John Lydon in Soho, April 1976 (© Ray Stevenson)

3

I got you in my camera

A second of your life, ruined for life

You wanna ruin me in your magazine

You wanna cover us in margarine

Now is the time, you got the time

To realize, to have real eyes.

John Lydon for the Sex Pistols: ‘I Wanna Be Me’ (1976)

Punk was out of the starting blocks, and, just as the Ramones’ first album accelerated a generation of English musicians, the competition to form Punk Rock groups intensified. During the spring of 1976, McLaren and Bernie Rhodes were actively trying to fashion groups out of the musicians that had ebbed in and out of London SS. Understanding that the Sex Pistols would be more impressive if they could appear as the spearhead of a new generation, McLaren embarked on a policy of nurturing an environment where people make things happen.

‘The 101’ers were doing well‚’ says Joe Strummer about his first group, named after their squat at 101 Walterton Terrace. Nurtured by a resident spot at their local pub, the Chippenham, and the surrounding squat community, the 101’ers had just released their first single, a fast, intense Pub Rocker called ‘Keys to your Heart’. ‘We were working very hard: we did twelve gigs in fourteen days in places like Sheffield, and it was up and down every day, but we were invisible. ‘In April the Sex Pistols played the Nashville for the first time, supporting us. I walked out onstage while they were doing their soundcheck and I heard Malcolm going to John, “Do you want those kind of shoes that Steve’s got or the kind that Paul’s got? What sort of sweater do you want?” And I thought, “Blimey they’ve got a manager, and he’s offering them clothes!” The rest of my group didn’t think much of all this, but I sat out in the audience. Lydon was really thin: he pulled out his snot rag and blew into it and he went, “If you hadn’t guessed already, we’re the Sex Pistols‚” and they blasted into “Substitute”.

‘They did “Steppin’ Stone” which we did but they were light years ahead of us. The difference was, we played “Route 66” to the drunks at the bar, going “Please like us”. But here was this quartet who were standing there going, “We don’t give a toss what you think, you pricks, this is what we like to play and this is the way we’re gonna play it.” They were from another century, it took my head off. They honestly didn’t give a shit. The audience were shocked.

‘After that I started going down to Tuesday nights at the 100 Club. That’s when Bernie Rhodes came up to me and said, “Give me your number, I want to call you about something.” We had some dates supporting Kilburn and the High Roads but I split the group up. They thought I was mad. They were probably right, but it was a case of jump that side of the fence or you’re on the other side. Remember the T-shirt that Bernie and Malcolm designed, “Which side of the bed”? It was so clear.’

‘Strummer came rushing up to me in the Red Cow: “Have I done the right thing?”‚’ says Roger Armstrong. ‘“What?” “I’ve left the 101’ers.” He was in tow with Mick Jones and Bernie, and he started on a whole rant about how this was the future. I knew Bernie from the great King’s Road triumvirate. Malcolm, Bernie and Andy Czezowski: the tailor, the rabbi and the accountant. It was a funny alliance: they all got their band out of it.’

Solidarity, however, was not the main spur. Both the Ramones and the Sex Pistols had already shown the way: it was possible to make a loud noise, express hostility, learn in public and get attention. This temporary advantage had to be exploited quickly: the result was a frantic jockeying for position, like a game of musical chairs.

‘I saw Bernie and Malcolm as competitors‚’ says Chrissie Hynde, ‘when they could have been working together. Everything that Bernie did seemed like a pale version of what Malcolm was doing with the Sex Pistols. For instance, when I finally came back from France, I was going to do something with Mick Jones. Mick phoned me up one day and said, “I want you to talk to Bernie who’s going to manage us.” “I’m in a band with you, I don’t want to talk to this other guy.” He goes, “Alright, I’ll try to explain. You won’t sing at all, you’ll just play the guitar and be in the background. The band’s going to be called School Girls Underwear.” I thought, “I’m going to be in a band called School Girls Underwear, I’m sure.”

