Rhino Films was in post-production on our first three features when I got a call from Eric Gardner, an artist’s manager who represented Todd Rundgren. I had made a deal for Rhino to license the Bearsville Records masters, which included Rundgren’s catalogue, and I had developed a good relationship with Eric the past ten years.
Now he was representing John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the 1970s band the Sex Pistols. He’d called to inquire if Rhino Films would be interested in making a movie from Lydon’s 1994 autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. I was surprised when he told me that no one had previously optioned the property.
“Punk rock” was coined in the early 1970s to refer to American rock bands of the 1960s that sounded like they got started practicing in their garages. More specifically, it meant edgy bands with attitude that derived their sound from The Rolling Stones, bands like The Standells, The Seeds, The Shadows of Knight, and ? and the Mysterians. In 1976 the Sex Pistols emerged, spearheading a movement in Britain composed of angry, ragged musicians and singers who railed against the class system, the bleak economy, and the unresponsive government. The press called the music “punk rock.” The better known performers included The Clash, The Jam, The Damned, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
I loved the Sex Pistols’ debut single “Anarchy in the UK” as soon as I heard it. I was curious to know more about the group, and Robert Hilburn, the pop music editor of the Los Angeles Times, assigned me to interview their manager, Malcolm McLaren, by phone. This may have been the first interview article to be published in the US, and ran many months prior to Rolling Stone covering the group. At this point it might be apt for an overview of the band, and my March 1977 Los Angeles Times piece is a good place to start.
England’s Sex Pistols are already being called The Rolling Stones of the seventies. But The Stones’ legendary outrageousness pales in comparison to the Pistols’ antics, which have caused them to be banned from English radio and TV. Municipal governments have banded together, forbidding them from performing anywhere in the UK. It seems as if America is the only market open to them. “Right now we’re making arrangements to come to the States,” manager Malcolm McLaren said by phone from London. “But instead of just tour there, we may move there completely.”
McLaren is part-owner/designer of London’s SEX shop (now called Seditionaries), which deals in avant-garde clothes, often with a bondage motif. Johnny Rotten, 21-year-old lead vocalist of the Pistols, used to come into the store and steal items. McLaren decided to get back some of the lost money by managing the band.
The Pistols’ music is loud and aggressive. On stage Rotten flaunts a ripped wardrobe barely held together by safety pins, which also pierce his ear lobes, inspiring a whole new fashion in Britain. With a ghostly pallor, he looks as if he’ll keel over any moment, which contrasts sharply with his shockingly dyed-orange hair. After he’s through smoking cigarettes, he puts them out on his arms. He’s got the marks and a stay in the hospital fighting the incurred infection to show for it. When the Pistols find themselves in an extremely good mood, it’s not uncommon for them to abandon their instruments on stage and join their audience in brawls.
Soon after their first release, “Anarchy in the UK” (on the EMI label), late last year, the Pistols made a much-publicized appearance on a British TV show. The group’s use of obscenities led to headlines in all five national papers, lots of indignant letter writing, and organized protests. One irate viewer kicked in his picture tube.
A week later the band was waiting in a smoky airport departure lounge for a flight to Amsterdam. Guitarist Steve Jones, reportedly nauseated from a night of heavy drinking, threw up, unable to make it to the toilet. Photographers swarmed on the scene, and it was blown out of proportion.
Amid mounting protests, EMI cancelled the band’s contract. Groups of mothers planted themselves outside the home of the general manager of EMI with petitions and banners that read: “Pop Profiteers Stop Ruining Our Kids Ears!” Others as well, including McLaren, were confronted with complaints and hecklers. In England the record went from 46 to 32 on the charts before it was withdrawn.
“The Sex Pistols are totally committed, and honestly don’t care,” said Rory Johnston, their representative in the United States. “They’re real anarchists, they’re not paper-outrageous like The Damned or the other punk groups around. Now that they’re successful, they’re still out there on the street. Johnny Rotten, for instance, doesn’t ride around in a car now that he’s made money. He still takes the buses and subways. People know who he is and he gets abused. The Sex Pistols are a national institution; they’re the most talked-about group since The Rolling Stones.”
With all of this interest, England A&M’s Derek Green convinced Jerry Moss (the M of A&M) to sign the group. Contracts were inked March 10 outside Buckingham Palace, and a new single, “God Save the Queen,” was announced. The record was never issued and they were off the label in six days. No explanation was given publicly, and local A&M spokespeople were tight-lipped, leaking only a “no comment.”
