Rotten Read online

  I hated rugby, and there was no way they’d ever get me to participate in a game so foolish. Badminton was goddamn awful. Why did you have to wear those ridiculous white outfits? White plimsoles, white socks, white shorts, and a nice little white Fred Perry shirt with your little badminton bat. It was all so rinky-dinky. No way, I’d decided; I wouldn’t do it, so I dug my heels in. I suppose it was also a test of power. They really couldn’t have a go at me because on the education side I was up there, well smart. I wouldn’t listen to the rubbish the English teacher would be spouting about Shakespeare. I knew he was talking rubbish, and I proved it a few years later when I finally did get to take my exams. They’d thrown me out before I had the chance to originally. I never really failed any exam I’d sat for, except woodworking. That was so boring. I was clever enough never to take chemistry and physics, two subjects that made no sense to me whatsoever. Mathematics was all well and fine until they started introducing logarithms. They wouldn’t explain what they were for, hence it seemed absolutely stupid to me. Things like the binary system. They should have told us it was the computer language of the future! They didn’t tell you anything that would make such things relevant. It’s too much bother. Bad teachers inspire negative attitudes in their pupils when they don’t keep their interest.

  Outside of the Catholic schools, there are state schools. Catholic parents sent their children to Catholic schools because they thought that was the right thing to do. My parents learned their lesson with me and Jimmy. My other two younger brothers, Bobby and Martin, went to state schools after that. They weren’t buggered up by the Catholics. You assimilate better in the state schools, and you don’t feel cut off from the world, which is what these Catholic institutions do. You’re landlocked in there with priests and nuns.

  I’ve never been a thief, and I don’t like people who are, but one day after school Jimmy and I broke into one of the garages near where we lived. We weren’t stealing. We were just funning. We were seeing how things worked and rooting through the toolsheds, just being nosy. No real thievery. The police caught us and brought Jimmy and me to the front step. My father answered the door.

  They asked him, “Are these your sons?”

  “Never seen them before in me life.”

  He slammed the door in the policeman’s face. There was nothing they could do with us. We were underage, so they had to let us go. At first I was horrified, but later I realized that was the smartest thing I’d ever seen my old man do. He impressed me no end, because he never mentioned it again, either. I thought I’d get the hiding of my life. No. Never mentioned it. So the lesson was: Don’t get caught.

  My father had a much harder life than most people I know. His early childhood was hell on earth in Ireland. He had a stepmother, and his father was an alcoholic. There were a lot of children, so Dad did the best he could. He came to London at fourteen and drove a truck. Fucking big bollocks. That’s why he could call me a fucking sissy when I would sit around the house with my long hair.

  Looking at my parents’ wedding photos from way back in the fifties, I notice my father had this enormous quiff—quite a radical statement for those days. John Lydon, Sr., has always been a rebel. What he’s done all my life, which I never understood until the day I left home, was to deliberately make sure that I would always be my own man and not be led or fooled by anyone. He never gave me an easy time about anything. No matter what I did, he called it crap. I hated it at the time, but it made me question. He would never compliment any of us—Jimmy, Bobby, Martin, and me—when we would do something good because we were supposed to know. Unfortunately, sometimes we didn’t. After Mum died we all sat down together, brothers and daddy, and worked this out. He has said more to me in the last few years than in our entire life together before.

  In later life, everything my old man taught me has held true, and I love him very much for it. He’s as hard today with me as he was way back then. But his eyes are a little softer, and I know he’s proud that I’m my own man. His worst nightmare would have been if I had grown up to be a moron and joined the army.

  Looking back, I cannot disagree with any of my father’s decisions on how he raised me and my brothers. I wanted to at times because I felt hurt and betrayed when there wasn’t that camaraderie that dads were supposed to have for you, but lo and behold, he did everything a father should do. No one will ever get one over on me. They might at some point, but eventually vengeance is mine—and I don’t mean in violent ways. My old man calls it patience.

