Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (50 page)

Savage’s view of the world was Gang of Four, smug in-house student intellectualism. And all this coming out of the wordsmith genius of an ex-lawyer. The rumour was he gave up law to write
music journalism. See? He could’ve been some use to all of us.

This kind of thing was going on and on left, right and centre, all around. I was furious with people deciding what I thought, and did, and how I was – that my opinion was somehow lesser
than
England’s Dreaming
, and how that was presumed to be
the
authority on punk. The agenda from all manner of bands of the day – not just the Clash! – was to outdo
the Sex Pistols. It was an ugly, ugly world.

You’d have to be some kind of idiot if you’re not going to analyze what your public persona is. That doesn’t mean I have to read the sensational hate-lines on a daily basis.
Far from it! But I keep my ear to the ground. When the truth is being swayed off into angles of hatred, for God knows whatever different reasons or purposes, there is a point where you have to
stand up for yourself. And you pick the best moments to rally your troops.

So I thought that putting out my own true account of things in a book would be a good beginning towards counteracting it all. It was an issue I put off for quite a long
time, until the offer came, and there was a lull with Public Image, so I actually had the time. Then I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do this.’

I knew it would be taking on a whole kettle of piranhas. It certainly put a full stop on a lot of the nay-sayers. I called it
Rotten
, with the subtitle
No Irish, No Blacks, No
Dogs
, as I’d had to not be Rotten for so long because of the court case, and I’d been focusing on PiL–PiL–PiL, where I was Lydon all the way. It was like reclaiming that
part of myself. It was a serious step in my character development, because, since putting that book out, I’ve become very much less fearful of who I am, and what I am. And even though people
have tarnished and tried to steal that aspect of me, it
is
still me, it’s an intrinsic part of me, and I’ve come to realize that as very relevant. I
am
the elephant in the
room.

I gave over a lot of space to other people’s voices. Despite all the allegations out there, I still made room for people like Steve Jones and Paul Cook. It proved the point: whatever you
think we are, we’re not. We will always still help each other out, because it’s all about telling it like it is, and not just how others want it to be.

I also included some affidavits from the McLaren court case. I absolutely wanted them in there because it gave you a sense of the scenario – just read them and judge for yourself what you
think was going on with all of that. There was Malcolm, declaring himself a competent manager – hmm, very novel. Then there was Vivienne’s hateful nonsense – these were the adults
in my life and they just weren’t grasping reality at all. They had no qualms about trying to
fuck me out of my own life
. They came in hard with that ridiculous court case and left with
their arses royally reamed.

Then there was a guy from Virgin going on about my ‘unrequited homosexual affection for Malcolm’. Malcolm himself had put out stories – one in particular, in a German music
paper – that I’d always loved him, but he had to say ‘no’, and that was my
problem. At the time, I thought, ‘He can have his little gay fantasy
all he likes, I don’t give two fucks.’ But when he hit back with the line that I’d always seen him as a father figure . . . that was too much, that’s something my dad
wouldn’t like to be reading, and I don’t think it should be said. It’s wrong. I don’t care what he says about me, he can lie all day long, but don’t go into those
areas. The spite in it and the childishness really ten-folded my contempt for him. I thought, ‘Jesus, listen, we were all really right about what an arsehole he is.’

For me, it was a great book, maybe harsh, but then the situations I had to deal with in it were appalling.

One thing that needs correcting was something the ghost-writers rewrote without asking – they tried changing me coming from Finsbury Park to Camden Town! And their insane justification was
that people won’t know where Finsbury Park is, but everybody knows Camden Town because of the market! To try and alter where someone comes from is ludicrous!

After it was published in 1994, the most fabulous thing that happened was the improvement in the quality of the journalists that interviewed me. They were books-y people, so the conversations
became ever so much more interesting. I felt, ‘God, I really like doing interviews now,’ and I’ve been that way ever since. Rather than feeling like I have to aggressively defend
myself all the time, here was a whole catalogue of eminent whatevers actually giving me the time and respect to allow me to properly answer a really sensibly researched question. Proper lines of
communication, and – the very thing I thought journalism was about – a respect for the facts.

