Melody Maker | 6 August 1977
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Ray Stevenson / Rex Features
Photos: Jorgen Angel / Getty
July 13, 1977: in a muslin “Destroy” top designed by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Johnny Rotten fronts the Sex Pistols at Daddy's Dance Hall, Copenhagen.
Everyone has a beastly side
The Sex Pistols outrage the locals in Stockholm, but a chat with Paul Cook, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious reveals hidden depths.
Discussed: hippies, imitators, O-levels, even music. We never sat down and wrote a thesis, says Rotten. We just do it.
The prosperous cyborgs at the next table in the back room of this expensive Stockholm eating-place are sloshing down their coffee as fast as they possibly can, with such indecent haste that one plump, middle-aged Swedette disgraces herself in the process. As they vacate the premises, another troupe are ushered in, take a look at the party in the corner and usher themselves out again.
John Rotten—a discordant symphony of spiky crimson hair, grubby white tuxedo embellished with a giant paperclip on the lapel and an absolutely godawful black tie with orange polka dots—looks at the departing Swedish posteriors with no little disdain.
It must’ve been my aftershave, he remarks in his fake-out voice, halfway between Kenneth Williams, Sweeney Todd and Peter Cook, and returns to his beef heart fillet, which—much to his disgust—is delicious. He eats nearly all of it and that night he doesn’t even throw up.
In Stockholm, the Sex Pistols are a big deal. God Save The Queen is in the Top 10, just as it is in Norway, where they also have—for their pains—a monarchy. They’ve been splattered all over the national press in Scandinavia just like over here; more so than any other visiting rock band, or so they tell me, anyway.
It hardly bears thinking about: The outrageous young superstar of Britain’s controversial punk-rock group the Sex Pistols knocked over an ashtray this morning while having his breakfast. MPs commented, ‘Is this the kind of behaviour that we want our young people to emulate? We must certainly think carefully about allowing this kind of performer on television.’ See editorial: page two. And all in Swedish, too...
In general, though, Sweden has been less willing to take John Rotten at his word and identify him with the Antichrist than the good ol’ UK. They’ve stayed four nights in the same Stockholm hotel without any complaints from the management, despite Sid Vicious taking a leak in the corridor because two girls had locked themselves in the bathroom of his particular chamber.
When the local equivalent of Teds (a bunch of kustom-kar kruisers/American Graffiti freaks known as raggare) began harassing the Pistols’ fans as they left the gig and, indeed, followed the band and their admirers back to—and into—the hotel, the police were right there for the protection of the people.
I even saw one Swedish copper at the back of the hall on the second gig doing a restrained but joyful pogo to the lilting strains of Pretty Vacant. Can you imagine that at a British Pistols gig—in fact, can you imagine a British Pistols gig at all these days? In Britain, if the police were informed that the Sex Pistols and/or their fans were getting the shit whacked out of them somewhere, the most you could expect would be that they’d show up an hour or two later to count the bodies and bust the survivors (if any) for threatening behaviour.
At home the Sex Pistols are public enemies. In Sweden they’re an important visiting Britpop group. So it goes...
Lemme tell you a little bit about Stockholm, just for context and perspective, before we get on to the good bits. They’ve got the highest standard of living in the world over there—weep, America, weep—with an average weekly wage of £120 and prices to match. A bottle of beer will set you back over a quid a throw, and by British standards it ain’t even beer; more like a beer-flavoured soft drink that fills you up and leaves you belching and farting and urinating like an elephant and doesn’t even get you pissed. You can drink 20 quid’s worth of the poxy stuff and still go to bed sober, though the Henry twist-in-the-tail comes when you wake up with a hangover.
Somehow the idea of a suffering hangover without even having been drunk is peculiarly Swedish.
The natives don’t see it quite that way, though. Through some weirdness or other of the Scandinavian metabolism, they get completely zonko on the stuff, with the result that the authorities think that they have an alcohol problem. You can imagine what effect this would have on a bunch like the Sex Pistols, who are pretty fond of their beer. It got so bad that by the end of the tour John Rotten gave up in disgust and started drinking Coca-Cola.