  Once he made me take over the controls of the crane when we worked together on a job site. I had to manipulate these pedals and an armful of levers all at one time. I broke my ankle, and he had to take me to the hospital. I went home and would not tell my mum how it happened because that was something between the two of us. It wasn’t the first time he broke my ankle. He broke it when I was five years old. We were watching “The Rifleman” on the telly, and he was playing about. He came in and yelled, “Get to bed, you kids!” Bang went his shovel on the bed, and my foot was there. He shattered my ankle, the same one, twice.

  Saturdays and Sundays were a nightmare for me because my father would have me outside underneath his car, trying to show me how an engine worked. He used to drive me nuts. He would drop heavy things on me. “Feel the weight of that!” The old man didn’t have the powers of communication back then, but he meant well. He thought I would be perceptive enough to pick up. But I just wasn’t … until I left home.

  Mum was a whole different kettle of piranha. Mum loved the music I used to buy. Just before leaving home, she would always come upstairs to my room and ask in her heavy Irish brogue, “What have you bought lately, son? I heard some noise earlier on that I rather liked.”

  “No, Mum, I’m sure you won’t like this. It’s Hawkwind’s first album.” She would sit and listen and absorb the music. She was genuinely thrilled. She loved “Funhouse” by the Stooges. It was hard trying to be the rebellious one here in your room when your mum’s sitting there listening to “Funhouse.” Oh, no! Get me out of this crazy family quickly.

  Then back would come the old dreams. Why wasn’t I born into a wealthy family that would leave me alone? It would be ever so much easier. Kids are romantic like that. All children love to believe that their parents don’t love them. It’s a wonderful dream that the teenage years require. But it’s not the reality at all. You think, God, did I really need to talk to them that badly? Then you realize, Yeah, because I know when they were young they did the same thing.

  I once had a job as a minicab dispatcher when I was ten. I did it for a year because there was no money in the house. Bad times. It was an easy enough job to tell the drivers where to go, since I knew the area. I had fantastic fun even at such an early age, because I was always good at responsibility. But I got bored with it only because the boss was a miserable old Irish git. He was one of those old Teddy boy sorts. He wore a huge quiff and a draped jacket, another monster from the past. He used to hate the clothes I’d buy as soon as I got my pay packet.

  “You fucking look like a girl, you cunt!”

  “But the passengers don’t have to see me. I’m sitting in a room out back.” Maybe I wasn’t aware, and I was giving him problems with his libido. That’s probably what that anti-long hair thing was all about back then.

  My old man was working for a spell on the oil rigs in Norfolk at a place called Bacton On Sea. I remember the family staying in Eastbourne, Hastings, Norfolk—all very far from London. We lived in a holiday camp one winter. It was bitter cold, and we were the only people in this empty camp. It was off season, and they were closed down. It was a frighteningly desolate existence much like in The Shining. Very strange. I remember this silly, desolate holiday camp facing the North Sea, with the gales blowing in and the winds whistling. Yet I loved the bizarreness of this empty camp. I would wander around for hours thinking about what it would be like in the summer when there were thousands of people crammed together. I remember a drained swim
ming pool. Exhilarating.

  My mum and dad would always play these mind games. My dad liked things screwy or off center. He wouldn’t ever say anything, but you knew he was enjoying it. “Jeez, we’re having a lot of fun here!” It was so preposterous, it was fantastic. Mum would look over: “Mmm. Boiled potatoes again for dinner.” There was a lot of black humor in my family. My dad would tell us ghost stories and really wind us up. He’d get us terrified and then make up a silly way out at the end. “By the way, I lied.” You knew you were fooled. It would be humiliating.

  I loved my mother’s family in Ireland. They were such strange and freaky people. They used to love telling ghost stories, and I loved listening. I suppose they were very primitive. They had the feel of, say, Yugoslavian peasants, yet they were so warm in the weirdest way. They would never talk to me directly, they would just sit next to me and stare. That stare would tell you everything, and you knew you belonged and everything was all right. They insisted on babbling to me in Gaelic when I was young. I could not get a word around it.

