After Malcolm got involved, we did just one gig with me singing. That was all it took to confirm that being the frontman was not my bag. It wasn’t like this was some big pressure show, either, just a little party for some coke-taking rich kids at Salter’s Cafe on the King’s Road. But from how much I was shitting myself, you’d think it was the fucking Royal Albert Hall.
It can be a bit of a drag nowadays how everything gets filmed and documented from the very beginning, because it stops anything from developing on its own and you lose the mystery of someone who did see it telling you what happened. But I wish someone had filmed that gig, because watching how terrible I was would’ve been fucking hilarious. Afterwards Vivienne said I was ‘singing in the back of my throat’. I’m not really sure what that meant – God bless her – but I think she was trying to be kind. The problem wasn’t so much my singing (although that was bad enough) as the fact that I just had no idea what to do with myself onstage.
I wasn’t wearing any punk clothes yet – I think the flash-hippie-Poco-A&R-man look was still operational – and we only did ‘Scarface’ and a couple of covers. But that was one hell of a long fucking ten minutes, certainly long enough for me to know that being the guy everyone was looking at was not for me. It just ain’t my personality. Well, it is, because I do like attention, but only up to a point. I’m a strange mixture of an extrovert and an introvert like that – once the spotlight gets too bright, I just want to fuck off back into the shadows.
In a way, the same thing had happened at the shop, which had changed its name by then to plain old Sex. The whole point of that place was to be right up in everyone’s face, and Malcolm and Vivienne were recruiting some very bold characters to help them get their message across. Obviously, I was one of them; at least, I was when I had a couple of drinks in me. But Pamela Rooke – also known as Jordan – who’d joined Chrissie on the Sex shop floor, she was something else, man.
It was like she was fully formed from the minute she arrived at the shop. Now, I liked Jordan. She was a good laugh, but how little of a shit she gave almost frightened me. She dressed so outrageously that I was almost embarrassed to walk down the street with her because everyone would be staring at us. It wasn’t like she got changed to go to work, and no one had cars then, so at the end of her daily grind she’d totter off down the King’s Road and get on a bus back to the countryside or wherever the fuck it was that she lived. She’d have her tits hanging out on the bus in all of this rubber gear! You could probably go to work in a bank looking like that now, but in early 1975 people had never seen anything like it. I guess she loved the attention, but I used to think, ‘Fuck me! She’s got some balls walking around like that.’
What Vivienne and Malcolm were doing with Sex was tapping into the sense a lot of people had at that time of just wanting something to happen – music had got so two-bob and Britain seemed so fucking grey and boring. If no one else was gonna do it, why shouldn’t they get something going for themselves? The Sixties was yesterday’s news by then, and with glam kind of dying away, what better way to cause a fucking stink than covering the walls with pornographic quotes and taking perverts’ rubber gear out of the closet and putting it straight onto the fucking high street (or the King’s Road, in this case)? Without people like Jordan around to put their ideas into action, Sex – and maybe punk too – would’ve been just another art school conspiracy. It would never have left the drawing board.
It did get pretty weird at the shop when all the bondage gear was in there. The rubber stuff wasn’t my thing from a sexual point of view – it just did nothing for me. Even later on, when Linda the Dominatrix got involved with Sex and Sid and some of the other people around the band got into hanging out at her dungeon, I never really got into it.
As you may have noticed, I’m not a prude, but even I have my limits, and some of the shit that went on in Sex at that time shocked even me. I’d be in there with Chrissie or Jordan (I never shagged her, in case anyone was wondering – Adam Ant turned out to be more her type) and you’d get all these MP types in pinstripe suits sneaking in when they got off work. They’d go into the dressing room with some latex on and have a pedal in there. That was like a common thing with the pervy toffs. I guess they learnt it at public school. Glen was always moaning about having to clean up the bodily fluids.