Swedish television is fun, too. For a start, the two channels only operate for a combined seven hours each night, and the programming seems to consist almost exclusively of obscure documentaries and the occasional mouldy old English B-picture. Radio is impossibly dopey—you can’t even dance to a rock’n’roll station, ’cuz there’s nuthin’ goin’ on at all. Not at all.
In the discos, they play the same dumbo records that they play in UK discos, only six months later, and the girls think you’re weird if you don’t/can’t dance the Bump.
Put it this way: if you think that there’s nothing going on in your particular corner of the UK, then there’s double nothing going on in Sweden. Make that treble nothing. God only knows what the Swedes get up to in the privacy of their own homes to cope with the total lack of decent public entertainment facilities, but it must be pretty bloody extreme.
We thought some kind of oasis had been discovered when we found a late-night café that served Guinness.
John Rotten—who is, after all, an Irisher by roots (the rest of the band call him Paddy sometimes) and therefore likes his Guinness—was enchanted by this revelation until we discovered that it was—are you beginning to get the picture now?—a special Scandinavian variety of Guinness even though it’s brewed up in Dublin, and therefore no stronger than the rest of the stuff they have over there.
We ordered up about 10 of the bloody things, swilled them down and discovered to our horror that we were all still sober, so we celebrated the fact by doing a burner on the establishment in question and vamoosing without settling the bill. We’d got as far as the car of our self-appointed guide—a Chris Spedding lookalike who runs a punk boutique called Suicide and who calls himself the only true punk in Sweden—before a search party from the café catches up with us and hauls The Only True Punk away to face retribution.
At this stage in the proceedings, the Pistols are only three-quarters strong. Sid Vicious is in London, where he has had to appear in court on charges of possessing an offensive weapon of the knifish variety and assaulting a police officer.
That leaves the rest of the party as Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, roadies Rodent (borrowed from The Clash) and Boogie, and Virgin Records’ international panjandrum Laurie Dunn, an amiable Australian (stop laughing at the back there) whose room seems to function as an assembly point. People at a loss for anything to do seem to end up going to Laurie’s room as a convenient way of running into other people with nothing to do.
Steve Jones plays guitar. He’s been playing the guitar for little more than a year and a half, which would indicate that he’s going to be a monster player by the time he’s been playing for a bit longer. The reason that he sounds far more professional and experienced than he actually is is that he sticks to what is simple and effective and—within the confines of a hard-rock aesthetic—tasteful. He knows what constitutes a good guitar sound, his time and attack are impeccable, and he plays no self-indulgent bullshit whatsoever.
There are a lot of musicians far “better” than Steve Jones (in the technical-ecstasy sense, that is) who could learn a lot from listening to him, could remind themselves of what they were originally looking for when they started out and how they lost it along the way.
Steve Jones is the oldest of the Pistols at 22, and his stolid features and blocky physique make him, visually at least, the most atypical Pistol of ’em all. On the first evening, he went out to dinner in a Normal Person costume of dark-blue blazer, grey slacks and a neat shirt and tie—camouflage so effective that I nearly didn’t recognise him when he passed me in the corridor. It was only his fluorescent hennaed hair that gave him away as being a rock’n’roller. He’s a friendly, relaxed, good-natured geezer; could be anybody you know and like and drink with; could be you.
Paul Cook plays drums, and has done so for three years now. Like Jones, he plays with an ear for what sounds good, a straight-ahead high-powered no-bullshit approach to what he does and no distance at all between himself and his drums.
Again, he’s an ordinary guy in the best sense of the term; he was in at the roots of the band when a convocation of kids with heisted instruments were jamming around in Shepherds Bush—no formal groups, just a bunch of people playing together.
July 13, 1977: the Pistols play to an audience of about 125 at a disco in the restaurant of the Östra Stranden Hotel, Halmstad, Sweden.
The nucleus was Cook and Jones (the latter then singing as well as playing guitar), Glen Matlock on bass and sundry additional guitarists including Mick Jones (now of The Clash), Brian James (now of The Damned) and Nick Kent (now of no fixed abode).