McLaren is just as puzzled. “A&M is a good company. They wanted us, and looked to us to open up the label to a wider spectrum of music that they were not usually associated with. Immediately there was dissent from other artists on the label. Lots of people at the BBC, as well as people in publishing and promotion at A&M, expressed their negativeness toward A&M signing the Sex Pistols. Initially A&M thought they could handle things but they quite clearly bit off more than they could chew. There’s a whole degree of mystery surrounding their actions; it’s kind of an industrial blacklist. The reason, if you want to call it that, we were given was that the Sex Pistols would tarnish the kind of quality MOR label image A&M has.”
With a studio already booked, the Pistols proceeded to record an album with producer Chris Thomas (whose credits include Procol Harum, Roxy Music and the Climax Blues Band). The titles confirm the whole negative image: “No Feelings,” “No Love,” “There Is No Future,” “Problems,” “Liar,” and “Pretty Vacant.”
Mulling over how to expose his group under the enforced restrictions, a light bulb over Malcolm’s head flashed “a film.” “It will be a way for people to see the group and hear their music, without the theater owners risking an unpredictable live show.” Written by English comedian Peter Cook, in some ways it will be a fantasy/factual melding à la A Hard Day’s Night. Malcolm also feels the film will aid the group in attracting record companies.
Understandably shaken, McLaren is negotiating with other labels, but even with a sizeable cash settlement he’s feeling the effects of the turmoil. “The image I’ve got now is almost like a contagious disease. When I walk into record company offices people really scatter and lose themselves very fast.”
I think it’s interesting that McLaren had contacted Peter Cook about writing the Sex Pistols’ movie. Sexploitation director Russ Meyer was hired to direct a script written by American film critic Roger Ebert. Meyer lasted only four days before he abandoned the film. An ex-military man who normally ran a tight ship, he couldn’t deal with the Pistols’ lack of discipline and commitment. A documentary of sorts was admirably cobbled together by director Julien Temple and released in 1980. John Lydon did not participate in the newly filmed segments.
I was a fan of the group’s music, initially from the UK singles, which we sold in the Rhino store. I loved Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols when the album was released in October 1977. I thought it was an exceptional album, now as well as then. It’s remarkable how a group of street urchins could deliver such a confident collection of performances. The music was simple, but powerful—Steve Jones’ grinding guitar, Glen Matlock’s throbbing bass, and Paul Cook’s solid drumming—providing the perfect pocket for Lydon’s raging vocals. (Jones also played bass on a number of tracks.) One has to give a lot of credit for the result to producer Chris Thomas. He created the band’s dynamic sound by having Jones quadruple his rhythm guitar while ensuring that Lydon’s vocals could be heard, and provided subtleties like ghostly background vocals on “Bodies.” The album did not sell well in the United States. It got only to 106 on Billboard’s LP chart, dropping off after twelve weeks. But it sold steadily though the years, and by the late-eighties had totaled over a million.
In the early days of Rhino, to enhance the appeal of one of our new bands compilations—1978’s Saturday Night Pogo—I produced a cover of the Sex Pistols’ “Belsen Was a Gas.” The group hadn’t released their version. I learned the song from a tape a friend had of the group’s Winterland concert from earlier in the year. I think on the strength of my approximating Lydon’s scabrous vocals, months following the death of Sid Vicious, Rory Johnston asked me if I would audition to be the group’s new bass player. I didn’t play bass, but neither had Sid. I thought about it only for a few seconds, and declined. The music was too angry, the scene too negative, and I couldn’t relate to the fashion.
I loved Lydon’s book, though. His memory was intact and he had a cynical sense of humor and an entertaining way of telling his story. Lydon’s cowriters complemented his reminiscences with those of others on the scene, including his ex-bandmates.
John was born into an Irish family and survived a tough childhood. His family had an odd bathing regimen: “I used to get scrubbed with Dettol, a toilet cleaner solvent we also used for the sinks to kill off the bugs.” When he was seven, he spent a year in the hospital battling spinal meningitis, frequently in a comatose state. When cured, he couldn’t recognize his parents when they came to take him home. He attended an Irish Catholic school “with wicked and violent nuns.” He described himself as a “shy, nervous kid.”
His mother was often sick and he was responsible for getting his brothers dressed for school. This later led him to feel comfortable working with troubled kids. He described his mother as “a thinker,” and he was, too. He loved reading and treasured Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the writings of Oscar Wilde. His favorite musical acts were Alice Cooper, Hawkwind, and T. Rex. Seeing the gangster Kray Brothers on TV also made an impression: “They looked so viciously sharp, the world’s best dressers… That’s how I like my suits to be worn—with a sense of vicious purpose.”
John was a denizen of the King’s Road. He was known as the kid with dyed-green hair who wore a homemade “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt and second-hand clothes bound with safety pins to keep them from disintegrating. He liked chaos. There was also a sensitive side to him.