Sex was designed to be a fashion statement, not a fetish shop, but I guess those cunts don’t mind where they do it. If you build it, they will cum. I never knew who any of them were till people told me afterwards: they were just men with briefcases as far as I was concerned (unlike the one I carried up and down the King’s Road, theirs actually had stuff in them, even if it was only Vaseline and a gimp mask), but I do remember the newsreader Reginald Bosanquet being around a few times. He was massively obsessed with Jordan, and sometimes when he was reading the news on TV in the evening he’d wink at the camera as a code to show her he was wearing rubber pants in her honour. In terms of what Malcolm was trying to achieve by showing the British establishment in its true colours, that was probably one of his proudest moments.
The one group of people who were even less into bondage than I was were the Teds. They used to love hanging out at Let It Rock, but they got really pissed off when it stopped being all about them. There were a few ugly scenes in the early days of Sex, and later on the whole Teds vs punks thing festered into real violence – several people in and around the Pistols, including Cookie, would get glassed or stabbed by Teds at one time or another. (I was lucky: I escaped injury with the help of the Cloak.) That violence tended to be seen as an old-fashioned mods vs rockers type of thing, but really it was more specific than that. The Teds hated the punks because they thought the punks had nicked their shop, and they also probably felt they’d been betrayed by Malcolm. Obviously they weren’t the last people to feel that way.
I didn’t have to model any of the rubber-wear once the band was in the public eye. Malcolm and Vivienne never told us to wear anything in particular, we just helped ourselves to what we wanted and they either charged us for it afterwards or didn’t. I liked the T-shirts, though – the tits and the naked young boys smoking cigarettes and the Cambridge rapist mask and the cowboys with their cocks out. I got that the point of those was to shock people. Glen and Bernie Rhodes took offence at some of them, but I never did.
I didn’t know what Malcolm’s deal was, sexually. I got the feeling that he’d had some gay encounters, but I never felt that was what was driving him. He and Vivienne were like a proper couple, but the vibe between them wasn’t very sexual. In theory McLaren liked all the earthy, elemental stuff, but it was mostly bravado. It wasn’t about actual experience.
Sometimes when I did things he’d be shocked and get all giggly like a little schoolboy. I suppose that’s why I never took him too seriously in that area. Even when he would fuck about with kiddie porn shit, which I suppose I could’ve related to experiences I’d been through and found upsetting, it never bothered me. Probably for the same reason I never thought twice about wearing the clothes with swastikas on them – because at the time it felt more important to shake things up a bit than to worry about hurting other people’s feelings.
The first time the name ‘Sex Pistols’ appeared was on one of those T-shirts. I think Malcolm and Vivienne and Bernie designed it together and the idea was for it to be a kind of manifesto, so one side was ‘Hates’ and the other side was ‘Loves’ and the slogan at the top said, ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on …’ There were long lists of things you were meant to like and not like – I hadn’t heard of most of them, to be honest, and I think it was a matter of trying to get an ‘Us against Them’ vibe going more than anything specific. Anyway, there in the middle of the ‘Loves’ was ‘Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS’.
Obviously I was happy to be a Kutie, but I wasn’t too sure about the SEX PISTOLS element. It just sounded a bit gay. It wasn’t the idea of people thinking we were buckled that bothered me – as I’ve said, I had no anxieties about my sexuality, because I loved birds and at that time I was fucking so many of them I was like a walking dildo – it was more what choosing that name would say about the band. As I remember, the only one of us who really liked it at first was Wally, which was a bit cruel as he was on his way out by then.
Malcolm had been on at me for a while to take playing the guitar a bit more seriously. At first I think it was just to give me something to do with my hands so I wouldn’t look such a knob onstage. But then I started picking it up quite quickly from watching what Wally was doing. I still had no idea that I was going to end up being the guitarist – I just got shoved in that direction and miraculously it worked out. I don’t want to get all new-agey, but it is funny how things fall into place sometimes. Like with Iggy Pop – he was the drummer of his band at first, then all of a sudden he was the frontman because that was just how it was meant to be.