‘I had a meeting with Malcolm over some won ton soup. The Sex Pistols were going and he wanted another band. What Malcolm did at this point was he would meet people at parties who were personalities and put them together. He said he’d met this great kid drummer called Chris Miller, who was Rat Scabies by now, and he had these other people. So we went to meet this guy coming off the train from Hemel Hempstead, and it was David Zero, who later changed his name to Dave Vanian: he looked like Alice Cooper.

‘Later on we went to some retro clothing store in Covent Garden and there was another David who they’d tried out for the Sex Pistols. He didn’t want to be in a band at all, but Malcolm dragged him into it because he thought he had the right personality. That was very Malcolm: he didn’t care about the music at all, he was just interested in personalities. So we had the black David and the white one: they were the singers. I was supposed to play guitar, not sing at all. We were to be called the Masters of the Backside.’

London SS had finally split two ways: guitarist Bryan James teamed up with drummer Chris Miller, now named Rat Scabies after a bout of the disease. Miller’s old Croydon friend Ray Burns was brought in on guitar. He was a working-class drop-out whose manic behaviour masked real sensitivity. ‘Tony James was the bass player‚’ says Burns, ‘they gave him the elbow because he was too interested in his clothes, so I got the job. Then they chopped my hair off. I didn’t mind: I was like a hippy with teeth. That was London SS: when Chrissie Hynde joined it became Mike Hunt’s Honourable Discharge.

‘Malcolm came and put us in rehearsal for two days and then came down with Helen and Rotten and all those people, and they sat down watching us, laughing, and told us to fuck off. No commercial possibilities. Malcolm was good to us: he gave us money and talked sense. Chrissie left: we started playing ourselves. Brian and Rat had met Vanian at the Nashville – they thought he looked good. The name “The Damned” was Brian’s idea. We were damned really: everything that could go wrong did.’

Within weeks of forming, the Damned were given rehearsal space by John Krivine and Andy Czezowski and were being groomed as Sex competitors. Meanwhile, Bernard Rhodes was working on the other half of London SS. ‘One morning I was signing on‚’ says Joe Strummer, ‘and there were these people staring at me on the bench. I was thinking there was going to be a ruck. It was Paul Simonon, Mick Jones and Viv Albertine: these were the weeks that Bernie had pulled Mick and Paul out of London SS and put them together. If they’d have come up to me, I’d probably have swung at one of them. Get it in first: Lisson Grove was the worst place on earth.

‘By that time Bernie had fallen out with Malcolm over the swastika, because Bernie’s mother was a refugee from Europe. Bernie called me and I agreed to meet him and Keith Levene. We drove over to Shepherd’s Bush to the squat where Paul and Mick and Viv had been staying – that’s why they’d been staring at me – and we put the group together there and then. For about a week we were the Psychotic Negatives, then we were the Weak Heartdrops, after a Big Youth lyric, then Paul thought of the name the Clash.’

The Sex Pistols had had great publicity but it worked both ways. After the reports of violence, doors were closing in their faces: they were banned now from the Marquee and the Nashville, and El Paradise had proved too unstable as a regular venue. The day that the NME piece about the Nashville fight came out, the group played a club called the Babalu halfway up the Finchley Road: ‘That was the best concert we ever did‚’ says Glen Matlock: ‘there were about thirteen people there, including us.’

McLaren and Helen Mininberg collected what press material the group had and wrapped it with an A3 poster, two photos printed at the Labour Party Press at Peckham Rye by McLaren’s old friend Jamie Reid, who had been brought into the fold for his printing expertise. Armed with this pack, McLaren approached booking agencies, but without success. McLaren then decided to ask John Curd, a bearish man who promoted concerts at the Roundhouse, if the Sex Pistols could be added to the forthcoming Ramones bill. Malcolm and Nils went to Curd’s home, where they were thrown bodily down the stairs.