Malcolm McLaren was looking for something different to invigorate the rock band he managed. John hadn’t sung in a group before, hadn’t seriously thought about it, but he did make up lyrics, “ludicrous songs about people killing each other with broken light bulbs.” And John had ambition: “I always wanted to be brilliant, excellent, loved and adored right from the start.” He flailed about during his audition, which consisted of singing along to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” as it blasted from the jukebox in McLaren’s shop.
In August 1975 when John auditioned, Britain’s unemployment was the highest it had been in thirty years. John found London a depressing place, “completely run-down, with trash on the streets.” He was angry at Britain’s still-influential class system, which denied opportunities in education and employment to members of the working class. He also saw himself as “a person who respected the right of others, and always stood up for the disenfranchised.”
Steve Jones renamed Lydon “Johnny Rotten” because of his poor dental hygiene. His teeth were green. Lydon loved Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III—“so utterly vile, it was great”–and revealed that he based his Johnny Rotten character on Olivier’s mannerisms in the 1955 film: “nasty, evil, conniving, selfish.” With the Sex Pistols’ aggressive music, their ripped-up clothes, overall surly manner, and Lydon singing that he’s the “Antichrist” in “Anarchy in the UK,” one would have expected the group to be violent thugs. But that wasn’t the case. As Lydon said in Rotten, “The only violence about the Sex Pistols was the anger. We were not violent people.”
Although Glen Matlock was a good bass player and songwriter—he’s credited with coming up with the music for “Anarchy in the UK” and “Pretty Vacant”—his personality and fondness for The Beatles infuriated Lydon, so as of February 1977, he was out. As the newcomer, John felt that he needed somebody on his side, so the group agreed to his suggestion of Sid Vicious. Sid had an authentic punk image, but he had never played bass before. He had also been involved in incidences of violence. A misguided glass thrown at The Damned during a performance at the 100 Club, shattered, with fragments flying into a girl’s eye, had been attributed to him. Sid was incarcerated for that. At a Pistols’ performance also at the 100 Club, he assaulted music journalist Nick Kent with a bike chain.
The group’s offensive “God Save the Queen,” released to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in June 1977, alienated the group further from British society. As there were few venues that would book them, Malcolm set up a six-date tour of the American South with a concluding concert at Winterland in San Francisco.
With his newfound fame, Sid acquired a new girlfriend, American Nancy Spungen, who introduced him to heroin and initiated his downward spiral. John, concerned for Sid, elected to accompany him and the road crew on the tour bus to keep him away from the drug. As Malcolm, Steve, and Paul were flying to the tour locations, this served to alienate John further from the others. When they got to the final date in San Francisco, John and Sid were considered persona non gratae. John was abandoned in San Francisco without a plane ticket, and had to borrow money to fly back to London. Sid scored, overdosed, and then overdosed again on the plane to New York. (Sid died from an overdose on February 2, 1979.)
Although the Sex Pistols elevated awareness of social problems and expressed the frustration of the working class, their primary impact was initiating England’s punk rock movement. Give them credit also for later inspiring the punk rock trend in the US, and even later, the grunge sound. Politically they accomplished little. The Conservative government was elected in 1979. A criticism of the American punk groups that followed—none of which was considered a commercial success—was that they were more motivated by the musical trend and the fashion rather than a need to express social discontent.
Interestingly, the gang of punks John hung around with—aside from Sid Vicious whose real name was John Beverley—did well as responsible adults: two teachers, an accountant, and a band leader. And John, who once professed an attraction to chaos and anarchy, expressed a philosophy of passive resistance in the wisdom of middle age, stating, “Gandhi is my life’s inspiration.” The Sex Pistols were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. In a typical anti-establishment gesture, none of the members attended the induction ceremony.
A meeting was set up in the dining room at Shutters on the Beach hotel in Santa Monica: John Lydon, Eric Gardner, Stephen Nemeth, my brother-in-law and head of production for Rhino Films, and me. Lydon, shall we say, had filled out from his former undernourished youth. A waitress came over, telling us what a fan of the group she was, not sure who other than John might have been in the Sex Pistols as she looked us over.
During that meeting, and a subsequent lunch, John came across as congenial, goofy. He smiled and gyrated throughout the meal and proved to be a good conversationalist. He cleared his throat of phlegm, and we both discovered that we were allergic to milk (which is different from lactose intolerance). He explained that’s how punk fans spitting on their favorite groups started. As he sang, phlegm emerged from his throat and he spat onto the stage. The fans, not understanding his discomfort, imitated the action and the trend developed.
