Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (7 page)

What I loved was the comedies – particularly
Steptoe and Son
, because there they were, they were dealing with garbage and trash, but the writing was a jewel, and the characters were
so real to working-class people. The portrayal of the
characters was not cartoonish, and the dialogue was overwhelmingly educational. The understanding and the comprehensive
balance and delicacies of being British were all in there.

Poor old ’Arold trying to be sophisticated was a scream. I could immediately empathize with the pain he was going through, getting it wrong, but I couldn’t empathize with the fact
that he never seemed to learn – his presumptuousness in wanting to go ‘poash’ and every single time completely misunderstanding posh people. Whatever environment he was trying to
sleaze his way into with his sycophantic ‘oh yaah!’, those alleged posh people came over as decent folk who couldn’t tolerate him and thought
he
was the snob. He was always
being reprimanded for his social climbing because he was the most judgemental one of the lot. This is all what I gleaned from it as a very young kid.

I loved Norman Wisdom films too – a heart of gold, and always misunderstood – but music very quickly became my thing. For me, exploring it alone was the best way. I’d obviously
take hints from Mum and Dad, but their taste wasn’t always mine. At all. I could never understand the Beatles for some reason, and they loved them. It was all that ‘she loves you, yeah,
yeah, yeah’ stuff. Urgh! I hated their hairdo, hated everything about them.

So, when I’d got a bit of money together from different odd jobs, I’d go off to different record stores and deal with the challenge of finding out what’s what. My first
purchases were all bad choices based on the colours of the covers, but one thing led to another. I loved the shape of records, I loved the feel of them, I loved the power of what came out of the
speakers from them. It was astoundingly rewarding to me, to do that. All kinds of noises thrilled me.

When I was ten or eleven, it was 1966 or ’67, and albums
were becoming more important, but they were outside my price zone. So I’d always have a single off it.
Some of them stores would actually let you hear the album, and that was always fascinating. You had to find very select stores with people who really did love music and would share it with you, and
could see that you were an up-and-coming musaholic.

For all the ‘Swinging ’60s’ nonsense, Britain was still stuck in the Max Bygraves era. We were still being force-fed all that showbiz syrup. Like always, what they play on
popular radio isn’t necessarily popular – it’s what you’re told is popular. It’s what you’re denied access to that’s really the most intriguing stuff.

Until punk started, there really wasn’t anywhere to listen to new and different types of music. It’s been belaboured that John Peel or the pirate radio stations were doing that, but
they weren’t really. It was still music that was above and beyond the average working-class listener. No one around my area gave tuppence about
Sergeant Pepper’s
. That was when
the Beatles were rich kids having fun. It was still highly orchestrated and highly organized, and a lot of money went into promoting it.

The Beatles – yeah, a couple of good records there, but my mum and dad had driven me crazy with their early stuff, so by the time they’d turned into Gungadin and his Bongos, there
wasn’t much there for me. The people surrounding them were pretentious, with flowers painted on their faces and rose-tinted oversized sunglasses. The whole thing was too silly for words. I
remember watching them on
Top of the Pops
doing ‘All You Need Is Love’, all that ‘la la la la-laaaa’ – oh, fuck off! No, I need a hell of a lot of other things
as well. Don’t make me feel selfish for acknowledging a truth at a very early age.

My impression of them always was: cold as ice, not made for sharing. I preferred listening to Slade, which was a bonkers stoopid-looking band. Noddy Holder with that perm
– come on, that’s ridiculous, and what a great guitarist!

From about thirteen, circa 1969, I started getting really heavily into record-buying, and that was my albums period. I was listening to everything and anything, not just pop and rock. I loved
Rachmaninov, anything that had a Rimsky-Korsakov banging-of-the-piano was way up my street. That heavy, heavy stuff. I think it was called
Romeo & Juliet
, but there was a part in it that
just sounded like tanks coming over a hill to me – loved it!

As an aside, the school orchestra always thrilled me, because it was just dreadful, but glorious. I’d always listen at the side, banging a triangle, while forty of us made this insane row.
I’d listen inside of the ringing, and pick out tunes, all absolutely discordant. There’d be the haters in there bashing away, and the arseholes who were trying to do it properly –
the Matlocks. And then there’d be the merrymakers, such as I.

