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The
Sex Pistols are now three decades in the past, and if you're under 40,
there's a good chance that you won't recognize the names of either Johnny
Rotten or John Lydon, who happen to be the same person. Whether the younger
generation knows him or not, many of them are walking in his footsteps.
The Sex Pistols were a pivotal force in popular culture.
Listen to them now and you'll hear a rawness of sound and a rawness of
emotion that a whole range of performers who came after them have tried
to imitate. Look at them, and you'll see a street style than became a
stage style that became a street style that became a consumer phenomenon.
Remember safety pins, tartans, school neckties... pogo-ing?
By the time the Sex Pistols pushed their way into view, there had been
a British revolution in pop music every year or two. If those earlier
revolutions were about more than music, they were usually about attitude
and style, like the Rolling Stones. The Sex Pistols, however, were impossible
to understand without understanding where they came from or what they
were singing about. Kids of mostly Irish origins from housing estates
for working class families (if their parents actually had jobs) were venting
emotions about the Royals ("God Save the Queen") and about a
society ("I am an Anti-Christ") in which the already-downtrodden
working man was being told by a new "free market" government
that his real problem was that the government had given him too much money.
Bear in mind, these were kids whose parents shoplifted groceries. (Remember,
romanticized consumer-safe views of British poverty and abandonment like
The Full Monty came more than a decade after labor riots tore the place
apart.) The whole country seemed to be on strike - evidenced by mountains
of garbage that went uncollected, and the Sex Pistols' practice of wearing
"bin liners," black garbage bags, to spoof the extortionately
expensive rubber sex-wear peddled at the time by hip haberdasher Malcolm
McLaren and the designer Vivienne Westwood. In an street-riot atmosphere
like that, why not wear ripped improvised clothes held together with safety
pins and spoof upper-class costuming while you spit at the audience, which
spits back.
You would think that respectable leaders of society would know better
than to denounce the young boys, yet they did. What better fuel for a
publicity campaign than official outrage?
For better or worse, the band's bitterness soon became branded, an encouragement
for the comfortable pop culture consumers out there to use what came to
be called punk as a reason to throw fits about anything that annoyed them.
You can't blame the Sex Pistols for that, but punk did turn into the new
thing for privileged kids, yet not before the UK was genuinely shocked
by the "nasty little bastards" (Sid Vicious) that its children
had become. "We declared war on England without meaning to,"
said their singer, John Lydon. Is he being just a bit coy here? For more
on this, consult Lydon's lively 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish,
No Blacks, No Dogs, which could now be on its way to becoming a film.
They're not back - not yet, at least - but AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression
in British Fashion, an exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, has installed examples of punk fashion (enabled if not
inspired by the Sex Pistols and others) alongside more established British
dress in its English period rooms - a tartan jacket on loan from John
Lydon a/k/a Johnny Rotten, Mohawked mannequins sprawled defiantly across
a "gentlemen's club," and a bedroom in which a seductress in
a spine dress (with a snake-like backbone appended like an odd phallic
tail on the outside) moves in with an accomplice for the kill. As often
happens, you see more continuity than clash here - the modern clothes
are no less British. You also see drama. Each room could be a montage
for the stage, or even better, an elaborate production design for a film
shot. The ambitious show which puts the "yobs" in the same room
as a tiny tuxedoed Duke of Windsor is the work of the Met's costume curator,
Andrew Bolton, who happens to be British.
You can see the Sex Pistols on the screen in Julien Temple's perceptive
chronicle from 2000 of the band and its times, The Filth and the Fury:
A Sex Pistols Movie. (It's a long way from Spinal Tap, and even more distant
from the Beatles movies, which were live-action cartoons.)
See this one before watching any of the other tour films or Malcolm McLaren's
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, also directed (far less effectively)
by Temple in 1980. Every successful band is ripe for exploitation. For
that, we have Sid and Nancy, the triumph of sex and drugs over rock and
roll, which wears its age (made in 1986) as awkwardly as any fifty-something
paunchy punk.
Lydon, 50, who lives in Los Angeles today, is anything but awkward, a
born talker whose opinions haven't softened over the years. I spoke to
him in early May when he came for the opening of AngloMania. He was disappointed
in coverage of the opening in the New York Times.
Tell me about your relations with the press.
