Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (48 page)

Touring
9
was a happy experience, up to a point. Through the summer of 1989, we went around America with New Order and the Sugarcubes. It was fantastic fun, and great for the crowd
getting three decent bands in one night, and all very friendly backstage – just a mass of people getting on with each other, and no pretension about who was headlining.

It became, oddly enough, by its openness, almost claustrophobic to me. It gave me precious little time to get ready for my bit – my moody moment where I have to find what it is I’m
about to project onstage. I do need those moments of silence before I go on, otherwise I’m not grasping it, and I walk on there ‘au casual’ and then suddenly it hurts because
I’m not bang-on from second one, and you have to be.

New Order’s singer, Bernard Sumner, was having problems emotionally and looked a bit the worse for wear. At one particular gig, they had to tape him to a luggage trolley, wheel him on, and
prop him up in front of the microphone. When he came off,
I went, ‘Bernie, you’re now a trolley dolly.’ Nice fella, but never really got to know him
well.

We got very close with the Sugarcubes; that was a band I loved and adored. I used to go to their gigs, long before we ever worked on the same stages together. I think I’ve got just about
every Sugarcubes record ever made. I’m not so much of a Björk fan now. I find it borderline classical pretension; it’s not interesting to me. Einar, their male singer, was a
problem. Einar was a bit of an Einar, and he’d hit on me at every chance he got. I really liked him, but I couldn’t bear the – ‘John! You must hear my new poem!’ This
was very difficult, backstage. Great fella, though – creative, bouncy, and sorely missing now in Björk’s work. She’s now left to wearing swans and making pretentious squeals
and squeaks.

Also that year, I appeared at the ‘Hysteria 2’ Aids benefit at Sadler’s Wells alongside the likes of Tina Turner and Dave Gilmour. I was invited to attend, I think, by Stephen
Fry, of all people.

I was supposed to do a skit with Stephen, but I said, ‘There’s no way I can learn lines,’ so when my time came, I went up and just made it up on the spot. I’ve no idea
what I did, all I know is, when I came off, it was, ‘Wow! That was funny!’ Everything there was great, fun and wonderful – except that the snobbery backstage was appalling and
really turned me off. My God, we’re here to raise money for good causes, but what I was getting was the likes of John Cleese going, ‘Who is
that
?’, pointing at me. What?!
And a huge fuss was made for the arrival of Jerry Hall. Eh? That’s just someone Mick Jagger bonked. Give it up! My God, was she tall and horsey-like. Very Texan. She walked in with an
enormous entourage, and I was shoved into a corner, and not many of those alleged celebrities had anything good or nice to say to me.

I brought Nora and it was really hard on us; she felt the cold of it backstage so we left early. We felt it was just wrong, and I decided from that day on that I wouldn’t get myself
involved with
these kinds of people, because they’re not genuine – well, not all of them, maybe 80 to 90 per cent. The few that are, like Stephen Fry,
who’s a crazy fuck and absolutely hilarious, are very busy, trying to keep the whole thing together, so they’ve got no time for you and it’s incredibly unsociable backstage.

Through 1989, PiL became a proper, hard-touring band, but it went too far. We toured too much,
waaaaay
too much, to the point where we became distant from each other. Everybody ended up
just getting up to whatever it is they wanted to do that particular night after the gig. Sometimes the touring doesn’t actually pull you together, it pulls you apart. And poor old Johnny,
being the old fart I always have been, I’m not one for going out after a gig, I don’t have the energy to do that. Everything has been spent onstage and therefore you start not to hang
out with each other and that widens the gap.

In amongst all that, certain band members were taking advances off the road manager. When you have to come in and say, ‘Look, we ain’t got the money to be doing that any more,
you’ve had your share, and in fact you’re already in debt even by the end of the tour when it all racks up – so stop it’ – well, then you have a big problem.

I don’t want to be the hardcore businessman, I don’t do it for that, yet somebody has to. You’re the lead singer, but at the same time you’re the one that’s at the
helm here, and as much as you don’t want to be bothered by financial dips, you have to be, and it can affect your work ultimately, and it can affect your relationships with band members.
I’m not saying that was anything at all to do with little Allan Dias – he would have been the least of them, actually. Poor old Bruce Smith was the biggest problem – but
we’re still working together to this day. Bad bunny.

