Rotten Read online

  The next day Paul and Steve left with Malcolm for Rio without me. I don’t think they meant to be spiteful, but I think they just went where they thought the money was. It was the easier ride of the two—go with Malcolm or side with me and find out what was really going on. Joe Stevens shared a room with Malcolm on most of the tour. He was the one who lent me the money to get a plane ticket back to London. We went to New York that very evening. I would have been truly stranded without his help because I hadn’t been given my ticket home. It was nice, since he was one of Malcolm’s gang. I never got that kind of respect from the rest of them.

  After stopping in New York, I returned to London. I went back to my house, the one I had cleverly insisted on buying in my name just before we left for America. It was in Gunter Grove. I remember that argument very well. Malcolm wanted to sign for it. I said, “Nope. Nope. Nope. You give me the money or that’s it.” None of the Pistols even had bank accounts at that time. Steve and Paul lived in a flat on Bell Street that was under Malcolm’s name. So they had to sort of agree with whatever he said. Poxy scum.

  * * *

  The Sex Pistols just fizzled. There was no final band meeting when we dissolved in San Francisco. We had no big sit-down. There was no actual mass resignation. Looking back, I understand that Steve and Paul didn’t want to carry on with the band. I didn’t want to, either. None of us really wanted to do a tour of Scandinavia at that point. Sid was a complete disaster. I don’t remember even seeing Sid after the San Francisco gig. He was so embarrassing that I kept as far away from him as I could. He became everything I didn’t want a Sex Pistol to be: another worn-out druggie rock ’n’ roller. It was a complete contradiction of everything we wanted to set up within the Sex Pistols.

  Steve and Paul felt that way too at the time. They were against that kind of hard-drug use. Steve got into his drug problems a long time after; I think it was him trying to sort himself out. Paul never got into anything, but sometimes I think Paul doesn’t need to know, he just accepts and carries on.

  When Malcolm wanted to be spiteful, he sure knew how to be. That’s why I pursued the court case—Lydon vs. Glitterbest—against him for so long. I was literally dropped like excess baggage. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I had been given a ticket home. This is an elephant that never forgets. He tried to run off and even claimed he owned my name, Johnny Rotten. I wasn’t allowed to use the name for years after until I took him to court and got it back.

  Some twelve years later, when I finally did get to Rio with PiL, Ronnie Biggs wanted to come to one of the gigs. He left a message for me at the hotel saying Malcolm owed him some money, and could he collect from me? It had something to do with royalties from the record they did together. How was Ronnie Biggs ever going to collect on it? I don’t think any money was withheld deliberately. It was because of Malcolm’s inefficiency. Who was going to listen to Biggs bemoan his sorry lot?

  In this respect, it’s funny: Malcolm even stiffed the great train robber.

  SEGMENT 02:

  CHILD OF THE ASHES

  It’s amazing that even with security systems, you can’t keep kids out. Kids find ways in. The more elaborate the security system or the bigger the guard dogs, the more determined kids are to get in. I was no exception. We used to do an awful lot of breaking into factories. That used to be hilarious good fun. Sewing machine factories, any place that was closed at night and on weekends. It was fun to run around inside. I was young, and there would be a gang of thirty or forty of us running around inside. It was a neighborhood gang thing in Finsbury Park, North London, in the early 1960s. Organized only in the sense that if kids from other neighborhoods tried to come in, there would be brick fights. You’d pile up as many bricks as you could and throw them. They’d be doing the same across the street until one lot ran off. That was it. What good fun.

  The biggest joy was living on the edge of an industrial estate. It proved to be the best playground. We’d tamper with lathes and fiddle about with tools and stuff. I never had lots of toys when I was young. We never had the money, so we had just bits and pieces—not like the other kids. Some kids at school had these expensive, bleeding sets. It drove me crazy, but I figured, they don’t do the things I can do.

