Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (67 page)

I believe in changing things, but not at any cost. I agreed with the Poll Tax riots in 1989, for instance, but I didn’t understand the rioters then attacking a McDonald’s. What the
hell was that? The riot was about specific things: ‘Let’s go
and solve those specific problems with the Poll Tax.’ How does a cheeseburger come into
this?

The Tottenham riots in 2011 were equally foolish. The point and purpose of it were lost to the mob, which you might assume to be out of control. But there are manipulators in there that run
private agendas. In any crowd situation, be very wary who you follow so willingly. Don’t be jumping behind the banner of the loudest mouth in the crowd. Make sure you know who that fella is
and that you agree with his agenda. That’s just common sense to me, but that’s something you learn being brought up with football. We’re not easily led to go charging down a
street by the first arsehole that says, ‘This way, chaps!’ You’ve got to have earned the right to my support.

So I’m dead against that kind of senseless rioting, particularly when it ends up with innocent people being murdered. There was one situation in 2011: why on earth were those idiots
wrecking up this woman’s little hairdresser’s shop? The viciousness had been hoodwinked into other things, and none of them solve any problems. I’m telling you: I don’t
believe that violence solves anything, it just opens the door to the lowest common denominator to manipulate the mob and the end result is always stupidity. Always. Whatever cause you had to be
demonstrating there in the first place is at that point gone, lost forever.

So they just ended up looting plasma-screen TVs. Once again, we’re back to the power of advertising. That’s the ugliness of it: the message through advertising is, ‘Everyone
must have one of these.’ So, everybody went out to get one. They can’t earn it by fair means, so it becomes by hook or by crook. An invite to thieves, and nobody relates it to what
started the escalation.

Police shooting people on the streets – my God, that was a
big, big issue that kicked off the Tottenham riots. It says a lot about Britain that the rioting was
widespread because everybody in the country realized at that point that the police force was a headless chicken, and no one was in charge of anything and they didn’t have the means to stop
it. Which is useful information to people like me, but then it was thrown out the window with ‘I want Adidas and Samsung!’ Pah! The masses!

Some of the racial tensions I notice when I’m back in London these days are so unjustifiable. Your poor Polish chap that gets off the plane, he’s there to work and to make money. His
attitude to me is proper working class. I don’t see him as stealing anyone’s job. He’s not the enemy, it’s the government that’s created that agenda and deliberately
wants to set you up against these folk. Where actually they’re the same as us, they just want to do the best they can for their families.

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but Rambo and I, we have this laugh, to see how many cornices on the outside of Georgian buildings have been knocked off by Polish workers.
Stripped down of ornamentation! Ornamentation is definitely on the way out!

Beyond that, I bemoan the modern architecture in London. Some pieces I like but generally speaking I find it coldly indifferent and soul-destroying. The ugliness of steel piping on the outside,
and temples of glass – it’s so impersonal. I can’t find a message in that kind of architecture that’s in any way friendly. In many ways, too, the old Georgian architecture
was an imperialistic look
down
on us, but there was a beauty in it. It was at least something to aspire to artistically. There was effort in the stone work and attention to detail, which is
always riveting. There’s somehow an aspirational quality to it.

But oh God, that one that looks like a coffee percolator! Is it the Gherkin? Oh God, no! And that new glass ‘Shard’ thing that’s sticking up, scraping
the sky. It looks so antisocial. To me it just looks like it’s tearing and ripping the sky. It’s a very evil piece of work. I want modern, and I want update, and I want new
achievements, but I don’t want them to be at the sacrifice of the people that have to live in these environments. Pay attention to what our needs are and make it comfortable for us to live
in, and make us proud to live there. And that’s not what’s happening. Modern architecture has somehow disassociated itself completely, as indeed modern art has. It just seems art for
art’s sake. We’re completely uninvolved.

Maybe they just build them as a tax write-off. They don’t occur to me as being proud monuments of a nation’s achievements.

