Everything prior to Grundy was good, in my book. It was like the normal progression you’d expect of a band – we’d just made a great record, people were showing up to see us and getting converted, there was a real scene. Getting recognised for what we did by the music press was fun and it was something we could cope with. But then overnight we were on everyone’s fucking breakfast table and the Sun and the News of the World were doorstepping us in Denmark Street.
Grundy didn’t just catapult us to a new level of fame, it took the whole thing into another dimension in a way that was hard to grasp. Don’t get me wrong, the notoriety was a good laugh, and it definitely brought us a lot of new fans very quickly. But the best way I can think of describing how it felt is like in Star Trek when they’re just flying along normally in space, then Scotty presses the warp speed button and, whoosh, they’re fucking gone.
In terms of the Sex Pistols having any kind of long-term future, this sudden acceleration was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. I still think we’d have got really big in the end without it, but the whole process would have been much slower and maybe less traumatic. I guess it was just never our destiny to be a normal band who make a few albums and then fade away. Grundy was definitely the point where everybody’s egos started to spin out – McLaren’s probably most of all.
He was as prone to believing his own publicity as any of us, maybe more so. I think he’d never really thought about what was good for the band; the idea of looking out for his boys wasn’t in his genetic make-up like it would be for most normal managers. He wasn’t one of those muso guys who plays a long game like Peter Grant or Andrew Loog Oldham. And from this time on, the music – which had always been the most important thing to us – took a total back seat as far as Malcolm was concerned. Everything started to be about him playing the system.
The first nightmarish situation McLaren had to try and make out was a deliberate strategy was the Anarchy Tour. By rights this should’ve been one of the highlights of the whole punk thing – us at the peak of our powers on a nationwide tour with The Clash, The Damned (who’d both played their first ever shows supporting us back in July, and were actually getting pretty good by this time) and Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, who Malcolm had flown over from New York to give us an American angle. I think they arrived on the night after the Grundy thing, so they didn’t know what kind of shit-storm they’d walked into.
The police were banning us, local councils were banning us – everyone was fucking banning us. It was exciting at first, showing up at all these places and finding out whether the specially convened meeting of all the most stuck-up people in the town thought we should be allowed to corrupt the young people of the area with our punk rock filth. But it got boring pretty quickly. We were driving round the country in this big flash tour bus, getting told everywhere we turned up that we couldn’t play, sometimes right at the last minute. There was nothing else to do but get pissed and cause trouble.
Even that got old after a while. It didn’t feel as spontaneous as it used to. It was like everyone had an idea of what to expect from us, and we were just giving it to them. Of course, Malcolm was relishing the whole thing, because us getting banned everywhere made for so much great press, but it would’ve been nice to play a few more gigs as well. Especially as at the small number of shows we did actually get to do – like in Caerphilly, the one there’s some really funny footage of in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle – all the Bible-thumpers came out and told us we were the Devil’s children.
By the time we got back off that tour, Vivienne had changed the shop from Sex to Seditionaries, with all the bombing of Dresden pictures on the wall. Bomber Harris – that would’ve been a good punk name; almost as good as Fabian Quest. I would still go in there after that, but it wasn’t as cosy as it used to be. They took out the couches and the jukebox, so it felt very clinical, and it wasn’t really a hang place any more. Apart from anything else, there’d be all these punk kids knocking around wanting to talk to you, and they weren’t as cool as the Bromley people – some of them were complete fucking idiots.
A bit of a siege mentality had been developing at the shop for a while. As if the angry Teds threatening to smash the place up weren’t bad enough, Malcolm and Vivienne had been getting quite paranoid about people turning up at the shop and trying to steal their ideas. It was no wonder, really – when Don Letts came round from Acme Attractions he’d practically bring a notebook. A lot of fourth-division people were starting to capitalise on the whole punk thing. Boy was the worst – that place stank of tuppencery. It was the same with music; after Grundy, every Tom, Dick and Harry in London who owned a leather jacket seemed to be starting their own punk band.
The crowds were settling into a formula, too. Instead of thinking for themselves like they used to, the people who came to the occasional gig we did actually get to play seemed to have almost a code of conduct in their minds of how they should behave. They’d read that spitting and pogoing was the thing to do, so they fucking did it.
Sid was meant to have started the pogo by jumping up and down at the 100 Club because he couldn’t see one of the bands. I think that one would probably come under the heading of ‘good stories that might or might not be true’ (especially given how tall he was). Rotten’s claim to starting the spitting was probably a bit better, because he did have some problem with his sinus so he was always having a good clear-out, but whoever started it, it was horrible. Joe Strummer got a massive green one fully in his open mouth once and caught something. It really was fucking disgusting. I guess it was another thing that marked us out from the Led Zeppelins of this world, but not necessarily in a good way.