The Sex Pistols had their dark genesis when Jones, Matlock and Cook got together with Johnny Rotten under the Cupid auspices of Malcolm McLaren. Since Glen Matlock got the push and was replaced by Rotten’s old college (not “university”—college) buddy and neo-bassist Sid Vicious, the Pistols have consisted of two factions: Cook/Jones and Rotten/Vicious.
These factions are by no means opposed or unfriendly or at cross-purposes; it’s just that Paul and Steve get up earlier and go to bed earlier (with all that implies) and John and Sid get up later and go to bed later (with all that implies)—Paul and Steve hanging out together before Sid and John get up and Sid and John hanging out together after Paul and Steve have gone to bed.
John and Sid are the public face of the Sex Pistols: Jagger and Richard to the other two’s Watts and Wyman, even though it’d be highly misleading to assume that the creative chores are split that way as well.
Anyway, that’s as much background as we’ve time or need for, so zoom in on the Happy House, a Stockholm club run under the auspices of the local university’s Student Union where we’re a few minutes early for the soundcheck prior to the first of the band’s two nights there.
One thing you have to say for Rodent: it takes a lot of bottle to set up gear while wearing a pair of those dumb bondage pants that strap together at the knees.
Rodent, Boogie and this Swede called Toby (though the band and their own crew call him Bollock-Chops) have just schlepped a massive PA system, three amps, a drum kit and all the rest of the paraphernalia that it takes to put on a rock show up to the second floor of this horrible structure, and Rodent’s done it all in bondage pants.
He does it the next night with his sleeves held together with crocodile clips. It’s a man’s life in the punk-rock business. Join the professionals.
Sid Vicious has caused everybody a massive amount of relief by returning from London with the news that he beat the assault rap completely and copped a mere (?) £125 fine for the knife.
How’d you dress for court, Sid?
Oh, I wore this real corny shirt my mum got me about five years ago and me steels. I must’ve looked a right stroppy cunt.
Oh yeah, we haven’t really met Sid yet. He got the name Sid when he was named after an allegedly really foul-looking albino hamster of that name that he and Rotten used to have.
I stayed in for about two weeks because everyone kept calling me Sid.
I hate the name Sid, it’s a right poxy name, it’s really vile. I stayed in for about two weeks because everyone kept calling me Sid, but they just wouldn’t stop. Rotten started. He’s ’orrible like that, he’s always picking on me...
Rotten: Sid’s the philosopher of the band.
Vicious: I’m an intellectual.
Rotten: He’s also an oaf. He listens to what everybody else says and thinks, ‘How can I get in on this?’
Vicious: No I don’t! I’m a highly original thinker, man; he’s just jealous because I’m really the brains of the group. I’ve written all the songs, even right from the beginning when I wasn’t even in the group. They were so useless they had to come to me because they couldn’t think of anything by themselves...
Thank you, boys. We’ll be returning to this conversation later, but meantime there’s this soundcheck to do and it sounds terrible.
The stage is acoustically weird and means that by the time Sid’s got his bass amp set up so that he can hear himself the bass is thundering around the hall with an echo that bounces like a speed freak playing pinball. The drums and guitar have been utterly swamped and everybody has a headache. Even me—the man who stood 10 feet in front of Black Sabbath yelling, Louder! Louder!—I have a headache. Oh, the shame and degradation of it all!
The problem is partially solved by the simple expedient of moving the amp forward until it’s beside Sid instead of behind him. It’s unorthodox but it works and it means that a semi-reasonable balance can be obtained. The sound still swims in the echoey hall and everybody’s brought down something—you should pardon the expression—rotten.
Friends since schooldays in West London: Paul Cook and (right) Steve Jones
Outside, a youthful horde of Swedish punks decked out in fair facsimiles of Britpunk outfits are milling around looking up at the window behind which the band and their entourage are lurking.
None of these kids are going to get in tonight, however, because Happy House gigs are mostly for over-23s only—a fact which causes bitter amusement because it means that the audience is, officially at least, all older than the band.
When the group make a break for it to go back to the hotel, it’s Sid Vicious who stays out in the street listening to what the people have to say and assuring them that the band are on their side. He’s out there for more than five minutes before he’s virtually pulled into the car.
I don’t think we should be playing for them poxy student hippies.