‘That was the incident that made McLaren want to go totally outside the music industry‚’ says Jonh Ingham. ‘His idea was to create your own, total alternative to what was going on in the business at that time. Malcolm was trying to get his band into situations. One of his things was, “You have to pay to see them, because then you’re making an active effort.” That was the opposite to what the Pub Rockers were thinking, which was get your band in front of any audience: what he was doing was creating an audience that was specifically for the band.’

During May, the group were set a new challenge: a tour of the north of England. ‘That was ridiculous‚’ says Nils Stevenson. ‘Malcolm would give us just about enough money to get there, then you have to fend for yourself. Steve would steal chocolate bars to eat. You had to make sure you got your money as most people didn’t want to pay after seeing the group. Frightening times playing these really straight places. I’m totally non-aggressive, but my adrenalin was so whacked up that I’d be up on stage kicking punters off.

‘In Barnsley, we played this awful place out in the sticks, just this pub in the middle of nowhere. The place filled up and things got a bit hairy, so I made the landlord call the police, who escorted us out. In Hull things got very nasty, we had to high-tail it out of there. Rotten would get very lippy and put the crowd down, but it wasn’t too bad. It was just that the look of the band and their lack of professionalism used to incense these people. They wanted a hippy group with long hair but these kids really pissed them off.

‘We’d have the cheapest, cheapest vans: we had one to go to Scarborough that wouldn’t go up hills, so we had to look at the Ordnance Survey map. Glen worked out this ridiculous route, all the way round everywhere, but it was flat so we could get to the venue. You’d tell Malcolm about all these problems when you got home and he’d be very apologetic, but the same thing would happen again the next week.

‘There were ridiculous arguments going on in the van. You can imagine how petty John could be, depending on his mood. Rotten would always insist on going in the comfy seat: “I’m the star, fuck off.” It could be quite uncomfortable with all four of them together, but it was all superficial: as soon as they were on their own everyone would be as sweet as a nut. Rotten would generally want the company of everybody but would be too insecure and would put on this weird front all the time and wander off by himself, watching people to see if they had noticed.’

‘It was vile, horrible, a nightmare‚’ says John Lydon. ‘No chance to relax, nothing, nylon sheets. What you can never get in your book is the utter, total boredom of being in a band.’

‘It was like little boys‚’ says Glen Matlock. ‘Imagine being in a van with Rotten. And the places! We were playing in Whitby and they kept telling us to turn it down. In the end we were just larking about pretending to mime. This bloke comes up and says: “It’s no good lads. Look we’ll pay you what you’re due, but you can’t hear the bingo in the other room.” We’d played for about 15 minutes.’

The pattern was the same in or outside London: rejection by most people and instant identification on the part of a tiny but significant minority. ‘My boyfriend then, Peter Lloyd and I lived in Ferryhill just outside Durham‚’ says Pauline Murray of Penetration, ‘but we’d go to see everything in Newcastle. We’d seen pictures of the Sex Pistols looking great. We were real provincial fans. When we eventually got to London, and saw Johnny Rotten on a bus, we followed him into this shop: the jukebox had songs like “Little Johnny Jewel” and Jonathan Richman, which we hadn’t heard.

‘In Newcastle, you could watch things as they came along‚ track it all through – T. Rex and Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople, Hawkwind, Cockney Rebel and then nothing for a long time. We started to go and see Doctors of Madness, who were a real record-company type band: then we saw the Sex Pistols in Northallerton, in this tiny club. A short while later they played with the Doctors of Madness in Middlesbrough and they wiped them out. They wiped a lot of bands out. It sounds a cliché now but I saw it happen. All those bands lost their confidence when the Sex Pistols came along.’

‘My life changed the moment that I saw the Sex Pistols‚’ says Howard Devoto. ‘I immediately got caught up in trying to make things happen. Suddenly there was a direction, something I passionately wanted to be involved in. It was amazingly heady. I’d said to Malcolm, “Do you want to come and play at my college?” and he said, “If you can set it up, we’ll do it.” I tried to persuade the Students’ Union to put them on, but they wouldn’t go for it. Not because of their reputation, just that they had never heard of them. There was still very little in the press.’

