Rotten Read online

  Once Sid was boiling an old-fashioned metal syringe in a saucepan of water. He was sterilizing it and then injecting speed and amphetamine sulfate. I was quite horrified. I asked him where he got it from, and he said, “It’s me mum’s.”

  Sid would often stay over at our house. My mum thought he was a bit retarded. He would strike you that way. It would be midwinter and bitter cold outside. He wouldn’t wear a jacket because he would buy this new shirt or something. He had to be seen in this shirt. He would be frozen stiff at the door, shivering. “Is-s-s-s J-J-J-John in?” I got my first nasty hangover after Sid and I mixed up a punch bowl of Southern Comfort, Cinzano Bianco, and Martini & Rossi and drank it in a rush. I’ve never touched any of those drinks since.

  My mum never met Sid’s mother. She was always cooking something weird like deviled kidneys. My family was the baked beans and boiled bacon brigade. Her kind of cooking struck me as really bizarre. I was horrified that someone would cook something so vile, plunk a plate of it in front of me, and then eat it. Oh, please! Sid’s mum was an oddball hippie. “Oh, hello, Sid,” she said when we came by their flat. “I’ve just cooked a quiche.” I didn’t know what a quiche was. It sounded like she’d just tie-dyed a T-shirt.

  Musically I was into Alice Cooper and Hawkwind at the time. T. Rex gets in there, too. Bits of Bowie, but not too much. I didn’t find his stuff very interesting. Never Yes or any of that stuff. That was too arty, distant and remote, all about 6/4 masturbation.

  When we were sixteen there were a few girls. Our look would attract girls, but not to any great extent. I was the moonstruck one. I used to follow one girl around and carry her books like a real toe-rag. Her name was Sylvia Hartland. When I think about her, it’s absolutely humiliating. I was so totally subservient, and she was upper class. That’s what really struck me as being odd about it. I really hated people with that accent. “Oooh, yaww.” But I found her absolutely enthralling, much like a Barbara Cartland novel. Now that I look back on it, it brings tears to my eyes, it’s so corny and sappy.

  I never really had much of an interest in girls until I went to the state school because we were mixed. Then things blossomed. I thought it was brilliant. I don’t understand to this day why they have same-sex schools. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a much better environment with girls in the class. You learn a lot more, as diversity makes things more interesting. There’s much more to look at, it’s not just mindless. And if there were naughty girls there, it was worth turning up on time.

  It’s around seventeen that I believe you begin to form a definite attitude on sex. It was that way with me, except then I really hadn’t worked it all out until about twenty-one. And I thought, Right! Now I know. Done this, I’d done that. Didn’t like this. Didn’t like that. Now I know what I want.

  When you’re sixteen, you think you know it all. Now you know you didn’t. Anybody who looks back on their earlier years will blush. You can become so arrogant at that time that it’s the necessary part of growing up. Being in the Pistols didn’t fuel that arrogance for me. The circumstances were a bit different because there was so much stop and start and squabbling. It wasn’t easy to be an arrogant rock ’n’ roller when we were struggling and things were so unstable. The Pistols were the exact opposite of arrogant. We weren’t arrogant, nihilistic, asexual—none of those things that people associate with us.

  For a kid, sex can be messy, horrible, embarrassing, and third-rate. “See you later,” as you run off into the bushes with a smirk on your face. Then you wake up the next morning—Oh, my God, I hope I didn’t catch anything. Why is life like that? Why is there always that guilt or fear thing at the end of sex with strangers? I could never give you a catalog of who I shagged. It really wouldn’t amount to very much. Before the Pistols it didn’t happen that much. Sex didn’t interest me when I was young. You can call me a retard or a late developer, but that’s the truth. Sex is something you can’t or don’t want to avoid. You always want it to be the ultimate conclusion to something, but it never gives you quite what you want—ever, no matter what you do. It’s not the end-all. It’s not the teenage dream all these pop songs make it out to be.

