Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (54 page)

The next morning, Steve, Paul and Glen were flying separately to me and Rambo, and they didn’t even say goodbye when they left. This left a real sour tone on me and that’s where it
is with us. It shouldn’t be like that – especially after a gig like that, my God! Must you really all rush off to bed early and then leave without saying goodbye? Apparently, they
must.

Rambo and I duly travelled as far as customs in Florida together, then I had a connecting flight to LA, and he had a connecting flight to Memphis. Because of his leg wound they had reluctantly
put him in a wheelchair! I even got to wheel him a little, he hated it, but it meant he got whisked right through. When I finally got through, I ran into him. There he was, walking around the
airport without the wheelchair, and we had a real laugh, and a proper goodbye.

And that’s a moment in time I should have been sharing with my band, but they don’t give you those opportunities. What can I say? It leaves a blemish.

I’ve always had bad teeth, from my early youth onwards. The dentist’s was the very last place any of us in my family would go. It was where my mum and dad had all
their teeth removed. They were given money by the state towards getting a set of dentures fitted, which they were told would solve all of their problems for the rest of their life.

This policy, which was obviously all about saving the government from paying for proper dental care, created nothing but trouble for the patients who took them up on it.

Come nine or ten on an ordinary night, they’d take their teeth out after dinner and soak ’em in this vile liquid, Steradent. Otherwise dental hygiene was unrequired. And it
wasn’t just my mum and dad, it was my aunts, uncles, and everybody I knew.

Once the teeth had been extracted, however, the gums would recede and the dentures would require all manner of sticky-back plastic, shall we say, to keep them in, because
the gums had dissolved to nothing. Every time they laughed, their teeth would fall out. It was an even bigger problem when Mum and Dad would throw a party at our house. They’d
all lose their teeth from dancing, from all the jumping up and down. My job was not only playing the records, but finding the teeth and working out whose was whose.

So that was how it was presented to me: I needn’t bother brushing because when I grow up I’ll have a fresh set ready at the dentist and I could lose them on the dancefloor like
everyone else. So I would naturally avoid the dentist. Also, because of the pain. Dentists were very brutal back then. Yes, it was free on the National Health Service, but the cost in trauma was
incalculable.

When I was about thirteen, I had a very bad experience. At school I had this toothache, so bad that I was screaming with the pain, and school actually booked an appointment with my local
dentist. She was Polish and insane, and she had a ‘Brünnhilde SS’ kind of vibe, with the hair pulled back tightly and a bun in the back done in a braid. Short, chubby, very blonde,
very Germanic in her approach, and very, very volatile. She absolutely wouldn’t listen to you squeal in pain. She had no time at all for any of us children. She scared the living daylights
out of everyone

Anyway, she immediately decided she had to pull this tooth, but when she ripped it out, she broke a blood vessel. She gave me a cotton swab to hold on the wound, but it just kept bleeding. The
dentist’s was on the corner of Holloway Road and Seven Sisters, and I caught the bus to go home, but I actually passed out on the bus. They stopped the bus, and the conductor took me home
– basically dragged me, all limp like a dead body. I’d lost a lot of blood, I was covered in it. Luckily, my dad was back from work, and he rushed me
straight to
the hospital, where they stitched up that side of my jaw.

From that day forth, on the upper left side, I had a huge gap between my teeth where she’d taken quite a lot of the gum with her. I could make dolphin noises, I discovered, by sucking air
in through the gap. The budgie loved it. The hamster never responded too well, but the cats and dogs loved it too. So it became like a party trick of mine. I actually used it on the Sex Pistols
song, ‘Submission’ – the ‘pffffmmmmwwwwp-p-p-p’ noise in the bridge section is all from that. I’ve since had it replaced, so I can’t do it any longer.

Understandably, that Brünnhilde experience left a really negative impression, and strengthened my aversion to oral hygiene. At the dentist’s, you always got either that dreadful gas
mask, which would make you feel like you were being gassed to death, or the injections, or just the sheer violence of pulling teeth, which seemed to be their main ambition. After a while, fillings
were more the fashion. They’d drill holes in every tooth, and fill ’em full of mercury . . . and then they’d pull the tooth anyway! Just more pain on pain.

