That first few weeks after Rotten joined the band in August 1975 were a real nause. We’d lost all the comfort and convenience of Riverside Studios the minute Wally got the boot, so any time we wanted to practise, we had to drive round everyone’s houses and load up a rented van with all the gear I’d nicked – my shag-wagon wasn’t big enough any more. Me and Glen and Cookie would have to spend a couple of hours setting it all up. If Rotten turned up for a couple of hours in the middle, that was as good as it got. Then we’d have to waste another couple of hours taking all the gear down, loading it back in the van and finally getting rid of the van again after driving the stuff back to wherever we were stashing it. The traffic in London wasn’t as bad then as it is now, but it was still a fucking nightmare.
Luckily – probably in the nick of time, looking back on it – Glen saw an advert which this guy who used to tour-manage for Badfinger had put in the paper for a rehearsal space to rent at 6–7 Denmark Street. It was right in the heart of the old Tin Pan Alley, where all the guitar shops were. Malcolm promised him a load of money, which he may or may not have finally given him. I hope he did, because he was a really nice old guy. His name was Bill Collins, and I only recently found out he was the dad of Lewis Collins from The Professionals – which was a funny coincidence, cos that’s what me and Cookie would end up calling our next band a few years later.
Things had gone to shit for Badfinger due to a load of record company bollocks. One of them committed suicide a few months before we moved in and his best mate in the band – who found his body – would follow suit a few years later. I used to wonder if the first guy had done the deed in Denmark Street and that was why we’d got the place cheap, but apparently he hanged himself in his garage in Surrey. Either way, it was an ill wind that blew the Sex Pistols a load of good. Not only did we now have somewhere right in the middle of town where we could leave our gear set up the whole time, I actually had somewhere to fucking live.
Of course, no one was meant to live there, but there was never any doubt that I was going to. I’d been kipping on people’s couches for long enough and I was hardly going to pass up the chance for a place I could call my own. There was a bookshop round the front and you’d come through there and up some steps, out into the open yard and then into this funny little square building out the back which had a downstairs – where all our gear went – and an upstairs which wasn’t a liveable space when we got there but I made it one soon enough. There was already an Ascot water heater and I put a bed and a little black-and-white TV in and generally ponced the whole thing up. Eh voila – chez Steve.
I fucking loved being in Denmark Street. It’s probably my favourite place I’ve ever lived. It was right up the West End, in the middle of all the action. You only had to walk out the front door and all the brasses would be there – I was living the dream!
It was dead quiet in there at night, too, so you could even sleep really well. I think John resented me having my own place in the middle of Soho, but it was all right for him – he was still living at home with his mum and dad. He used to crash upstairs sometimes anyway – Cookie had a fight with him up there once, as did Glen, whose folks had moved out to the distant suburbs so it was harder for him to get home than it used to be, especially once he started at St Martin’s art college just over the road. Chrissie used to come and stay over too sometimes but obviously that wasn’t so much about sleeping.
There was also a period when I was knocking about in Ladbroke Grove with this bird with big tits – not the one who used to get onstage with Hawkwind, a different biker groupie chick I had a little thing with. She was a proper greaser and we’d buy speed off Lemmy and lurk in those boozers down Portobello Road where the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind and the people that became Motörhead used to hang out.
That’s a part of West London a lot of people associate with good times, but I’ve never really liked it. Although while we’re in Notting Hill I should probably mention my uncredited cameo appearance in a film which was shot there around that time. It’s a British gangster flick called The Squeeze which has Stacy Keach and the comedian Freddie Starr in it, and at one point early on you can see me walking through Portobello Market wearing a Hawaiian shirt (the West-Coast-A&R-man look’s only appearance on celluloid). Cookie saw it by chance on late-night TV once and nearly fell off his fucking sofa. Anyway, I digress.
This bird I was shagging lived in a squat in Ladbroke Grove with all these biker dudes. When I’d go round there I remember thinking ‘Fuck this shit. This is not my cup of tea at all.’ Obviously the whole squatting lifestyle would become very associated with punk later on, but it wasn’t my scene in any way. It was dirty, the houses were always shitholes, and I found the squalor of it really depressing.
I need my surroundings to be a certain way – I like to be tidy and I like nice things. I don’t want to be sleeping in a place where you don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the next. Even the fact that it was illegal wasn’t for me – I suppose if you’re as prolific a law-breaker as I am, you don’t want your home to be another possible entry on your ever extending rap sheet. I know that technically what I was doing in Denmark Street was squatting, but you wouldn’t have known that to look at the place. I’m very organised and clean by nature – I guess it’s the mod in me.
