Billed as the autobiography
of John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs works as well, if
not better, as a '70s generational memoir and indictment of post-war
class-ridden Britain as it does a personal account of one singer's life.
Unimpressed by Jon Savage's history, England's Dreaming, lydon's method
is to shatter the dead weight of the Pistols' myth by including a range
of voices which completely contradict and indict each other; thus rewriting
'76 to '78, not as the golden years of pop culture, but as the "utter
disaster" they were. Lydon insists he never felt a real port of
the Pistols, a gong Mclaren had already pulled together before he and
then Vicious joined up. As the song-writer of the group, he nonetheless
embodied their spirit.
Setting up this distance
between himself and the others allows him to take the Rotten persona
out of the milieu of Kings Road and the Sex shop and back into his own
upbringing. The second generation North London Irish context he sketches
hasn't been noted before, and it yields surprising images: of lydon
as on artistic 18-year-old happy to stay to stay in his room and listen
to Can records, of Sid Vicious as a pre-Pistols Bowie fanatic, of how
Bowie's music was the crucial nexus through which soul boys and art
school kids, football fans and the Bromley crowd could all mix. The
non-aligned squat scene enabled the not-yet-named punks to slip in and
out of different Londons: the London of soul, of reggae, of Jarman,
even of House Of Lords perviness. This squa-tocracy, more Wildeian than
Clockwork Orange, allowed girls an equality of reinvention unknown to
previous pop cults.
By including interviews with
many of the major players and excluding Mclaren, Lydon makes Rotten
a walk-on part in the drama of the times. The result is to restore arbitrariness
to the punk moment, to give it a sense of no-one knowing what it all
meant or where it was all leading. The last section is taken up with
the eight-year-long court case he pursued against McLaren, and, while
this drags on, it's saved by Lydon's Ortonesque relish for the crafted
put-down.
The missing element, though,
is not Mclaren but the story of Public Image Limited.
Where the Pistols in their conviction politics now seem impossibly ancient,
Pil's dub-inflected mystery points to now, the '90s of The Orb and Aba-Shanti,
ambient and jungle as survival strategies for the hard rimes of this
present. Lydon is less willing to disinter the bones of PiL because
they mean more to him, but it's their sound we can use and abuse nowadays,
not that of the Pistols anymore. |