So, I always had bad teeth. The concept of brushing them never occurred to me, and I can’t blame Mum and Dad for that. There were toothbrushes in the house, but I’d only ever seen
Dad use one on his work boots. I suffered a lot of ill health because of it, and I was naive not to be aware of that. It took me forever to catch on that my teeth were one of the things making me
feel so ill all the time.

By the time I was joining the Pistols, the second I smiled, it was like, ‘Oh my God, look at those teeth on him.’ It was Steve Jones who went, ‘Uuuuh-uuurrgh, you’re
rotten! Look at you, your teeth are rotten!’ The front two had this green mould on them. It wasn’t just like I’d eaten some spinach or
something. If it
was, that stuff remained stuck there for a real long time. Between the gum and the tooth, there was a green line on the front two, like slime, and on every other one, there was that horrible yellow
stuff that I never understood – plaque.

At the time I thought it was exceptional – a good thing. Nope. It wasn’t. There I was, you know – ‘Why don’t no one wanna give me a kiss?’

So I was known as Rotten, and the nickname stuck – for life! I know it’s a bizarre thing for me of all people to say, but, really –
take care of your teeth!
In this one
respect, don’t do
anything
like what I did! Through all those years of ignorant behaviour, I was slowly but surely poisoning and killing myself.

Much later, once I was in California, I spent what ended up being a small fortune getting them fixed. You don’t even want to know the cost. I had to have a whole series of operations,
because so much was going wrong up there. Eventually I started to listen to what the professionals were telling me, but it was mostly pain that guided me. It reached a point where I was really
seriously ill. It became so painful that I’d rather deal with the pain of the dentist, than put up with the pain I had every single day.

I was poisoning myself with constant abscesses, and had near-permanent headaches. To remedy the situation, I’ve had everything – crowns, you name it. In 2012 I had titanium
screw-ins, because there was so much damage going on up in the bone region, it all had to be rebuilt and replaced. I had to have all the bones realigned. I pretty much had my jaw realigned –
major, major stuff.

I put it off for so long because I thought it might affect the way I sing, or the way my voice sounds. I took the risk, because I thought I’d rather live, and live without pain.

I’m really pleased I did it. I couldn’t imagine having anything like this done on the National Health in England. It should be possible. All I know is, I paid
through the nose, so to speak – that’s where most of the injections came through, from the inside of the mouth, upwards! – and it was a great deal of agony.

It’s different now. I don’t get ill as much, I don’t get run down as much, and I notice the difference physically – very, very seriously. A lot of the perpetual illnesses
just stopped overnight. I have a lot more stamina. A lot of that hunched-over-the-mic early Johnny Rotten posture was like, that boy was dying. And taking the long, painful, slow way about it.

You’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, and everyone in California has a pretty smile.’ Well, I haven’t got one of them. That I would not allow. The replacements and screwins
are all the same grey colour as the rest of them were, and there’s no sense of matchy-matchy about it. As Rambo said to me, ‘Your teeth are like Lego bricks.’ He’s full of
the truisms of life.

I’m still not too used to the toothbrush, though. I know I should be, but I have to remind myself. The only times I really brush my teeth are when Nora catches me before I go to bed, or on
tour when one of the band will go, ‘Jo-o-ohhn!’ So it’s not like there’s suddenly mouthwash on our rider. I generally always use brandy instead, particularly onstage, to
clear my pipes for singing, but that’s a fallacy, too – apparently, it’s not helping in many respects.

Since I finished our last tour, and have been off the brandy bottle, I’ve lost a lot of weight. It’s a bugger, because that’s the only comfort and joy when you come offstage.
So there I am going on about my mouthwash, but I was really just washing out my innards!

I know I let myself go for a bit there and I really spread out like a balloon on tour. I got so happy and content, I just ate everything in sight. And of course, most
fatally of all, I gargled brandy onstage and then finished the bottle when I got off, and that put the calories on. So I’ve stopped all that, and the weight’s just dropped off me and I
feel physically better for it.