In thirty years' experience in the industry, I can truly say the press
is just as bad as ever. I don't know why people are paid to write rubbish
and to report second-hand gossip. It still, to this day, is one of my
bitterest enemies. Maybe the newspapers believe that people have a need
to hear others being put down. There's a resentment there. And you'll
find that the journalists who wrote this kind of cack weren't actually
at the event at all. I certainly wasn't running around the event saying,
"Buy my new pants." That was not my intention. But it was my
intention to accept an accolade for the Sex Pistols for writing songs
that did change social history for us in Britain, which were on some serious
subjects, and we were investigated under the death penalty act, the treason
act. I think that's kind of relevant. To remove all that, and put it down
to someone complaining about his chair and a meat pie is missing the point.
It seems to assume, too, the New York Times, that conformity, versus anarchy,
was the order of the day.
What was the press like when the Sex Pistols started performing?
Bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. We were investigated in Parliament. This
is ridiculous, under the Traitors Act, and it was always "those foul-mouthed
yobs," and that's the thing that's now continued and continued. I
thought I'd cleared that up, or quite a bit. But no, it's back again with
a vengeance. I don't know who these fashion people are, these journalists,
but everybody got a kicking in that [New York Times] article [about the
opening of the exhibition]. There's not one saving grace. And in a weird
way, you can sort of enjoy it, too - who do those foo-foo people think
they are, having fun on the town? [He's referring to the Anglo-mania exhibition
and Costume Institute benefit gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Well, I'll tell you who they are. They raised four-point-odd million,
for a good cause. That's good enough, isn't it, and I don't think they
need to be slagged off, no matter what they did or wore.
When that investigation happened back in the days of the Sex Pistols,
was all of the press against you, or was it just the conservative press?
All of it. All of it. All of it.
So all these people were dancing at the clubs, and they turned around
and attacked you?
There were no clubs. We had to create all that ourselves. There was no
easy route for us to fall into. It wasn't like it was in America. New
York had things like CBGB's, so it was kind of set up. Most of the New
York punk bands were following traditional roots. Us, we came from outer
space, I suppose, out of nothing, out of council flats, out of the poor
end of town. If you're going to make any analogy, rap has been tried,
but I don't think that's quite accurate. Rap, to me, was disingenuous
about its original roots. It was very much Afrika Bambaataa, but he's
kind of been pushed aside for the more gangsterly nonsense, which is all
very fashionable, but aggressive and vicious by nature. We've not been
that way. All we've done is hit problems on the head and try to solve
them.
"God Save the Queen" isn't just a bitter piece of whining, nor
in the context of the full Sex Pistols story - "pretty vacant - I'm
not pretty, I'm not vacant" - it's about irony. Is this right, is
this wrong. A song like "Bodies" - am I pro-abortion, am I not?
Well, I'm discussing the bloody issue in the most heartfelt way, and I've
always done that. "Death Disco," in Public Image Ltd. What's
that about? It's about my mother dying. She asked me to write a song for
her, so I did. This is like reality to me. Clear-cut answers like, they're
all wrong, they're all right, is not reality. I think the ultimate thing
you can achieve in wisdom is to find out that you know nothing. True wisdom.
The world is a mad place, and it's full of liars. It's impossible to get
over that, but I give it a go. I'm not utopian. It's not that nonsense.
You mentioned rap. The early stages were right from the projects -
what we call the projects in this country, and you call council flats
or housing estates. Then, soon, middle-class kids got involved.
Yeah, hopped onto it. It's the same, sort of, with punk. There are analogies,
there are comparisons to make. But I was in New York when rap was starting.
What did you think of it at the time?
It was fine. We didn't know it was rap. It's like punk. The title came
later. And with that title came all the a-holes who attached onto it,
the money-grabbers, the power-weavers. I made a record with Bambaataa,
in the early days, before the word rap was even out there. In those days,
it was hip-hop. It was a curious blend, what Bambaataa used to play, a
mixture of Kraftwerk, bits of heavy metal and, say, Parliament. It was
no black-white nonsense. It was everything altogether. The only thing
that was really black was the vinyl. People didn't really judge it in
any other way. New York was very mixed then - now it's become ghettoized.
Rap has narrowed itself into its "black man's world" only, with
a token gesture of Eminem thrown in.
Were there any black punk kids in Britain then?
Yeah, but we never noticed it. It was very mixed.
It wasn't a Black nationalistic thing?
No. In England, it was a melting pot. When you come from the slums, you're
all there together. And Finsbury Park, where I emanate, it's definitely
always been a melting pot.
Of course there were rich kids. There were girls, boys, all mixed up.
Then the name-grabbers and the title-grabbers move in. That's when the
poison begins. Then the Vivienne Westwoods of this world claim it, or
try to claim it, in a very sly way, as being their creation. It's like,
Who wrote the song, right? The t-shirt I've got on don't matter two fucks.