  Would my mum teach me Gaelic? No. Both my parents had decided when they left Ireland that they would never speak Gaelic again. It was some modernistic urge they felt; they might have been ashamed of their roots. I suppose they cut it off so I wouldn’t inherit the grief that they went through when they came to London. But it left me isolated and shallow inside. I wanted to go out of my way and find out about my own Irishness, but when I did get there, it was never as romantic as books make it out to be. The truth is always mediocre. How on earth would I have been able to use Gaelic, being raised in London? It would have been absolutely useless. My parents were right. It just took a long time for me to suss it out.

  My father’s Irish side was always a little strange because he never had a respectable family life. Every time we’d go back to Galway, it would always be very difficult. We would see only his sister after my grandfather died. My father’s father was a grizzly old sod. He’d smoke all the time and drink whiskey, port, and Guinness day and night. He lived with a working woman of many occupations called Moll and fathered seventeen kids. It must have been tough on my father. They used to live in a pub called the Donkey, which is kind of aptly named. I remember my mum saying something once when I was really young. “Oh, that donkey’s at it again.” Lo and behold, I’d find out. Another kid from my grandad on my father’s side.

  He finally died shagging a prostitute on a doorstep. He fell backward, cracked his skull, and that was the end of him. Age seventy. He died with a hard-on. I had to take my aunt, my father’s sister, to the hospital morgue. They pulled him out, and they had just severed his skull and put it back on really badly. It was kind of lopsided, and Grandad’s nose was twisted. Bits were missing out of the back. But I remember seeing this huge penis. It literally was the biggest penis I think I’ve ever seen in my life. In all the porno flicks I’ve ever seen since, there was nothing to compete with it.

  My aunt looked down at her dead father and screamed. She couldn’t believe what she was looking at. Have you ever seen a rotting dick? It was an unbelievable boner of contention. Then when we got back to the Donkey that night, she was in the bedroom opposite me, screaming all night because she had nightmares. What went on when they were young? At the time, I thought, You silly cow. That was your own father.

  Beer had always been there for me as long as I can remember. I was eleven when my old man’s father died. During the wake, I could easily hold my own in the pub with the rest of them. It caused a big fight among my old man’s cousins. They thought it was an absolute disgrace for an eleven-year-old kid like me to be sitting there, downing pints of Guinness. These people around me would get drunk, and there I would sit, still sober. They say alcohol destroys the brain cells. Apparently it hasn’t done its damage to me. Whatever there was worth destroying must have been already buggered up by my illness. What’s left is well hearty.

  The Irish like their country and western music played badly on accordions and violins. They’re time warped. My uncle’s farm in Cork doesn’t even have electricity yet—it’s still candles and a gas cooker. It’s as if there’s no reason to change, even if they’re freezing to death. The Catholic church still runs the Irish government, which is why everything is so suppressed. That’s what scares the Protestants in Northern Ireland the most, and I don’t blame them. There’s no creativity in the Catholic regime—including procreativeness or divorce. It’s all bicycles with no brakes going downhill. If you think the anti-abortion lot in America are wicked in their tactics, you ought to see the antidivorce lot in Ireland. It’s nuns with pickax handles on the street, in gangs roaming towns and villages. Wicked bitches!

  BILLY IDOL: My mother came from Cork, just like John’s mum. When I was a little boy we’d go up to Ireland at least once a year to see her family. They used to call me the British kid because I had such an English accent. It seemed like everywhere I went, I was the outcast. When my mother used to watch something about Ireland on TV she’d say, “I hate the British.”

  You can see why my mum and dad could never live in Ireland. We’d go back there in the summer for about six weeks, then it was back to Britain where things “don’t work” better. If I went back to my uncle’s farm in Ireland today, the boat with the holes would be in exactly the same place, and the stupid horse would still be chewing on the same stupid tree. It’s all like a postcard scene. It never moves. It’s a void. How can you have a sense of belonging to something that never changes? No future, literally.

