Rotten Read online

  It would be terrible times when the school would take us to Fairfield Hall. We’d have to listen to these dismal orchestras hour after hour. There would be loads of other schools there, so there would invariably be school warfare and rivalry, absolute murder to control. Hilarious. Five hundred kids battling the hell out of each other to the tune of an orchestra playing away on the “William Tell Overture.”

  Dud-dud-dunt. Dud-dud-dunt. Dud-dud-dunt-dunt-dunt.

  Bang! Crash! Boom!

  I certainly didn’t acquire my love of music from school days. The music lessons in Catholic school were farcical. It was so soppy. We’d play Swan Lake or something cruddy like that. Then they would give us these little triangles. We were thirteen years old and made to feel thoroughly ridiculous! This is how backward Catholic schools are. Of course, there wouldn’t be enough triangles. There would only be six in a class of forty kids, so six triangles would do the rounds. We had plastic flutes, but there were only two flutes. You were expected to buy your own, but no one could afford them. The whole thing ended up nowhere. Then they would try to get us into the choirs. The plan was to sing as badly as possible so that you would never be put in one of those girl dresses and made to sing in church. That’s all they were doing, it seemed, recruiting for the priesthood. You had to be real clever to keep out of that.

  Maybe schools are a little different now. They never used to encourage discussion. It was absolutely rigorous—just read and form your own opinion, and they couldn’t give a damn what that opinion was. They gave kids no guidelines, so the old-fashioned way of teaching proved quite aimless—too much belligerence and animosity from the teaching establishment. They’re there to humiliate you and browbeat you. Believe it or not, there’s people who are trying to bring that back into the schools again, to restore law and order to future societies!

  Catholic schools in Britain were very ghettolike. They had to be because they are not state run, which means they’re independently financed, apparently. With forty in a class it was near impossible to keep any kind of organization or discipline. But it’s not so much the discipline that’s necessary—it’s to make the education process interesting, and they didn’t do that. Catholic schools resorted to authoritative measures, which is “Shut up! Be seen, not heard.” That’s where things went wrong. That’s when little tykes like me become quite nasty. We can see the weaknesses in that system and know how to use them when authority shows weakness; anything that is rigid and doesn’t bend with the breeze will snap sooner or later.

  Back when I was away from school in hospital for a year with meningitis, I felt like a complete stranger when I returned. I had to work hard to catch up with the schoolwork. Once I did catch up, I took another path. It wasn’t a matter of being better than anyone else or any of that, I just went my own way. All of my friends were people who went their own way. I don’t have many friends, but the few I still have are well worth keeping because of just that. Highly individualistic. Unable to fit cozily into systems.

  I like crazy people, especially those who don’t see the risk.

  School was just like prison. They try to use the bullies to keep the masses down. All you have to do is find a way to bribe the bully into a better way of life. That’s what we did. Just roped them in with us. You tell them what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. That’s very appealing to a bully. They don’t like the system any more than anyone else. If you show them by the efforts of your work that you’re cracking it at the seams, they like the deviousness of it. Maybe I was lucky. We had good bullies. I wasn’t tough. I was an absolute weed. I got away from getting picked on by just being clever.

  The whole idea of my having to say “sir” or “Your Majesty” to someone self-appointed offended me. I’ve always hated the word sir. It got to me when I had to call the teachers “sir” or “miss.” Sir implies subservience, and I disagreed with that notion. I don’t understand why education should imply subservience. Sure, you can respect a teacher for having more knowledge than you. The idea is to drain them of that and improve yourself, not that you’re a lesser human being. That’s what the word teacher implies. At the time my friends thought I was being stupid. “So what, everybody does it.” Nonsense.

  I never thought I would ever become a performer when I was a kid—except at school, when we had drama class once for a year. They used to have a drama class at William of York I liked only because the teacher was stunningly gorgeous. Things like that didn’t happen at our secondary school. Our teacher was Sally. Long black luxurious hair, long blond thighs in a miniskirt. Hmmm. I could get into this acting lark. The idea you could put on a persona and be completely different seemed really good fun. She wanted us to go to late night drama classes at the universities and attend meetings, but that’s when I lost interest. That was no place for working-class people like me. Acting and drama seemed confined by four tight walls, judged more by who you know and not what talent you had. The idea of passing exams to be an actor struck me as absurd.

