Rotten Read online

  RAMBO: I started hangin’ around with the people who were all from Finsbury Park. We had this whole group. A lot of black people—mostly West Indian—along with white people. In them days you were breaking the barriers. We were Finsbury Park, but you’d have Islington and the other part of Islington called Highbury. You still had a little bit of the racist thing going on up in Highbury. They were Arsenal as well, but we never got on with them. We used to have battles with them. We were a mixed mob—blacks, white, and that. But Highbury was a white gang. Sometimes we’d hang around together, but there was always a little bit of division. In Finsbury Park we had a head start, and that’s why we ended up miles ahead of other areas because we were automatically hanging around with black people, Greek people, a lot of Irish, and Scottish. You had to get on with each other. We used to fight at the Tottenham Royal against Tottenham blacks—with blacks in our mob against their black gangs. By 1973 Arsenal had quite a few black people in the mob.

  We both drifted into music and began buying music from a very early age. By about age nine, we got jobs. I got a Saturday job in a supermarket and would spend all my wages on one LP. During that period I bought early Lennon solo albums and stuff like that. John lurched off into a different area—he got into Captain Beefheart and Can. While we started getting into the exciting groups, we liked the mainstream as well. We were big T. Rex and Gary Glitter fans, and we also went for the NME rock types. Then we started going to gigs. I was first; I saw Marc Bolan at the Roundhouse just before “Ride a White Swan” was a hit.

  The Roundhouse was quite easy to get to from where John and I lived, so we’d go every Sunday. There would be these amazing all-day bills with about six groups. We saw everyone from Arthur Brown to Can. The deejay used to play all our favorite records full volume through the PA systems. It was brilliant.

  BILLY IDOL: Once I saw the MC5 at this place called Phun City. They had these two guitarists dressed in spangled jackets who twirled around and jumped in the air! Here was this one blastoid rock ’n’ roll band in among all this hippie shit!

  During our early teens, John and I got into going to the bar, drinking Newcastle Brown. I’m sure it’s called underage drinking now, but in those days we got away with it. We had long hair, and our main cultural activities consisted of gigs, listening to records, and drinking beer, the usual teenage stuff.

  Meanwhile we were still in school, and the schoolmasters wanted us to conform. It was a Catholic all-boys school, and they were heavily into uniforms, religion, and discipline. I remember getting into a vociferous argument with a trainee priest and getting ejected for being too questioning. John would take the piss out of it more.

  Once we had to wear a tie, but John didn’t wear one.

  “You can’t come back tomorrow unless you’re wearing a tie,” the priest told him.

  So John would turn up the next day wearing a tie and nothing else. Just a jacket, pants, a tie, and no shirt. The teacher would ask him, “Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”

  “You asked us to wear a tie. Make up your mind.”

  I came from a family of five kids, John from a family of four kids. Irish people didn’t have loads of money to throw around, so we wore these cheap baseball boots. The teachers would then tell us to get black leather shoes. You could go home and pester your parents all you like, but it wouldn’t matter. In fact, John’s parents were much more forthcoming with their money for their kids than my parents were.

  Anyway, I remember being told off at school for having these baseball boots on. We’d get hassled by the teachers every day.

  “Why aren’t you wearing the statutory uniform?”

  When John was about fifteen, just about the time we were approaching the exam periods for O levels, John pushed the patience of one English master, Mr. Prentiss. It was a crisis point for John. There were only about six of us in the sixth form at that point, and we were this little alternative gang within the school. There was Dave Crowe, Tony Purcell, John, myself, and a couple of other kids. We were all quite intelligent, even though we didn’t play the game. Yet the teachers had to cling to us because we were the only students who were game for the exams.

  “You aren’t going to be entered for the exams unless you get your act together,” one of the teachers threatened, so some of us knuckled down and started studying.

  John had really long hair at this point and was testing things to the very limit. Eventually he was expelled, and his parents were invited to the school. I remember his mom having a big to-do; it was a big explosion. I think that if John had backed down, he might have gotten away with it. As it was, his parents backed him to the hilt; they were horrified at the way he was being treated. I think there was a negotiation period where he was told he could come back if he apologized and promised to be a good boy, but by this time both his mum and his dad were so pissed off at the school, that they just said, “Stick it.” So John didn’t come back

  From there he went on to another college, which is where he met Wobble and Sid. We still hung out occasionally. I was at school with Dave Crowe doing A levels. John was at college, starting at Hackney, then off to King’s Cross, where he worked. We carried on our social life outside of school. In fact, the social life must have taken over. I didn’t finish any of my A levels. O levels are what sixteen-year-olds take. A levels are more for seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds. John went ahead and got a few of his O levels a little late because he’d been expelled early in the spring term, so he had to wait until the following September to enroll into a college. During an academic year, you just couldn’t walk in the middle of a year.

  John was disillusioned before the time he was expelled. In those days, we had to choose certain subjects, and that interfered with John’s talent for art and English. The combinations of subjects were arranged in such a way that the artist types couldn’t just take art. John and I were artistic, but the school only let the less intelligent children take it because they saw art as a kind of cop-out subject. We were pressured to take math and science. That immediately disillusioned John. John’s strength was in painting and drawing and talking about books. Ironically it was in those classes he had the most confrontations with the teachers.

