"Here, lend us a fiver Neil." John
Lydon's upturned palm pokes toward The Guest Journalist, an expectant
eyebrow arching above the famed John Rotten stare. Britain's most
famous rock star is tapping me for a hand-out.
Is he joking? Is this another arch put-on, in the grand Johnny Rotten
tradition of arch put-ons?
"I'm broke," he says flatly. "Completely
penniless. There's no money coming in at all. He has it
all..."
The eyes roll in silent reference to well-known and heeled King's
Road anarchist and rag trade magnate Malcolm McLaren, ex-New York Dolls
manager and currently protagonist of a flurry of lawsuits against Pistols
photographer Ray Stevenson and now film maker and ex-Roxy Club DJ,
rasta Don Letts.
Presently too, it seems,
McLaren and his Glitterbest organisation will be engaged in another
legal tussle, this time with his former protégé and
Sex Pistols frontman, a situation that under British law precludes
all but the vaguest references to and conjectures about relations
between the two parties concerned.
Suffice to say that on the
Lydon side of the tracks, the wounds inflicted by the Pistols break-up
and subsequent events are deep and bloody. The resentments held are
bitter and savage. The resolutions for the future though are considered
and determined. No matter what happens, you feel – and as much should be clear from past events – John
Lydon is not a man to be kept down.
Which is just as well considering not only the current financial embarrassment
of both Lydon and the slightly motley musical trio rehearsing with
him, but also the immediate prospects for its relief.
"Frankly," says Wobble, the band's bassman, "with
John's business affairs the way they are, I reckon it could be six
to twelve months before this band is gigging."
In the meantime the quartet of Lydon (vocals), Jah Wobble (bass),
Keith Levene (guitar) and Jim Walker (drums) face the usual precarious
hand-to-mouth existence that's the lot of any unsigned rock band, and
quite a few signed and successful ones, to come to that. Just because
we put these guys on the NME cover it doesn't necessarily mean that
they can afford the time of day.
They do at least have somewhere
to live though. "This," says
Lydon with a gesture that takes in the scraggy three-story terraced
house that he bought with Pistols proceeds and which overlooks a thundering
inner London juggernaut artery, "is all I got out of it... the
Pistols. It's very nice, but now I can't afford to pay the bills, the
rates, nothing..."
The three other members of the band sit dolefully on the sagging sofa,
and Wobble and Levene compare sympathetic notes on the injustices of
being struck off the social security as a result of their joining forces
with Lydon in this line-up. Jim Walker sits quietly on one side, resisting
all attempts by the others to haggle him into going to the off-licence,
with the ackers dutifully coughed up by The Visiting Journalist.
On the wall 'Anarchy' posters are relieved only by the occasional
photograph of the Kray brothers. On the turntable it's reggae.
It is not what certain members
of the rock press touchingly refer to as an 'interview situation' – that
comes later once Lydon is conveniently absent. He's never liked committing
himself to tape, least of all now he's faced with a minefield of
legal complications.
The conversation roams around,
centering mostly – and inevitably
disparagingly – on the activities of former Sex Pistols and McLaren.
Tales and incidents are related, some sinister, some downright laughable.
John – he responds to a passing reference to 'Johnny Rotten'
with a wry "he's not here" – seems particularly concerned
lest the tapes that Paul Cook and Steve Jones apparently made with
Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs in Rio de Janeiro are released under
the Pistols name.
The former Pistol describes
Biggs as "someone to avoid at all
costs rather than seek out. People seem to have forgotten that that
train driver is still a vegetable." (Actually, he's dead – Ed.) [1]
Lydon also has a small fund
of stories to relate about his recent visit to Jamaica and the attempts
by Boogie, a former Pistols roadie, to film him there – attempts
which went so far as to involve the hapless cameraman hiding in the
bushes by the Sheraton Hotel swimming pool.
Mention of the way some people closely involved with the Pistols have
changed their 'anarchistic' attitude over recent months spurs me to
trot out the old George Orwell adage about 'all power corrupting'.
[2]
"Well, that ain't true," says Wobble. "Just
look at John, it ain't corrupted him. He used to be far worse
than he is now."
"It's true," agrees Lydon with a cackle. "I
was far more corrupt when I started than now. These days I'm not
corrupt at all..."
Jah Wobble – he acquired the Jamaican prefix as a result of
his obsession with reggae – is better placed than most to pass
judgement. He's known John Lydon some five years now, first encountering
him when they were enrolling at Kingsway College of Further Education
together.
"I thought he was a Led Zeppelin fan," he recalls. "I
was queueing up behind him and we had a bit of a quarrel about who
was going to put their names down first... After that he just started
crawling around after me and I let him be my mate. He used to have
to buy me drinks though, 'cos no-one liked him then. He used to wind
everyone up, everyone. People who say he's a bastard now should have
seen him then."
Wobble himself was still
something of a skinhead at the time, fresh up from his native Whitechapel
and the terraces of West Ham [5], which easily outstripped the current
rock scene as a source of inspiration. His heroes at the time, he
says, were the West Ham team. "Trevor
Brooking definitely. Not just 'cos he's a good footballer, but the
way he plays the game... you can relate that to life - style, elegance.