Howard and Peter had already formed their own Sex-Pistols type group and had changed their identities to seal this pact of transformation. Instead of McNeish, there was Shelley, the name Peter would have had if he was a girl. Howard Trafford became Devoto. The group name, the Buzzcocks, came from a February Time Out review of Rock Follies which ends, ‘get a buzz, cock’. The next thing was to play out, and promoting a Sex Pistols’ concert was the easiest way: ‘Someone told me about this little hall above the Free Trade Hall‚’ says Devoto, ‘I got it for the fourth of June, and meanwhile we were planning to play ourselves.’

‘The other two bottled out‚’ says Shelley, ‘so we got this band, the Mandala Band, to play with the Pistols. We were organizing this thing and we put an ad in the New Manchester Review for a drummer and bass player. On the Friday afternoon we arrived at the Lesser Free Trade Hall and Howard said to me, within earshot of Malcolm, that a bass guitarist had called him, and they were calling back. As the doors were getting ready to open, I was in the box office taking the money: Malcolm was in the street saying to people, “Come on in, there’s a great band from London, you know, they’re going to be famous. Roll up! Roll up!”

‘There was this guy standing on the steps, saying he was waiting for somebody, he probably said he was waiting for a guitarist. So Malcolm said: “Oh, you’re a bass guitarist?” “Yeah.” Malcolm said: “Oh, they’re in here‚” and brought him inside to the box office and said to me, “Here’s your bass guitarist.” And there was the bemused Steve Diggle, with collar-length hair. It was a real Brian Rix farce. So I said, “Now you’re here, come and see this group.” And he liked it, and so we said, “We’ve got a band, we’re not too dissimilar‚” and we made arrangements.’

Advertised by a four-side, folded A4 leaflet, the Manchester concert was a good opportunity to establish the Sex Pistols outside London, since Manchester is England’s third largest city and the gateway to the North and North West. The concert was poorly attended but, again, the seventy or so people there included future performers and media names, – such as Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner of Joy Division/New Order, Morrissey, Factory’s Tony Wilson – who would lay the foundations for Manchester’s future musical preeminence.

‘That first appearance was quite difficult‚’ says Morrissey; ‘There weren’t any instructions. Being northern, we didn’t know how to react: people were very rigid. There was a support group from Blackburn, and their hair swept off the stage. People were unwilling to respond to the Sex Pistols; the audience was very slim. It was a front-parlour affair. The Sex Pistols still had slightly capped sleeves and flares were not entirely taboo at that point: their jeans were somewhere in the middle. I liked them, but they seemed like a clued-in singer and three patched musicians.’

‘At that time, I’d never known what a good audience was‚’ says John Lydon, ‘but when an audience behaves badly to you, it does tend to make your work better.’ Bolstered by their rejections, the Sex Pistols were building up speed. ‘There was a sudden point when I realized how good they were‚’ says Ray Stevenson. ‘It was at the 100 Club: that telepathy and tension, where John would be slagging off the audience, Steve and Paul would be doing something, and they would just go into a number at the perfect moment. John’s control. I was seeing them as amateurs, and to imagine this bozo kid from Finsbury Park with no schooling was phenomenal.’

‘They were having such fun‚’ says Caroline Coon; ‘Steve told me he wanted to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix. Chris Spedding gave them a confidence they hadn’t had: after he produced their first demo tape he said they had the most expressive guitar lines he’d heard in two decades of working in Rock’n’Roll. Steve was a typically underprivileged child, but he was the musician in the Sex Pistols. Johnny was like a young Rimbaud: thoughtful, angry, beautiful. I don’t think he ever realized how beautiful he was.’