I reckon we should tell ’em that we don’t play unless they let the kids in—either that or open up the back doors and let the kids in anyway. In the end, the kids have to wait until the following night when it’s 15-and-over, but it’s not a situation that the band are particularly happy with.
In the dressing room back at the Happy House a few hours later, John is ostentatiously asleep on a couch, Steve is tuning up his white Les Paul with the aid of a Strobo-Tune (more accurate than the human ear, totally silent so you don’t bug the shit out of everybody else in the room by making horrible noises, hours of fun for all the family, get one today!) and Sid is whacking out Dee Dee Ramone basslines on his white Fender Precision bass.
Sid’s musicianship (or lack of same) is something of an issue with some people, so let’s say right here that he’s coming along pretty good. His choice of Dee Dee as his model is a wise one, since that’s just the kind of clean, strong and simple playing that the Pistols require.
At present, he’s using a kind of flailing-from-the-elbow right-hand action that takes far more effort than the notes require, but he keeps time, doesn’t hit more than his share of bum notes (not much more than his share, anyway) and takes his new-found role as a bass player as seriously as he takes anything.
Up in the hall, the student audience is milling around ignoring the reggae that’s pumping out of the PA system. There are signs of movement from behind the silver curtains and then they’re on, revealed in all their scummy glory. Rotten’s behind the mic, staring out at the audience through gunmetal pupils, mouth tight, shoulders hunched, one hand clamped around the microphone.
I’d like to apologise, he says harshly, for all the people who couldn’t get in. It wasn’t our fault.
And the band kicks into Anarchy In The UK,
Jones’ guitar a saw-toothed snarl teetering on the edge of a feedback holocaust, Sid’s bass synched firmly into Cook’s walloping drums and Rotten an avenging scarecrow, an accusing outcast cawing doom and contempt like Poe’s raven.
There’s been a lot of bullshit laid down about the Pistols’ musicianship by a lot of people who should know better (but the world is full of people who should know better but never do).
I played God Save The Queen to Mick Ronson when he was over here a little while ago and he looked at me in amazement and said, I don’t understand why people keep telling me that they can’t play! They’re fucking great! And, of course, he’s right. They put down a blazing roller-coaster power drive for Rotten’s caustic vocals to ride and it sounds totally right.
Except that there’s something wrong. Somewhere along the line the monitors have completely dropped out, and Rotten can’t hear himself singing, with the result that he has to shout even louder, his pitching becomes ever more erratic and his throat gets put under more and more strain.
Between numbers, Rotten mercilessly harangues Boogie, who’s responsible for the live sound-mix, but there’s absolutely nothing Boogie can do. The monitors are completely shot, and they’ll just have to be patched up before tomorrow’s gig.
Still, the Pistols flail on through I Wanna Be Me, I’m A Lazy Sod, EMI (by far the best song so far written about a record company), God Save The Queen, Problems, No Feelings, Pretty Vacant, the encore of No Fun and sundry others, and it’s hard to see how anyone who digs rock’n’roll couldn’t dig the Pistols; while they’re on stage you couldn’t conceive of anybody being better and John Rotten bestrides the rock’n’roll stage of the second half of the ’70s the way David Bowie did for the first half.
If the last few British rock’n’roll years have produced a superstar, Johnny Rotten is it. And let Fleet Street, the BBC and the rock establishment cope with that the best way they know how, because it isn’t just happening, it’s already happened. And if the definitive British rock band of now feel that they have to go to Europe or Scandinavia or even America just to be able to play in front of people, then there’s something worse than anarchy in the UK right now.
Never are tyrants born of anarchy, wrote celebrated fun person the Marquis de Sade. You see them flourish only behind the screen of law. And right now in 1977, who’s to say he’s wrong?
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights... and segue straight into Marley’s Exodus, pumping out of the sound system of a hideously twee rococo disco deep in the ’eart of Stockholm. It’s playing at least twice as loud as anything else that they’ve played so far tonight, and that’s because John and Sid have commandeered the disco DJ’s command post and they’ve found it among his records. They’ve also found Pretty Vacant and that comes up next... even louder.