  John Sr. and Eileen must have realized they’d made a mistake sending John to Catholic school at that age. Before, he went to Eden Grove primary school, which worked okay for primary age. John, being the oldest boy, was stuck with Catholic school. When disillusionment set in, the parents sent the younger siblings to non-Catholic schools. The parents finally saw that there was an overfocus on religion while the rest of the curriculum was being ignored.

  As youngsters, John and I never got into trouble or in any gang situation. We had individual skirmishes. We were too clever to be caught as a gang subverting authority. We did it on a one-to-one level. I was always punished for answering the teachers back. John was usually in trouble for individual acts of disobedience, although we did back each other up sometimes.

  One incident was when we all threw chalk at the blackboard when the teacher went out of the room. Chalk all over the classroom, wrecked. The teacher came in and said, “I’m going to cane the lot of you.”

  I stood up indignantly and said, “I never touched any chalk, and I refuse to be caned.”

  The teacher then fumbled around and let me off. Naturally John’s hand shot up, and he said, “Sir, I didn’t throw any chalk, either.”

  Before long there were twenty-nine children refusing punishment. The teacher lost it. He caned only a few of the children. They never really birched our bums at school. It was very much the hands at that point. I got caned once, when I was chased around the corridor for insulting somebody. I don’t remember John ever getting caned; he was always too clever.

  John and I had this math teacher named Mr. Harnett who was particularly lethal. If you couldn’t get your sums right, he’d belt you round the head and then knock it against the blackboard. We used to attend his lessons shaking with fear. It was the biggest a
drenaline rush I’d ever had in my life. It was really naff, and the experience was probably what made me become a teacher because he made me determined not to teach kids like that. Anyway, in this class we started off in the math B grade, there being A, B, C, and D. In those days, students were streamed by ability. The D’s were considered hopeless. The C’s had some chance. The B’s were average—getting their act together. The A’s were the high flyers. Our first year, we were put in the B’s stream, but after a couple of months it became obvious we were in the wrong class. So they put us into the A stream. We were bright! We could write, we could string sentences together. We weren’t particularly hardworking, though. We got by on natural brains.

  There were no girls in the school. Now, you get the boys hanging outside the girls’ school or the girls going to the boys’ school. There wasn’t a girls’ school for miles around. All we got were boys from other schools coming to beat us up. There were violent clashes between local schools when the whole school would be under siege. Gangs would descend on the school at lunchtime and throw bricks and wood over the playground gate as some of the D streams and C streams from our school would rush off and retaliate.

  RAMBO: Finsbury Park was one of the biggest mobs in the early seventies. We were a gang, and in the early days we used to be called Holloway, which is a stretch from Finsbury Park all the way down to Holloway. Jimmy used to come with me. Johnny was there every now and again. He was game for it. There was [an Indian] geezer called [Serious], a skinny little bloke. He used to be a lunatic. Now he’s one of the top veterinarians. He used to go around with these surgical knives and scalpels. He was game and would jump out at the geezers and just cut ’em. Now he’s one of the most quiet blokes going and still there in Finsbury Park. We had another two buds called the [Beasts]. They had a big reputation name on them. They were twin black blokes who used to hang about with us. There was another geezer called [Dock] and also [Caesar] and his brother, called [Romulus]. John’s friend [Julius] used to go to school with me. These were the characters who hung around Finsbury Park.

  We loved the excitement. John’s always been interested in hooliganism, violence, and football, more like an academic interest, I would say. He wasn’t interested in participating. As for girls, we never saw them. It wasn’t until John was in the Pistols that girls started figuring in on the scene.

  As for music, we used to have choir practice and singing sessions during our music lessons. We had this modern music teacher who brought the Who’s Tommy in one day and tried to teach us music through Tommy. John and I certainly weren’t Who fans, nor did we like Tommy, but he forced us to sing.

  When John sang, he deliberately took the piss out of the whole thing. He went up and down like a yodeling cat being strangled. That was the first time I’d ever heard John sing. The teacher shouted, “Stop stop stop! I’ve heard enough.”

  Rather than coping with teenage rebellion, the Catholic schools used it as an excuse to get rid of you. If you’re used to dealing with teenagers, however, you should be used to rebellion, because most teenagers are difficult. But they held up religion and uniforms as a barrier that, if you were half-intelligent, you’d want to break down. I must have conformed a bit more than John, although I do remember going to a physics lesson with purple hair. Later when we were at college, John had green hair.

  I don’t know where we got that from; maybe we were influenced by David Bowie. We bought Crazy Color—I distinctly remember the name, it came in tubs—down on Denmark Street or somewhere near the Marquee or near Piccadilly Circus. We used to travel there specially to buy it. I put my color on top, and it went purple. John, who is naturally blond, wanted his blue on top. Of course blue and yellow makes green, so he ended up with this bizarre chemical green color.

