Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (6 page)

Just as I was starting to find my feet at William of York, something terrible happened. My paternal grandfather, the Owl Fella, died and I had to identify the body. By now, he had fourteen
children and was living with a prostitute. Can you imagine that, how my dad felt about representing that to me?

My aunt, who had fourteen kids of her own, came over from Galway, but my dad had to go to work, so I was left to go along with her to the morgue. They’d had to patch up his skull quite a
bit, because he’d fallen backwards and split his head open while shagging a prostitute on a doorstep – that’s how he died. When they pulled out the body on the slab, he’d
died with a stiffy. And it weren’t the leaning tower of ‘Pissy’!

So I’m there with this auntie – Auntie Lol – and she started screaming and crying, yet that was her father. Her hysterical behaviour really freaked me out – how adults
sometimes can put so much pain on you when they should be taking responsibility at that particular point. ‘Argh, urgh, I can’t look at it! It’s the worst thing I’ve ever
seen!’ That’s what she said. And they went, ‘Yes, but we need someone to recognize the body.’ So, up I had to go. He
looked, again, a bit like
Frankenstein’s monster, with the stitch marks across the front of the skull, but I recognized him all right.

As young as I was, I realized he must’ve been a dirtier bugger than I ever knew because, for my father’s sister to behave that way, when they pulled the body out nude with a big
fucking hard-on . . . Christ, I’m not that well-endowed – it really was big. God almighty, that’s your own father. What on earth’s gone on in this family?

This is County Galway, my father’s family. My mother’s family had different ways of telling me they died – by flashing through the corridor. For some odd reason, my mum and dad
loved each other, they truly did, and had us as offspring, but both sides of their family backgrounds are incredibly crazy. It doesn’t make sense. The coldness of my mother’s family,
the insane fear of whatever, and endless troops of disaster marching in from the other side.

That night at the flat in Six Acres, Auntie Lol was in the bedroom next door – Mum and Dad gave her a bedroom to herself, so that meant me, Bobby, Martin and Jimmy had to share beds. And
we heard her screaming all night long – really terrified screams – and I’d have to go in because that’s what we were told to do by my dad, to calm her down. It was too much
to listen to her screaming – ‘He’s comin’ back to haunt me!’

Something had happened, because you can’t be crying about your father in that way. Something evil must’ve gone on. And that’s a terrible truth and reality to know about your
own family, just as I was getting over my problems.

My whole world was school and our little slice of London. What else did we know? The furthest I’d travelled was the farm in Carrigrohane, and those periods following
Dad’s work in Hastings and Eastbourne. That was the extent of my travels, up until the Sex Pistols. There was a school field trip to Guernsey, and a Geography trip to Guildford. Guildford was
an awful long way from London in them days – a murderously boring coach journey down very windy little country lanes, and it would take for ever. It was a week
in these
awful huts on Box Hill – which I referenced years later in PiL’s ‘Flowers Of Romance’ – and you’d have to deal with the PE teacher threatening to slipper you
unless you took a communal shower. ‘Ah, thank you, I love the slipper!’

It was all about us kids looking for ways to get into pubs. That’s what we did. It’s a way of growing up, and you feel like you’ve achieved something – something
approaching manhood – once you stretch into those no-go areas.

During William of York, Dad got a job driving cranes on the oil rigs off the coast of Norfolk. It was winter, and we stayed in a holiday camp in Bacton-on-Sea – no one there, just us. That
wasn’t for too long, but while I was there, I picked up a bit of an ‘ooh-aaarr’ in my voice. When we came back to Finsbury Park, that didn’t do me no favours at all.
‘You
what
?!’

I used to run around in a Norwich bobble hat, without the bobble. My only affinity was I liked the colours – yellow and green. I also had another one-colour bobble hat, also without the
bobble. What with the way I dressed and looked, which was always a bit different from the norm, it seemed to rub people up the wrong way at the back of the North Bank – the home terrace at
Arsenal’s old ground, Highbury.