I felt that we needed an English writer, someone familiar with the punk rock scene, the social order, and the colloquialisms. We were contacted by Jeremy Drysdale, who read about our project in the industry trades. He left school at sixteen and got work in advertising, rising to cocreative director of the Visage Company. He worked hard on his writing samples and we told him to fly to Los Angeles—at his own expense—for a lunch meeting at Shutters On the Beach on April 2, 1999. It was the four of us, as before, with Jeremy, who made a favorable impression. He learned later that we were apprehensive that he might be an alcoholic (more on that soon) because he drank four bottles of beer. I was concerned, and it wasn’t just because I paid for lunch. The next day Jeremy came down with the flu. For the next three days Stephen left cartons of hot soup outside his hotel room door.
Given our low budget, we considered him the perfect person for the job, even though he’d never written a screenplay before. We paid Jeremy $25,000 for the screenplay. Lydon’s option fee and other expenses amounted to an additional $15,000. Jeremy went back to England, read John’s book, made notes, and returned to Los Angeles, this time at our expense, for a story meeting with John. On January 20, 2000, Jeremy took a cab to John’s Venice Beach pad—which had once been owned by movie star Mae West—arriving at 11:00 a.m. He pounded on the door, but it took a long time before a grumpy and hung over Lydon answered, addressing Jeremy as “Are you the fucking writer?” Jeremy was asked to sit in the lounge—which was littered with empty bottles—while Lydon “woke up,” which included taking a shower.
Upon his return, John was responsive to Jeremy’s questions. Jeremy: “I found him to be spiky, intelligent, well-read and quick-witted, and I quite liked him, although he seemed to have a massive chip on his shoulder about the way he had been treated.” The two drank beer throughout the session—no food was consumed—and Jeremy had to keep up or John would hurl abuse at him. They worked for eight hours, splitting thirty-six beers.
The next day, Jeremy let it slip that he had a (small) per diem of which John wanted to take advantage by dining at a fancy Marina del Rey restaurant. Unfortunately John was in obnoxious Rotten mode and alienated the servers, none of whom seemed to know who he was. They worked for only four-and-a-half hours because John was “very hung over.”
One of the problems with the book was that it lacked a narrative flow. John would spray his opinions like a garden hose on high. Interview passages from others on the scene would intrude on John’s first-person voice. Had Jeremy been experienced, he might have bridged the book’s shortcomings in his first draft.
To John’s credit, he was a stickler for accuracy. Most of his comments reflected that concern. In order to make a book or other account workable in a feature film format, liberties have to be taken with the facts. Sometimes numerous characters have to be combined into fewer ones. The same with locations. Time can be an issue, the expanse of years, but in this case the Sex Pistols’ duration—a little over two years—was workable. As our projected movie was conceived to accommodate a lower budget— speculatively eight million dollars—the writer has to be aware of the number of locations and extras, among other considerations. As John was also new to scriptwriting, he was bothered when events deviated from how they were conveyed in his book. Sometimes Jeremy had difficulty capturing the voice of a character. John could have helped more here.
Stephen, Eric and I had script notes. John’s were the most colorful of all, rendered in a histrionic, near-Ralph Steadman style. I doubt whether anybody else in the movie-making process had experienced comments such as the following: “Doh! Boring! Silly Fuck Off Talk. Middle Class Twat Talk. It reads silly, like a debutante’s hissy fit.” Sometimes his comments were more pointed: “Either be accurate or deliberately comedic.” Jeremy’s second draft rectified most of the concerns.
I liked what Guy Ritchie did with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and thought he would be the perfect director for our film, but he turned it down. Eric suggested Penelope Spheeris because she had directed the Decline of Western Civilization series of documentaries, one of which profiled the Los Angeles punk community in 1980. She also showed her comedic sense with Wayne’s World and The Beverly Hillbillies. John met her and liked her. Stephen had Jeremy fly out to meet her and discuss the script. Spheeris, who had written only a fraction of the films she had directed, kept kvetching to Jeremy that she “wrote her own stuff and didn’t see why they needed an outside writer.”
A number of weeks later, Stephen received a call from John wondering if his character could be played by “a woman, a black child, and an old guy?” It was a bad idea in 2000, and no less in 2007 when six different characters—including a black child—played Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. I guess John was ahead of his time.
I was surprised that the project fell apart. I thought John didn’t renew the option because he thought he and Penelope could make the movie without us. Or maybe he had now fallen out with Eric Gardner. If he didn’t renew with us, he wouldn’t have to cut Eric in as a producer. Stephen merely thought that he changed his mind and didn’t want to make the film. As of this writing, no movie has been made from Lydon’s book.
I had been looking forward to the production. The shortened title of “Rotten” intrigued me. There had never been a feature film with that title. If the movie turned out less than stellar, it would be too easy for dismissive reviewers to say that the movie lived up to its name. It seemed like a very John Lydon thing to do.