As well as my first proper home as an adult, Denmark Street gave me something else I really needed, which was somewhere to practise the guitar. When you’ve got nowhere to kip apart from your mates’ sofas, opportunities to bone up on your bar chords are few and far between. Plugging in your Gibson Les Paul and playing along to The Stooges’ Fun House doesn’t tend to go down too well with the mums and dads. Now I finally had a place of my own, I could hammer along to ‘TV Eye’ and ‘Dirt’ to my heart’s content and at any volume I wanted. The New York Dolls’ first album was my other favourite for playing along to – cos it was simple and I could grasp it, it was the perfect thing to learn from.
I would play the guitar by myself for literally hours upstairs at Denmark Street – just figuring out how it worked. If you’re wondering how someone with full-on ADHD and the attention span of a fucking mosquito managed to concentrate for long enough to become Rolling Stone’s 97th greatest rock guitarist of all time, well, the answer is very simple: speed. Not sulphate, but the diet pills you get on prescription from doctors. Some people call them black bombers, others call them black beauties, but either way, you’d better get plenty of Mandrax to take afterwards if you ever want to get to fucking sleep.
Malcolm was very big on wanting everyone to be skinny so the band would look the part, and I think that’s how I persuaded him to hook me up. He’d send me down to a quack doctor on Harley Street to get them: sixty pills and sixty Mandrax each time. All the models and the people out of Who’s Who went to this guy for their diet pills – he’d be in there writing prescriptions all day long. Once I turned up and the guy was so tired from all the bullshit scripts he was writing that he was actually nodding out on the counter. I think he got struck off in the end, but not before he’d given my guitar-playing the chemical leg-up it had been crying out for.
Those black beauties weren’t a drug you’d take just for a laugh – the level of focus they gave you was beyond anything normal. You’d hear stories of housewives that had done one too many being up all night washing dishes or cleaning their floors with a toothbrush, just completely obsessing over the tiniest little detail. I could relate, as I approached learning the guitar in pretty much the same spirit.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved music and I had an ear for it; it wasn’t just a mechanical thing. But I honestly don’t think I could have become a professional musician if I hadn’t had the pills to help me along. A lot of people who get sober will tell you that drink or drugs did nothing but fuck up their lives – and they may well be right – but in my case I don’t think I’d have got anywhere without them. Some of the best things that have happened to me have been largely if not entirely down to drink and/or drugs. That’s why this shit’s so hard to give up.
I didn’t generally like speed, but I loved the feeling those pills gave me. The excitement of knowing I could actually focus on something for once would be hard to get across to anyone who hadn’t struggled in school like I did. It ain’t easy to learn an instrument properly and left to my own devices I’d probably have got bored and lost interest. I just wouldn’t have had the patience to stick with it – whereas all I had to do was pop a couple of those pills and boom! One hundred per cent attention. And the quicker the progress I made, the more I got into it. It was pretty much like Chuck Berry said in his classic hit ‘Jonesy Be Good’ – I may not have learnt to read or write so well, but I could play that guitar just like ringing a bell.
I knew I was getting better, but my band-mates took a bit of convincing, especially Cookie. He was still doing his apprenticeship and I think it was pulling him away from us. He said he wouldn’t go forward with the band unless we got someone in who could actually play the guitar properly – which I couldn’t quite yet, even though I was getting there. Obviously I took that a bit personally at the time, but I’m over it now.
Cookie’s very much a playing-it-safe kind of guy – he’s the opposite to me in that regard. I’ll dive in headfirst, but he always wants to know all the ifs and buts of what’s going to happen. I think Rotten hates that about him, but you’ve got to have a balance for the chemistry to be right, haven’t you? A band with four hotheads in it isn’t going to get very far.
We put an advert in the Melody Maker looking for a ‘whizz kid guitar player’ who was twenty years old or under and ‘not worse looking than Johnny Thunders’. We put that in to keep the Yes types away – though, with hindsight, jamming with Steve Howe might’ve given me something to bounce off – and it seemed to work because very few real musos showed up.
Basically there were a few urchins and some total fucking clowns. We auditioned all sorts – about thirty or forty people altogether. My favourite of the real idiots was a guy called Fabian Quest – I know, it’s a great name, isn’t it? He showed up with all these fancy pedals and whatnot but the shame of it was this silly cunt couldn’t play a note. There was also a kind of hippie-rock guy right near the end who could play his arse off. The only downside with him was he was obviously high on smack while he was doing it. I wish I could find out who he was and whether he went on to do anything else afterwards, because he was an excellent guitarist.