The following afternoon finds the Pistols’ party signing autographs, hanging out, posing and nicking things at The Only True Punk In Sweden’s boutique.
The verdict seems to be that everything there is pretty much like SEX was a year or so ago and, in keeping with the celebrated Swedish standard of living, everything is around twice the price that it would be in London.
A photographer is on hand to capture the golden moments. Swelling almost visibly with pride, Sweden’s Only True Punk unveils with a flourish a deluxe leather jacket that he’s ordered up specially for Sid.
Vicious—charmingly clad in baggy pink pants, a floral blouse and sandals, with a little pink bow in his immaculately spiky coiffure—takes one look at it and declares it poxy, vile, corny and twee.
Sweden’s Only True Punk looks deeply hurt.
Over the other side of the shop, Rotten is trying on a pair of repulsive leopard-skin-topped shoes.
They’re really ’orrible, he beams. I must have them. I could start another absurd trend... like safety pins.
We do what we want to do and there’s no industry behind us
The way that previous sartorial quirk of his had caught on with The Youth and become an industry virtually overnight is a source of vast amusement to him—as well it might be.
With the Only True Swedish Punk and his girlfriend are two 12-year-old kids, neighbours of theirs from out in the country, where they live. These two kids immediately latch on to Vicious, and he spends much of his day sitting with them and playing with them and talking to them... generally keeping the kids amused. He’s really great with them... if you know anyone who’s got a pre-adolescent kid who’s into punk rock and needs a babysitter, allow me to recommend you Sid Vicious, Mary Poppins in punk’s clothing.
The previous night, the air had been thick with rumours that the raggare had eyes for trashing, and for the second gig—the one open to the teenage punk rockers—the talk is intensified.
The band’s limo—shaddup at the back there!—and the attendant dronemobiles are waved through a police cordon and everyone’s hustled through a back door much schnell.
Get that poser inside! snaps Rotten as Sweden’s Only True Punk dawdles to make sure he’s noticed in the exalted company. There’s less dressing-room ligging than last time and the band are on fast as shit.
The punkette audience tonight is a lot cooler and better behaved than the beer-chucking beardies who made up last night’s crew, and the band feel a far greater kinship to the crowd.
It’s our night tonight! shouts Rotten as the band crash into Anarchy, and tonight his contempt is not directed at the audience but—on their behalf—at a phantom enemy: the crowds who lurk outside the police cordons in their Dodges, Chevies and Cadillacs.
Tonight everything goes fine. The monitors work, the sound’s fine and the band relax and play a better, longer set, graced by a couple of additional numbers that they hadn’t bothered to get into the night before, including Satellite Boy and Submission.
Next to me, a girl sits on her boyfriend’s shoulders, oblivious to the little bubble of blood welling up around the safety-pin puncture in her cheek. After a while, she switches the safety pin to her other cheek so’s she can link it up with the chain in her earring. Pretty soon, that begins to bleed too. She doesn’t care.
Everybody—band, audience, even the cop at the back—is high as a kite and happy as can be. There’s no violence and not a bad vibe in sight; everybody’s getting off. And this is the show that our guardians won’t let us see?
Listen, all the Pistols do is get up on stage, play some songs and get off again. Shit, officer, t’ain’t nothin’ but a little rock’n’roll fun; no chicken-killing, throwing of clothes into the audience, nudity, or any of that dirty stuff. No audience manipulation, no incitement. This is healthy, Jack.
The trouble comes after the audience leave; it ain’t the Pistols’ fault, and there’s nothing at all that the Pistols can do about it.
We’re all upstairs drinking rats’ piss when there’s a commotion outside and someone reports in with the news that a bunch of raggare have just chased a couple of young girl fans and ripped the pins right through their faces to prove what big bad tough guys they are.
Sid wants to go out there and lay into them. Someone else suggests ramming them with the limousine like the cat in the South did to the Ku Klux Klan a while back. Ultimately, there’s nothing that can be done except call the Fuzz and feel very, very sick about the whole thing.
So ultimately, why are the various establishments—governmental, media and even rock’n’roll—more frightened of the Pistols than of any other previous manifestation of rock’n’roll madness?