Not at all. Never did, never will. It don't mean nothing. What's the content,
what's the driving force?
And I've seen this exhibition at the Metropolitan - it understood completely
that we're part of an ongoing process in Britain. We probably are all
mad, according to America values. That's why you all jumped on the Mayflower
to get away. But there's a fun thing in madness and humor and comedy.
You can solve a lot of the world's problems that way. If you don't take
yourself so serious, then the threats from the outside world aren't so
poisonous. So let them [the press] write what they like. Let them do it,
since they're doing us all no favor in the end except rubbishing their
own lives. It's a hard, difficult thing to be bitter. It really is. It
requires a great amount of energy. And I've always known that anyone who
has utter contempt for me, the biggest fun I have is knowing that they
go to bed thinking about me. It's killing them, and I don't have to lift
a finger.
When did people start stealing things from you?
Oh, Day One, mate, the day you're born.
But specifically from the punk times.
It wasn't a movement. I'd never seen it as such. No one was waving a flag
for us all to line up behind. I've always been about the individual. I
mean, the Sex Pistols as a band - sometimes we'd bitterly hate each other,
and sometimes really don't mind each other. But it's all those contentions
in our differing characters that make the songs what they are. If we were
all following a dogma, we'd be slaves to a system, and so punk was supposedly
against that. But it didn't. It became very, very uniform. And I've got
to say, Vivienne Westwood, she was great fun at the beginning. She didn't
like me very much, but she was great fun, and I liked buying at full price
the clothes in her store. We had no choice about that. There were no freebies.
She didn't give them to you?
Never. She'd rather die than give anything away. That's how that was.
Her hubbie might be the manager, but that meant nothing. So what we would
wear would be a mix and match of many things. It never really centered
around her shop. It's been rewritten in history as that way, but that's
not strictly the truth. Because we never had the money for it. I mean,
I got noticed for going to Vivienne and Malcolm's shop before the Pistols,
because I had on an "I Hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt. It was a regular
Pink Floyd t-shirt. I just scrawled "I Hate" across the top.
And if this led to a life of notoriety, well, I'm just amazed. It was
an ongoing process, a long time before those two [Westwood and McLaren].
At the time they were selling... basically kinky sex-wear. Rubber. It
took me months working on a building site to save up. I wanted a polo-neck
rubber sweater. I got it, too. I wore it, actually, at one of the first
Sex Pistols gigs, and collapsed from dehydration. Even though we only
had a 15-minute set, I couldn't manage four. That's a severe piece of
clothing.
The idea of mad, mad, mad torturous clothing was kind of fun. So I was
always on that side of it, and I support them for that, for going that
way. They might possibly have gone too far. Vivienne now is haute couture,
really - it's way up there. It's for very, very rich, tired old women,
really, her gear, which is sad. But at least she's being true to herself.
Were the safety pins your idea?
Safety pins were because I couldn't sew. It's just practical behavior.
If the sleeves are falling off the only jumper you can afford, you pin
it together. And I'm not going to hand my pants over to a tailor. I had
pins to hold me cuffs up. I like that look anyway. Why should I care?
Who tells me what I should and shouldn't wear? I wear what I'm comfortable
in. My God - I was born, wasn't I? What do you think my Mum and Dad put
on me? A nappy with a safety pin. So I can't say I invented the damn thing,
but I came into the world with one.
Where did the straitjacket come in?
From a series of photos that we did. I think it was with Ray Stevenson,
a journalist, a photographer, who in those days did these things for nothing.
He brought a white straitjacket, and me and a couple of other people loved
to try it on, to see what that felt like. Awful. I don't recommend a straitjacket
ever. Your control is taken away, and that's a difficult thing to give
up. But it made for great photos. And that led on to bondage suits, which
were much flimsier, of course, and equally restrictive. If you were attacked
on the streets, there's no way that you were gonna run. So you were literally,
quite aptly, skewered to your beliefs.
When you were getting attacked on the streets, what would happen?
I don't suppose it had much to do with being a punk. It's just what life
growing up in London was like. If you came from just another manor - which
means area - you would be attacked, because you wouldn't be from that
part, right? So that's just the way that was. Soccer games was always
good for warfare. It's not a village mentality. It's a "this village
hates that village" mentality. It's territorial. Britain is a pirate
culture. It's always us and them, but it works, although it can be nasty
when you're growing up. Knives, machetes, the lot, and many people were
seriously hurt. But look, we won. It's almost like by passive resistance.
Gandhi is one of my all-time ultimate heroes. Not that he was a pacifist
genuinely. I just think he certainly understood that there has to be an
alternative to just taking arms against each other. They drove the English
out by not doing anything. How wonderful is that?
