Rotten Read online

  It’s funny. I read recently about some disco git in England who theorized that punk actually began in the discotheques. There was, he wrote, a club called the Lacey Lady in Ilford, and he recalled seeing punks there who danced to all the disco records. He remembers it well. Johnny Rotten stole it all from them! Ha! Those punks happened to be me and my mates. Sid, Wobble, John Gray, Dave Crowe, and Tony Purcell—a right motley crew. We used to go down to the Lacey Lady every weekend because we knew someone who lived nearby.

  JOHN GRAY: We’d go to the Lacey Lady and dance like lunatics. Although we were into all of this rock stuff, we were also into the Black Byrds with Donald Byrd, the Ohio Players, and other soul/dance groups. Most of the patrons would shuffle around the bar, drinking vodka and orange juice, but we’d go wild, dancing in the middle of the floor. We’d have spiky hair, dressed in ordinary jeans, with ties around our legs, baseball boots, and silly T-shirts. We must have looked bizarre. The deejay still talks about us, he remembers John and me. We thought it was strange that people formed a circle around us and watched us dance. Sometimes we’d stay all night at Tony’s, though it was uncomfortable sleeping on the floor. Usually we’d catch the all-night train. Once we’d done that club and explored it, we started going to reggae sound systems and black clubs.

  We enjoyed going to gay clubs because you could be yourself, nobody bothered you, and nobody hit on you, unless that’s what you wanted. There were always loads of girls in those places. Always. They were there for the same reason we were, to avoid the boot boy harassment. Besides, pubs were no places for girls because they would be seen as tarts. In pubs, men always outnumbered the girls ten to one, so they’d become victims very quickly.

  The gay clubs always had the best records. The House thing and the Rave thing comes from that scene. Extreme twelve-inch mixes that weren’t available in the shops. It was an underground club thing. You’d find the addresses of these record stores that didn’t sell to everybody. Same thing with reggae in Finsbury Park. I went out of my way to make sure I always had the best records because I put a lot of interest into it. Most kids were probably buying Tamla/Motown, which was something I never liked. I took immaculate care of all my records.

  If Bowie was important, he was important to Sid. I didn’t quite get it. Sid thought he was God. What was odd was that all the football hooligans would be deeply into Bowie. Bowie did bring all different sorts together. A Bowie concert would be quite an event. All walks of life were there. You’d have to go because the social aspect of it all was phenomenal. In London, I don’t think people took David Bowie’s gay thing seriously. It didn’t mean anything at all. He was very clever at it. But of course he had many years to practice his art. That’s what’s so unfair about the way punk was judged. We were judged in the same light as those who had been learning their craft for ten years. We weren’t given any breaks for being young.

  As I recall my old mates, it reminds me how much people change, as they should do. John Gray is a teacher now. Dave Crowe’s a teacher as well. Wobble has since become a serious bass player and bandleader. Tony Purcell became an accountant. There were a few others in our mob. I don’t know where they ended up. Some are in jail, I suppose, because a few of them were quite violent. We used to terrify a lot of the regular boot boys when they’d see a mob like us. We looked like nothing anyone had ever seen. They couldn’t relate us to anything. They seemed miffed that we’d quite easily defend ourselves and more. That left impressions. When you stand up for yourself, you get some kind of respect. If punks hadn’t stood up for themselves initially, they wouldn’t have gone very far. Punk would have been just another prissy affectation.

  Those ten, twenty guys—that’s definitely where the whole punk thing germinated. We had nothing to do with Malcolm McLaren or the other Pistols then. We were quite well formed and organized on our own long before they came onto the scene—and a long time before I joined the band. This is what the Sex Pistols bought when they got me, the whole image. It came lock, stock, and both barrels.