The thing that did really make us special, which was the music, seemed to be getting left by the wayside. The Grundy business had put the kibosh on the EMI deal, and they were looking for a way to get shot of us. The word was that the boss of the label used to go to dinner with the Queen and he didn’t want to be associated with these foul-mouthed yobs any more. As far as the band was concerned, the one thing we all shared was that we wanted to make an album of the songs we’d written and performed live – I think that was everyone’s main goal. But while Malcolm was in the process of negotiating a new deal with A&M, we kind of lost sight of that.
Tension had been mounting between Glen and John for a while, and when they had a really big row right around the time Glen started asking Malcolm awkward questions about where all the money was going, Matlock’s days were probably numbered. Julien Temple says that getting rid of Glen and replacing him with Sid was the last project he saw Rotten and Malcolm really work together on. I’m not trying to get me and Cookie off the hook by saying this, as we did go along with it of our own free will, but it was one time when Malcolm’s puppetmaster fantasy probably had a bit of truth to it. He certainly knew how to stir the shit-pot.
I can’t really put my finger on the exact nature of those manipulations, but they were definitely going on. There was no denying there were some good reasons for getting rid of Glen. For all the big contributions he made to the songwriting and getting the band off the ground, he just didn’t fit into the urchin vibe. Rotten calling him a ‘mummy’s boy’ was unfair, but Matlock never quite looked the part. You could see he’d never gone without a meal, and he’d started to act up to being the toff of the group in a way that was quite embarrassing.
At first he’d been happy to wear clothes from Sex, but as time went on he seemed to be more and more into his Beatles thing, and it was all getting a bit painful. It wasn’t just that he was more respectable and strait-laced than we were, it almost felt like he thought he was too good for us. The fact that he had a deal set up for his own band the minute he left – and with EMI, of all people – would kind of show where his loyalties lay.
On top of that, as we were building up the sound of the band, it was becoming very powerful; overwhelming, even. This meant there’d been less and less room in it for Matlock’s dicking around with sevenths and elevenths. I don’t think any of these factors loomed too large in Johnny’s mind, though. He just wanted his mate along for the ride so he’d have a bit of back-up against me and Cookie. He’d always hated the fact that I had a mate in the band and he didn’t. Malcolm’s motivation was a bit harder to work out. To Cookie and me, it just didn’t make any sense to have someone who couldn’t play a note trying to fill Glen’s shoes, but it was never about the music for McLaren. In fact, he didn’t give a shit about it. He was always on a different trip, and getting Sid in the band was the ultimate expression of that.
I didn’t mind having to play the bass on the album, in fact I was happy to do it. But teaching Vicious where to put his fingers on the fretboard so he could make some attempt at playing live was a total pain in the arse. Me and Cookie would just look at each other, like, ‘Fuck me, what have we got into here?’
Obviously kids today don’t give a shit that Sid couldn’t play bass. They love him because he looked so fucking good. And not just for how he looked, but the attitude and the death and the whole mystique of him. Believe me, I get it. When I first saw Sid walk down King’s Road on his way to Sex – this was before Rotten had joined the band – he was already a superstar in the making. He didn’t have the spiky hair yet, but he was wearing it short (which was unusual at the time) and he was tall, with a great boat race and a generally stylish air about him.
Even then, he was bad news. He was taking a lot of speed and already knew Johnny (in fact, he got his name from Johnny’s hamster). I had the same uneasy feeling about the two of them that I did about Jordan: you just didn’t really feel safe hanging out with them outside the shop because they drew so much attention to themselves. When I’m not drunk and looking for kicks my instinct is always to stay out of trouble – I just prefer to slip off on my own and mind my own business (however nefarious that business might be). Put a couple of drinks inside me and that’s all reversed, obviously, but I wasn’t one of the low-class clientele who made a habit of getting pissed in the daylight hours.
It was never too early for Sid to get pissed or stoned, though. And his craziness was catching like the fucking clap. The day we signed to A&M, for example – 10th March 1977 – was a total nightmare. We started hitting the bottle at about eight in the morning, just drinking vodka in a room, then we got driven to Buckingham Palace to do the fake signing, then we went to hear the finished version of ‘God Save the Queen’ at Wessex Studios (this was the only good bit, as I couldn’t believe how amazing it sounded: not just cos I was part of it, but generally, as a fan). Then we had a fight in the car, then we went to A&M and all kinds of fucking carnage ensued. It was a long fucking day of getting pushed from pillar to post and by the end of it we were all so pissed we didn’t know what we were doing. In so far as Malcolm had arranged the whole thing, he was in control of it, but he had no way of knowing what was actually going to happen.
