(Photos: Daniel Maurer)
It’s not often you see Monty Python and John Lydon in the space of a week, but there was Britain’s other living legend at St. Vitus last night, chatting with Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly about his new autobiography Anger Is an Energy. The book, out this week, tells how a childhood bout with meningitis shaped his personality (“I’m a shy, sensitive kind of fellow,” he insisted to the incredulous crowd at St. Vitus) and then goes on to recount his trailblazing and troublemaking with the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., and, of course, his later dalliances with reality tv (that time he showed off his “fried-egg breasts” in I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!) and butter commercials (“the most anarchistic thing I’ve ever been presented with”).
At last night’s event, put on by the good folks at Word, Lydon confessed that “I discovered when I was really young that arrogance was a really fucking great tool – if you hone in on it and perfect it, you can be absurdly arrogant where it becomes an act of friendship.” That arrogance meddled with the occasional touch of humility is evident in the book as he recounts endless tiffs with his bandmates and, especially, with Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, whose role in the band Lydon goes to great pains to downplay. Rather than the band’s mastermind, McLaren is depicted as a pretentious, artst-fartsy type who was overly reverential of the cloistered CBGB scene, which was “all so precious – ‘Oh, we’re the creators, we’re special, nobody else counts.’”
Of New York bands like Television and the Ramones, Lydon writes, “We couldn’t believe how old they all were, and how much more loaded. They could afford things that we desperately wanted, but had no taste, so they’d come over from New York and they’d look terrible.”
The downfall of Sid Vicious, per the book, was that he tried too hard to be Lou Reed and was “trying to parody a New York lifestyle.” (Fun bit of trivia: Lemmy – yes, Lemmy from Motörhead – tried to teach Sid Vicious to play the bass, though in the end he was so bad at it that he wasn’t even plugged in during Sex Pistols shows.)
For Lydon’s part, the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle was short on sex and drugs. “I’d never felt comfortable being a Jack-the-Lad playboy,” he writes. “I can’t stand flippant one-night stands. The next day, I’d feel horrible about it, how pointless it was, and what the hell was that all about?”
He tried heroin just once (he got sick from “the world’s biggest fucking foolishness”), but he did inevitably dabble in cocaine during his New York days (“cocaine kind of dumbed us out of being creative”) and liked that speed made him “sit down and think and enjoy whatever it is I’m doing.” He also smoked his share of weed during a trip to Kingston where Virgin label head Richard Branson drove him around in “that absurdly pompous, Raj-of-India car.” (There, he failed to do a “Jamaica-inspired version” of “Submission” with Lee Perry: “I didn’t get my chops together. I wasn’t prepared for it. Ouch. Tail-between-the-legs time.”) For the most part, though, Lydon’s drug of choice was a German wine, Liebfraumilch. “It was terrible,” he writes, “but gosh, it got me through…how many gigs?”
While McLaren pushed for the Sex Pistols to be more like the New York bands, Lydon pushed back. “I loved punk when it first started,” he told the crowd last night. “The variety and textures and all the bands and it was happening instantaneously everywhere. Fabulous, right? And then it got fucked up and ended up with Green Day.”
At St. Vitus, Lydon called out favorite bands like The Raincoats, The Slits, and X-Ray Spex: “I liked the more experimental ones,” he said, “and I loved the fact that women, for the first time, really, in what we call pop music, where women stood on stage equal of the men.”
But eventually, punk became conformist. “Punk when it started, I hated the cliché bands, all donned the same studded leather jackets,” Lydon sneared. “They looked like fucking coathangers to me. And what have you got, like a modern example: Green Day.”
Okay, so Lydon hates Green Day, and he doesn’t like Madonna much, either: “Is she still Kabbalah or is it Kabbollocks?” he asked. On the other hand, he said that Nirvana made “fabulous records,” even if Kurt Cobain may have lifted the line “just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you” from a poster that Poly Styrene gave Lydon. “Maybe he got it from a picture of my living room at the time,” he writes.
Signing a fan’s shirt.
But let’s not forget that Richard Hell, in his own memoir, accused Malcolm McLaren of lifting his style and fashioning the Sex Pistols after him. Lydon’s book doesn’t address this head-on, but he does claim that, unlike his bandmates, he wasn’t willing to be McLaren’s puppet. Even before the Sex Pistols came into their own, Lydon writes that the New York Dolls would come into SEX – the shop McLaren and Vivienne Westwood operated, where Lydon worked – to talk trash about McLaren, their manager: “They’d be saying, ‘He just puts up a few silly ideas but nothing that actually ever really stood a chance of being helpful.’”
