Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (52 page)

I think a lot of people think we only played Finsbury Park and that’s it, but we did something like sixty or seventy shows covering the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and
South America. It was a massive commitment. We called the tour ‘Filthy Lucre’, because that was one of the accusations from the newspapers when we were being paid to leave EMI and
A&M, back in ’77. My mate, Dave Jackson, who’d done our stage design in PiL, came up with the set idea of having all them sensationalist hateful headlines printed on a massive sheet
of paper across the front of the stage, and us then bursting through it. It came at great expense, but there we were, smashing up the headlines – what part of that aren’t you getting?
These headlines are lies. We’re not. And ultimately, if you don’t even understand any of the infusions of the Sex Pistols in modern culture, please at least understand that we broke
through the bullshit barrier. We survived Maxwell
and
Murdoch!

After all the media cynicism, the actual response at the first European gigs was just incredible. We were finally getting that respect. It was overwhelming and emotional.
And the thrill of that and the audience absolutely being there right from second one, is that you don’t have to become a parody of yourself. You’re with it as much as the audience is.
They give me as much as I give them.

The third show was a massive one for me – outdoors in Finsbury Park, actually in the park itself in front of something like 30,000 people. It was a very difficult gig to do, because my
family were all there and close friends and everybody from the neighbourhood, and they all want your attention. There were lots of pop stars and footballers whizzing about backstage, all wanting to
talk to you.

The whole gig, however, turned out fantastic, one of the very best days. It was right in the middle of the Euro ’96 football tournament, which was taking place in Britain, and a couple of
the England team, Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate, came down. They were specifically warned not to come by the England manager, Terry Venables, but they came anyway, so of course I gave them my
full support, and asked them to introduce us onstage, which they did. Some of the audience were not over-exuberant in their appreciation of them, they were just puzzled as to what the connection
was. ‘Hello, we’re giving you proper England, you fools!’

All the pre-show excitement
drained
my energy. By the time I got onstage I was exhausted, and I hadn’t fully prepared. But we did good. My ‘fat, forty and back’ line
seemed to go down well – a nod and a wink to that lovely old Tamla song, ‘Young, Gifted And Black’, trying to bring a sense of humour to it. ‘Hello, I’m not here
pretending I’m seventeen. Get it right! But this is what I’ve been doing, this is what I’ve done, and I’m proud of it and nobody else has the right to try and step into
these positions that we created.’ That whole Swindle nonsense of Malcolm trying to get someone not only to emulate me, but steal my position in life, steal my own work – that was always
an issue with me. I will always come back and get vengeance for that kind of activity, and rightly so. I am
what I am, and you will get my bitterness if I see you stealing
my hairdos, my lifestyle, my clothing, my lyrics, my music. I won’t have much time for you, and I will say so. Other than that, I’m quite an easy fella to get on with.

It was such great fun being onstage, doing those songs again. Doing ‘EMI’, after the label’s recent halting of PiL’s progress, I really, really hammered it in. I took no
prisoners. I couldn’t wait to get to that part of the gig – that was, ‘Whhoooaaaarrrrghhh!’ I’d be holding back on some of the more excessive screaming tones, and
saving them for that. I made the delivery oh-so-vicious and attacking. Which is exactly the way I wrote it.

Them songs, still to this day I don’t know how I managed to record the vocal lines all in one go. It was always hard to do live, and the longer I’m at it, the more astounded I am
that I ever could get up to it like that in the first place.

A couple of weeks or so after Finsbury Park, we played a smaller gig indoors at the Shepherds Bush Empire, which prompted Alan McGee, then the boss of Creation Records, to pay for a full-page ad
on the back of the NME, praising us to the heavens. That was all his doing; he felt really bloody angry that people were trying to slag us off or put us down, while ignoring our history. Very nice
and neat of him, I thought. And nothing at all about a working relationship – that was never ever discussed with him, even though he was a big fan.

It’s ironic, but it’s delicious too, that, gosh, we’ve got a lot of enemies – and if I may say so myself, fully deserved. But that just makes us better, every one of us.
What is it about us, or me in particular, that seems to annoy? Just telling it like it is. When it all comes down to it, that’s my crime. I tell it like it is.