In the following years, I tried very hard to get
No Irish
made into a movie. I got some kind of backing going there. I raised a million or two, but dealing with the
script-writers was where it fell apart. It was all just people wanting to rewrite everything in a very ‘David Cassidy’s life story on VH1’ kind of way. It’d be, ‘Well,
now we’ve
got to have some romantic interest – your book don’t say much about that, let’s make some up.’ ‘No, we will not make some up.
You’ll tell it like it is, and that’s that!’ And no matter what it is, or whatever I do, I don’t do kiss-and-tells. And certainly not just to sell books or cinema tickets
for money. I don’t hurt people like that, and quite frankly, anyone who has had any physical relationships with me must feel very hurt already. It wouldn’t bode well for the reputation.
They’d be contaminated.

My idea for the lead role was Justin Timberlake. I thought, ‘That would work.’ Because Justin at the time was out there, but he was coming to a rough end in his music. He was getting
bored and starting to do acting, and he hadn’t got any good roles yet. I thought this would be tailor-made for him, being so fluffy and nice and kind of simple in his approach to life. I
thought this would be a real challenge for him to take on, the role of Johnny Rotten, and there was every chance he could sing the songs.

It started as a joke in interviews but then I got deadly earnest and serious about it. I might’ve been shooting at pie in the sky, but I thought, ‘If you don’t aim high,
you’re not going to get results.’ It was the powers-that-be that wouldn’t go there. They were talking like, ‘No, well, maybe we should use some unknowns.’ ‘What?
What’s the point of this, then?’ They just wanted to keep the costs down, and thereby keep potential out of it. Who needs another B-minus movie.

It never got as far as meeting with Justin. I just shot it out into press statements to see which way the wind would blow. But even if they wanted to respond on his behalf, I knew that our lot,
my backers, would’ve negated on it. But such a juicy backdrop of a plot!

I’d been quite outspoken about some of the more escapist dance music of the early ‘90s. There was plenty of rubbish going on. The floppy-hat teapot brigade were
back; the lot in the loon pants who’d never lend you a tent peg at the original hippie festivals.

There was, however, another underground clubby scene, where the beats were harder and there was a load more urban grit going on in it – and that stuff I
loved
.

Leftfield, by chance, I knew through John Gray, because one of the duo, Neil Barnes, had been working at the play centres that I got kicked out of in the mid-’70s. He occasionally used to
come around Gunter Grove with John. I was thrilled when he started up with Leftfield, and by the sounds they were coming up with together. I got to know Paul Daley, his partner in the group, and
really liked him. It took quite a while to get us on the same page, from the first time they presented me with a cassette and said, ‘Maybe you could help us out with some words here.’
They were getting big in the British dance scene, and there were hardly any singers on the records at that point, in those circles. And so, in I came.

What I loved about that whole rave-y dance scene was that it was wide open, racially and culturally. There were no judgement calls on anything. It’d seemingly come out of nothing. It came
out of itself, and created itself really well, and blended really well with punk. I was eager to see that develop, but certainly not move into it or copy it, which was one of my huge problems with
getting into doing it. I kept telling them, ‘I don’t want it to be perceived that I’m jumping on a bandwagon here.’ But the boys kept at me, ‘No, no, John, no one is
ever gonna think that, you’re the only person that can do this . . .’

As I say, it was a universe of music that was just about beats and things, but with no vocal direction on it, because it was almost impossible for singers to fit into the rigidity of the tempos.
Well, we found a way. We found a very good way, and a very natural way. When I was ready, I rung ’em and I went down, and we finished it in a night. Fantastic. A great deal of worry went on
on my part, I must say, because I didn’t want to commit and make a twot of it. Fair play to the boys, it would be, ‘No, don’t worry if it’s rubbish, John, we’re not
gonna use it.’ Oddly enough, those words are never very comforting.

