Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (69 page)

What’s happened via the internet, causing small and creative record companies to fold, is such a catastrophe. That’s why if you look at the Grammys these days, it’s forever
Taylor Swift and Jay-Z, and it always is going to be. They’ve hogged the top line. That was exactly the position when we first started with the Pistols. All the top spaces were filled, and
the industry didn’t want anything to challenge that dictatorship.

Beyoncé, Rihanna, Jay-Z: they’re all Las Vegas – big production and lights and fireworks. It’s all distractions. It’s not really about very much else. Dancers.
Showbiz. I’ve seen them live – Nora likes all that stuff – and the songs become very empty and pompous in a live performance. It’s actually assumed and accepted that nobody
sings live. I see no culture, there’s no learning in it for me. They leave me so cold.

Music in the ’70s was thrilling because there were so many differences, and I mean
extreme
differences, not like modern times now. There’s this propensity to mélange
everything into one prevailing sound. Modern music just sounds like shifty blends – more like elevator music – and I think it’s to the detriment of music in the future. A very
ugly pudding comes out of it.

Most of it is just metronomes on a computer, beyond personality, humanity or involvement. It’s all part of this attitude, ‘Music
can’t change anything,
why bother?’ It’s all part and parcel of the same agenda, to take away the power of music from us. I’m firmly entrenched in the belief that a bloody well-written lyric to a bloody
fine tune gets a bloody good response.

In the face of all that, I’ve played some of my favourite ever gigs in latter years – the two nights at Heaven in London 2012 were astounding, particularly the second. We had a great
crowd at Glastonbury 2013, too, and we definitely rocked it. People who see us know they’re getting the top class.

PiL, you see, is the full cultures. Lu’s coming in there with everything he really truly understands, from the Muslim world and the former Eastern Bloc. My Irish background is giving me a
great sense of open vocal-ness. I might as well be an Arab with a shamrock. What was I buying when I was young? Greek and Turkish folk music, and reggae, and chuck Alice Cooper in there for good
measure! It’s not like you have to go on a great learning curve. It’s intuitive, and it comes out of your childhood. I can’t do ‘Do-Re-Mi’, but I can give you an
‘Aaaa-aaaa-llaaaah!’ like you never heard, and yet it’ll still be all right.

So, as the song says, if you’re in a storm at sea, go out to the deeper water, it’s easier to ride it out. Closer to shore, that’s where the danger is. That’s where you
get swamped, and there’s Johnny Rotten, going ever and ever deeper and deeper into the wonderful world of music.

PiL, as it is today, is my pride and joy, the culmination of my life so far. But it amazes me when I see these all-time top albums lists, and
Never Mind The Bollocks
is
hovering around Number Ten or Fifteen, or even Twenty. What?! Oh, for fools! Not that I care about the positioning, or chart systems, but come on, that album changed everybody’s lives, one
way or another – for or against! It altered your perceptions. It had –
phwoooooaar!
– seismic repercussions on British culture, then into the outer world.

It’s affected the Royal Family to the point where you can’t really
discuss them without the Sex Pistols cropping up in the back of your head. It’s hard
to deny, and very hard to avoid. In many ways, it’s an unloving, but deeply personal and well-felt relationship we have with the Windsors. We’re bound together. I almost have a certain
affection for them. They’re born into a gilded cage they can’t escape from, and that’s a terrible thing to have to endure. God bless ’em.

As for being an anarchist? Well, there’s so many variants on the word ‘anarchy’, it’s ludicrous. In America, there’s a whole bunch of organisations that are all
‘anarchist this, that or the other’. But they all end with ‘dot org’, which more or less tells you they’re government-sponsored. And they’re all feeding fabulous
theories and lies about, ‘Whoa, let’s dismantle society and start again!’ Well, that’s not quite what I’m into, matey. I don’t want the power of the bully with
the biggest gun to take over, and that’s what would happen.

What I want to see is a line of sense and sensibility creeping into things, where people start to think what it really is that they do, and realize that every action can have an equal and
opposite reaction. Start thinking of yourself as an individual, and then you’ll start respecting others as individuals. You have to learn to love yourself before you can learn to love anybody
else. I don’t have a moral agenda: what I have is a set of values, and I value each and every single one of us on this planet.