  SEGMENT 03:

  JOHN GRAY, A LONGTIME CHILDHOOD FRIEND

  JOHN GRAY SCHOOL DAYS, NORTH LONDON

  As a matter of style, the Lydons took the piss out of one another; it was natural for them. When John and I first met, we went to the same Catholic school, Sir William of York, which has since amalgamated with Aloysius College. It was on Gifford Street off York Way in Islington, very near Pentonville Prison, now a big industrial area. Funny enough, John’s been back there to rehearse PiL in the studio on Brewery Road. It’s ironic how the school site that John hated so much is now a big band center where everyone rehearses before they go on tour.

  I lived in Kentish Town/Camden Town, which was half an hour’s walk or an even shorter bus ride away. When you’re eleven, you get invited round to each other’s houses. The first time I went round to John’s house off Holloway Road, they lived in a storefront with a big shop window facing Benwell Road. The whole front room consisted of this shop window with a net curtain over it. Eileen Lydon, John’s mum, was very hospitable and served us Spam-and-tomato sandwiches on white bread—the traditional Irish greeting at the time. What she didn’t realize was that even then I was a vegetarian. I must have looked horrified when she put the food in front of me. I didn’t want to offend her so I picked off the bread and left the Spam. I came from the same background as the Lydons, and I loathed all the Irish-type cooking and food. But when you go to an Irish household, it’s an offense to turn down their offerings.

  The Lydon tea was watery, weak, and milky. To this day John drinks it like that. When sipping this liquid I thought, God, I have to be polite. Afterward John and I walked up to the Arsenal football grounds, which was round the corner from Highbury football grounds. I’m not sure if we saw a match or not. I wasn’t much interested in football or sport. At that age you’re pressured into following a team. I went along with it, thinking Arsenal would do. To this day John is a loyal Arsenal fan. I remember going to a match with him in Nottingham Forest, standing in the terraces for an hour and a half, freezing cold, bored out of my mind.

  RAMBO: I used to go to football in the seventies with Jimmy Lydon, John’s brother. John used to go out to football with us, but I became a friend of Jimmy’s first before I knew John. When me and Jimmy used to go to football all the time, Jimmy had a Dave Bowie haircut. I used to like David Bowie, but you used to always wonder what your other mates thought of him. He was queer, but he was accepted among the football teams. They were all thugs, but th
ey had Ziggy Stardust haircuts.

  JOHN LYDON: Professional team sports was a local thing. All the schools nearby wanted to play for their team. They’d send coaches and scouts down to the social clubs. Everybody wanted to be a football hero, a fine thing to want to be when you’re young. It gave you a point and meaning.

  I’d have rows with people, but I have to be honest. I’m not a physical person. Never have been. I don’t like fighting. I don’t understand it. It hurts, and quite frankly I don’t want to hurt other people, no matter how much they annoy me. My weapons are my words. While I tried to stay away from any football violence, at the same time I’d still be part of that “home game, no one’s gonna take our end” stuff. I loved the shambolic nightmare of it all. True anarchy was happening with football. The police couldn’t stop it. The gangs didn’t want to stop it. Yet nobody really seemed to have gotten too hurt. It was all about fisticuffs. The razor blades, stabbings, and guns came in much later. Gangs that ran with knives were always looked down on as being wankers. If they needed weapons, it meant that they couldn’t hold their own.

  The football clubs pretended that the violence wasn’t happening. I’m sure they appreciated the away support when they played road games, but the clubs have never done anything to stop football violence other than fill the terraces with police, which is not the answer. You’ve got to involve the fans more with the game. You have to make them a part of it. In England now, wearing team colors has nothing to do with violence at all. It’s quite the opposite. It’s the ones who don’t wear the colors that you have to look out for. Those are the knife-in-the-back merchants.