It was when Malcolm returned to England from his fucking car crash of trying to manage the New York Dolls in America that he really started to push me on the guitar front. He should’ve had his tail between his legs, but I think that failure made him keener to get involved with us, because now he had something to prove. He bought me Sylvain Sylvain’s white Gibson Les Paul with the pin-up sticker on it – I think the band gave it to him in place of money they owed him, or maybe he nicked it, I’m not sure. Either way, even though I loved the New York Dolls, this didn’t register with me as a big deal at the time. I knew a Les Paul was the best guitar for rock ’n’ roll, and a few of them had already passed through my hands by then; I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, thank you, God – the sacred flame.’
This event probably got talked up a bit by Malcolm over the years because it made him look like Merlin getting the sword for King Arthur. The idea of him bringing someone over from America to be the new singer of the band – one of the Dolls, Richard Hell, Gladys Knight? I don’t know who the fuck it was meant to be – was another of his imaginary managerial master strokes that got talked up out of all proportion. McLaren was notorious for changing the facts to fit his version of events afterwards; it was something he was really known for.
Another one who liked to edge a bit further into the spotlight every time he told a story was the NME journalist Nick Kent – I guess everyone wants a piece of the myth. Malcolm talked a good game about doing things a different way to other bands, but from the beginning he was always very keen to keep in with the music press, and when Nick Kent – who was a well-known rock writer at the time – came down to the Riverside Studios a couple of times, we assumed it was just to get him on-side. It was only years later that we’d learn how close we’d come to having one of the great musical geniuses of the twentieth century in our ranks.
Nick did know a few chords – I was quite impressed with an open tuning in G he showed me which made your guitar-playing sound a bit like Keith Richards’. The only problem was, Nick’s Keith Richards addiction was totally out of control. He’d stand there doing his Keith Richards pose, his body all sloppy, just like his hero’s. It was a joke. If Keith had wandered by and seen it he’d have said, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ … shortly before asking me for his fucking coat back.
Nick Kent went out with Chrissie for a while. He was very jealous (probably with good reason, to be honest) and he came into Sex to be a cunt to her once. She stopped working there after that, which was a shame, as far as I was concerned, so there was a bit of ‘what goes around comes around’ about it when Sid had a go at him at the 100 Club a while later. All that was still way ahead of us at this point, though.
For the moment, our biggest problem was what to do about Wally. Before he went off to New York with the Dolls, Malcolm had already been telling us we should give him the push. It was harsh, but we had to do it. With hindsight, getting rid of Wally was absolutely the best thing to do. He didn’t look right, for a start. I’m not saying he was an ugly geezer, but let’s just say he lacked the classical bone structure of some other members of the band. Plus he wore glasses, which is just not acceptable in a rock ’n’ roll guitarist. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules.
One thing I knew for sure was that the band wasn’t going anywhere without me. I was pretty much homeless then, and music was all I had. It was the only thing in my life apart from stealing and sex that I’d ever invested any kind of consistent energy in. So if I wasn’t going to sing, I was going to play the guitar – that was all there was to it. Something had to fucking happen for us, even if we didn’t know exactly what it was yet.
There was stuff around for us to bounce off, like Futurama, the second Be-Bop Deluxe album, a big favourite with both me and Cookie by then. Bill Nelson was a great guitarist who really had the Bowie look down when we saw him live at the Fulham Greyhound. Pub rock was coming through more strongly by that time, too. I remember seeing Dr Feelgood at the Kensington – that place was just a boozer with a tiny little stage at the end. There was also a band called The Winkies who no one thinks about much any more that I thought were pretty good. They played on that Brian Eno song ‘Seven Deadly Finns’, and they had this guitarist who thought he was Keith Richards but had a little bit more to back that fantasy up than Nick Kent ever did. I remember looking up at him playing his black Les Paul through an Ampeg amp and thinking, ‘Maybe I could do that.’
I must have liked them, because I didn’t follow their Ford Transit after they loaded all their gear into it at the end of the gig and nick their equipment. Others weren’t so lucky. All in all, when you looked around at the competition, there was nothing out there to really scare the shit out of anyone. That was going to be our job. All we needed now was a singer.