I know they say the captain of a ship should never be friendly with the crew – well, I’m consistently trying to challenge that perception.

The longer I worked with John McGeoch, the more problems he created for himself with alcohol. His nerves were terrible, much worse than even my own, and
he became very absorbed in the idea of sticking rigidly to a schedule. Now: on tour, things change, buses don’t arrive exactly on time, planes get delayed, but all of these moments would
drive him crazy with his particular phobias, so he’d be starting to yell at the tour manager, ‘But the book says 8.30, and it’s now 9.40, I can’t work like this . . . I need
a Martini!’

I know we’ve all done it, but John got used to it, and then became unworkable. When Lu was still in the band, he’d have to take over parts that John would start to forget, or
mistime. I had such a row with him on one gig, where he forgot a certain part in ‘Seattle’, and he went, ‘Stop, let’s start again,’ and we were already into the second
chorus! I gave such a hateful glare. My message was clear, and my band knew this too –
you don’t stop!
Once you’ve started a song, you do not stop it, not ever. People have
paid money for this. Everybody makes mistakes, go with it. Wait for the beat to come round, there’s your spot, and you’re back in. That can actually be really good in a live
performance, because it’s adding flavour to the song.

After the
9
tour, Bruce Smith had his other things to get involved with, and I couldn’t keep up a regular wage packet for him as a retainer, because there wasn’t the money
there for that. So we had a pleasant parting of the ways, but I always kept him and Lu in mind.

By this point, our batteries were really low, all of us. We’d toured a lot, and the travel wears you down. You lose your sense of base, of home, and thereby, purpose. I’m a bit of a
gypsy and a wanderer myself, but I do need to have the sanctuary of somewhere solid to go back to – to get a plug-in. I’d been ‘working in music’, for want of a better
phrase, for fifteen years now, and the smart thing to do is to take a break, as a human being.

Unfortunately, it’s a very forgetful industry, where if you haven’t heard of someone for a year, you presume they’re dead. What kept
us moving was
‘Don’t Ask Me’, a terrific single which Allan Dias wrote mostly on his own. He had a good chunk of lyrics there, which I felt needed to be bumped up just that extra notch but not
too much. I was chuffed to pieces with it. You know, ‘What’s it all about?/They scream and then they shout/Don’t ask me, cause I don’t know/No UFOs to save us/And do we
really care?’ It’s a very long song vocal-wise. Hundreds of words but they’re all poignant.

We did a terrific cover for it, emulating the Metal Box. It was in a small round little metal tin. We also did a great video, which was directed by Bob Dylan’s son, Jesse. It started going
up the charts, but somehow or other Virgin muffed the whole thing, by failing to press any more copies, because they weren’t expecting it to be a hit.

Their big plan was to release a Greatest Hits compilation. It was an idea that came from Gemma Corfield at Virgin – a very crazy lady, and a friend of sorts, who’d always had
something to say about my career, going back endless albums. Somebody did a Christmas prank on her, I think, and I’d seen it in the corner by her desk. It was a mocked-up poster that said,
‘Gemma Corfield’s Greatest Tits’, and there was a fake picture of her with her tits out. So obviously I wanted the album to be called
Greatest Tits
, because I thought that
was exactly right. Right up to the last minute, that was going to be the approach, but then it was altered, not to my liking, and I was furious about it.

It seems a silly thing now, but it took away my willingness to go out and promote it. We didn’t play at all, to coincide. What started us back up again was an offer to do a song for the
soundtrack to a Keanu Reeves movie,
Point Break
. That absolutely puzzled all of us. God, what are we gonna do? What a challenge. Somehow or other we wrote this song, ‘Criminal’,
and it was actually used. My problem was, I sang too high. Maybe I was rusty, but I was developing these extraordinarily high notes that were unlistenable. Bloody hell, glass-shatteringly piercing,
but that’s the experiment I was running, juxtapositioned with this bassy woof/thuddy pattern underneath. It just about worked.

I couldn’t really get any involvement from McGeoch in the studio. He was just into this layering and layering endless overdubs to form his familiar blancmange, and
so there’s a dissipated energy going on in that song, where it’s not quite finding itself.