  Benwell Road and Holloway Road in Finsbury Park had a scruffy mob of kids of all ages. We were all led by a chap called [Smoothie],1 a particularly bad piece of work. He was a real problem to his family, but I used to think he was great. He was such total chaos, he wouldn’t follow any rules and went in and out of Borstals. His parents sent Smoothie on all kinds of courses to try to rehabilitate him. He was English, so they had a little bit more money than us Irish, who lived across the street. His parents used to say that it was us Irish kids who made Smoothie misbehave. But I was six and Smoothie was twelve at the time. I liked the gang fights he started. Hilarious fiascoes, not at all like the knives and guns of today. The meanness wasn’t there. It was more like yelling, shouting, throwing stones, and running away giggling. Maybe the reality was colored by my youth.

  We have very long days in England in the summer. It gets dark very late, nine-thirty or ten o’clock. Now when I look back on the earliest part of my childhood, it reminds me of those post–World War II black-and-white English movies. You’d see dilapidated wastelands of bombed-out buildings and a distinct lack of streetlights. You saw it even in the sixties—a backdrop of desolated houses. There weren’t many cars in England then. The streets were decorated with Teddy boys and slick mobster sorts walking around—Kray types with huge quiffs—the bigger and higher the better—dressed in very sharp creased suits. You know that Steve McGarrett look on “Hawaii Five-O”? Black suits always buttoned up tight. I remember all the kids running around in rags. It was quite common for most kids to have no shoes. We thought shoes were uncomfortable, particularly for my other brothers because they had to wear what I finished with. I would always be the one told off if I scuffed my shoes because “it’s got to be handed down!” So it was easier to run around barefoot.

  Everybody knew about the Kray Twins around where I lived. They were looked upon as heroes. There were often times you’d be given a fiver for throwing a brick through a pub window. “The Krays want you to do this!” Wow! That gangster thing was very much part of North London to the East End. It was all connected. That’s where the Krays focused on. They used to thrill people. They’d show them on TV. They looked so viciously sharp, the world’s best dressers at the time. So wicked and hard, without being poncey. That’s how I always like suits to be worn—with a sense of vicious purpose. Ultimately the Krays weren’t an influence, just a titillation—the same way kids read Superman comics. It was devoid of all reality by the time it filtered down to a ten-year-old. You’d see all those old gangster movies from America on the TV and think how great it was killing people all day long and never getting killed yourself. The Krays were just a craze.

  We had our own gangsters living up the road. Queensland Road, near our flat on Benwell Road, was the roughest area there was in London. One day my brother Jimmy came into the house. “Look, Daddy, what I got.” A policeman was shot the night before on Queensland Road, and Jimmy ran in with a gun and the copper’s helmet. There was always a gang of Teds hanging around gambling on the corner, and we would hear shooting at night. Some of the characters on the street were complete killers. They used to have guns and vicious dogs.

  I was actually very shy as a kid. Very retiring. I wouldn’t speak to anyone, and I was nervous as all hell. I was apparently born in London. I’m not so sure. There’s some vagueness about the date on my birth certificate since it was issued two years after I was born. Apparently it was lost. It was really difficult to get a passport because it wasn’t in the records office. Great mysteries of all time. I’m probably a bastard since I am by nature. For all intents and purposes, I was brought up a Londoner. That’s the place that educated me, but every year we’d go to Ireland, where my father and mother were born, for six- or eight-week holidays. That w
ould be it. Ireland is not my kind of place to be. It’s all right when you want to get drunk. You wake up, and there’s nothing to do. That’s not very purposeful. I could never be willful on a farm. The only things you can antagonize are the cows. My Irish half provided my sense of devilry. Like Oscar Wilde, my philosophy became, Just do it, see what you can cause.

  It’s no accident that the Irish invented stream-of-consciousness literature. It was out of absolute necessity. Poverty and the deprivation of their own language made this very important. Hence long-term memory, which is a Celtic thing. The American Indians live by this concept, too. Time flows. The Celts believe if you must resort to writing down your history, you lack the intelligence and conviction to recall.