  My father was appalled with some of the girls I would bring home. I suppose that kind of pride is in every father. But there were never any restrictions on me and my brothers in our house. We could bring in girls and stay the night anytime when I was seventeen or eighteen. There was never any pressure about that. We were typically open about it. I know very few who had that kind of openness with their parents. I think it’s healthy because you tend not to go out with any old trollop anywhere you can. You can be selective, and you have a good place to go to. You’re not going to bugger up a good thing. I used to bring over a lot of my outrageous friends. There was a hairy Irish chap who was a bit of a drag queen. I liked him because he was really funny. He had a thick Irish accent. I took him over to the house one day and introduced him as my mate. I thought it was hilarious that my old man didn’t explode. He didn’t seem to care. They just talked about Ireland. It was so funny. My father’s much more open than he lets on. The bark is worse than the bite.

  RAMBO: In the seventies, the football violence wasn’t so organized. It was mass violence. Thousands against thousands. Two or three thousand against two or three thousand kids fighting. We very rarely got mentioned in the newspapers. Football in the seventies was like mass brawls.

  In 1971 Arsenal won the league championship on Tottenham Hot Spur’s ground. We tore the place apart. Arsenal took over the whole ground and outside as well. There were as many outside as there were inside. Some started wearing white butchers coats with the name of the team written down the side. We’d meet at the George Robey. There were three or four thousand kids walking four or five miles to the match. We rode up to the match on the back of a lorry from Finsbury Park to Tottenham. Jimmy and Johnny Lydon came along with me. We were all singing:

  Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho,

  We are the Arsenal Boys,

  Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho,

  We are the Arsenal Boys,

  And if you are a Tottenham fan,

  Surrender or you’ll die,

  We will follow the Arsenal!

  After I passed my O levels, I got into a row with my father and was thrown out of my house because of my long hair, which came way down to the middle of my back. It was the most annoying thing I could do at the time. The old man insisted I go get it cut, so I thought long and hard and did exactly that. I had it cropped and dyed bright green, a very savage thing to do in those days. It was green dye that wasn’t used for hair, I think it was clothes dye. Lo and behold, I looked like a cabbage. I walked in and that was it.

  “Get the fuck out of my house, and take that fucking cabbage on your head with ya!”

  I went to Sid’s place. He had a squat at that time.

  Sid and I even went on to college to study A levels up at the north part of King’s Cross in High Holborn. There we met Wobble, who later formed PiL with me. However, we never went to any of the lessons. Didn’t have to. There was no such thing as report cards. It wasn’t about that. It was there if you wanted to improve your life. If you didn’t, they couldn’t give a shit about you. It was sort of a progressive school. The foreign exchange students paid to get in, but I got in because I was brought up in England. I studied English literature and art, I liked poetry and the writings of Ted Hughes. We were supposed to study Keats, but I found him too tweedy for my liking. That’s when I got into Oscar Wilde. I thought his stuff was fucking brilliant. What an attitude to life! I preferred his letters to his actual works. The Importance of Being Earnest was good stuff, but his comments were what impressed me. Here was a man ruined by his mother, so his whole life was a kind of vengeance against her. He turned out to be the biggest poof on earth at a time when that was completely unacceptable. What a genius. No Rimbaud or Baudelaire for me. It read like poncey shit, and it didn’t fool me for one second. But Oscar Wilde, there was a writer.

  During the A level d
ays at King’s Cross, we practically never went to class. Sid never turned up at all. I hung around mostly with Wobble at the time. We spent most of our days at the pub nearby. I made a lot of money working on the building sites with my father and didn’t mind having a drinking partner. I learned most of my studies with the teachers in the pub. I would sit with the them in the pub during lunch break. Sometimes they wouldn’t go to class, either.

  It was the first total looseness I had ever seen in school. When the teachers got a bit inebriated in the pub, they tipped me off on the ins and outs of the subjects and topics. We talked about Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare, I found his characters vivid. They thought very differently back then—far more emotional and less on the logical, thinking side. I loved Macbeth—a gorgeous piece of nastiness. The characters did what they felt, not exclusively because they were evil, but because they didn’t have the inclination to behave any other way. They just fitted in with the times. Plus it was much easier to use murder as a solution then.