I won’t use words like ‘legacy’ – I’m still alive! – but we have to look after what we created in the Pistols. We don’t run a museum here, we run a
house of accuracy, and we don’t want that ever to be allowed to get out of hand and be misinterpreted. It’s happening all the time.

Awards don’t interest me. Funnily enough, the other day I heard that the council in Tunbridge Wells are discussing whether to put up a memorial plaque for Sid Vicious. I don’t think
I ever knew this, but apparently he spent some of his early years there.

If he’s watching out there somewhere, I imagine he’d take that with a great sense of fun, because that’s absurd by any stretch. It’s
also perfect,
and beautiful! Oh, I’d love to be at the unveiling. I hope it’s a serious ceremony, with old council biddies in fur coats and tiaras. A suit-and-tie affair, hahaha! It’ll be like
the opening of a supermarket!

The thing about us is, the shriller and more angst-ridden the opposition gets against something like that, the more you drive and push for it. Suddenly it’s like, why not? Automatically,
people like me and Sid have got many issues about things like that, but the more they say, ‘No’, the more we say, ‘Yeeeaaaah!’ And vice versa? Dead right. If these things
are not actively appreciating your life’s work and your efforts – I mean, I know we’re talking Sid here, but still! – what use are they? You can’t fluff over that.

But certainly a blue plaque is more than I ever got. There was a suggestion of one years ago in Finsbury Park but the council utterly and completely refused. And I’m very pleased, too.

In October 2013, though, I happily went to the Dorchester Hotel in London to accept the ‘Icon’ award from BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.), who help collect royalties on behalf of
songwriters and publishers. It was their highest award for song-writing and it was really the only time I’ve ever received anything from the music industry where I felt like the people
actually understood me.

Right up until getting into the ballroom where the black-tie ceremony was held, I was suspicious. Awards go to people that toe the line and do things in a predictable, set-patterned way. A chap
like me isn’t like that. I’m incapable of toeing the line because I don’t have the patience to understand what the line is supposed to be.

I turned up with some of the family and a bunch of top lads from my old manor, and we had a terrific night. Being honoured in a room full of fellow songwriters really meant something. I even got
to sing ‘EMI’, with one letter changed, to BMI’s bossman Del Bryant. It was a big night for him because he was retiring. He was a great fella and came over and sat next to me and
Nora and had a chat, which he didn’t have to do.

So what do you agree to, and what do you not? The previous
summer, the Pistols were invited to appear at the London 2012 Olympics closing ceremony. Their idea was
we’d be plonked on the back of a truck going around the outer circle of the Olympic stadium. They wanted to deck the truck out like the Marquee club and have us on parade waving at the crowd
while doing ‘Pretty Vacant’. It was naff panto. Watering us down to a sideshow.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure about the Olympics. As a whole I felt it was a waste of money that could have been better spent on the NHS itself. I didn’t want to do it live with the
Pistols anyway, I didn’t want to do anything with them, because I was firmly into doing the
This Is PiL
album and touring it, and I didn’t want to be seen as, ‘Oh look,
he’s going back to that!’ I wanted that chapter closed.

I only got seriously interested when the director of the opening ceremony, Danny Boyle, took a personal interest in us. I don’t think the closing ceremony people who originally approached
us understood what we were about at all. Danny really wanted to include us and just would not give up. He was a Pistols fan and knew the cultural importance of what we had achieved, so we
eventually had conversations with him. I liked him, and he told me the whole layout of celebrating the National Health Service. I was all for that – ‘Of course you can use us in a video
scenario, that would be delicious, actually!’

Our stipulation was they
had
to include ‘God Save The Queen’. They were pushing for ‘Pretty Vacant’ only. We dug our heels in for both. They came back with the
idea of only using the guitar riff of ‘God Save The Queen’. Our argument was it meant nothing without the words. Quite frankly it doesn’t. Then they only wanted to use two words:
‘God Saves . . .’. They were getting squeaky on us as they knew the Queen herself would be there. But it
had
to be ‘God Save The Queen’. All or nothing. It took a
while but we won that battle. Perhaps we should have also gone for ‘Bodies’ like Rambo had suggested back at the initial meeting with the closing ceremony people. He later told me Anita
Camarata had been kicking him under the table as he said it, haha.