  There was also this tradition of the Irish before they had gas fires and central heating. It’s called “Child of the Ashes”—I remember reading about it. Being the oldest son, this is more or less what I am. I didn’t get to my ashes in Ireland, I got to them in England. You put your children in front of a real coal fire and let them work it out. They either touch the flame or the ashes. If they’re stupid enough to touch the flame, then they’re not a real Gael. If you’re going to put your hand into it, you’re a moron. But if you go for the ashes, that’s it. “Child of the Ashes.” Dirty fingers. Isn’t it romantic?

  I used to love to play with the ashes, particularly by using the hot poker. This is my earliest childhood recollection. Every weekend when I was really young, my father would give me the poker and sit me down in front of the fire, and I’d poke it in, get it real red hot, and then plunge it into a mug of Guinness. It would fizzle and be nice and warm. I think the heat kills off most of the alcohol. Then you would sip it. I must have been about three or four. That’s as far back as I can remember. It was an Irish family ritual, one of the very few Irish traditions my family passed on to me. Unfortunately, I can’t pass it on to anyone else. Gaelic times in London are gone.

  I was raised in a tenement, working-class slummy. I was brought up to about the age of eleven in a two-room flat. No bathroom. Outside toilet. It would be a slum in anyone’s language. There was an air raid shelter outside next to the toilet. It was infested with rats, and that used to thrill me. It was totally open, and you could go in and play in it.

  The building was a Victorian dwelling that held forty or fifty families. I’ve got three brothers. I’m the eldest, and we were all born relatively close together. I don’t know how old they are, to be quite frank. Don’t know when their birthdays are, and they don’t know mine. We’re not that kind of family. We don’t celebrate that kind of thing. Never had any interest in it. Until recently, I wasn’t close to my father at all. I don’t think I ever seriously spoke to him until the day he kicked me out of the house.

  “It’s time to get out and work for yourself, you bastard!”

  Then things changed. Afterward it was “Hello, son! How are you? Now you’re fending for yourself.” It was right that he did that because I would have been a couch potato or a vegetable, just poncing off them on the dole.

  My family background is very, very poor. My father was christened John Christopher Lydon. I’m John Joseph Lydon. His father was an absolute nightmare. The lot of them all had to come to England from Ireland for jobs. He was a right cunt, womanizer. “The old fella” is what they used to call him. I think my dad hated him. Very odd family, I suppose, but colorful, I’ll tell you that. Extremely. A very violent family, too—all the cousins’ side of it. There used to be fights on the weekends. They’d come over, and they’d be punching shit out of each other in the backyard. My father’s from Galway. He was a crane driver. It’s true, the Irish laborers all had hands like shovels. They practically used them as such, too. It’s the Irish way to go into laboring. Building sites. Shit shovelers. John Lydon, son of a shit shoveler. That would be no disgrace. Practically everyone I was brought up with was the same way. It used to be a nightmare when he would drag us to work with him. He probably hoped we would follow in his footsteps—as shit shovelers extraordinaire. I hated sitting in the crane with him. It was a noisy, huge, metal stinky thing. Other kids might have liked sitting in the crane, but this kid didn’t. I saw myself as being way above all of that.

  My mother’s side is very quiet. Thinkers. My mother’s from Cork. Eileen Barry before she married John Lydon. Her father was famous for being in the Irish independent army. I just knew him as Granddad. Excellent gun collection, I remember. He hated the English and probably hated me and my brother Jimmy. We spoke with thick cockney accents that he could not stand. My mother’s accent was totally Irish.

  Londoners had no choice but to accept the Irish because there were so many of us, and we do blend in better than the Jamaicans. When I was very young and going to school, I remember bricks thrown at me by English parents. To get to the Catholic school you had to go through a predominantly Protestant area. That was most unpleasant. It would always be done on a quick run. “Those dirty Irish bastards!” That kind of shit. Now they transfer it onto the blacks or whomever. There will always be hate in the English because they’re a hateful nation. That’s the trouble with working-class people throughout the world. They always try to spur their hatred onto what they see as being lower down the scale, rather than going for the fucking jugular of the upper- and middle-class bastards who are keeping them down in the first place. We were the Irish scum. But it’s fun being scum, too.