In terms of the policing and surveillance on the streets below, it’s all about protecting the very wealthy. You’ll probably get less for murder than you will for damaging their
property. That’s telling you lots about where society has ended up. That kills creativity and when people can’t be creative and contribute, they use that extreme talent to other means.
If one of them be crime, that’s how it ends up. If all roads are closed, you plough through the field.

That sense of neighbourhood seems to be gone. I can’t speak for the young, but I can speak
with
them. Times have moved on and you’ve had a very cold-hearted Conservative
government – a coalition in name, but it’s just two cunts for the price of one. Before that, it was an even more distant Labour government with Blair, that all combined has led to some
serious problems. This Britain is slowly dissolving and unravelling and it’s not great to see.

In many ways I look back at it and I think the Sex Pistols
were a way, way early messenger of doom. Yet we were offering hope, because once you realize these problems and
who’s creating them, you at least have a chance to change it. And then we’re back to censorship. It’s still there, as bad as it ever was, if not worse now. They learned from the
likes of the Pistols and people of similar attributes, how to close us down. The media is a great tool for that. Them enquiries into phone-hacking and all of that – you find out the
government’s in collusion with it, you find out the police are in collusion with it. It’s quite a bizarre truth but one that really has to be looked at.

I don’t know what answers are going to come out of the investigations into this, and the trials. I saw Rebekah Brooks, that former editor of the
News of the World
, on TV and the
Americans were laughing about it. She said in court she didn’t know that what she was doing was illegal and indeed she was found not guilty at the end of the trial. But I mean, come on, then,
what chance do the rest of us stand? She was at the time going out with that Ross Kemp from
EastEnders
. My, oh my, what a wicked web we weave!

Then there was the revelation about how she’d been
lent
a police horse for a couple of years and that David Cameron had ended up riding it. Oh my gosh. I wonder if that horse was
ever used to dispel rioters. It’s intriguing: the tentacles of corruption, how high they go! Corruption in any country is from the top downwards, not the bottom up. So don’t be nicking
my class because they’re flogging a few bits of gear at the end of the street. Have a word about those that have the money to import it, don’t set us up as the mugs. Or take the easy
route: just answer the
Daily Mail
’s rallying call, and blame it on the oiks. In this respect we’re the oiks,
all
of us.

I
’d always wanted to reactivate PiL, but exactly who should be in the band wasn’t completely clear to me. When I think back to PiL
beginnings, I’ve still got Jah Wobble in my mind, as being there in heart and soul. It’s not a puzzlement to me, it’s just my memories are fond of this fella. Not so much with
Keith Levene, obviously. I can’t help that. I understood fully why Wobble couldn’t work with him. But I also knew that Keith’s attention to detail was exactly why he
couldn’t work with Wobble. The two couldn’t be in the same room together, and it wasn’t easy having to pick one member over another.

I simply didn’t want Keith in my life again. It’s completely clear: he’s a cunt. He’s very talented, but he doesn’t like himself, and therefore the rest of the
world must suffer. You cannot deny the power and beauty of the guitaring in ‘Poptones’. It’s utterly wonderful, the juxtaposition of up and down. It’s flora! It’s
tapestry! He’s a cunt that can play good – incredibly good – but he’s still a cunt.

So I called Wobble, and gave him the option of, ‘Shall we work together again?’ Everything was fine on the phone, sort of. But then came the question of money, and his manager had
extra-special
ideas about Wobble’s big bad self, and how important he was to the whole thing, and he should get more than everybody else. I’m sorry, that
ain’t PiL – goodbye! If you’re going to play them kind of games after all those years – well, where’s payback? All that investment that I put into this, from the
beginning – that don’t count? And you still want to be paid
more
?

Wobble was my mate and he always will be, regardless of the rows or inconsequential tittle-tattles that have gone on in between. Those aren’t going to change anything. He knew me before
the band, and he should know me after. Hand on heart, I couldn’t work with him again, but that doesn’t mean that our friendship should stop. That’s his decision and good luck to
him on it. But for me, people that I’ve ever hung out with and respected as friends, stay that way, regardless of the errors of their ways. You have to forgive your friends. That’s what
friends are for.