So when you guys were skinheads, what did you believe?
I was never a skinhead. I had to wear the gear. It was community wear.
It was what everybody wore. You'd be impressed by Jack the Lad from manor,
and say, "I want to look like that." That's teenage angst. If
you want a girlfriend, you've got to look like a desirable boyfriend.
Why didn't the skinhead look penetrate as deeply as punk?
It never had any ambitions. It wasn't going anywhere. It was negative
fashion, anyway. There is an element of negativity being a positive force,
but it was limited in its brutality, somewhat. All the Arsenal mods knew
this, too, and would shift from that when you'd see endless Northerners
coming down off the trains, looking exactly like you did six months ago.
You'd go, "Well, I've had enough of that." As soon as people
would start copying your stuff, you'd start to move on. It's nice to think
that you're part of a clique, but the trouble is that you've got to break
the clique-ism of it every single time. Dressing up or down is a bloody
difficult thing.
Was it a racist thing?
Hardly. The music was absolutely pure Jamaican. Ska, reggae - that's the
backbeat to the skinheads thing. So how on earth could that be anti-Black?
It's history re-written. You've got to watch for those Daily Mails and
Times in England. They don't know what they write. They're full of it.
When did you guys start sharing clothes?
I think from the first minute we joined together. We had to. We had nowhere
to stay. We were squatting, living around different places, some still
at home. It was just a pile of clothes. I'd bring what I had and left
it in what we laughingly called the studio. "What would we wear?"
That was it. We'd go to the pile. We were quite generous with each other,
but not in a predetermined way. It was just instinctively.
How did the garbage strike of the mid-1970s fit into this?
There were just bleeding garbage bags on sale everywhere, and they were
cheap. It was ten foot high, all over London. The government made these
things and manufactured them for the first time. There were no plastic
bags for garbage up to that point. It was dustbins. They somehow kept
the smells in. And then they started introducing colors - some were bright
green and pink. And some of the girls started putting them on - arms through,
neck hole, a belt - looked good, looked very good, the shininess of it.
It might have been a play on the sex wear. You'd see this stuff, not necessarily
in Vivienne and Malcolm's shop, but all over Soho, the center of London,
where all the nightclubs are. Always next to a discotheque is kinky kinky-wear.
Well, if you're looking at two to three hundred pounds for a bit of kink,
I think two to three pence for a plastic bag, which has a similar, but
more loose effect, was a sensible option. I think it's always practicality
that leads to good fashion, and not art.
How did hair fit into all of this?
Long hair was the order of the day - the Rod Stewart thing, mullets.
Was mullet your term?
No, mullet was a term that came way, way later. I think we'd call it mod,
as in modern. It was a carry-on from the mods and rockers. We've always
had youth culture movements. They're always working class, and not orchestrated
from above. They're just jumped on by those above - rockers, teddy boys
of the 50s. Mods was a reaction against that. Mods and rockers would be
fighting on the beaches in the 60s. Mods were very short hair. Rockers
were very long hair. Then mods went into skinheads, and then mods went
back into rockers' long hair. It's all interrelated. As a mod, you could
be fighting rockers, but your best mate might be one.
Were you picking up on things that were already in film or television?
Not film or television. It would be the other way around. It would be
art imitating life, because there is this nonsense that everyone was going
for the Clockwork Orange thing, but that was done before the film. That
used to be an Arsenal look - the barber coats, the bowler hats. The only
thing that Clockwork Orange, the movie, actually added was the eye mascara,
which, by the way, no punk band would wear. It would have been a bit daft.
Why waste the money? You could get a black eye for nothing.
What about the leather jacket?
Leather jackets are later, and they crept in for lack of anything to wear.
Steve had a leather jacket because Malcolm borrowed him one. Sid had a
leather jacket because I had one and gave it to him, because I didn't
like it. It wasn't a deliberate thing. Then Sid started to want to be
a Ramone, which was odd. Sid bought into the New York decadence - Lou
Reed-isms, right? Sid, not being very bright, he ended up looking like
a Ramone. He thought he was a tough New York drug-taking decadent person.
He was my best friend then, and I miss him dearly, but he was a bit daft.
When we finally met these bands, it was disappointing. Somehow or other,
some press tittle-tattle had got in there, and jealousies and perversions
such as who invented punk started creeping in. And then this idea of punk
spread back to this idea, "Iggy Pop was a punk." How do you
work that one out? He was a longhaired hippie. He might have been a bit
of a nutcase, but that's what he was.