In the end we were the first band used on the opening segment – there was a short sharp blast of ‘God Save The Queen’ including those very words as the
camera panned up the Thames. A nod and a wink to our boat trip. It shows you how much things had changed. The BBC, who were broadcasting the ceremony, had denied ‘God Save The Queen’
even existed in 1977; now they were showing it on the opening of the Olympics. ‘God Save The Queen’ was followed by a tiny snippet of ‘Under The House’ by PiL. It was
Danny’s idea to use it – he had told us it was one of his favourite ever songs. I admit I barely heard it, but was happy to know it was there. Somewhere.

‘Pretty Vacant’, which we agreed on for the ceremony, was pretty damn near excellent as a song idea, because the entire Royal Family was sitting there staring at this video –
Johnny Rotten calling you ‘vay-cunt’! ‘Nice to see you!’ And there is some possible plausibility in my belief that they might actually have enjoyed it. Because that’s
what we British are – we’re kind of nuts. It could actually be taken as ‘That’s very witty’.

So, in this instance, one minute thirty seconds of full-on video screening was a much better way to see me. In America it was actually edited out. NBC, who broadcast it, put commercials all over
our part.

I watched the ceremony in a hotel room in Poland. It was very difficult because we needed to get the cable switched on in the hotel – a huge palaver. Very good watching that in bed –
I felt quite chuffed. I liked it because of the politics of it, and there was a Dickensian element in it, and it was celebrating a full expanse and range of what British culture is. It’s not
all joyous ballet dancers and classical orchestras that make Britain Britain.

The NHS was clearly being celebrated as a major British achievement, and indeed it is. It is an astounding creation. It’s just it should be available to the British, instead of anyone who
gets off a plane or a train, which is what’s bankrupting it. It caters for all nations, let’s put it that way, and therefore there’s not enough money to cater for the people who
actually support it.

Please, please, don’t go mistaking my views as similar to those of that twot, Nigel Farrage, leader of the UK Independence Party though. It’s the connotations
he places on that, that bring up the ugly scenario of racism and nationalism, which is not what I’m saying at all. It’s about: I don’t go to Korea and demand a heart operation for
free. It’s opportunists who do this stuff, I’m afraid, and this is what politicians are, they jump on it and swing it to their agenda. Farrage just holds animosity for all things
outside –
Ausländer
, as the Germans would call them. It’s pretty damn fucking disgraceful.

What I’m saying is, please do take care of British citizens first. And emphasize the word ‘citizens’. If you’ve been welcomed in, and you’re in, that’s it.
You’re British. Hello, how do you do?

When I was young, there’d be a lot of people from all over Europe who would come to England just on a tourist visa and be claiming dole money, and it was never questioned. It’s the
same kind of scenario now. It’s never been properly clearly defined that it’s a no-no. It’s just abuse and theft. It’s been going on a long time and nobody seems prepared to
deal with it, because of the interpretation, quite wrongly, that it would be ‘racist’. It’s a minefield.

Who’d be Prime Minister, you say. Well, maybe I would! I’d make this seem very clear, because the situation
is
clear. It’s because there are so many taboos in what you
can and can’t say that it becomes an irresolvable quagmire, because nobody’s actually saying what is really going on.

In July 2012 BBC TV had me on
Question Time
. To be very honest, I turned up frantic, mid-tour. When I’m touring I find it hard to concentrate on anything else. It’s quite a
switch from live gigs to live TV. Your mind needs to refocus. I was excited about doing it but also very wary.

I’d watched the host, David Dimbleby, ever since I was a kid. I was thrilled at the prospect of meeting him, but I was also cautious, as he’s a smart bunny, and I thought he might
have it in for me. But he turned out to be such a great fella – we had a good chat after the show. If you wanted to find someone whose political point of view
was
closest to mine, it would probably be someone like David. He struck me as a person who can sort the wheat from the chaff.