Still, it was impossibly, ludicrously funny for me to hear, in 2012, that Levene and Wobble – worst enemies! – had buried the hatchet, and joined back up again, and were declaring
that I can’t sing. So what do they do about that? They go and get an
X-Factor
-style Johnny Rotten tribute act, to literally imitate me, in their new mock-PiL band. Exactly the thing
that both of them said they couldn’t bear about me, they get from a mimic! They’ve made a mockery of themselves in that. No progress in that at all.

The people I really wanted in PiL, deep down, were Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, from mid-late ’80s PiL, as my guitarist and drummer respectively. I rang up Bruce, and I hadn’t spoken
to him for maybe twenty years. He immediately went, ‘Hello, John!’ and I burst out laughing. It’s odd, because when I spoke to Wobble, I didn’t recognize his voice on the
phone – he sounded like he was an infomercial trying to get all the words in very quickly. It felt wrong. But with Bruce, we were right there, as mates, instantly. I knew from that very
moment that it was the correct thing to do.

After his tinnitus problems, Lu had given up trying to convert Western computers to gamelan, and gone acoustic. He’d become a
kind of cultural ambassador in former
Soviet republics, and places like Kurdistan. He’d travel to different communities, bringing with him instruments indigenous to the region, and teach the locals their own lost culture.
He’s the most wonderful, generous and creative person. I begged him to work with me, and his whole wall of rejection was, ‘Oh John, please don’t spend your own money!’ Aw,
what a sweetheart. How could I not want to work with a man who cared that deeply? He didn’t want to see me lose, and viewed himself as a risk or a liability. I pleaded with him to see it
differently and he did, and now here we are – PiL, back again.

Then, bass-player-hunting we went, and through our then tour manager, Bill Barclay, we found Scott Firth. His CV ranged from the Spice Girls to Stevie Winwood. Wow, that’s an open mind! Or
at least it’s someone who knows that sometimes you have to work with chavs and slashers. You knew that he had a work ethic. I talked to him on the phone, and I really liked him. It was clear
right from the outset – he loves his wife, loves his kids, he’s got that area of his life sorted, and it’s all centred around that. Fantastic, I’m listening to a
stable-minded human being!

I turned up late to the new PiL’s first rehearsal, and I’m really glad I did. When I walked in, they’d gotten into ‘Albatross’, off
Metal Box
, which I
didn’t even put forward as a thing we should rehearse, but they were rehearsing it. It was a dead straight line from the studio door to the mic. I asked the crew if the mic was on, walked
right up, turned to face the drummer, and – bingo! – just dropped straight into it, and I knew instantly that we were the band. It really was a most excellent moment. It was much better
than I ever remember it before – more solid, much more deliberate, pointed and purposeful. That’s what Scott’s done, he’s added that clarity to the bass. In the early days
it was always distracted and fractional, because the bloke was learning.

As soon as we got out there playing, in the run-up to Christmas ’09, we’d got the patterns tightened somewhat, and that allowed all manner of flexibility for the vocals. The
flexibility in the past was all
in the instrumentation, which was flopping all over the place, but that’s how it worked. This was a much better way and just sounds
tougher, and the words land better. I’m given more space, and I can sing better because of that.

It felt just magical to be playing
those
songs again. They’re the story of my life, almost. Stuff like ‘Death Disco’, about my mum. I’d have tears in my eyes most
nights. On ‘Public Image’ Lu would play a Turkish saz, wired up like an electric guitar. He’d have a vast array of instruments up there, because he was very bored with regular
guitar. They were just getting him to where sonically he feels the most honest to his heart and soul.

We did what you might call ‘more challenging numbers’, like ‘USLS1’, to give people’s heads another space to explore, and to show that I’m not a one-trick
pony, by any means. It’s not all a juggernaut trundling off down the highway relentlessly. I’m a bit of a tourist, when I travel, and I stop off at all the right sites. We really pushed
some of these songs to the limit, like ‘Flowers Of Romance’, where Scott added upright bass, and ‘Religion’, which we made into an evil crescendo, with extra-heavy bass, and
my sermons about the Pope, and paedophilia in the Catholic Church.