What do you think of hippies?
A dreadful movement. They set the whole world back twenty or thirty paces.
It was a very selfish credo. It was free love all right, but it was the
women who were getting stuffed up the bootie. They were exactly welcome
in the free speech department. They were accoutrements to some turgid
nonsense. And most of those hippies ended up as corporate geniuses. Richard
Branson comes to mind - a very nice radical man, a hippie, but basically
a businessman, and always was. It really was about selling tie-dyed t-shirts.
Your first experience of the United States was in the South. What effect
did that have on you?
It wasn't deliberate to do the South. The North didn't want us, didn't
want us at all. Warner Brothers, the record company was so dead against
us going down South that that really tipped it in the right way. We were
determined to go to the South. What was it about the South that the North
didn't want you to know? We found them to be thoroughly honest nice decent
human beings down there. Yes, there were guns and we were shot at in places
down there, but so what. You get that anywhere, particularly Chicago and
New York.
How different was the South from what people had told you about it?
Incredibly so, and it's made me question the entire history of America
and the Civil War and all of it. Your Civil War wasn't about freeing the
slaves, was it? It was about the economy, wasn't it? It was about the
North trying to starve the South out. I happen to like the family social
way that people relate to each other in the South. I find that closer
to my Irish London roots than I do anything from up here. Here, it's "grab
the money and run," and pretend your mom and dad are dead the second
you've left their wallet. It's a greedy, greedy, greedy corporate-induced
culture in the North. I've played Chicago many times, and I love playing
on tour buses, I don't like flying. It takes you about four or five hours
to get past that industrial wasteland. It's shocking. It's like Chernobyl,
over and over again. Bilious smoke. Acid rain, whatever you want to call
it. America's killing itself.
More than England?
We're smaller. We don't have the industries. We don't have the capacity.
We don't have the population, for a start. You've got the numbers. You've
won. You have the resources. You've won the world. But look at what George
Bush has gone out and done. You could be everybody's favorite person,
a benevolent uncle of sorts. Now you've turned into a nasty one.
Tell that to Tony Blair.
I'm anti-Blair, always have been. He's no Labor man, not at all.
When you were in the Sex Pistols, were you paying attention to Parliamentary
politics?
Big time.
Margaret Thatcher came in around then.
And who knew that she'd become ongoing - she never went away. One thing
she was solid on was "This lady's not for turning!" That was
impressive, but she sold the North Sea oil to the Americans, sold Sheffield
Steel, raised the tax and made the country impossible to function economically.
And then she blamed the unions.
Why unions are so important in England is this. Before them, it was the
workhouse. The unions stopped that. If some of the unions had become corrupt,
then the workers would sort that out nicely. A lot of blame was attached
to people like Arthur Scargill. Apart from his manic Marxist leanings,
he was also a democrat. He believed in voting, democracy. And that wasn't
understood. So he was victimized. So, naturally, my instincts, I side
with him. Anyone who speaks for the people is on my side, and I'm on their
side. I don't expect us to agree on every subject, utterly completely.
That's why I don't believe in political parties, where you have to toe
the line. You have to go with the lobbying agenda, and this is wrong.
Do you vote?
Yeah.
Are you a US citizen?
Not yet.
So you vote in British elections?
Yeah. That's very difficult. Who do you vote for? It's very very hard.
I'm finding more working class values in the Conservative Party than I
do in the Labor.
There have been a lot of films about towns that are dying in the North
- Full Monty, Kinky Boots, Brassed Off, Billy Elliot...
So you understand those films. It's the subplot that matters. That's how
we view them in England. Here, The Full Monty was portrayed as a laughingly,
jokingly family movie for all. We're trying to tell you - We're dying
here - Help. Madness, isn't it.
It was marketed as a movie about gender reversals, about men taking
off their clothes on stage and stripping.
Yeah, but if it's related to anything, it's Bleak House. Hello, we're
back to Dickens.
So a British audience would see that film very differently from an
American one.
Yeah. The stripping thing is nothing. There's no titillation in it at
all. It's just, "What a load of daft buggers." They need to
make money, so that's that you have to do, so there's no moralistic values
put on them.
What do you think about the way that punk has been portrayed in films
like The Rock and Roll Swindle?
That's Malcolm [McLaren]. That was a real serious problem. Malcolm is
a man without much content in life. I think Rock and Roll Swindle shows
that. I had no involvement in it at all, in any shape or form.
What about Sid and Nancy?