  SEGMENT 06:

  “I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I HATE YOU, BABY”

  Destiny. Do you really believe in destiny? Things happen because you make them happen. There’s no such thing as destiny or fate or any of that. Everything seemed impossible to the Sex Pistols—even gaining an audience. During our heyday, it was the arty-farty lot—the socialites and trendies—who would come to the gigs. I especially liked the working-class bit creeping in. That didn’t appeal much to Malcolm McLaren and his friends because they were pushed to the back of the hall very quickly. Those were chaotic days. The only real violence we would get would never be from our audiences, it would be from outsiders—usually the men wearing blue uniforms. The regular boot boys—football hooligans—never needed victims. They were vicious gangs of drunkards that roamed the streets looking for anything to prey on, as long as there were fifteen of them and one of you. The skinheads were fizzling out in 1976. Skinhead gangs were fighting too much among themselves to be much bothered by anything else. There were rightist skinhead gangs and very left-wing extremist skinheads. The whole thing became more of a fashion thing as the real skinhead movement had come and gone a long time before—between 1966 and 1969. They evolved out of the mod thing with their very sharp, neat style of dress. When it was rejuvenated in the seventies, it was completely different. It was no different from the punk imitators who grabbed on to the idea of one steady uniform being rigidly adored. I’ve always hated the idea of a uniform. If you have any kind of a movement at all, you should reject things like that. You’re not moving, plus it’s sterile.

  * * *

  Malcolm owned a shop that sold rubber wear and bondage gear, which, of course, was highly appealing to any teenager who wanted to be decadent. Lovely stuff, skintight rubber T-shirts. Malcolm’s shop sold it all. I got a great one there; it was a skintight, turtleneck, long-sleeved rubber sweater. I hacked up the neck with a razor so it was torn and shredded. Then I cut out the nipples. That was excellent, definitely offensive.

  Malcolm seized the moment. He watched it all unfold because he ran the shop and was already selling this stuff, if only to perverts on King’s Road. The shop was called Sex at the time. Later he found a way of manipulating it with Sex Pistol T-shirts, which took off rather well for him. T-shirts with two cowboys with their pants down, their knobs almost touching. Others of young boys totally nude. Cambridge rapist T-shirts. Vile imagery, but it worked. I could understand what he was doing. Most of that had a lot to do with Vivienne Westwood. Malcolm took a lot of the praise, but I think she did most of the designs.

  BOB GRUEN: When I went to the Sex store, Malcolm was selling pants with belts on the middle of the legs. He said it was so you could tie your legs together. Who the hell would want to do that? Six months later kids all over England were walking around knock-kneed, with their legs tied together. I thought, Oh, my God, he sold it.

  During the pre-Sex days, Malcolm and Vivienne sold sex aids to dull people as well as Teddy Boy gear and the Bowie-esque puffed shoulder blouse tops. They also had fifties’ rip-offs like pegged pants and smooth slip-on shoes. It would be the same old cut from the fifties, but their angle would be to make the pants pink instead of black or the shoes gold instead of brown or blue. I would buy from the shop occasionally, but that would only be part of my mix and match. I’d buy clothes everywhere, and it would always deeply annoy Malcolm and Vivienne.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: All the bondage gear wasn’t supposed to stimulate you in the sexual sense. It was more of a statement; two fingers up at the Establishment. They would have T-shirts with pictures of rapists wearing rubber masks as if they were reflecting something from the culture back at us. They were extremely anti-Establishment. When the punk kids walked around wearing swastikas and bondage gear, it was their two fingers up at the Establishment. They weren’t buying into or in any way associating themselves with nazism or the National Front or sadomasochism. These were teenagers who were just trying to say, “F
uck you!”

  When I was seventeen I used to slash up suits and safety-pin them back together. I also used to get the shit beat out of me wearing that kind of stuff on the street. It’s difficult to explain, but I always sensed a certain flair of how bums dressed in London. Street urchins, bums, tramps—whatever you want to call them—had a much better way of wearing their clothes. Forgetting the dirt, they looked so stylish to me. They always wore suits or had a peculiar angle to the hats on their heads. I sensed an indescribable jauntiness to it, almost cavalier and reflecting pride in what they were. It’s not Aqua-lung—more like Aquascutum. Wearing bin liners came from watching the transients in London. I used to love the way they wore bin liners. I thought it was so shiny and neat, much better than leather. Just sew some sleeves on that and you’re happening. So I did.

  “John, you look like a fucking tramp!”

  “Yes, Dad! I’ve got style.”