Because they were all to some extent slightly controlled by the industry, says Rotten, ensconced with Vicious and Cook in the relative peace and quiet of a hotel room. There was always an element of the establishment behind it, but with us it’s totally our own. We do what we want to do and there’s no industry behind us. That’s the difference. That’s what frightens them.
Or rather, interposes Vicious, the industry is behind us rather than with us.
Hey, if the industry’s behind you it’s got a knife in its hand...
Yeah, says Sid, but we’ve got a Chieftain tank.
They can’t control us, continues Rotten. We’re uncontrollable. They’ve predicted all down the line against us, and they’ve failed. This scares them. They’ve never been able to do that before. They’ve always known before that the money would come into it, but they’ve missed the boat so many times.
Paul Cook: The thing was that everyone in the beginning was so sure that no way was it going to take off. People like Nicky Horne said that they’d never play punk rock and now he don’t play nothing but.
Which is an equally narrow attitude...
Rotten: If not worse. With us it used to be ‘They won’t catch on because we’re going to stop it’ and there’ve been a hell of a lot of organisations out to stop us, and they’ve all failed.
Me, I don’t think the Pistols can be stopped unless the kids are tired of them.
Rotten: They’re the ones who make all the decisions now. They’re the ones that count, and I hope they’ve got the brains to suss it all out for themselves and not be told by the press, ‘This band is finished,’ and then think, ‘Yes, that’s right, they’re finished and I’m not going to like them any more. I’m now going to like this.’ They’ve got to decide for themselves. Cook: I think it’s gone beyond the point where people can be told. They wouldn’t play God Save The Queen but that went to the top of the charts, and that usually dictates what goes in.
We talk about the Only True Swedish Punk’s boutique, and Rotten opines that places like that should only be there to inspire people to create their own look, and be what they are instead of adopting a readymade façade. The same dictum, natiirlich, applies to moozic:
Friends since meeting at Hackney Tech in 1973: Sid Vicious and (right) Johnny Rotten
That’s what music should be about, says Rotten. I get very sick with the imitations. I despise them.
They ruin it. They have no reason to be in it other than wanting money, which shows.
You’ve got to have your own point of view. You can have an idol—like you may see a band and think, ‘God, that band are really fucking good, I’d like to be like that.’ So you start up your own band, and then your own ideas come in as well on top of that and you have a foundation.
But a lot of those bands don’t leave that foundation and they stay in a rut and they listen to all the other songs in their morbid little circle and they do rewrites of them.
Hence fifty thousand songs about how hard it is to be on the dole.
Been listening to The Clash, obviously, says Sid. The Clash only wrote those songs in the first place ’cos of me and ’im [Rotten] moaning about living in a poxy squat in Hampstead. It was probably them coming up there and seeing the squalor we were living in that encouraged them to write all that shit. Squalor in Hampstead, the bastion of liberalism?
Oh no, says Rotten. You shoulda seen it.
Vicious: It was liberal, all right. It didn’t even have a bathtub.
Was there any particular plan or strategy in mind right at the start of the Pistols?
Rotten: Instinct. It hasn’t really worked out like that. We never sat down and wrote a thesis. There’s no rules, and no order. We just do it, which is more to the point. Do it, and when you can’t do it no more, then don’t do it at all.
Vicious: If it requires any real effort, then there’s no point in doing it. It should just come. If you have to force it, then there’s something wrong. Rotten: Yeah, if you have to sit down in your room and go, ‘I’ve got to write a song, but what about?’... that’s rubbish. It just comes. It’s there. Yeah, I know just what you mean, John. Pure, untainted, burning creativity...
Rotten: Oh yeah, man. Far out. It’s very hard not to run into those hippie bullshit phrases, because some of them were good, some of them actually meant something. It’s just a shame that they ruined a lot of ’em with silly ideas about, ‘Yeah man, I wanna be free,’ which meant fuck all. Vicious: Free from what they never even said.
’Course we did, man—free from the same things you want free from: pre-planned existences, boring jobs, stifling media...
Cook: Yeah, but they were like that themselves, weren’t they?