It drove our music teacher mad. I can’t remember his name. He was so effeminate and ridiculous, and he loved the Bee Gees. He had these silly plastic xylophone things, with just one metal
clip and a tiny hammer, and asked us to be twottering away to Bee Gees records. It was great to hear the Bee Gees in school, but they were hardly to my mind the voice of rebellion. At the same
time, that music teacher, he had to endure the hate and the wrath of the Catholic hierarchy at William of York, because they viewed the Bee Gees as a negative influence on the youth. There were no
youth running around trying to look like the Bee Gees, I can tell you that.

At the same time, we had everything around us in Finsbury Park, which is what ‘Lollipop Opera’ on the
This Is PiL
album is all about. Reggae was always
around – you couldn’t miss it because of the Caribbean community living there. Oooooh, the
dirtiness
of some of them early ska records. One I remember in particular was ‘Dr
Kitch’ – ‘I cannot stand the sight of your injection/I put it in!/She pull it out! I push it in . . .’

From a very early age I’d go to my favourite store, the one under the bridge in Finsbury Park, run by a little old lady. People from outside the area used to come just for that store. I
don’t know how, but she had the best reggae in the world, all imported directly from Jamaica. The shop was full of Jamaicans, and heavy metal heads. There was a lot of Jimi Hendrix in the
racks, a lot of hardcore heavy metal, which it wasn’t called that at the time. It was called progressive. So there would be the brilliant combination of those two elements that felt right at
home with each other to me.

All of these records used to intermingle; I never made any cultural decisions about them, they all just seemed to fit together well, and blend well. So I’d like bits and pieces of
anything, and I’d quite happily mix reggae or classical up with Alice Cooper and Hawkwind. I realized that it all exists inside the head, it’s another universe entirely. It’s as
real as anything else; it’s the gift that we humans have for each other, that extra special form of communication that goes beyond words and sounds. It’s a dreamscape, I suppose, and
out of dreams great things do come.

I loved Status Quo, for instance. I loved the way that they found something inside a simple format, to say so much. Their methodology is simplicity, and perfection inside that simplicity.
I’m so empathic with what they do, it just sounds
like jolly good push-and-shove. Very, very skillful to me – superb, and beat perfect. Fantastic rock. Wonderful,
brilliant, beautiful stuff.

I also latched onto Captain Beefheart in a big way. I had no idea what he was about, but I knew I liked it. Captain Beefheart was a comedy act, slightly. He never took pause when he was going
into deep comedy or parody. He was a bit like a Tommy Cooper of music at that time. It was wonderful what he did – taking deep Delta blues and all those Southern things, and turning it upside
down, and making really, really good tunes, out of tuneless cacophony.

He wasn’t liked by many serious blues musicians at all, precisely because of his chaotic handle on it. They would take themselves rather too serious, and were too wrapped up in themselves
as historians, shall we say. Which is missing the point and purpose of music, which is to entertain, enthral and educate. But not dictate. Authenticity? Oh, stop it! That’s the devil in
music. The people who were preaching authenticity in blues were the likes of Eric Clapton – now, hang on! Apart from coming from the wrong country – there’s a few other things
wrong there! He’s imitating something, then preaching the rights and wrongs of it. He misunderstands that music is written by people, for people. I understand that purity is a very fine
thing, but some of us sometimes – we like impure also. Y’know, I like to mix my drinks!

‘Progressive rock’ was an unfortunate title for all the music that came at the turn of the ’70s, because most of the bands under that banner really weren’t very
progressive at all; they all seemed to be following each other, and there was too much Beatles influence in so many things. I was never one for Yes. I loved the covers and the artwork, but that
ridiculous dribble that they released – there’s not much in
there for me. But I took the Roger Dean trail so seriously. I bought albums by bands like Paladin
– anything that he had artwork on. In many ways, that opened my mind to records that I wouldn’t normally have listened to. There are many ways to get to the music, and artwork is one of
them for me.