Tapes exist of both the Manchester concert and a performance at the 100 Club on the 29th of the month. Manchester is a quantum leap from the Nashville in April, but the too Club tape is something else. Here the Sex Pistols are wound up to a pitch of impossible tautness: they swoop and drive through their set of fifteen songs (more than half of all they would ever play in their brief life). They begin with an improvisation, ‘Flowers of Romance’, loosely based on Mud’s ‘Dynamite’, over which Lydon chants and rants. Phrases leap out of the aural streetfight: ‘True love and peace’, ‘Jah Rastafari’.

The songs are a series of musical manifestos: each sets up a statement which is only partially resolved at the song’s end. They pass in a strip of rough harmonies from Glen, sounds of aerial battle from Steve Jones’s guitar, and a rhythm section that never lets up. Lydon is mesmerizing: taunting both McLaren – ‘you always hide when I want money from you’ – and his audience of peers. Just after ‘Flowers of Romance’, Jones breaks a string but Lydon keeps the crowd entertained with a non-stop stream of squeals, sarcasm and invective, delivered in a bewildering variety of voices.

In the intimate setting of the 100 Club, the group could relax enough to take risks with their material and their performances. There they began to master their environment, using the acoustics of the small club to experiment with overload, feedback and distortion. Electric amplification had provided much of the excitement of early Rock’n’ Roll: pushing their equipment to the limit – even further than the early Who – the Sex Pistols twisted their limited repertoire into a noise as futuristic as their rhetoric.

‘Electricity come from other planets‚’ quipped Lou Reed in a song released that summer. In return, the audience took the electricity of the group’s performances to develop a sympathetic new style. Apart from the gelled, spiky, electric-shock hairstyle, there was ‘gobbing’, the habit of spitting which began as a response to Lydon’s constant expulsion of phlegm over the audience, and pogoing, the frozen leap, as though on a pogo stick, to gain a view: an action born out of necessity in the club’s packed space.

But, just as the Sex Pistols inspired loyalty, then they deliberately fostered division. There were still fathers to be killed, people to be forcibly alienated. New material like ‘I Wanna Be Me’ was a diatribe against a ‘typewriter god’ suspiciously like Nick Kent. The lyric was quickly accompanied by a physical attack. ‘It was a week after seeing the Rolling Stones in Paris‚’ says Kent, ‘where somebody pulled a gun on Mick Jagger backstage. There was a lot of violence in the air. I went over to Malcolm and for the first time ever he was quite cold. I just thought: “Well, he’s in a bad mood”, and sloped off to the very back of the 100 Club where I waited for the group to perform. I was sitting there, fairly drugged-out: my reactions to what did occur were very slow. I started noticing that this guy would, whenever he walked past, kick me in the shins. At first it seemed like a clumsy mistake: the second time, this was on purpose.

‘I knew his name was Sid, because at the final night of the Stones at Earl’s Court, all the future hierarchy were gathered in their Sunday best to get in and were unable to. He was obviously wearing his father’s old clothes, he had the bog-brush hair and he looked really lairy. It was quite interesting to see that guy with the Richard Hell hair: Bryan James and Chrissie pointed Sid out to me. They’d tried him out as a singer. So he was starting to harass me and then he disappeared for a while. Then I noticed he was following Lydon around: everywhere Lydon went, he would go.

‘Lydon by that point was the Don: he was top cat. In the classic star tradition, he didn’t take the stage with the other three members: he would wait until they had turned up. I remember seeing Malcolm, Lydon and Sid, and Lydon was pointing my way. My mind was like a stranger: I remember this really malevolent look on all three. It all happens very quickly: Lydon goes on stage, and Sid decides to stand directly in front of me. I tapped him on the shoulder and I said, very careful: “Could you move over?”

‘Sid immediately pulled this chain out. He made some remark which he thought was insulting like: “I don’t like your trousers.” The guy next to me immediately makes a motion towards Vicious and then pulls his knife out and he really wants to cut my face. Years later I find his name is Wobble. This was a real speed freak, and this is when it got very unhealthy. I remember putting my hands up and not moving a muscle, and then Vicious tapped him on the shoulder and he disappeared immediately. It was all set up: Vicious then had a clear aim and got me with the bike chain.’