From the minute Sid joined the band, nothing was ever normal again. I get that it was great the way him and John looked together, and the media frenzy certainly sold a lot of newspapers, but as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t what the Sex Pistols were meant to be. I hadn’t minded being second fiddle to John, but now I was playing third fiddle to this fucking idiot; maybe even fourth if you went along with Malcolm’s increasingly delusional certainty that we were all his puppets.
It wasn’t so much that my pride was dented, though that was part of it, it was more just being around this fucking chaos. That night at the Marquee the year before when John heard himself for the first time, I’d told the guy from the NME, ‘We’re not into music, we’re into chaos.’ I was proud of that one at the time and it’s still a blinding line, but I found out afterwards that it wasn’t really true. Be careful what you fucking wish for! I was into music. We all were – not just Rotten playing his Van der Graaf Generator on Capital Radio – but now we’d got chaos instead, and it was shit.
People from more established bands had been a bit wary of us from the beginning – probably with good reason, to be honest. I remember me and Cookie being at the Roxy the night Jimmy Page and Robert Plant came down and noticing that they didn’t really talk to us. Another time I was sitting in the Roebuck with Gary Holton, who was in a band called the Heavy Metal Kids. He came to see us early on and his advice was: ‘You know, what you should do after a show is always bow and say thank you.’ Obviously this is a lesson that has served me well. Gary was probably thinking, ‘Fuck me, these rude cunts are gonna put me out of business.’ He didn’t get that it wasn’t showbiz any more; well, it was, but in a different way.
Once things got going with the Pistols, a lot of my old fandom kind of went out of the window – I guess I was getting a bit older so I wasn’t going to be idolising people so much any more. But one person I was still excited to meet was Pete Townshend. I was always a major fan of The Who and what with him coming from Shepherd’s Bush way, I felt like we had a bit in common.
The funny thing was, on the night me and Cookie met him down the Speakeasy it wasn’t us that were causing trouble, it was him. I think he’d been drinking all day at some business meeting in Tin Pan Alley, and by the time he got to us he was pretty lit. He kept saying ‘Who the fuck are you?’ to everyone and afterwards he credited that meeting with inspiring the song ‘Who Are You?’, which was their last big hit before Moonie died. If you listen to the lyrics you really get a sense of how belligerent he was. There’s a photograph of us with him from that night. To be honest, I found it kind of inspiring that he was even talking to us because I dug him and his band so much.
There was no chance of that kind of thing happening once Sid was in the band, though – he’d probably have threatened to glass Pete Townshend like he did the DJ Bob Harris. That was at the Speakeasy as well. I think we showed up separately but the minute I saw him there I thought, ‘Oh shit, this is a nightmare.’ It was, as well. The guy’s nickname was ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, for fuck’s sake – he wasn’t an East End gangster. He didn’t need a fucking glass pushing right up in his sound engineer’s face or one of Rotten’s mates threatening to kill him. Anywhere you went that Sid turned up, you knew there was going to be trouble. He kind of got off on that. Well, I assume he did as I don’t know why he would’ve done it otherwise.
All this happened the day after the official signing to A&M, and once Harris’ lawyers had been on the phone, we were off the label in less than a week and the release of ‘God Save the Queen’ was shelved. That was a disappointment, and we couldn’t help wondering if we were ever going to get to finish our fucking album. At this point, Malcolm had the bright idea of getting us out of the country till the heat was off while he shopped around for a new deal.
First we went to Jersey, where we got thrown off the island within a day, and then to Berlin, which was horrible and bleak – the same kind of weather as London. Malcolm’s paranoia had pushed Nils Stevenson out by this time so this guy Boogie was with us as McLaren’s fixer. There’s some 8mm film of this trip somewhere – we stayed in a dreary hotel, went sightseeing a few times and dropped in at a couple of weird tranny clubs. The only good thing that came out of it was ‘Holidays in the Sun’. That was my music and Rotten’s words. You can hear how pissed off we were at the time in that song. The funny thing is, an actual holiday in the sun might’ve cheered some of us up a bit.
After Matlock got the boot the pressure was on for me to pull my finger out and write a bit more. The song ‘Bodies’ was another good example. It was my tune and Rotten wrote the words about this woman from Birmingham called Pauline who was a bit of a nutcase and carried her abortion round in a bag. It was weird. She was a good-looking bird who didn’t dress like a punk or anything – she looked like someone who would work in Safeways. I remember fucking her down an alley off Wardour Street. It might’ve been after the Marquee show. Either way, we used to draw these nut-jobs to us: it was part of what gave the band its special character. The only problem was, now we’d got one of them in to be our bass player.