Once we properly got into the tour, there were bitter arguments. I’m the singer and I don’t go on a tour bus unless there is an open window. I can’t sit in
there with air conditioner. It totally fucks up your musical instrument – your voice – and then you can’t do the
gigs. This is just a natural fact. The
only instrument I have to fine tune is my tonsils. I can’t ask a roadie to repair them when I’ve been dehydrated for twelve hours on an overnight bus ride. You end up with all kind of
medical problems from that, ripping your tonsils out due to nothing more than the lack of an open window.

Of course, this made me a spoiled brat. Certain members of the band found it annoying or precious, on my behalf. But these would be the same guitarists that insisted on employing someone to put
the strings on their instruments. Well, an open window is the strings on my instrument.

It’s the same with hotels: I have to have a room that has a window that opens, or preferably a balcony door, whether it be freezing or not. That’s the kind of thing, for me, that
keeps me going. Otherwise I start getting ill, I start getting run down, and then strep-throat comes in, then you need doctors and then it gets into Vitamin B12 shots. It becomes a downward spiral,
and physically you become drained because of it. An open window isn’t the perfect answer but it’s nine-tenths the solution to the problem.

Then jealousy can creep in if the only open window is at the back of the bus – well, that’ll be where I sleep then. And too bad if you wanna sit around there chatting. But I’ve
got to tell you, too, a lot of the time that’s a problem in itself, because tour buses are very rattly things. When you have an open window, the sound of the wind rushing by – and the
rattling and the banging – it’s like being in an aircraft engine, and you’re in a state of sleeplessness.

You can see how the rock-star private-jet phenomenon came about. You get there quick, you get it over with, and then you can stand next to your open window in a hotel room for eight hours.
Rather than ten hours on a motorway, arguing.

We toured way too long. I realized very early on that I couldn’t write a song for them any more. I didn’t feel it in that way, and every time a song idea came up, I was always
thinking, ‘PiL!’ That would be something we could experiment with in a
PiL way, not here, because this would be ten steps backwards, like a re-enactment really,
and I don’t do those.

I enjoyed shape-shifting the old songs. I also enjoyed revisiting our anti-format of that time, and how we put those songs together. Fond memories – it would be there in the back of my
mind how these things came together, as I was actually doing it live. Fantastic, really rich rewards in that. But then animosities started to creep in. Again. Sometimes, they deliberately
wouldn’t give me that cue for a verse or whatever, that musicians ordinarily do. Then you’re standing there in front of thousands of people, wondering, ‘Where’s the singer
supposed to go here?’ I caught them doing that more than a couple of times. I’d look round and go, ‘Where’s me cue?’ They’d all have their backs to me in an
idiotic Status Quo impression, Steve and Glen doing this arse-waggling back-turn to me. Stuck in their little jam session bit. Ludicrous, lu-dick-erous.

Very early on, in Paris, I was in my hotel room, watching, of all things, George Formby doing ‘when I’m cleaning win–daaaahs’. I heard this rustling under the door, and I
thought, ‘What’s that? Is that room service again?’ because I do love my French onion soup every twenty minutes. That’s one of the greatest things about the French. Wow!
French onion soup – I’d die for it. But anyway, no, it was a cassette and a little note attached going, ‘Do you think you could put some words to this?’ That was the general
gist of it. What?!

They’d gone off with Chris Thomas, the producer of
Never Mind The Bollocks,
and laid down some basic tracks without involving me at all, and then presented this cassette, not to my
face, but snuck it under the bloody hotel door. ‘Just put the words to it.’ I exploded on that one – to me, that’s just, ‘What, after all these years, you don’t
think I’m good enough to be involved with the initial songwriting of these tunes? You didn’t even invite me to that?’ No. ‘Just put some words to it.’ To this day,
I’m very bitter about that. Not hateful but just, I’m sad for them that they thought that would ever work with me, because they know me deep down, and
they knew
that would hurt very, very deeply. So unfriendly, and just not the thing to do, and a kind of ‘You’re not one of us’ attitude. Smug and pompous and, at the same time, going,
‘Go on, put the money-earner on top of this dross.’