  As a teenager, I found the language of Shakespeare a little difficult until it was properly explained. I actually got an inkling of it at William of York with Mr. Prentiss. He explained that, although slightly buttered up, that was the way people talked then. Once I got into the poetic beat of it, I began to understand the gist of Shakespeare. At Kingsway College, they explained to me that it would lose its point and purpose to modernize the prose. It’s the same logic as to why you can’t live out a seventies punk rock environment today in the nineties. It’s not valid now, and it doesn’t connect with anything around it. You had to get into the dream of it—a vision complete unto itself.

  I much preferred barroom discourse with teachers to sitting in the class having to work it all out for myself. The teachers’ opinions gave me something to grasp. That’s why I like to talk so much. That’s how I learn. You can get other people to open up. You learn far more through discussion than any other way.

  At about age sixteen, I was out squatting with Sid, and he started selling speed. We’d live off of that. It was a very cheap life-style. There was nowhere we wanted to go, we just wanted to be up all the time, that’s all. After leaving home—me with green hair—Sid and I started squatting in more abandoned buildings. We never bothered to go back to college in King’s Cross, either. Once I’d moved in with Sid—fuck it—school was too far to travel. It became too boring to get up in the morning. Why bother? There were a lot of Teddy boys in our building because at that time there was a rock ’n’ roll revivalist movement going on that I found loathsome. Here were sixteen-year-old kids into Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. I thought it was an absolute disgrace. You shouldn’t be propping up somebody’s grandad as a hero. They weren’t making any life of their own. They were living in somebody else’s fucking nightmare.

  The law clearly stated back then that if the premises were unoccupied and you could gain access, then you had rights to stay there. Considering my background in burglary as a boy, it was easy access. I’m in! Here’s Johnny! Now it’s fashionable to squat in old buildings again and not pay rent. It had definite tinges of hippiedom. Unfortunately, lack of money forced me into such a position. In England, squatting has now turned into a profession again. It’s an absolute way of life rather than a way of getting from A to B.

  We ended up sharing this squat in, of all places, Hampstead, which is an upwardly middle-class posh area surrounded by millionaires. Sid found the building. He knew someone from the college who got him in. It was funny, some of the people who lived there. They were insane, totally screwed out of their brains on drugs from the hippie days, which is where my contempt of hippies comes from. These people were caricatures with their silly scarves thrown over milk crates to make things look ever so nice. The smell of joss sticks. They all sat on cushions on the floor.

  JOHN GRAY: I wasn’t into living rough in some squat, and I certainly wouldn’t have lived with Wobble, Sid, and Mad Jane. She was one of Sid’s early girlfriends, and I was quite friendly with her as well. Sid would strangle cats and slash himself with an old Heinz baked beans tin lid.

  Ironically the building was very much like what I’d been brought up in during the early days, a Victorian slum dwelling. They’d become illegal for people to live in officially. So in went the squatters because the council didn’t bother to pull the place down. No electricity. There was plumbing, but no hot water. By this time my school days had petered out. What was the point? It cost money to travel. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Few of us in those days ever paid anything to travel on the subways. It was easy to jump over the fences and turnstiles. I don’t know how the tube system in London ever managed to keep running. I never knew anyone who ever paid or bought a ticket—outside of American tourists.

  I did have some money left at the time. Before the winter we became squatters, I worked on building sites during the summer. My dad got me the job at twenty-five pounds a day—a lot of money, so I was rolling in it. I had a lot of money building a sewage farm in Guildford. I hope the people in Guildford are thankful. Johnny built your sewer!

  I worked with the site engineers and learned a lot taking measurements and surveying. I loved that. Fascinating stuff. There I was, green hair and all. Laborers don’t give a damn, particularly the Irish. It’s your fucking life, that was their attitude. If you can wield a shovel as good as anybody else, that’s fine.