Musically I've always been into black music, always. First soul, then
reggae, which I followed through from my skinhead days. Bit of a cliché,
but it's true."
It's worth mentioning at
this point that Wobble has acquired himself a reputation in some
quarters as something of a bruiser, and there are comparisons drawn
between him and Sid Vicious, whom Lydon also met at the Kingsway
College and who of course also went on to play bass alongside Lydon.
Furthermore, it was Wobble who played back-up to Vicious in the seedy
fracas at a Pistols gig at the 100 Club in summer '76 [3] when NME's
Nick Kent, in the words of Malcolm McLaren, "got
what was coming to him" and was 'done' by Vicious and his chain.
The Vicious/Wobble comparisons, though, don't really wash. Wobble
is not the type to share Vicious' taste either for exotic pharmaceuticals,
crazed American ladies of high parentage, or the cranky exhibitions
of bloody self-destruction which Vicious has paraded before the world.
Wobble's interest in the rock scene began only with the Pistols' emergence
in late '75. Since then he's entertained the notion of playing bass
without ever taking up the instrument seriously until a month or so
ago.
At the other extreme, Keith
Levene started playing guitar at the age of seven and received classical
training in both guitar and piano well into his teens [6].
He describes his major point
of interest in rock before Pistols as Bowie. "I was a skinhead
for four weeks... I was a hippie first, then a skin, 'cos I wanted
to be different, but all the skinhead I knew were stupid and would
just fight all the time, so I became a hippie again, a hippie in
skinhead clothes."
A follower of the fledgling
punk scene from its earliest inception, Levene belonged to The Clash
in their earliest incarnation, surviving only a matter of weeks before
his departure/expulsion for reasons which he says should be "obvious...
I wasn't into politics."
A flirtation with drugs was apparently another reason why Levene didn't
stay the course with the City Rockers, certainly 'Deny' on The Clash's
first album is widely reputed to refer to him at this time, a period
when he also met Wobble and Lydon for the first time.
Having flunked his first
punk band, Levene weaned himself from his drug habit and concentrated
his energies on mixing sound for The Slits, a group whom he describes
as currently "about the most original
and exciting group around... like the Sex Pistols used to be in a way."
Drummer Jim Walker is ostensibly
the odd man out in the group. A clean cut Canadian who at 23 is the
oldest member of the outfit, he left his native Vancouver six months
ago, inspired by the wave of imports and excitement coming over from
the U.K. and disillusioned by the apathetic response meted out to
the local combo with whom he was plying his trade, The Furies. His
recruitment to the Lydon band came with a rock paper advertisement
which had already yielded some twenty sticksmen to the bored ears
of the other three before Walker took the kit and was hired, in his
own words, "after about five seconds. Really. I just knew
it was the best band I'd ever had."
Together they are... well,
hell, the foursome boasts no collective moniker at present, or at
least not one they'll publicly admit to, beyond a "seven day biodegredable" tag
of The Carnivarious Buttockflies.
The band are hardly less reticent about their raison
d'être.
They've all had a gutful of their projections and rationalisations
shot their way by critics and their ilk, OD'd into stupefaction by
the popular press ballyhoo about punk.
"Music's just a laugh," says
Wobble.
"Yeah, there ain't no big message or anything," says Levene. "We're
just trying to be as honest as possible."
Lydon likewise holds few
briefs for the new venture. "Things
now are worse than when the Pistols started," he says. "Pathetic.
Still, I did try."
It's a feeling that seems common to the band as a whole. The aftermath
of post-Pistols, post-punk disillusionment, the feeling that inspite
of it all nothing has really changed... that it's the 'same old hippie
trip', that the business has accommodated, emasculated.
In the light of all this,
certain truths are held by the band to be self-evident. Like that
there'll be no manager – "It's the
obvious thing after what's gone down in the last twelve months. That
ain't Catch 22," says Keith. "It's another Catch altogether."
But some things have changed, I insist. The New Wave stars definitely
have a different attitude towards their role and towards their fans.
"Yeah, it's a one percent change," says Wobble, "but
it's an important one – a crucial one. A lot of it's down to
the Pistols and Rotten especially... like that Capital Radio programme
he did with Tommy Vance [4] – to me that was more important than
the Pistols getting the front page of the Daily Mirror."
One of the things that alienated a lot of people from the Pistols
and punk in general was the way that violence became so glorified for
a spell. Like if rock culture can't get itself together on that level...
"Well, put this down," says Wobble. "All
the violence with the punk thing is very symbolic violence. It's
just people posing in a violent way, and if you go down to any pub
in Britain on a Friday or Saturday night you're going to see real
violence, like glasses hitting people's faces, but people never write
about that. There's a murder a day in London that never gets reported."
Yeah, but symbolic or not, there was a period in summer '76 when at
every Pistols gig I went to there were scraps. It got very sinister,
like the violence was actually being engineered.