A terrible film, because of the same thing. I missed what we were trying
to really do here, as human beings. It revolved around this druggy relationship
- sending them off in a cab to rock and roll heaven at the end was a bad,
bad lesson to be preaching. Drugs kill utterly, and beyond life, I don't
know if there's any existence at all. We're here to live for as long as
we can. This is why I'm anti-war and murder.
Did you go to Catholic school as a kid?
Yeah, but I wasn't very good at that. I didn't last very long. I had a
very bitty education as a kid, because when I was young, when I was seven,
I had meningitis, so I missed two years of school, and they threw me out
at 14. So I had to go to what you might call a Day-Approved School, for
problematic children. My problems weren't that I was violent or disruptive
- disruptive, yes, I'll grant you that - but I passed every exam I ever
took. I asked too many questions, and I would dispute bad teaching policies.
I wanted to know the truth of the damn things. The things that I excelled
at were geography, history, literature, language - loved them. Hopeless
at maths. I'll never be a businessman.
How do you feel about your Irish roots?
They're intertwined and mixed. I don't see any difference from Ireland
to England. I see them basically as one culture. And we are. What the
problem begins and ends with is religion. Eliminate religion and I think
the world would be a far better place. It just leads to death and warfare
and judgment. I'm against morals. I find morals to be immoral. I like
values. I understand values.
Have you followed this whole debate about Islamic cartoons in the newspaper?
Yeah - insane. What kind of a religion is it if you can't take a joke?
Your god is utterly valueless and you know there's something wrong. You
know something's wrong if you can't face any criticism or questions.
How do you feel about American attitudes toward the monarchy?
I think you want to own them I think you want them. And they'd be a perfect
Disney attraction. Epcot Center, straight ahead. But Donald Trump can't
buy his way into that kind of status. He's trying very hard. He's got
some damn fine buildings around this town. They're like foolish empty
monuments. He's so insistent on his name. You don't need to do that.
That's the difference between English and Americans. Americans want
the attention.
Is it a jealousy thing? I'll tell you how I feel about the monarchy. I
think we should keep them. Because there's everything else being taken
away. Whether we like it or not, it's part of our history. They are a
historical fact. They've been around a long time. The values that working
class people hold and keep us together have been around a long time. You
cannot just drop all that because of some socialist whim, because they
ain't coming back if you do. You're ignoring history and you're trying
to rewrite it. The current lot are a horrible lot, but they're a lot better
than what we had way back then.
Let's get back to The Filth and the Fury. Were you happy with that?
Yeah. We all had a large involvement.
After the Sex Pistols, when you started Public Image Ltd, you were
going to make films.
We were very ambitious, but we ran into too many brick walls, too many
brick walls.
Do you still want to be involved in film?
Yeah, I love it. I've been in a few movies. I do cartoon voice-overs as
well and advertisement voices. I've done a lot of records under different
names because, quite frankly, if I put my name to it, it wouldn't sell.
Have you been on The Simpsons?
I did the one with the chef, the Black chef.
You mean South Park?
I did a voice-over for a character loosely based around the chef. The
Simpsons, no. I met those people two years ago, but I don't think they
liked me.
What sort of films do you watch?
Everything, but less and less. I don't like these Arnold Schwarzenegger-type
thingies at all. I never have. I love science fiction, as long as it's
a bit trashy. I like the SciFi Channel on TV, because it's full of utter
nonsense, like Stargate, which I wallow in. The very early Doctor Who
I liked. I'm not sure about this new one. I think it's too glitzy.
Did you watch things like Supercar and Fireball XL5 in Britain when
you were growing up?
Oh, yeah. Listen, all of this is good stuff.
But these days it's perceived as being too crude technologically.
That was the value. Like Doctor Who - I loved it when they were made out
of cardboard, and you could see the feet under them, and the "Ant
Men" with great big thick appendages. It left your imagination to
play into it. Now you've got computer-generated things creeping in, and
it doesn't work so much for me. It kills imagination. Imagination is now
being replaced by visual entertainment. It's very flimsy.
What do you think of the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor
of the state that you live in?
He's killing us. He's absolutely killing us.
Have you met him?
No. Maybe once at a premiere, I think, years ago. Better still, now I
remember it. The house I live in is on the beach in Venice. One of the
first jobs that he ever had when he came to America was as a bricklayer,
so he built the wall around it. And, a few years back, when the twins,
my wife's daughter's children, first came to live with us - they stayed
with us from 13 on - he turned up on a bicycle, Mr. Schwarzenegger, with
his wife. What's her name?
Maria Shriver.