  I wouldn’t have minded being a teacher. After dropping out of college, I landed a job working at the play centers near where I lived in Finsbury Park. I had friends working there, and they recommended me. It was definitely a heady, fantasy job. You knew you were doing it for all the right reasons. Easy sainthood, but they paid so badly. I worked at the play center, looking after five-year-olds during the spring break and the summer holidays in England. Just prior to joining the Sex Pistols, I worked there for a couple of months, looking after the kids of people who work all day during the summer. In America they call it day care. The first job they assigned me was with the three-, four-, and five-year-olds. I wasn’t very happy in bah-bah-goo-goo land, so they moved me to the woodwork center. I was very good at teaching nine-year-old kids how to build airplanes. I would show them how to cut out wings out of balsa wood. The children were real problem kids from the neighborhood, so I was told not to give them knives because they might start hurting each other. I would have none of that. No kid was going to hurt themselves in my class. I wasn’t into bullying the kids, and they hadn’t started one fight among each other, which certainly wasn’t the norm up until then. The headmaster was Mr. Cutbush. God, how I would have loved to cut his bush off. He was such a nasty fucking git! He walked into the woodwork center, took one look at the kids, and waved me to come over. “This is not on,” he whispered emphatically. “These children all have knives.”

  I explained, “Yes, but nobody is getting hurt. Don’t you understand?”

  He said there were knife fights in the class before—but not when I was teaching it.

  Then came the sack. Actually, it was worse than the sack. They wanted to send me off to an education center where I could learn rounders and go to session groups to be taught what the rules were and how teachers were supposed to conduct themselves. I found it so offensive. Surely if you’re dealing with kids, you should be intuitive; otherwise you’re not catering to them as individuals. It’s just block booking again. I still feel I could have become a teacher if I’d followed through on it. Basically I already was a teacher doing reading, writing, a bit of maps, and a bit of woodwork. I suppose having green hair didn’t help, either. Parents were complaining. “He’s weird. He might try to fiddle with the kids.” They didn’t realize; they just didn’t get it. That was the very thing the kids focused on. “He’s weird, we like him.” I wasn’t a cane-wielding maniac, into discipline. I found children disciplined themselves if their interests were kept high. Like crime, mischief springs from boredom. When you’re overly repressive with kids, then you’re breeding perverts of the future.

/>   Back inside our building were the squatters. All around the neighborhood were these wonderful Georgian terraced houses where the upper-class twits lived. The neighbors fucking hated us. The other squatters hated us as well because of the way we looked—short cropped hair and old suits. That’s when Sid started to come around to my way of fashion. I gave him his first decent haircut, which was the punk style as it soon became. You’d literally cut chunks of hair out of your head. The idea was to not have any shape to your hairdo—just have it fucked up. That was the beginning of it all.

  Sid and I used to mess around with cigarette burns. It was mostly me. I don’t know what prompted it. Insecurity. I got it from a Michael Caine movie. They were torturing him with cigarettes. I thought, That doesn’t look too painful. I can handle that. It isn’t really, except it’s a bit bad when you burst a vein because it does spout. There’s scars all up and down my arm. I stopped when I got up to the tops of my arms by my shoulder. Forget it, there’s a lot of muscle tissue around there. Really stupid stuff. I think it was a badge of self-pity more than anything. I wasn’t looking for attention. There were much better ways than that to get attention.

  I used to jam in the subway stations with Sid on acoustic guitar and me on violin singing Alice Cooper’s “I Love the Dead.” We would sing the same song over and over, hour after hour. Sid couldn’t play guitar and I couldn’t play violin, but we had the most fun. We used to do loads of things like that together. Busking was a big thing at the time, but it was always these naff hippies with their acoustic guitars singing Donovan songs. People would throw us the occasional two shillings just to make us shut up. “Yes, yes, we’ve heard enough. Do you have another song? The train is late and you’ve played this for a half an hour upward! I think I’m going to kill you.” The other song we sang was “I Don’t Love the Dead.” Another favorite of ours was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” sung as “I Left My Heart in Some Crummy Disco.” Those were the only words in the whole song.