  At the time, what we had wasn’t a gang as much as a collection of extremely bored people. I suppose we’d come together out of desperation. There was no hope as far as any of us were concerned. That was the common bond. There was no point in looking for a normal job because that would be just too awful. There was no way out. We had no inspiration, musical or nonmusical, until the band started. Before the Pistols, me and the boys used to like to walk up and down King’s Road, where people would be buying all of this ridiculous fashion gear. There we would be, these ugly monsters right in the middle of it. That was the place to be, the fashion center of London.

  JOHN GRAY: When John and I first stalked the King’s Road, we wore jumble sale clothes, not leather jackets or straight-legged trousers. Either they weren’t being made or we couldn’t afford them. We were coming out of the flared trousers scene, which we felt looked quite ridiculous. So I’d have big loons on; pants that John gave me. I had no money for clothes, so I’d wear his old gear—black platform boots four inches thick, completely cropped hair, and a Vivienne Westwood top! We must have looked completely bizarre and incongruous, but that was right for us because we just made the best of what we had: something wacky here, something ludicrous there.

  Then there was our hair, a mixture of spikes and Ziggy Stardust, all jelled up and spiked in different colors. We used to buy lots of Vaseline. Sid used tons of it. You wouldn’t dare have him sleep on your pillow because he’d leave a big grease stain. My hair might have a pink rinse that turned into a lilac color. It was Crazy Color, so it never turned out as deep a color as was on the lid.

  At first it was just the boys; no girls would go along with this! You know what girls are like; they want to look pretty—particularly the English because they want to keep their secretarial jobs or whatever. Slowly but surely it all came together. The first girls to join in was the Bromley contingent, Siouxsie and the Banshees and people like that. They joined in for a more fashionable reason. They were into the Roxy Music look of sophisticated elegance. Eventually they got bored with that, so they started to rip their fishnets and wear plastic bin liners. They got their name because they came from Bromley, a suburb of south London. After a Pistols concert, they’d invited all of us over to their house for a party. For me, the party ended up like a discussion while the rest danced to their silly Bowie records. We discussed how this whole thing should be approached, and what we should be thinking about. You might call that plotting, I don’t agree. We were definitely pointing the direction. A few years later, of course, antifashion became a fashion unto itself. Then it was time to move on.

  CAROLINE COON: The punk movement was the first time that women played an equal role as partners in a subcultural group. Up until then there were no female equivalents to skinheads or Teddy boys. It was even more interesting seeing women standing side by side with men in the context of patriarchy. It was a huge step forward. For me, one of the most liberating things was the death of the horrible archetype of this hippie chick sitting at home embroidering. Johnny Rotten had his safety pins holding his clothes together! No more women’s work! Johnny Rotten had ripped clothes, so he wasn’t going to go home and ask his lover to sew up the seams of his clothes.

  The punk thing started pretty much nonmusically. Bernie Rhodes spotted me wearing my “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt on King’s Road and asked me to come back that night to meet Malcolm, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook in the Roebuck pub on the King’s Road. I wasn’t going to go alone. I could have gone with Wobble, but I brought John Gray. Fuck this, it sounded like a setup to me. Malcolm asked me if I wanted to be in a band. I thought they must be joking. It seemed very cynical, and that really pissed off Steve. He was a bit thick, and he couldn’t make out what I was talking about. He didn’t seem to understand me. Paul just sat there grinning all the time, trying to be reasonable. When the pub closed, it was Bernie Rhodes who finally broke in and said, “Well, let’s go back to the shop and see if you can mime or sing to a few songs.” I could mime fine, but of course I couldn’t sing a note. I knew all the words to Alice Cooper’s songs, whereas I knew practically none of the records inside Malcolm’s jukebox because it was all that awful sixties mod music that I couldn’t stand. The only song I could cope with was Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen.” I just gyrated like a belly dancer. Malcolm thought, Yes, he’s the one. Paul thought it was a joke and couldn’t have cared less. Steve was really annoyed because he instantly hated me. “I can’t work with that fucking cunt! All he does is take the piss and moan!”