Rotten: I can remember going to those concerts and seeing all those hippies being far out and together, maaaaaaaaan, despising me because I was about 20 years younger than they were and having short hair. That’s when I saw through their bullshit. A lot of punks are like that as well, which makes me really sick.
Cook: The only memory of hippies I have was when I was in a park once when we was skinheads and we was throwin’ conkers at these hippies and they were goin’, ‘Hey, that’s really nice, man, I really love conkers.’
Rotten: Well, that made you a fool then, didn’t it? I think they won hands down, because you were wasting your energy and they were laughing at you.
It may or may not seem ironic now, but when Johnny Rotten was 15-year-old John Lydon of Finsbury Park, he was tossed out of school because his hair was too long, the old find-out-what-the-kids-are-doing-and-make-them-stop trick.
Yeah, but when they find out it’s always too late, he says.
In five years’ time they’ll have schoolteachers with safety pins in their ears. It’s so predictable with those oafs.
Vicious: The definition of a grown-up is someone who catches on just as something becomes redundant.
The kids Rotten went to school with weren’t really into music, except the geezers I hung around with. It was in skinhead times and they couldn’t understand how a skinhead could like The Velvet Underground. It was quite apt. I went to the Catholic School in Caledonian Road, opposite the prison. What a dungeon! Force-feeding you religion along with the lessons?
Yeah, it was terrible. They really destroy you with what they do to your soul. They try and take away any kind of thought that might in any way be original. You know when caning was banned? In Catholic schools that didn’t apply, because they’re not state-run. They get aid from the state, but they’re not entirely state-run. I don’t know where they get their money from... I’d like to know. It’s probably some Irish mafia.
What they try to do is turn you out a robot. When it comes to allocating jobs for a student who’s about to be kicked out into the wild world, it’s always jobs like bank clerk... be a railway attendant or a ticket collector. Even the ones who stayed on for A-levels...
Were any of the teachers halfway human?
The ones that were got sacked very quickly. Everything was taught in a very strict style, in the same way that they taught religion: this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and if you don’t like it you’re gonna get caned. But Catholic schools build rebels: a lot went along with it, but a lot didn’t. There was always a riot in religion classes.
Nobody liked that subject.
I got kicked out when I was nearly 15—14 and a half—because I had too long hair. I had really long hair... A balding old hippy with a big pair of platforms on, sneers Vicious. That’s what you were. I went to the same college as him...
...to get O-levels, Rotten finishes the sentence for him. I waited a year and a bit because I went on building sites working, and then I went to get some O-levels because I still had it in me that O-levels were the way to heaven... plus I didn’t want to work no more.
I got a grant. It was very easy. For some reason I always liked technical drawing and geography. At college I did maths, English, physics, technical drawing and chemistry... Cook: I’ve got an O-level in woodwork. Vicious: I’ve got two O-levels... English and English Literature... and I’m very intelligent. Rotten: English Literature was a joke.
I passed that with flying colours without even trying. It was stupid fucking Keats poetry, because I did my English in my Catholic school.
They kicked me out halfway through the course because they said I’d never pass, but they’d already entered me, so I went and took the exam privately because I was still entitled to sit down at County Hall.
And I passed with an A... and I went down there with the certificate and showed it to ’em.
Unlike fellow reggae freaks in The Clash, there’s no reggae in the Pistols’ repertoire.
I find that slightly condescending—and that is not a slag-off of The Clash. I’m white, and I’m rock. I don’t like rock music, but I like what we do with it. How could we sing about ‘Jah Rastafari’? Even Police And Thieves is full of innuendo, it’s about three in one God on the cross and on each side are the police and the thieves; Rasta in the middle. That’s what the song implies. It doesn’t need to say more, because a Jamaican will know straight away. Besides, I don’t like Junior Murvin’s voice.
I’m really the brains of the group: John Beverly—aka Sid Vicious—on a plane in 1977
He’s very much like Curtis Mayfield.
Yeah, very much like Curtis Mayfield.
And you don’t like Curtis Mayfield?
Yeah, I do. I like the music; there’s a different feel about it.
Do black kids dig your music? Do they understand it as part of the same thing?