I’m not the kind of person to do any kind of physical exercise. One, I get bored, and two, it’s bad for my heart. I’ve yet to discuss it with my doctor, but I’m sure
they’d be in full agreement if I paid them well enough. That’s how it works. Gone are the good old days when you could get doctors to pump you full of narcotics at the drop of a hat.
Now in this health-conscious universe we live in, it’s a nightmare. More so than ever here – it’s really strict. Or maybe I just know all the right people – depending on
your point of view.

I wouldn’t go that way anyway. That’s like, ‘
Urgh
, authorized inebriation? No!’ I hate that idea. It takes the fun right out of it. As long as there’s that
innuendo of contamination and naughtiness wrapped around it, it wards off lesser mortals who wouldn’t be capable of handling such chemical devices. Of course it attracts others, but those
people are like iron to magnets, aren’t they? If it wasn’t drugs, it would be something else. It would be politics or religion, which is far worse.

I did once have a personal trainer. Bless him, the poor thing, he didn’t get on with me at all. I’m afraid that I have no motivation for developing muscles.
Pffff
, three of
them tummy-tuck things and I go, ‘What’s the fucking point?’ I’m here to enjoy my life and not get trapped into somebody else’s impression of what my physical shape
should be.

At the same time, there’s a lot to be said for the notion
that if you maintain yourself somewhat healthily physically, your brain will work better. Because of the
climate and the sheer dampness of everything in London, you eat in a comfort-food way, don’t you? You just stuff anything warm in you – missus! It’s the old joke, whenever I go
back there: the English always look grey and sickly.

But praises be to Allah, Jesus, or any one of them fellas – here I can open the door and walk out and pick a lemon off a tree and have a delicious drink in three and a half minutes. I love
that. And I loved that about Jamaica, too. There’s fruit just growing by the side of the road. Wonderful.

I used to have a bit of a thing about Pot Noodles, but I’ve gone way off them. I actually stopped it on tour, because I’d have one when I’d come off. Now, I can’t bear
the chemicals in them – I can literally taste them. How on earth did I ever manage to eat that amount of salt and sugar . . . and God knows what else, what powdered substance.

At home I cook, but not anything you would call a set menu. It’s really just whatever’s available. If it takes longer than ten minutes, don’t bother. No need, because if you
take longer than that, whatever you’re cooking, you’re killing. Unless it’s a turnip! I love turnips – I really do. And swede – swede is my favourite, even though I
always used to call them turnips. They take forever. You cannot possibly eat one unless it’s been boiling for forty minutes.

I’ve always had a firm love of Brussels sprouts, particularly having been called one by my father, which I now realize was somewhat of a compliment. But I love the taste and the texture,
all of it, and that’s without salt, butter or any condiments. I always used to watch my brothers scream at the prospect of them. You know, ‘What’s wrong with them?
Yum-yummies!’ Mini-cabbages, I used to call them.

I never forgot the taste of blood from that ordeal with the Polish dentist, yet I’m absolutely one for a good rare steak. I eat meat very rarely now, and it’s
not because of any health agenda or stupid diet cause, it’s that I find I don’t need to. Every now and then my system will go, ‘Oo, we’ll have a bit,’ but after that I
won’t need to for a while. I quite naturally now follow my instincts and that leads me to maximum vegetables, which I am absolutely in love with.

At the moment, I’m experimenting with my moles. I got an iPad last year, and I’ve fallen in love with it. I was looking up on moles. I found a home remedy to file them down so you
take off the top edge. So of course I did that – I gave one of mine a good sanding, with sandpaper – and it bled like I’d opened a vein. Now every day I’m putting apple
cider vinegar on it, and it seems to be working. Where I just had a mole before, I’ve now got this huge pusy septic thing. I’m beginning to worry that it might turn into a cancer. Like,
‘Oh fuck, what have I started here?’ But I’m going to carry it on to the bitter end. How stupid, huh?

But don’t you dare go praying for me! I’m not having that. What an awful thing to do. Let’s hope I’m around when the book comes out. Left to my own devices, there’s
every possibility I won’t be. For God’s sake, there was no mention that it would bleed like that. It really is quite literally like an open vein. It’s horrible. I’ve had it
all my life, but I just open-mindedly one night thought, ‘Oooh, why not get rid of it? Really, why not?’