  STEVE JONES: I first met John in McLaren’s shop. He came in with green hair. I thought he had a really interesting face. I liked his look. He had his “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt on, and it was held together with safety pins. John had something special, but when he started talking he was a real asshole—but smart.

  I admit I was an asshole when I first met Steve and Paul because I was nervous. They had this situation set up, and I didn’t know what they wanted from me. They explained very little. When we sat in the Roebuck, they just stared at me. It was awfully hard to come to grips with.

  I understand why Steve thought I was so deeply peculiar. I can be extremely unpleasant with people if I think they’re not playing the game fairly with me—and the other Pistols definitely weren’t playing fair that night. They were arrogant, smug, and content with their own cozy little group, and they didn’t want anything that threatened that. My attitude was, “Fine. I don’t need this, either. Fuck off.” Steve was antagonistic and annoyed because he and Paul had already formed in their minds what they thought a good band would be. Rod Stewart and the Faces, good-time rock ’n’ roll band. I told them that was going nowhere. Too many imitators had already been out there doing that. Anyway, it was dull and it wasn’t the music or the attitude I was interested in. “No, I will not mime to ‘Maggie May.’” But Steve wouldn’t give it up. He was intrigued, even though he couldn’t quite work out why I had got to him.

  In that respect I was the dumb one because I didn’t realize I was getting to him quite that way. I’d love to be able to say, “Oh, yes, this is the way I planned it.” But it wasn’t that at all. I was deeply confused when I left them that night. It was one of the most bizarre meetings I ever had, and I never wanted to go through that kind of nonsense ever again.

  All my friends were extremely different characters. One could be a complete yob, the other could be prissy, but they’re all obsessive and committed to their beliefs. That’s always been the people I hang around with. You’ll always find me where there’s lunacy. Most of my friends tended to be named John—Gray, Wardle AKA Wobble, and Ritchie. Glen Matlock couldn’t understand why everyone I knew was called John. It just seemed to be a name that was tagged on kids who were destined to become obsessive and individual.

  RAMBO: Before Ziggy Stardust, you had Clockwork Orange. Everybody used to dress like the Clockwork Orange film as well. When Clockwork Orange came out, we used to wear white boiler suits. Some wore bowler hats. Practically everybody who supported Arsenal had a white boiler suit. We were already into rows and that, but then
the film came out and that became another fashion to follow. When we played Tottenham, everyone supporting Arsenal was Clockwork Orange. You’d write things like “Arsenal” or the manager of the team on the side of the boiler suits. We’d wear red scarves in those days. You would carry canes, as far as you could get away with it. But umbrellas were the thing. We had the Arsenal lot from Bethnal Green, who also dressed in the boiler suits. All the Boreham Wood Arsenal had tattoos. Newcastle fans used to come down all dressed up like Alice Cooper with all the black makeup and the Alice Cooper gear on. Man United fans dressed like Dave Bowie.

  ZANDRA RHODES: Punk was an antidesign movement. Isn’t the movement from punk just an extension of the Clockwork Orange film by Stanley Kubrick that came around a bit before that period? It’s anti-commercialism, and depending on which side of the chasm you’re on, it’s either an antidesign movement or a design movement.

  RAMBO: Every Sunday night we used to meet up and bunk into the pictures in the West End. Caesar was a specialist in bunking with a coat hanger. He’d get the coat hanger, bend it round, lift the bar up, and get in. Julius saw Clockwork Orange around twenty times. I saw it eight or nine times myself. Everybody saw it a couple of times.

  Sex Pistols influenced by the characters in the film version of Clockwork Orange? Definitely not! Stanley Kubrick’s film centered around a gang mentality, not individuality. It was about everyone looking and being the same. The four Johns weren’t interested in that. We were more like Pinkie and his gang from Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. That’s what made that book so riveting for me. His gang was deeply peculiar, extremely different from each other. They weren’t a bunch of clones, nor was it ever explained how Pinkie, being as young as he was, could be leading around this bizarre collection of strange, older people. I hung around with people who challenged me continually about everything I stood for. Constant challenge. The Clockwork Orange connection to the early punks is too easy. It’s an arty analogy and ready-made, but not reality.