Meanwhile, Lydon was paying “out the nose” for all of the outfits he bought at SEX, including pairs of bondage pants that insured that your “testicles were unfeasibly bothered” to the point where he once got a “really major infection.” According to the book, Westwood refused to alter her designs because she was “a very difficult character” who was “very unforgiving and judgmental, and very hard to get on with,” and also because: “That’s what happens when you live with Malcolm as a lover: she performed expensive castration on her adoring fashion-worshippers!”
With so much trash talking, it’s hard to know when to take Lydon seriously (could his theory be true that one of Sid Vicious’s drug debtors planted a knife on him and framed him for the killing of Nancy Spungen?). He cheekily acknowledged this as he kicked off last night’s talk: “There’s so many easy ways to get into music and just do it for the money and tell a load of fucking lies and be a wanker tosser,” he said. “I like my route: right from day one I knew that (cuz I love my mom and dad very, very much and they always knew I wouldn’t lie) I’m not going to lie to anybody. They’ve both sadly passed away and I’m going to carry on the good and honest tradition of not getting caught lying.”
That desire for authenticity (or, at least, for not getting caught lying) is maybe why Lydon despises lip syncing (“one of my pet hates of all-time,” he said, though in the book he recounts how PiL had to do it on American Bandstand), religion (“I don’t know what’s up there,” he said. “Well, airplanes”), and certain BBC broadcasters. Asked why he uses the term “pop” facetiously, he noted it was a term bandied about by Jimmy Savile types. “This lot all turned out to be child molesters,” he said. “Well, I said so in 1978 and for my efforts I got banned by the BBC, so you tell me about family values. You know? ‘I’m here to protect your kids.’ So I use the term pop music in the most cynical, annoying way I can, right? Because these cunts are still keeping us off the radio.”
Lydon has some choice words for Savile in the book, and also for Joe Strummer (he started “taking the Clash too seriously” and “began to lack a sense of humor about himself”), Björk (post-Sugarcubes, “she’s now left to wearing swans and making pretentious squeals and squeaks”), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (“it’s record-industry-sponsored, the same industry that kept both my bands, the Pistols and PiL, in debt for so many years”), and the Grateful Dead (“I hate to repeat myself,” he said last night, “but I’m really grateful they’re dead”).
But he also gives credit where credit is due. He writes that he loved seeing Robin Williams live in New York: “a lot of the way he was freeforming the jokes and randomly jumping from one situation to another, then somehow or another they all seemed to make sense eventually, is exactly how I feel about myself, how I think I am.”
Though he calls Eric Clapton a heroin “burnout” in the book, it was Clapton’s bandmate Ginger Baker that Lydon named when an audience member asked him to pick a favorite collaborator. “There’s a man that absolutely impressed me,” he said. “He came into that studio like a fucking raging maniacal bastard from hell and he broke everything that he played – everything. He took every kind of chemical known to mankind and it still wasn’t good enough for him and he played perfect.”
Lydon now makes his home in Los Angeles, but he did live in New York for a few years, starting in 1981. One of the highlights of that time was a “soft riot,” as he called it last night, that broke out at the Ritz when the crowd thought it was getting a live PiL show and instead got a faulty light show with a skipping record. An audience member who attended the production described bottles raining down on stage. “We call that ‘soccer’ in England,” Lydon said nonchalantly.
Lydon writes that he moved to New York because “it was cheaper, and we could actually get gigs there,” and “I imagined I wouldn’t end up in jail quite so frequently.” At the time, the police raids at his Chelsea, London home and party pad, Gunter Grove, were occurring as frequently as three times a week. Once in New York, he and his PiL bandmates eventually got a 2,500-square-foot loft on West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th. The area was “dirt-cheap and industrial and full of incredibly seedy gay nightclubs like nothing we used to know in England. These were middle-aged men with beards and no arse in their pants, lots of bending over behind trucks, and wet beards – just full-on filth, pure decadent filth.” Culturally, “The people that did come over and wanted to speak to us were mad artists doing fabulously, stupidly, interestingly different things. New York’s full of that but it’s not a one-level town. There’s so much going on in it. At least, there was then.”
Ultimately, Lydon found the city’s overcast, drug-fueled vibe “soul-destroying,” and the band moved to LA in 1984.
As I got my book signed last night, I couldn’t help but ask Lydon, who had been sipping a Corona throughout his spiel, whether he had a favorite bar in New York (in the book, he mentions Moran’s, with its “brilliantly cheap stuffed clams”; they’re now $12). He said no. After the signing, he was going straight to bed – alone.
If you missed Lydon at St. Vitus, don’t worry, he’s appearing at the Strand on Thursday.