Lo and behold: ‘Burn, Hollywood, Burn’, or, according to the official title, ‘Open Up’, came into being. It was released in November ’93
– the same week that the hills of Hollywood were actually on fire! I had to deal with the press here in America going, ‘How dare you try to capitalize on a natural disaster?’
Ouch! This is music journalists at work, supposedly in the know, but somehow oblivious to the fact of how a record is recorded a good while before it finally gets released. It was insane and
twisted – ignorant fucks giving judgement.

The thing about that particular fire is, it came right down the hills. By then I had a house out in Malibu, on the coast, and the fire wasn’t far away from the front gates. Nora and I
thought, ‘What can we pack? What do we need?’ We’d all been told by the police that we’d left it too late and we had to leave, so we thought, ‘Let’s just get in
the car and go.’ We drove to the other house and waited to see on the news what was happening – to see if we’d lost it all.

It’s amazing, the vibe you get in those situations, it’s almost like, ‘Well, if it’s gone, so what, we haven’t lost each other.’ That is such a rewarding,
weird, strange emotion, where you realize that things like property and personal collections ultimately don’t matter. If you’re faced with a disastrous situation, it’s the missus
and the kids, isn’t it? By no means throw your possessions out or sell them off or anything of the kind, because you’ll regret that. But when you’re confronted with what really
matters most, that’s a different situation. There’s a puzzlement in there and I know I’ve got a song in there somewhere. Soon to be written.

On top of the fires, there’d been the Rodney King riots in LA the previous year, and all the folk around here in California weren’t too enamoured by touching on the theme of LA
boiling over again. They weren’t showing me any love for writing a song channelling a whole series of disastrous events. They weren’t grasping it. I wouldn’t say any of this is to
do with psychic ability on my part, but I think I’m on the pulse of inevitability – consistently. You’d
have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see it
happening. I think the problem is, most people in this world actually
are
deaf, dumb and blind. Facing up to reality is not something many people do – certainly not your mainstream
masses, and very few of the bands. In fact, whenever they do want to be realistic, they simply jump on the charity bandwagon,
cause célèbre
-stylee.

The lyrics of ‘Open Up’ are specifically about an aspiring actor trying to break into Hollywood movies, and they were actually autobiographical. As I said before, it was certainly
not something I’d had my eye on when we moved to LA, but things had been unexpectedly going in that direction, with the absence of PiL activity for the time being. I’d even been going
to try-outs, learning scripts and turning up to be auditioned. I went to quite a few, and they were all, I’ve got to tell you, the most embarrassing and fundamentally soul-destroying things
I’ve ever done. But I thought, ‘I’d really like to see if I can get on with this, because it’s a good angle of work.’ It’s an exploration of sorts.

But, no: massive humiliation in it. It’s so hard to be rejected. I’ve got a great deal of sadness for big actors, knowing what they had to go through to get where they are. Not any
of them had it easy. It’s really hard to shape-shift yourself into the mindset of another personality and give up yourself so much, and give so much of yourself, and then face rejection for
it. Wow!

One movie I tried out for was about a chauffeur and a butler kidnapping a toy dog from the wealthy owner they worked for, and the calamities that thereby unfolded. So it was mostly comedies like
that. Another was a war movie. The scene I was asked to learn, I was dying – and, yup, that’s exactly what happened. Oh, it was murder, I couldn’t grasp it. I had the drive but I
didn’t really at the time have the depth in me to take it seriously, because still at the back of my head there was this little thing jumping around like a demon saying,
‘
Huurrgh
, acting’s for arseholes.’ That was really a cover-up on my own behalf. It’s not taking it seriously and I should have. I should’ve had more power over
my own demons.

You know for sure that as a singer you’ll be judged more harshly. I’ve no idea if I’ve got what it takes. I’ve gone through all the
self-interrogation, which is more than enough for me to have to endure, but if it’s there then I’m gonna take the challenge. I can’t resist the challenge. It’s harsh on me
what I do to myself, but if there’s something where I risk facing complete and utter humiliation and degradation, then I will waltz into it. I find that irresistible. That’s what life
is, a series of superb challenges, and in none of these aspects am I talking about selling my soul or copping out or denying my past, my present or my future. What I’m talking about is
there’s a work thing here. A way of presenting whatever my message is in different ways.