Rambo eventually talked me into listening to it, and it was awful. It was hideous, it was rubbish. Nonsense. Old lazy-arse strumming . . . bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bah. The dullest thing. We never
worked that way ever in the past and I didn’t understand why it was being presented in that way to me now.

That’s when I categorically knew: it’s impossible for me to write songs with them ever again. From that moment on, it was compounded: ‘Who do you think you are, saddling up
with Chris Thomas?’ He had recorded Finsbury Park for our live album and was also recording the sound in Paris, you see. Again, their idea. I thought, why not? He knows the Pistols sound, but
he actually didn’t. But that’s neither here nor there. They could have these little cliquey set-ups, and the bottom line was, however much was spent doing that without my attendance, I
ain’t paying for it.

Amazing, isn’t it? Yet I still put up with them, but by God, that hurt. It really did, it hurt deeply. It was a very bad thing to do.

Some of the gigs were terrific, really excellent, but I kept feeling all the way through that I wasn’t in the mood to write new songs for this, in THIS part of my life. That time had gone.
More than happy to celebrate THAT part of my life, but not for it now to be a part of my present. There’s nothing better for me than to get up onstage with them fellas – we wrote those
songs together, so that’s the proper presentation. Offstage, I spent a great deal of time
not
hanging out with any of the band at all. I was 24/7 with Rambo – quite frankly,
it’s the only way it really lasted as a tour.

Security passes were something I never felt the need to wear, particularly when coupled with Rambo. The way we were viewing it was, ‘If our hairdos aren’t our pass, well, we’ll
pass on the gig, thank you.’ Rambo and I got into so much wackiness with clippers and dye. No regular mohawk for me or John, it’s not our way.

I always like a line down one side of my head, from the top to the back, but Rambo came up with some amazing wacky things on me – like the idea of
‘castle-ing’, so the top of my head looked like the Tower of London, with checker-board, black-and-white squares on top. All manner of squiggles and different designs – a gorgeous
mass of matt colours. Rambo wanted 666 on the back of his head, and I eventually managed to do it well with some nose-hair clippers. So it all went up a notch from the local hairdresser.

At one gig in Italy there was this big gang of travellers with young kids, all dressed mad, punky, spiky, and some of the crowd – I think it may even have been some of the travellers
– were throwing bottles at us. We had these young kids we’d allowed to sit onstage, because they were young, but there were a lot of beer bottles flying around. I was like, ‘Why
are you trying to kill us?’ Rambo moved quickly to get the kids cleared off the stage safely. I can’t understand that viciousness. When the mob mentality takes over, it’s hard to
control. I managed to shut it up, and single out the leading elements – ‘Oi, you, you fat turd. You’re the man, are you?’

Even more chaotic was the Axion Beach festival in Zeebrugge, Belgium. It was very exciting: my first time on Eurostar, and also Paul Cook’s birthday, which I didn’t know, so he
bought some champagne and I bought a few bottles more – I wanted to, you know,
be friends
, quite genuinely, but unfortunately most of the champagne was left to me. I got a bit drunk,
not mindlessly or violently, just a little tipsy. So after the two-bloody-hour drive to the gig from the hotel, we hung around – uuuuunnngggh! – went on stage, the gig’s halfway
through, I was standing out on a very long runway, right out in the middle of the crowd, a good 20 feet high and some venue bouncers started climbing up the side of the runway to try and get on the
stage – as explicitly forbidden in our contract. These were really large blokes, and you knew they were doing this just to cause trouble. Their excuse was ‘fans running onstage’,
but Rambo was dealing with all that – there’s no malice in it, we’re not going to beat them up, just politely lead them back into the crowd, no harm done.

It very quickly turned into a brawl, where they presumed that Rambo shouldn’t be on the stage – a major bad move on their part. I look around, mid-song, and
there’s these enormous great long muscular blokes attacking Rambo and then a whole pile of them charging at him, so I dived in with the microphone and did the best I could to get them the
hell off our property. By that time one of these big lumps had already been knocked out. It was an invasion at that point. And in that respect we won. We cleared them off, the band carried on
playing and I said to the audience, ‘That’s what happens when security take their job too seriously!’