So, after that, when we got back together for the sessions in LA which led to the
That What Is Not
album, the idea was to leave everything at a bare minimum, and let the silence in
between things actually fill your head with wonderful ideas. Less is best sometimes. You know, don’t send 70,000 troops in with machine guns to break up a Boy Scout reunion.

I saw it not so much as a reaction, just the next level for PiL. I thought I’d been indulgent enough and learned enough in the area of technology and verbosity to know I didn’t want
to pursue it any deeper. That was fine for the element I was trying to express at that point. Communication is like this. You can get bored with the way you keep endlessly repeating yourself and so
you end up thinking, ‘What if I change the sentence structure somewhat?’

I wrote the songs for the album and put the general music guidelines together at home in Los Angeles before we started recording. We did no rehearsals, because we were all living in different
corners of the world.

We had a producer, Dave Jerden, that Virgin had recommended to us. I didn’t like him, and he
hated
me. He got big because he’d worked with Jane’s Addiction and Alice in
Chains. What I didn’t expect was him wanting a Slick Rick kind of poppiness. He was firmly planting his buttocks in the American pop of that time – like ‘Jessie’s
Girl’ by Rick Springfield.

As soon as we started laying down the backing tracks, I had issues, and it was politely agreed via the record company that the best thing would be if Jerden would pay attention to what I was
saying. I’d take a week off, and not be in the studio while they laid down the backing tracks – which was a great idea because that can be very boring. The week turned into something
like two weeks, probably longer and, by the time I got back in, the direction of the
songs had changed, the tempos were changed, patterns were altered – just not what
I’d had in mind when I wrote them.

Jerden was trying to restrict me to, ‘Yes, that’s a great song idea, but I thought if we put it in this key . . .’ I’d be like, ‘Well, did you ever consider that I
can’t sing in that register? And now I’ve only got two hours to do the vocals on three songs, and you’ve altered the range.’ This would be a serious fucking dilemma. Time
and money was running out, and rather than just start again with someone else, which was my suggestion, with both arms handcuffed behind me, we had to make the best of it. So Jerden killed the life
out of it, and that’s why I called it
That What Is Not
. It feels restrained to me – the savage edge as delivered by Abba.

Using name producers was always a problem. You try to avoid them, and produce yourselves, as we did in the early days, but then up comes an opportunity of trying it with someone else, and you
think, ‘Why not? There’s every chance this might actually work.’ You entertain the idea seriously and you go ahead with it, and then when you leave the studio that mélange
of what I think is killing modern music creeps back in, and you’re expected to adapt to that. It’s like, ‘I didn’t write this song for your version to dominate!’

I hated the rows revolving around the album, but I do still love a lot of the songs. I am still proud of it. There is some seriously underrated material on there. ‘Cruel’ is the most
perfectly tragic love song I’ve ever been a part of. I just adore it. Of course it’s melodramatic, but that’s the joy of it. It brings me back to those ’60s songs that were
all just so sad, stuff by the Bee Gees, at their best, or even Roy Orbison. It’s a very sad song: there’s the battle of the sexes in there, and all manner of deceit and treachery. But
it sounds beautiful!

My other favourite is ‘Acid Drops’. That was all about capitalism going out of control, and not serving the people. I felt like no one was dealing with it; it was all blandly ignored
by every single other band out there, including those professional preachers called
U2. Censorship’s in there, too: ‘Who censors the censors, can I do that
myself, make up my own mind, like anyone else?’ That whole ethos was kind of negated in the album’s very making, but then it wasn’t, because it ended up being a most excellent
song.

‘Forget me, forget me not/Remember me like acid drops’: I think I quite skilfully handle the venom in them lines as I’m delivering them. I was like, eyeballs firmly on Jerden
– ‘Don’t you yank my chain and don’t you tug me strings, ’cause I ain’t got none.’ At the end of the song I wanted the end refrain from ‘God Save The
Queen’ – ‘
noooo
o fuuuuuture
’! That to me seemed absolutely appropriate. That’s my satisfaction in delivering a thing properly. I hope he remembers
‘me like acid drops’.