I used to love the Vertigo label, when it had the spinning spiral, that was just great, and it was always on the B-side, so I’d always play the B-side just to watch that revolve on the
turntable. It was great, it was quite trippy, on their 45s, on the singles. I’ve been prone to epileptic fits, after meningitis, so any kind of movement like that gets a bit trippy in my
head. Watching that symbol circulate, that ever-ever-ever-ongoing tunnel, and trying to get the fucking stylus on the groove – wowzers!

By the time I was fifteen, sixteen, glam rock had taken over. T. Rex’s
Electric Warrior
was a stunning album. Again, I loved the cover – the gold, and the power amp –
phwoar
, it was the dog’s bollocks! And there he was wisping away over those beautiful underplayed guitar parts – more than a nod and a wink to Bo Diddley, but God, look what
he’d done with it!

The productions at that time really, really thrilled me. Pop music in general sounded just great, so slick and groovy, even down to Alvin fucking Stardust, who I adored, and David Essex’s
‘Rock On’, and Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock And Roll (Part 1 & 2)’. Not much music in them, in a way, but there was something else going on, the atmosphere it would
create. It was modernizing rock ‘n’ roll, taking it to a new level, and it wasn’t always gonna be about Yes and bands like that, who were torturing you with their fine-note
productions. This lot were, ‘Oh, bollocks to that.’

In making his transition from hippie-dippie folk, Bolan was rather disliked by the cross-legged brigade, but he was
instantly adored and loved by girls and young boys at
the local disco. They were records that formulated a great deal of sexual activity, which cannot be undermined. Tamla Motown did the same. So we had it from all sources. You must let the youth bond
with each other.

Then there was David Bowie singing about ‘man love’ in ‘Moonage Daydream’. That’d be Sid’s song – he loved that, but he wouldn’t explain it. For
me, it was all about Mick Ronson’s bloody guitar, which to this day is still lurking around inside my head as the most wonderful sound I ever heard. It was smooth, delicious, tonal . . .
Ooooh, such a wonderful fucking
thing
to get to grips with. It would empower you.

Before him, if you were looking for guitar heroes, of course there was Jimi Hendrix, but nobody could quite work out what it was Jimi Hendrix was doing because – wonderfully so – it
was beyond music. But because he came from an American culture, there was still a mystery as to what that Americanism was, so it was very hard to relate to on a street level. Mick Ronson just
seemed like a lad, with a bit of glitter and satin pants, but he was playing tones that felt very, very soulful to my culture and my background.

When you went out, you’d spend all weekend out drinking, drugging, whatever, whoring – except we wouldn’t call it that, more like ‘having mutual-benefit
relationships’. Growing up, in other words. Just finding out what your body parts really can do. None of this was a bad thing, and in the back of that there was Mick Ronson’s guitars.
And various other sounds too, but music does that – it kicks everything off in your psyche.

And this wasn’t coming from intellectual bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer or Yes; this was from root-core, bog-standard pop. The absurdities of Marc Bolan, the
absolute beauty in simplistic stuff, the alleged three-chord wonder – ‘Oh, that’s not music.’ Well, it bloody well is. There’s something in them three
chords that hits everybody; that’s why, to this day, the bottom-line function I see in what I do is – I write pop songs. I can go into elaborate versions of pop songs but the basic root
of me is
pop music
. I love ‘Storm In A Teacup’ by the Fortunes as much as I do – well, a lot more than I do – ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple.

Bowie was propagating this man-love imagery, but he was doing it in such a brave way that Arsenal’s mob really liked it. Football thugs liked the audacity of it, and the toughness, and
suddenly outrageous gay people became warriors, respected by hooligans. It’s a good lesson to learn about the way things really work – what you’d think would be exact opposites
could sometimes meet at the same place. If you stand up for whatever it is you really believe in, if you really stand up, and be accounted for, people will rate you highly.

A lot of glam rock sounded great, but none of them had it in the complicated class that Bowie did. Bolan had great records, but, y’know, he was still a little whimsical elf. Bowie was
rather loud about it, and in a completely antisocial way according to the powers that be at that time. And therefore you made great room for him. And a Bowie gig was a great place to meet girls,
that’s for sure – absolutely full of them, and all rampant!