  Looking back, I guess I had a progressive family. But it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. They had not done any harm with excess parental baggage. A lot of it was my mother. “Leave ’im alone. He’ll work it out.” It was commonsense Irish. I’ve seen some “noncommonsense” Irish people who were absolutely vile to their children. You know, the Holy Joes. They open the religious cupboard every time they think you’re doing wrong and make you light a candle and kiss all those statues.

  I got caught jerking off as a kid at home. Actually, my younger brother Martin told my mum. I forgot to lock the toilet door. He yelled, “Mom! Dad! John’s sitting the wrong way on the toilet and doing something funny.” It was horrible! God, the embarrassment! They never said anything about it. They just let it go and told Martin to shut up. He was very young at the time. You can imagine me and the “Father Knows Best” approach, an American TV sitcom of the late fifties. Robert Young sits you down as Mother with the apron stands behind the sofa. In that respect, I must admit I never had a tortured childhood. It wasn’t a middle-class guilt thing that happened with families where they try to make their children feel humiliated over what are really perfectly normal functions.

  I didn’t get birched that much when I misbehaved—not so much as my younger brother Jimmy. He was a real piece of work. I was much more quiet, very subdued. I didn’t do much that could be conceived as wrong or right. At Christmas parties I would always be sitting in the darkest corner in the room. My brother Jimmy would get up and do his soldier dance for all the relatives and their applause. It’s funny that I ended up being the one doing the soldier dance on stage later on.

  And yet I was thrown out of Catholic school at fifteen for having a disruptive attitude. I was a constant, total pain—antagonist. I would stare. They hated me. No thought went into it, just pure fun on my part. They translated it into my being a future psychotic mass murderer or whatever. If they’d sent me to a psychologist, I would have failed dismally. I would have been found out as a fake, and that wouldn’t have appealed to me at all. My schoolwork was faultless, but it came with all this other stuff that they could not handle. That was the most annoying thing for them. One day I turned up late to class, walked in, sat down, and proceeded to read whatever I wanted. That was it for the teacher. He saw me as some anti-Catholic git and kicked me out of class. Mr. Prentiss. I called him Piss Stains because he used to wear this awful dogtooth suit. There was this piss stain on the crotch, deep yellow and ironed in. Pissy Prentiss. I found out a year later he’d died, and I went and pissed on his grave.

  After Piss Stains threw me out, I walked out, went home, and told my parents—eventually. “School’s out forever.” Alice Cooper reference.

  They went to see the headmaster, and he said they couldn’t have me back in school under any circumstances. “John causes too much trouble. We don’t like the way he dresses. Look at his long hair, shabby clothes.” I did not wear the Catholic school uniform, which was absolutely sinful for them. I
t had nothing to do with fashion. Fashion was just as bad as the school uniform in that respect. I didn’t have the money to buy a uniform, thank you very much. These are poor people you’re dealing with, Mr. Headmaster.

  RAMBO: John had long hair, and he used to wear a bovver hat. Then the next day I’d see him and he had blue hair. He started changing his image, and back in those days that was really different, really weird. To have blue hair, you would have had to have a lot of front, especially in Finsbury Park. I was in a chip shop one day and I saw John walking past. There were three other geezers coating him off and taking the piss out of him. He stood his ground. John hit one of them, so I ran out of the chip shop. We both steamed into them. We both done ’em. We done two of them bad, and one ran off. John was little and slim. He had a row, and he might have looked a bit weird, but he stood his ground.

  In England, if you are still underage, you have to carry on schooling until you’re sixteen. I had to do another year. The Catholics didn’t want me anymore, and that put me in the hands of the state. The Catholics couldn’t throw me out for being stupid, because I wasn’t. I had to go to what they called special schools. Hackney and Stoke Newington College of Further Education.