  My dad was horrified; he didn’t know what to say. I think John’s dad was horrified as well. He might have thought it was funny because he had more of a sense of humor, but it’s possible he was quite shocked.

  Eileen Lydon, however, was a friend. She wasn’t like a mother. She was totally different from my mother—we could talk openly. She seemed much younger than she actually was and didn’t seem like a grown-up half the time. She was extremely broad-minded. For a woman of her age and upbringing, I was amazed at how very close I was to her. We would while away endless hours talking away in the kitchen.

  Eileen Lydon wore glasses and was quite short. She had typical Irish-styled, mousey hair. She was very gentle but extremely hardworking. I remember thinking, What a liberal household! It was much more liberal than mine, so I spent ages there. I could never have friends crashing round. Normally you’d have a kind of rigid respect for your friend’s parents, and maybe you could even relate to them. She was extremely loyal and was very supportive when the band started happening for John. You couldn’t wish for a more supportive mother. John used to tell me stories about her gynecological problems. One time he was alone in the house with her and she had a very bad bleed. He had to call a doctor. He might find this too painful to talk about.

  I remember the digging jobs his father had. John was working with his dad at some kind of building site. I’ve seen pictures of John up on the crane, killing rats. He used to go on and on about the rats; he loved talking about killing them. He had the special job as the rat basher—keeping the rats from crawling up the wires of the crane. We also worked summer holidays with kids in the play center, day care center.

  The attitude, especially in our Irish households, was that if you weren’t going to school, you had to go to work. You weren’t going to lounge around at home being lazy; you had to do something useful until you went to college.

  John’s job paid for lots of things. He always had lots of money for someone his age; he made hundreds of pounds at one point. He used to buy loads of records with it. None of this saving for a rainy day. I know I never thought like that.

  When we left school we didn’t go on the dole, as many of the myths suggest. John may have, briefly, but I don’t think so. John wouldn’t have been able to get dole very easily anyway because he was doing part-time play center work and he was living with his parents. There was this big cliché about punk bands being on the dole and how horrible it was for them. To get dole you had to be on your own, homeless, and with no income. John could always work at the odd play center or work with his dad, and he had a very supportive family who helped him out with pocket money, even during the beginning of the Pistols. He had everything he wanted living at home.

  JOHN LYDON: I’ve always had different groups of friends who very rarely mixed and matched due to the diversity of my interests and tastes in people. For instance, the Gang of Johns never knew the Finsbury lot until a much later date when the Pistols brought all sorts of unlikely elements together. It was quite some time before Sid met Wobble, before either of them met John Gray or any of them met Rambo. When they did meet, the timing had to be right because mixing and matching is a dangerous game best played in no-man’s-land.

  I stayed in school until I was quite old—eighteen and a half; but my heart had already gone out of studying. I was going into youth work fulltime; John was at college. When he was at Hackney and Kingsway Princeton College, we met up with Wobble and Sid. By then we had an even bigger core of friends. We were distancing ourselves from certain crowds at schools because they were boring. Once we got together with our new friends, we’d go to gigs, hang out, and became interested in fashion.

  We were only available to work during the evenings and holiday periods. Every July and August we’d work in a different place—we weren’t secure. I was working at Hampstead, Kilburn at a youth center that was halfway between my house and John’s. Eventually I worked up a good relationship with the boss of the play center, which put me in the position to recommend John, who needed work. So they took him on for the summer holidays, all six weeks.

  There were quite good provisions offered to the children. They had coach trip outings, there were playgrounds and art rooms, and they provided l
unch. Every area of London had a special center staffed with experts in pottery, woodworking, sewing, and art. It was quite difficult for us because we’d get kids from five different schools who were timetabled to visit different centers at different times. John was the woodworking teacher Monday through Friday.

  We had a high turnover of different children, so we couldn’t build up relationships, which made it all the harder to work with them. If we’d had five days a week with the same kids, we wouldn’t have had any problems, but with busloads coming in—a morning crowd from one school, an afternoon crowd from another—it was rough. But John thought of some really interesting things to keep the kids busy. Even in those days John was into American Indian artwork, totem poles. He made the kids design back scratchers that were carved with forks at the bottom—something you’d get in a tourist shop now. He taught them how to make airplanes. For every class you’d need an endless stream of ideas to keep the kids occupied.

  The head of the system came to visit one day—Mr. Cutbush. He’s since died. He wasn’t so bad, but John didn’t want to conform or bow down, so he got his back up and answered back when the headmaster came around, and he got kicked out.

  Even in those days John had the green hair and wore a baseball cap from back to front. He wore baggy army trousers and a T-shirt with holes. Nowadays you could be a teacher and look like that. You’d be considered creative, wacky, and artistic. In those days you were considered a lunatic. It wasn’t really fair. If they had judged John on how he was producing with the kids, he would have kept the job. He became very bitter about it because he didn’t like being judged by his appearance.

  John is incredibly artistic and practical, but he’s left-handed, which makes it difficult. I don’t think he ever had the chance to became a sculptor, but I’ve seen some of the things he’s carved. He’s interested in three-dimensional stuff, but mainly he’s interested in painting. He could put his hand to it if he had to.