I was wearing that hat one of the first times I ran into John Stevens. Rambo, as we know him, was a mate of Jimmy’s from around the flats. He changed the face of football violence for
ever, with his commitment and organization. You’d never keep up with John! He’d be quicker than a ferret into a ‘row’ – one third the size of whatever was challenging
Arsenal, and always coming out of it with a big smile on his face. An eejit like me, I was slightly taller – I’d be the first to be punched in the gob. And always having difficult teeth
– oooh, I must’ve broken so many knuckles just on my buck teeth.

I don’t get into the psycho aspect of the violence because I’m not like that. I don’t hold grudges too long and my anger is a temporary thing until an issue is resolved.
It’s just plain and simple. Don’t
shout up Tottenham or Chelsea or anything at all in the back of the North Bank. Don’t. And then once we chase you out,
everything’s happy! I’m not one for pursuing the issue. But I
am
one for going to their grounds and yelling Arsenal as loud as you like. That’s a kind of hypocrisy, but
that’s the wonderful arena that football creates.

The sense of unity was astounding. Every ground had that depth, and you knew it. You knew that this was from the bottom to the top of the terracing. It was not there for the taking, it was there
for the full-on argument. Glorious, really. I loved History in school – the Roman invasion of Britain was my favourite subject when I was younger, and the Saxons, the Vikings – I always
wanted to imagine myself in one of those scenarios. Well, a football terrace was exactly that. And it was done in that exact same way. Flanking mattered a lot. I also had this book from the library
about the Battle of Agincourt – the tactics were all-important, and Rambo’s very tactical, even as such a young kid. Our part of Arsenal’s mob was so young, up against these
enormous fucks in their thirties and forties, but we wouldn’t run.

Anyway, that night, Tottenham had a home match. There was a rumour that their mob may be coming down. Forty of us met in the courtyard of the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park. I was there in my
one-colour bobble hat. Rambo had set an ambush for them, and any of their mob returning from the match. He just took one look and went to my brother Jimmy, ‘Oh no, he’s no good, send
him home!’ Jimmy went, ‘No, that’s my older brother, he’s harder than me!’ I was working on the building site at the time, so looks could be deceiving. This is, what,
fifteen, sixteen. I was utterly fucking fearless. Gone were the days of when I was younger and couldn’t really handle a fight at all. But for somebody like John to come up, and he’d
back you up – that’s like, wow, you don’t be turning that one down. Not at all, not ever, as I only fully realized many years later.

At school, I suppose I started to become a bit of a handful in
class. Not habitually, but instinctively. If I’m puzzled, I want to know the answer. And if they
resent explaining to you what it is they’re babbling on about, then fuck ’em, and then of course you will agitate them. You can’t expect people like me just to sit there and be
nullified. I knew in my own heart and soul that I was there to learn, that’s what school was supposed to give me – an education. When that’s being denied by rubbish teachers,
I’m furious. Not violent, but I always had the right words.

It was punishing and frustrating with subjects like History, which I loved. I’d have to ring up people like John Gray and ask them, ‘What was the lesson today about?’ They got
bored explaining to me, so then I’d go down to the library and research it myself. But slowly, left to your own devices, you lose interest. The perks are gone, the novelty wears off, and it
becomes just cumbersome to do that.

I was finally chucked out of William of York mid-year, mid-season. I turned up late – tardiness was their excuse, and not wearing a correct uniform, and my hair was too long. They thought
I was a Hell’s Angel, because I used to wear my dad’s leather coat. I couldn’t afford the bus pass, and so I cycled to school, and they just put all the wrong things together.

It was Prentiss, the English teacher, who got me expelled – Piss-Stains Prentiss. These days I go along with the notion of ‘Let the dead rest in peace’, but in them days I
hated that fucker. I despised him, yet ironically he was a brilliant teacher; it was absolutely thrilling the way he explained Shakespeare, I was fascinated. So complicated and in-depth, right down
to single-word analysis, and the poetic beat of a single sentence, and the structures – absolutely thrilling! The technicalities of the English language. A really masterfully wonderful
teacher, but a complete hateful git.

Because I was still under age for leaving school, and I wanted to finish my ‘O’-levels, I had to go to a College of Further Education in Hackney. It was like an approved day school
for misfits – when school decided they couldn’t cope with you, that was more or less
the local state-run detention centre. We were all supposedly vagabonds and
reprehensibles. I’d take the bus, and then it was a ten-minute walk.