  Picture this. Dead-end ladies leaning out the windows with their hair up in curlers. Beans on toast with fried eggs. The works. The Victorian slum dwelling on Benwell Road, off Holloway Road, isn’t there anymore. They pulled it down. It’s now illegal in Britain to rent out buildings like that. It wasn’t a house, just two rooms on the ground floor. The whole family shared the same bedroom and a kitchen. That’s all it was. A tramp lived in the front room, which used to be a shop front. The smell of his room was awful. There was just a door connecting us, so you could always hear him farting and smell him stinking away.

  We had a tin bath that my mother used to pull out. Zinc-alloy baths were so uncomfortable on your fingernails and your toenails, and you could never get it hot enough because nobody had big enough pots to heat up the water. We only had a kettle and a soup pot at the time, and when it was ready for you to get in, the water would be freezing cold. I used to get scrubbed with Dettol, a toilet cleaner solvent we also used for the sinks, to kill off the bugs. The stiff toilet brush was severe. Dettol and brush—once a month, if you were unlucky. In the winter you could stretch it out to six weeks if you were clever. You’d lie and say, “Oh, no, we went swimming today at school, Mum.” I was perfecting my rotten, filthy ways even way back then.

  I was always very confused about my family, how I felt about them, and where I came from. Was I happy with them? I remember wanting different parents. I was very impressed with people who had nice big houses. My God, why couldn’t I have been born there? Why don’t they sell me to them? It was a natural thought, but unnatural in the way that I would take it to the end extreme. I’d sit and analyze it for a long time as a child. People in decent houses or flats used to amaze me. Their places didn’t stink of food all the time, whereas our place had an awful smell of brussels sprouts to it.

  There used to be enormous rats that would come up from underneath the sink. Apparently the sewer line broke underneath, and they ate their way up. Great big sewer rats. I remember because I watched them kill a cat. They tore it to pieces.

  My main chores as the eldest—when my mother was ill, which she frequently was—consisted of looking after my brothers. I would get them ready for school. I made the breakfast because often when the money was tight in the early days my old man used to have to work far away from home. That’s what Irish houses are like. We had no sisters to pin it on, and I couldn’t say no. I don’t understand why girls should be roped into taking all that kind of responsibility. It should be taken by whoever is the oldest, regardless of sex. It’s your family, you’re related to them.

&nbs
p; I learned that from my mum and dad. They always had aunts and uncles involved in raising us. When I was very young and Mum was in the hospital, I would be looked after by Auntie Pauline for weeks on end. Auntie Agnes helped out, too. It was that Irish way of spreading families about. It isn’t a bad thing, either. It doesn’t spoil your attachment to your real parents. On the contrary, it makes you appreciate them in a more accurate way. It gives you a sense of individuality and independence. Living apart from the family with relatives during the summer was more like an outing or an adventure for me—it was much better than being sent off to some silly summer camp. That was just like school extended.

  My mum was ill with miscarriages throughout most of my early childhood. Lots of failed pregnancies. My parents must have been going at it like rabbits. Every year was another miscarriage. I’d sigh and say, “Oh, no! I’m going to have to pull out the bucket and catch the blood again.” I was about six years old, but it didn’t scare me or bother me as a young child because I took it as normal. Sometimes kids can be more resilient than adults. They don’t realize that kind of blood loss can result in death. It’s just, “Ooooh, what a mess, and doesn’t it smell!” But somebody’s got to do it. Even as a youngster, I liked having things to do and enjoyed my strong sense of responsibility. The more I had, the more I enjoyed it. The bigger the problems, the more I got into it. Easy work loads never appealed to me at all. I’ve always preferred everyday life bordering on the edge of disaster. That’s what it’s like trying to get your three younger brothers to school—especially when they’re constantly trying to not get there. Very often I was the only one who showed up. The headmaster would ask, “Where are Jimmy and Bobby?” I had sent them out an hour earlier and had no idea. My brothers were never interested in studying. School was a place where we went to be tormented for a few hours. English Catholic schools were boring and severe. Freedom at four o’clock was the only relief.