  The school, William of York, took us on a geographical expedition to Box Hill. Two weeks out in the wilderness of Guildford. We were supposed to be learning how to use compasses and become jolly good at geography. I’ll tell you what I learned with John Gray and Dave Crowe—we learned how to find the pubs. They foolishly left them on the maps as landmarks. Splendid, and they served us, too. It was the color of our money that the barmen were interested in. Besides, they’re mostly country bumpkins out there. They start early with the booze.

  There would be terrible times, too, especially with some of the physical education teachers. They’d lurk around while you were taking a shower or insist on handing you your towel only if you raised your arms to make sure you washed underneath your armpits. Stuff like that I found extremely suspect. It’s funny, the macho boys didn’t seem to mind, while I found it thoroughly offensive. The bully boys, the leaders, what they call jocks in America. It was no doubt shyness on my part, but there was more to it than that. I’ve never trusted that macho, muscle-bound thing anyway. I’ve always seen that lifestyle as suspect. Some of the teachers were definitely into fondling kids. But they weren’t going to fondle me.

  I was practically unlovable most of my early life. I wouldn’t even let my parents go near me. From a very early age I’ve always felt, “Get off, don’t touch me, leave me alone—I fondle myself.”

  I never screamed as a youngster. That shocked my mother when she first heard the Sex Pistols. She’d never seen that side of me. I was a stone-quiet child. She probably thought that she’d raised a lunatic, and I proved her right. I’ve always maintained a certain isolation. I feel safer when people aren’t trying to grab me. It’s different with my wife Nora, but even that took a long time. Basic sex I could handle, two minutes and fifty seconds of something is not quite the same as people, loved ones, trying to get inside your head. While it’s gotten better in recent years, I feel that isolation is a cover-up of feelings of inadequacy inside my own self. I never thought highly of myself right from day one. Had I not had my family, I probably would have turned into something psychopathic and asocial. But I’ve learned along the way, as indeed you must.

  The good side of me is that I do learn from other people. I watch people all the time. When they’re doing something right, I want to know why, why aren’t I doing that?

  About the time I worked at the play centers looking after the kids we were into vampire hunting. Dave Crowe was deadly curious about all the reports on TV and books about vampires in Highgate Cemetery. John Gray didn’t believe it. Of course there was me, I’d read too much, so I was well spooked. The fascination was there. To this day I enjoy a really good horror movie. I love being frightened.

  During that summer period, when we were about sixteen or seventeen and I was going to school in Hackney, we’d break into the crypts where the bodies were on shelves, open up the coffins, and have a look. We’d see which bodies hadn’t deteriorated. Was this vampire thing real? So many people were doing it, it was almost like a social club down there. You’d meet so many people, loonies mostly, running around with wooden stakes, crucifixes, and cloves of garlic. We’d get bored with that; there’d be a pub at the top of the road, and we’d drink a bit, then go back into the crypts later that night. I had money because I worked for my father. I was well stacked, so we could do these crazy, stupid things. At the time, it was highly unusual for kids to leave their districts and go off into the far reaches of London and dance at nightclubs or vampire hunt. People were still village oriented and rarely traveled to other regions because you could tell they were outsiders by the way they walked, talked, or dressed, and that usually led to confrontation. We were quite lucky in light of how weird we would dress. Maybe it was because we weren’t a gang who dressed alike. Each one of us looked and acted completely different. People considered us nutters and left us alone.

  I was pleased to go to the state school. What an adventure at last! The sheer freedom of it! You wear what you want, you could be what you are. There was no pressure to conform all the time. I liked the sheer variety of people, including the huge Jamaican contingent in the school. It was marvelous because I really loved reggae, and the dances were fucking brilliant. Me and my bloody long hair reggae-ing out, mon! There were social activities that made me want to hang around. It got my brain working without using stupid, childish ways of antagonizing teachers. I enjoyed that part of school. That’s where I took up all my exams. It was around the time of the O levels. I passed everything I sat down to take halfway through the year at state school. It was easy.