That's it, and he wanted to come in. You don't just knock on the door
and go, "I'm famous, let me in," so we didn't. For all the obvious
reasons - the house is in a mess, I can't bear this. P.S.: He's with twenty
photographers and an entourage of security a-holes, and it's all just
too rude. I've lived there for years and years and years, and privacy
I value above all else. Nobody turns up at my house with a press escort.
You just don't do it. Yes, so I have met Arnie.
What's it like having twin teenage grandchildren in LA, where kids
are into piercings and all those kinds of things?
The twins have grown up with Johnny Rotten as grand-dad. They're not into
that at all. They've gone into Gap-wear and sandals.
You let them get away with that?
It's not up to me. It's up to them. I'm not here to dress them. All I
can do is show them values, and if they appreciate that, that's fine.
You've got to let people find their own space in life. I put no judgments
on them. And I love them, and that's that. Sometimes I don't. [Laughs]
Listen, I have not loved Parent Teacher Association meetings.
You've gone to them?
Of course I have. You have to.
Are you doing any film projects now? People must be pitching you scripts
constantly.
I'm not interested in being an actor, although I started suggesting that
I be a romantic lead, in a Cary Grant-type way, knowing no one would take
that seriously. That made me safe.
Lately, I've hooked up with Penelope Spheeris, whom I like a lot. I appreciate
her honesty. And we're trying to get off the ground No Irish, No Blacks,
No Dogs, my book title, which by the way is not a racist statement on
our behalf. That's what used to be written on the hotels when you used
to go up North in England. They would not let in any Irish, Blacks or
dogs - in that order. The Irish were more hate than the Blacks and dogs.
Those signs disappeared just shortly after we started moving about there.
I think punk really cleaned out a lot of those closets. It really did.
Black meant Irish as well, and then you get the Civil Rights people moving
in to say, "They're Irish, they can't be Black." So that was
an inverted racism, right there. Serious problems that people make for
themselves. They had a golden opportunity back then to understand equality.
We're all Black. That'll do. Thank you. Clever, isn't it. The principal
is "divided we fall."
Just to change the subject a bit. Tell me about your new clothing line.
We've hooked up with A & G Cashmeres. I like their sweaters. I don't
like the rock and roll skulls and the tattoo arms. They print - they use
these computers to do it. And it's a very, very ingenious technology,
for our own Sex Pistols logos and signs. We've been ripped off by merchandisers
here for how many years? Countless. It's about time we turned around on
that, so the two things just fell beautifully together.
It's really nice to see "Fuck" on cashmere. It suddenly becomes
not a rude word, which it should never have been in the first place. I
went to court years ago over the word "bollocks." In Britain
that was an illegal word to use. It's a rude word. I found it in the Oxford
Dictionary. I took the state to court and won. So, there you go - Never
Mind the Bollocks. When we first put up the album displays, you see, the
police raided the stores. Yes, they created a lovely turmoil, but they
shouldn't have done that. That's our right. That's our language. That
word is fully-based in Anglo-Saxon culture, thank you.
I tell you what I don't like - when somebody calls you a "fucking
cunt," and meaning it to be nasty. There are implications here. It's
not a lovely wonderful world where we can all run around insulting each
other. Be careful how you use things. It's not one for me to pick up on,
because on British TV recently, I thanked 20 million British viewers and
told them they were fucking cunts for voting for me. I meant it in a fun
way. But when you're being aggressive with language, you can be aggressive
without those words. Am I explaining this well? We're jumping from one
subject to another. We're playing three-tiered chess here.
There is a famous case in the US Courts involving a man who entered
a courtroom wearing a jacket that said, "Fuck the Draft." They
also sell American flag toilet paper.
Well, somebody said, the first day in the museum, when I blew my nose
in my hankie, which was a Union Jack hankie, they said, "Isn't that
illegal?" I was flabbergasted at that remark. What is your flag worth
if you can't have fun with it? What's this fear, this holier-than-thou
nonsense? We're not mocking it, we're playing with it. That flag's part
of me, whether I like it or not. I'm not going to give it up too easily.
Many people have died under those colors, and for good reasons. Many for
wrong reasons, but more for good reasons.
Why do you live in the United States?
Police harassment, basically, originally, drove me out of England. It's
a cruel legacy. It's possible that I'm too awkward for my own good. In
one month, there were three police raids on my house. It was just the
silliest nonsense. I had an Irish flag in the window. I did, because I
had no curtains. I didn't think it was the Irish flag. I thought it was
an Italian flag. I also had an Arsenal flag, which they found offensive,
because I was living in Chelsea at the time - and with the football thing,
they thought I was trying to promote violence.