Even though it felt like a massive waste of time while it was going on, this audition process worked out really well, because it finally convinced Cookie that I was the only game in town, at least for the kind of band we were going to be. My style of guitar-playing was shaped by lack of knowledge and lack of experience, which was why it complemented John’s vocals so well, because he had exactly the same raw, natural quality. Cookie could just about hold a beat by then and Matlock played a bit of bass, but as far as me and John were concerned we were learning as we went along. That was what made the whole thing such a blast.
People often comment on the fact that a lot of the covers we played when we were working out the kind of band we were going to be – ‘No Fun’, ‘Don’t Give Me No Lip, Child’, ‘(I’m Not) Your Stepping Stone’ – had the word ‘No’ in the title. That was nothing to do with McLaren, who as I’ve said didn’t have much input into the musical side of things. It was partly coincidental and partly down to Rotten’s attitude. Anything that was remotely positive or involved any kind of happiness or love or appreciation made him want to vomit; that cunt never knew the meaning of the word obrigado. But the way he’d sneer his way through the lyrics really gave those old songs, especially cheesy ones like Dave Berry’s ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip, Child’ (the original of which I fucking hated) a bit of extra bite.
One more positive record which was a really big deal to us but never got as much credit as it should’ve was the first Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers album. Judy Nylon had an early copy that she used to play me, and it felt like a much bigger deal than any of the other East Coast ‘punk’ records, all of which seemed to be made by guys (or women, in Patti Smith’s case) with long hair who’d been around a while and were much older than us. I didn’t like the Patti Smith album at all when it came out – I wasn’t drawn to her in the slightest. Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’ was better than anything that lot could do, which is why the Sex Pistols ended up covering that song, not some Television tune with a twenty-minute guitar solo.
When it came to writing original songs, Rotten’s anger was an energy there too. The two main tunes of our own we had before he came along were ‘Did You No Wrong’ and ‘Seventeen’/‘Lazy Sod’. The second of those was the first proper song I’d ever come up with, and I remember Johnny moaning he couldn’t read the lyrics in my handwriting (which was no wonder, as I still couldn’t write properly), so he changed them to suit himself. Funnily enough, that was one of the first times I remember listening to the lyrics of a song with real attention, and that was because they were partly mine and I was straining to hear what Rotten had done to them. I never thought, ‘What’s he doing fucking my song up?’ though. I could hear straight away that his version was better.
I think this is the only Sex Pistols song that wasn’t a cover where the lyrics are kind of half and half; normally it’s him doing all of them. It goes back and forth. ‘We like noise it’s our choice’ – that is me. Not caring about long hair is him. ‘I don’t work, I just speed’ is me, as is ‘gotta lot to learn’, but ‘You’re only twenty-nine’ is 100 per cent Rotten. It’s not quite Lennon and McCartney, but it’s getting there. And once we had a couple of our own songs up and running, Glen and Johnny got down to work together (which I was fine with, as I’m a lazy sod, like the song said).
It didn’t go smoothly. John always moaned about having to go round Glen’s house. I don’t think John liked where Matlock came from. Even though John was like an art student, where he lived with his family he was always around real ’erberts – the Arsenal mob. Not that he was directly involved with that stuff, but Glen just had this very different background of nice home, nice parents and nice school which really got on John’s wick. That tension ended up going into the songs in a way that really worked out for us, but you couldn’t necessarily have predicted that from the beginning.
I would love to have footage of us rehearsing right at the beginning. You’d see Cookie not feeling confident and worrying that he might be better sticking with his apprenticeship, I’d be lazing about in my Denmark Street kingdom, coming up with the odd riff, and John would be sitting in the corner writing lyrics – on those rare occasions when he and Matlock weren’t at each other’s throats. You couldn’t fault Rotten for some of the words he came up with – for a nineteen-year-old to write ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was pretty fucking impressive. I might not have been too bothered about lyrics before, but I knew a fucking classic when I heard one.
The only problem was that as well as songs that would stand the test of time, you could see a few long-lasting grudges building up as well. The fact that Cookie and I were best friends outside the band was definitely an issue. Glen used to say we were like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, but it was John who was really bothered by it. Because he is very insecure, he didn’t like how close we were. He still doesn’t like it forty years later. I can see now how the fact that when rehearsals finished me and Cookie would generally fuck off together must have left him feeling a bit isolated. You’d have thought maybe the two of them would hang out a bit more to balance the whole thing out, but it never worked that way, because they didn’t really get on.
The one area where there was never any conflict, funnily enough, was over the money from songwriting. We agreed to split it equally from the off. John was different then – it was more ‘one for all and all for one’ in the early days, even if we were at each other’s throats most of the time.