‘I used to get violent on a few occasions‚’ says Wobble. ‘The one with Nick Kent was not one of those. Kent was with some geezer who demanded that we step aside, they couldn’t see the band. I said “Fuck off”, which was pretty standard. Sid wasn’t a rucker, but he lashed him with a chain and then I had a go, but we were just mucking about. What I didn’t know then was if you set yourself up as a hard man someone will come looking for you who’s harder than you are.’

‘It wasn’t painful‚’ says Nick Kent: ‘The main thing was that it drew a lot of blood, which was just pouring down my face and my chest. Ron Watts grabbed Sid off me. All those guys there like Mick Jones didn’t do a fucking thing. I was just trying to get the hell out of there – it had been years since I had been involved in any violence – and Vivienne comes up and says: “Oh God, that guy’s a psychopath. He’ll never be at one of our concerts again, I promise that. It’s not our fault, we’re so sorry.”

‘I saw Vivienne a month after that; the Ramones were playing and guess who she was with? With Sid, pogoing around. She came up to me and started to give me this: “You can’t handle violence; you’re just a weed.” I was completely dazed: what is this macho shit? Lydon then came up to me and said: “What’s all this shit you’re saying about us? You’re trying to get us banned, aren’t you?” “The people that were telling you this aren’t telling you the truth‚” I replied; he just turned round to me and said: “I know the truth.”

‘I just thought, what have I done to bring this on? It was like a shower of abuse. It was really like that T-shirt, going from one side to the other side. I think for that gig Malcolm worked out a thing that a fight was going to occur, because it made the publicity. Having seen the three of them work it out, it was quite clear. Malcolm is one of those people who gets an idea and he is going to see that idea through hell and high water.’

Another new song was ‘New York’, a diatribe aimed this time at David JoHansen and Syl Sylvain. Lydon’s lyrics are fluently vituperative, but they originate from McLaren. ‘Malcolm was real disappointed in me when I went with David JoHansen to Japan‚’ says Syl Sylvain, ‘he wrote me this letter where he got really mad. But if the song says anything bad about New York, it has to do with Malcolm as much as with us: he was so in love that he got bitter.’

But then it suited everybody to slag off New York: in the competition to patent Punk, London was coming up fast. On 4 July, there was the first chance to see ‘New York’ live, when the Ramones played the Roundhouse. ‘They had never played a larger venue than a club‚’ says Nick Kent, ‘and all of a sudden they are on a much larger stage. Culture shock. They plugged into this huge PA stack and started playing – and it just went off. Kaput. It was a damp squib. Then they came back on and just did it. It was good, but there was a lot of violence. It got very territorial.’

The same night, the Sex Pistols played at the Black Swan in Sheffield with the future Clash. ‘It was a Sunday‚’ says Joe Strummer, ‘but two hundred people turned up: they were very receptive.’ Two days later, the Damned played their first concert supporting the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. ‘They were so bizarre‚’ says Jonh Ingham. ‘They never rehearsed. They were all playing this white-light speed, and just by chance things would mesh and fall apart and mesh again. It was like this phasing up and down: very odd, but funny.’

On the 9th of the month, the Sex Pistols played their first concert on a large stage, at a Lyceum all-nighter. ‘They were absolutely petrified backstage,’ says Ingham. ‘They were taking it as very important: it had never occurred to me that they really wanted to win people over. That was the night that John stubbed out cigarettes on the back of his hand when he was singing: that frightened me. He was the most maniacal thing alive: it was back to Iggy, that unpredictability. He already had cigarette burns on his wrists: it was one of the games Sid and he played in their Hampstead bedsit.

‘At the Lyceum, there was suddenly this major step up in musical ability. Glen was phenomenal, Paul was right on the beat. It was in one night: they were all just there. Suddenly you knew this was a great band. By now everyone was being very serious about making this happen, it was quite clear that this was the only thing that was going to break through and create a new generation of music.’