"I don't think it was engineered," says Keith. "The
violent pose was on though... maybe some managers of punk bands tried
to engineer it..."
It seemed like the karma of that time worked its way back to the Pistols
when Paul and John got done over in the streets though.
"Yeah, but that was 35-year-old geezers," says Keith. "National
Front blokes... they are the ones who are influenced by what they read
in The Sun about punk."
"At the time," adds Wobble, "the
Pistols gigs were just a good place to go and listen to some raucous
out-of-tune music and have a booze-up and fall about on the floor
and knock people over and have a general laugh. Get drunk, pass out,
wake up with a hangover and go to the next gig. Watch Rotten take
the piss out of everyone and people take seriously what he said.
It was good..."
We talk about the differences between the rock culture and the reggae
culture, which I suggest has a good deal more dignity than most rock
bands or acts can muster. Both Levene and Wobble agree.
"Rock is obsolete," says Wobble. "But it's our music,
our basic culture. People thought we were gonna play reggae, but we
ain't gonna be no GT Moore and The Reggae Guitars or nothing. It's
just a natural influence – like I play heavy on the bass..."
And more and more rock seems
to be copping reggae's influence, like the way the whole of Elvis
Costello's act is based on a dub concept – different
levels of instruments, bass, drums and voices.
"Yeah, Costello's probably done it better than anyone. The Stranglers
are starting to use it now too. But like a lot of rock bands get it
wrong – like that 'Wild Dub' that Gen X did, that was just topside
dub, it didn't go down to the roots."
Later Keith Levene tells me that he's interested in using his experience
as a sound man on 'rock dub' in the band's repertoire, and later still
I get a chance to hear what he's talking about when the band practice
their as yet limited set in a workaday rehearsal studio somewhere in
South London.
What becomes immediately apparent on seeing and hearing what for want
of anything better we'll term the John Lydon Band is that they aren't
going to be any surrogate Sex Pistols. In fact, once Keith gets across
to the vocal console and starts knob twiddling, what emerges at times
sounds more like something from 'Electric Ladyland' than your archetypal
three-chord punk powerthrash.
There is a quality of deliberation
and thought to their music that was apparent only fleetingly with
the Pistols. Of course there is a limit to what a line-up of bass,
drums, guitar and vocals can achieve, as Keith readily bears witness
after their first number. "What
can you do?" he shrugs. "It doesn't sound like heavy metal
though, does it. Does it?"
No, it doesn't. Levene's guitar style alone precludes any such comparison.
Though built on chord sequences and a minimal amount of solo work,
Levene seems to have somehow stripped the sound he culls from his Les
Paul Junior to stark streamlined basics.
There's no windmill Townshend power chords, not even Steve Jones blood
and thunder attack, just cool precision wielded with unmistakable power.
Wobble is evidently limited as to what he can attempt on his Fender
Precision bass, but there's no mistaking that the man has a genuine
feel for the rhythms of the instrument and should at his present rate
of progress be able to see off a sizeable portion of the opposition
before the year is out.
He certainly has a rhythm partner to match. Jim Walker plays a rapid,
sharp-shooting kit, full of busy flurries and cymbal breaks.
John Lydon meanwhile alternately
slumps beside the microphone in apparent boredom or hulks over the
microphone incanting the lyrics to 'Religion' in a painfully deliberate
way. His style has also been an unholy combination of reggae DJ and
pub carouser. The time I saw him rehearse he seemed intent on projecting
anguish as simply and powerfully as possible. His persona remains
as inscrutable as it was with the Pistols, a mercurial visage flitting
between outrage, glee, anger and mockery. He's got a strange mug
alright, at times he can look like nothing less than a deranged Irish
literati out of the James Joyce and Flann O'Brien mould. Other times
he wears the glazed trance of a movie psychopath. In relity of course
he's something else again – actually disarmingly
human much (but definitely not all) of the time. His family, incidentally,
are real charming folk.
The numbers they play include
'Religion', formerly entitled 'Sod In Heaven' and a scathing attack
on Roman Catholicism, such as one might expect from a disillusioned
Irish Catholic: "Suck your host...
the holy ghost... read how many dead in The Irish Post..."
They also do a song called
'Public Image', are toying with the prospect of featuring 'E.M.I.',
and played 'Belsen Was A Gas' – a number
that in the past has always been considered to be the work of Sid Vicious.
They also seem to be fond of playing 'My Generation', a number which
Wobble introduces as "a vision I had last night". One suspects
that its inclusion is somewhat sarcastic.
Don Letts also showed up
to jam and do some startlingly competent talk-overs. "Can you do a toast of 'Religion', maan?" asks
Lydon.
Are they the future of rock and roll? Bollocks. The last word is Wobble's.
"Talking and analysing
and going round in a circle is last year's thing. Things are too
obvious now. If people don't know what's going on in the music industry
now with the big bands etc. then they'll never know. We're not into
making statements, we're just into having a laugh. We just got a
vibe and people in tune are just gonna pick it up."
Seen. |