV play by Ken Loach called
Cathy Come Home
, which I watched when I was very young and which really affected me. It’s about
unwanted pregnancies, and the sense of almost criminality put on an unwed mother, and what she would have to endure – the abandonment, lack of family support and isolation. Terrible, terrible
things. I was young but I felt it really
severely. Years later at Gunter Grove, I went out and found somebody who had a reel-to-reel of it, and I played it back and just
broke down and cried all over again. I felt so sad for Cathy, I just wanted to wrap my arms like wings around her. That’s how I am, and I make no apologies for it. That’s my basic
approach to life.

The final track, ‘Fat Chance Hotel’, was based on a true story in my life. Soon after the Pistols broke up in 1978, I was stuck out in LA, and I met the manager of Gwen Dickey of the
soul/disco band, Rose Royce. The manager was English, and she had a child but no husband with her, and Gwen had nothing to do, so the three of us and the kid just rented an RV and drove to Mexico
– me in full punk regalia, the tartan bondage suit, accompanied by a black gospel singer, for a want of a better word, and an English lady with a mixed-race daughter. We definitely turned a
few heads.

Unfortunately, I had some digestive issues with the local cuisine – tacky tacos. I would also advise anyone going there: don’t drink the water. So for a few days, I was stuck inside
this dreary run-down hotel, and the song has some quite poignant lyrics about being bored in the brain, out here doing nothing at all – with a ‘splattery botty’. To be able to
find a way to write a song about having nothing going on except diarrhoea, I was more than pleased when I heard the final tape. It certainly shouldn’t turn you off a good holiday. It
intrigues, with warning signs. There’s also a love of the desert in it. There’s something about the silence of the desert, which isn’t silent at all, it’s the loudest
silence you’ll ever hear. So it’s a very enjoyable song; you just close your eyes and drift in its space.

For me, the whole album was a very powerful co-production with Gary Langan, from the Art of Noise, with well-balanced results. Gary was nutty, a bit of a genius, but with a laugh and a smile,
and he always did things for the right reason.

At that time, Lu was obsessed with technology, and he wanted to somehow transfer modern electronic keyboards via the computer into the gamelan register. He wasted years and years on that, until
he came to grips with, ‘Well, you don’t need to – just play the thing!’ We
maybe went a little far into the banks of keyboards: I remember us all
being very, very in sync with each other.

It’s a serious problem for me, all this technology. The people who’ve used it best would be Depeche Mode. ‘Your own personal Jesus!’ Bloody ’ell mate,
they
got it! They were using the Casiotone effect and they wrapped a song around it, but they didn’t let it dictate to the song. That’s another tune I just absolutely love – I was so
impressed with the bravery of attempting such a subject matter.

The front cover of
Happy?
was a nod to the German artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose work I was truly impressed by. I don’t know nothing about him, I don’t want to. I
just know that any time that man put something together I was completely interested. He did architecture, too, and it was always interesting, for instance using gardens on the floors of
skyscrapers, and altering the shape of a building and making it interesting to the eye for the observer – as on our sleeve.

How I got into Hundertwasser goes back to the job that Sid got me working at Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road, when we had to clean up the vegetarian restaurant. Often we’d be bored
and have an hour to spare – because you had to be there for a certain length of time, but you’d clean up that place in a minute flat – so then we’d wander round the store. I
noticed the Hundertwasser books in the store’s library section and
procured
some, shall we say.