  STEVE JONES: I knew Paul Cook when we both went to Christopher Wren School on Blue Fontaine Avenue in White City Estate, Shepherd’s Bush. Before that he used to go to a different school, but we used to pass each other all the time. Then we became skinheads when that movement first started. It was great—soccer matches, dressing up, and looking better than the other guy. I stole all my clothes, so I always had a good wardrobe. I was a good thief, and I had a knack for going into the shops and taking stuff. After the soccer matches you could loot stores. That’s what I enjoyed—total chaos and anarchy. Football hooliganism was a great outlet if you’re a frustrated kid. I wouldn’t call myself a tough guy, but I was definitely a street person. I wouldn’t stay home, so at fifteen I was left to fend for myself. We would hang around at the Shepherd’s Bush market. We supported Queen’s Park Rangers, Chelsea, Fulham, but it wasn’t as much the game as it was the whole scene. We didn’t really watch the matches. We just walked around the grounds trying to look good.

  At state school, my mates and I were starting our prepunk look, which is really what Malcolm McLaren and the others picked up on later. They couldn’t relate it to anything. I think that’s what got them interested.

  State school is where I met Sid.

  Sid was an absolute wanker. We became friends a couple of weeks after I entered state school. I called him Sid, after my pet, the softest, furriest, weediest thing on earth, this soppy white hamster that used to live in a cage on the corner table in my parents’ living room. One day Sid the hamster was going around on this wheel inside his cage, and my mother took him out and cuddled him up to her. My father walked into the room and thought it was a rat at first. As she put Sid into his hand, the hamster took a bite out of my father’s hand. He flung it across the floor. We dubbed Sid the hamster “Vicious” after that.

  Sid’s real name was Simon Ritchie or John Beverly; even he wasn’t sure which. It all depended on his mother’s whim at the time. She was just a hippie mother. Sid was an absolutely goofy kid with a Dave Bowie hairdo, dyed red at the top. His father apparently was a grenadier guard or some sort. How funny. If the queen only knew who her soldier’s offspring were. Sid was brought up for a few years at Ibiza, off the coast of Spain.
That fascinated me because I had no concept of exotic foreign islands. They lived near the state school in Hackney. They were poor and would be moved by the council from place to place practically on a weekly basis. Sid and I took the same classes.

  He would always find a way to laugh at things—except at himself, of course. Everything else was a joke to him. That amused me because I was quite somber at times. I picked up on that.

  “This is useful humor. I can use this.”

  Sid was an absolute fashion victim—the worst I’d ever known. It was appalling. Everything about him was wrong. He’d buy these ridiculous Vogue magazines to study them and copy people. It was just terrible. He’d get it wrong so badly. He couldn’t quite grasp that the idea wasn’t to follow, it was to lead. I found that very funny. He used to annoy people so much because he’d take it all so seriously. He’d wear nail gloss and think of himself as being very dainty. He was a gangly, awkward git. Trying to dress effeminate was wrong, wrong, wrong. He’d wear sandals in the snow with no socks when he wanted to show off his toenail varnish. It was a Dave Bowie thing. After I ribbed him too much about that, he went out and got a Marc Bolan perm. That made him look like an old woman. He was very pimply and ugly—yet thought of himself as being stunningly beautiful. He wanted to be a model. Yes, Sid did some modeling at St. Martin’s College in London. The art class needed someone to stand in the corner. It was perfect. It gave him an excuse to go home, hang upside down in the oven to get his hair to stand up like Bowie’s, and pose in the latest clobber he’d bought. Complete fashion victim. Nothing he wore ever really suited him. It was as if the clothes wore him.

  JOHN GRAY: We spent a lot of time round Sid’s flat, sometimes crashing out. We’d listen to music. Sid was also a mad Bowie fan, obsessed with David Bowie beyond all reason. In those days Sid wasn’t particularly interested in drinking. Not the way we were. That came later on.