Let’s face it, Hackney was never a great place. Let’s just say it was a different class of Arsenal fan.

And that’s where I met Sid.

Music was always played in the Lydon home; it was a constant thing. Dad was particularly into it – he used to play accordion when he was very young. At twelve and
thirteen, back in Ireland, he was in Irish show bands, all the ‘diddly-doodly-doo’ stuff, but he would never teach me any of it – which I thought was really odd of him. Maybe, as
with everything else in life, he wanted me to find my own way with it. He still had an accordion, but he buried it at the bottom of a cupboard, and he didn’t want to talk about it or have
anything to do with it. It was so strange, this mysterious atmosphere he created around it. He didn’t want to pass on any knowledge about music at all.

But Mum and Dad had an enormous record collection. There was music playing all the time, especially at the weekend. They had very varied tastes, and varied friends. Everyone would bring stuff
around to listen to, so endless records would come in the house, which I loved. ‘A Boy Named Sue’ by Johnny Cash was the kind of record my mum and dad would like to hear, to challenge
their friends and see
what their reaction would be. Mum also liked traditional ballads and folk, but she also loved the Kinks, the Beatles, big singers like Petula Clark and
Shirley Bassey, and lots of dance music.

I vividly remember my mum and dad dancing to ‘Welcome To My World’ by Jim Reeves on the Dansette in the front room – her with her bouffant and pink Crimplene outfit, and my dad
in his suit and tie. It was a very romantic song, but also kind of political, that the world could be a better place – just hopeful, positive. A
wonderful
song.

That was where I learned my DJ skills, because I’d see that as my job when I was young, to put the records on. And serve the drinks – in them situations the DJ had to run the bar,
and the younger the better, because you’d serve up big measures to make your elders happy. I loved putting on records. Now that was the kind of machinery I understood, because I was getting
results – ‘a-ha, pleasant sound at loud volume!’ Great, what a pay-off! And so I got into buying records myself, and went from there on.

Oddly, though, when I was in hospital, which was for nearly a year, I never missed it at all, probably because I didn’t remember it, but there was no music, no radio playing in the
hospital ward or anything like that. In fact, I don’t even think there was a television.

I was soon guzzling up all the popular culture that came my way. I remember us always having a telly, a small Rediffusion, maybe. It was something that looked English and was, so it didn’t
work too well – grainy, black-and-white, and small. My dad was never too interested in it, nor my mum – for them it was just something to stare at when you’re exhausted at the end
of the day.

After World War Two, class was redefined completely in the UK. The landed gentry really were an all-but-dead
dinosaur, so things had to be readjusted. So you had the BBC
– Tory, upper/middle class; and ITV – Labour, working class. The lines were drawn that clearly. We’d never watch anything on the BBC at all apart from the football, because it was
considered posh people doing rubbish. I loved the plays, I grew up with them, but the posh accents drove me nuts.

I hated Sundays bitterly because the TV was always so bad. The religious programmes in the early morning. We loved
The Big Match
in the afternoon, but after that you knew it was more
hymns and
Stars on Sunday
and all them horrible
Sunday Night at the Palladium
things, which were just grim to watch. I hated them, hated everybody on them – even the comedians;
you got the idea that they were watered down. Even at a very early age you knew the humour was just babyish. You’d end up watching
Upstairs Downstairs
– I used to love the mother
in the strangled neck clothing – simply because there was fuck all else on.

It’s worth reminding people: how many channels did we have? Three, at that point. And what would there be on for kids? Rubbish like
Thunderbirds and Supercar
– urgh! –
and
Fireball XL5
. That’s my youth. I hated all of them. It was just daft puppetry. You could see the strings! You could maybe laugh at that, but really I had no attention span for it
at all. There was
Doctor Who
, which involved humans, but only because of the Daleks would I have any interest. Most of it was those stupid ant people, and you could see the big fat legs and
you knew it was a man in a suit. It was a bloke in high waders with an ant job on top. Daft!