For sure. Where was that gig where a lot of dreads turned up? That was really shocking. I think it was an early Nashville, years ago. There was a few of them at the back, and I was really shocked that they’d be there.
I talked to them afterwards and they said, ‘Understand, just understand, man will understand, mon.’ You never get any trouble from blacks. They understand it’s the same movement.
Yeah, but reggae singers talk about what they love at least as much as they do about what they hate.
Don’t we?
Only by implication: in the sense that if it’s known what you stand against it can then be inferred what you stand for.
Yeah, but it’s the same with reggae. There are so many people who refuse to listen to them: ‘No no, it’s all a big con. All this terrible Jah and Rasta stuff, it’s all a big con to make money.’ There’s been loads of reviews...
That one by Nick Kent was just classic ignorance, comparing reggae with hippies.
Many people like to feel that Malcolm McLaren is in total control of the Sex Pistols: Svengali to Rotten’s Trilby. Maybe they feel happier thinking that Rotten’s controlled by McLaren than they do feeling that maybe he isn’t controlled at all.
They need to do that because they don’t want to think differently than they already do. They like their safe world. They don’t like realising the way things actually are.
Cook: They fucking do that with everybody. They don’t like admitting that anybody actually is the way they are. They always say, ‘They got it from them, they’re just like them.’
Vicious: The trouble is that the general public are so contrived themselves that they can’t imagine how anybody else could not be contrived. Therefore, if you’re not contrived, they have to find some way of justifying their own contrivance...
Ghost voiceover from the past: Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider telling Fonda and Hopper, They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to them... what you represent to them is freedom.
But talking about it and being it—that’s two different things.
I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. ’Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cos then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah—they’re gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.
But I don’t tell ’em what my ghost voice says, because that’s hippies, and that’s past and gone... and it was bullshit anyway.
Or so they tell me.
A few more things about Johnny Rotten. When he was eight he had meningitis, and it left him with weak eyes, permanent sinus, stunted growth and a hunched back.
The once-decayed teeth which got him his nickname are held together with steel rods.
The only time I saw him throw up was because his dinner had disagreed with his somewhat unstable digestive system... and then some twisto went into the bog after he’d finished and started taking polaroids of it.
He uses foot powder on his hair because it absorbs all the grease. I never saw him hassle anyone who didn’t hassle him, and I never saw him bullshit anyone who didn’t bullshit him, and what more can you say for anyone in 1977?
Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it — John Rotten, 1977.
Still, 1977 is a prize year for violence, and talking about the Pistols nearly always ends up as talking about violence, so—in the words of Gary Gilmore—let’s do it.
We’re fighting people who ought to be on our side
When they push you into a corner like that, what are you to do? You either kill them or give up, which is very sad, because we’re fighting people who ought to be on our side... or are on our side but don’t know it. They say we’re using them, but the real people who are using them they don’t even know about.
Vicious: We’re quite nice friendly chappies, really, but everyone has a beastly side to them, don’t they? I can’t think of anyone I know who if somebody messed around with them they wouldn’t do ’em over.
Rotten: People are sick of being used, but they’re now attacking the wrong people—eg, us. When I was a skinhead, everyone I know used to go to the football games, and the match had nothing to do with it. What else was there to do? Disco? The youth club? Talkin’ ’bout my generation... there was nothing else except alcohol.
Yeah, but having a barney with a bunch of people who’re there to have one too is one thing, but random picking-on in the streets—like some skinheads used to do to hippies—is a whole other ballgame.
Rotten: Yeah, but to a skinhead it looked like: ‘These geezers are having fun doing what they’re doing and we’re not just because of the way we look, so smash ’em up and stop their fun.’ It’s just like the Teds in London, ’cos like I said, when I had a crop and I went to a festival, the reaction I had was terrible.
Violence is always the end result of nothing to do. And it’s very easy, and it’s very stupid.
Johnny Rotten is an avid fan of The Prisoner, which figures. After all, he’s not a number. He’s a free man. And no matter what they put him through, he’ll always be a freer man than any of the people who’ve tried to tear him down. Charles Shaar Murray •
It just comes, it’s there: Johnny Rotten on his songwriting, 1977
Melody Maker | 6 August 1977
The History Of Rock | 1977