And there was the "God Save the Queen" poster, the Sex Pistols
thing, which they said was propagating hooligan-ist behavior. And the
search for drugs was attached to all three - which they found nothing
of. Noise, disturbances, whatever - just endless harassment. And I went
to see my brother's band in Ireland, and I ended in jail for attacking
two policemen's fists with my face. I just decided to bugger off out of
Europe for a bit.
We had a great offer in New York - I can't remember the club - to do a
live video broadcast kind of thing, not performing live, just spinning
records, that ended up in a riot, and I thought, "I really like New
York." So I stayed. We found, as Public Image Ltd at that time, we
could get gigs in America, so we lived quite frugally, but we could just
rent a van and go off to Philadelphia and New Jersey and travel up and
down the East Coast and really enjoy it, really enjoy playing the small
clubs. Some band members couldn't tolerate the American way of life, I
suppose, and being the volatile bunch of creationists that we were, went
our different ways. Everybody had their own angle to go towards, so there
we were. We can't hold each other back.
So you stayed in the States.
Yeah, I do like the people here. You're easier going in many ways. Except
the foo-foo. The more wealthy the people become here, the more conservative
and more dangerous. That's an odd thing, but the poorer classes are absolutely
fine by me.
What do you think of MTV and the music video culture?
I'll tell you what I think. It's not for me, because I can't afford to
make music videos at that price. I never could, and if I could, even,
I wouldn't be paying $800 thousand to a couple of million for a lousy
video. It's nonsense. To me, the song is what matters, the content, not
the packaging. It's a postcard, a simulation of life, and it lessens us.
It takes away imagination. I always thought the power of music was the
listening inside your own head. You didn't need a visual blared at you.
It distracts, actually.
Why do you think it's become so big?
Consumer society - you can sell anything to anyone. Remember, this is
the land of pet rocks. People were buying pet rocks. Isn't that great?
I'm sure most of them were thinking, "What a giggle." But, really,
they were buying them. I bought a set of Spice Girls dolls, so I can't
talk.
Have you met them?
No.
Are you a Beckham fan?
You mentioned football and Beckham in the same sentence. Are you mad?
No. We're Arsenal. He was ManUnited, and now he's Real Madrid. I think
he's quite a brave chappie, really. He does put himself out there. He
seems to be alright as a bloke, and he seems to be unaffected, even though
his wife is pushing him into the most foo-foo ridiculous costumes, making
a mannequin of him somehow. Yet somehow he still has some dignity. Good
on him. I just think the game of football in England is too fast for him.
Do you still go to matches, or do you watch them on TV?
You can't get into the stadiums anymore. I'm a season ticket-holder, but
I live in America, so my brother uses them. So many real fans can't get
into the stadiums anymore. All the tickets are going to the wealthy. You're
getting stadiums now full of accountants and their friends. That seems
to be the order of it. I know these were all sorts of scams and schemes
to eliminate football hooliganism, but the hooligans sorted each other
out. If you just left them alone - they weren't running around looking
for hapless victims. They had each other. There's an odd unity between
these warring fractions. They're connected to each other, and when the
battle's over, that's who you hang out with.
What do you think of American soccer?
It's in its early stages, but, my God, you beat England two-nil not long
ago, and it shall not be forgotten. I think, Good on you. But please don't
try to reduce it to NFL, with a break every twelve minutes for commercials
on TV, because you'll kill the game stone-dead. The fun of soccer is that
it's a solid 90 minutes - a full all-out. It's about stamina and perseverance
and you can finally conquer that. It's a long time to be on a pitch. It's
physically demanding. American sport doesn't understand that. It's a long
haul, tough man's game. It's like rugby versus American football. These
blokes play 90 minutes in the snow. It's not the LA Galaxy.
That's what American football used to be like, playing in the weather
- rain or snow.
But then Ronald Reagan made that film, the Notre Dame what's-it that buggered
you all up.
How could I forget it? It's tattooed into our consciousness.
And he played second-fiddle to a chimpanzee. That's perfect for president.
Would the Brits vote an actor Prime Minister?
I wouldn't say so in the past, but I think it's highly possible in the
future. The world of trivia and gossip magazines has pervaded all. It's
reduced standards and values. So, yeah, any old twatch can get in now.
It's a free-for-all. If you've got the money, you can buy your way right
in to the top. You know how much money it costs to run a presidential
campaign here. We all do. That's a billionaire's game.
The mayor of New York spent more than $70 million to get himself elected.
So he can be invited to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a Johnny
Rotten t-shirt. [Laughs] The irony of it. It's superb, isn't it? In a
weird way, what goes around comes around. It's payback. Yeah.
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