Even Fagin gave his pickpockets a roof over their heads and an apple. There was a woman called Sophie Richmond who was Malcolm’s assistant and ran the office for him. We used to go to her for wages – we never questioned how much money was coming in, that was how stupid we were with the dough. You’re in a band. It’s exciting, things are good, you’re getting drunk, you’re getting laid. Why would you want to rock the boat by saying, ‘Where’s mine?’ I didn’t even have a fucking bank account.
Anyway, Sophie was a big part of the scene and she seemed like a sensible sort of character, even if she was going out with Malcolm’s cover designer guy, Jamie Reid, and she helped us all get somewhere to live when the pressure on Denmark Street got too much. The first gaff me and Cookie shared was on Bell Street in King’s Cross. When Sophie was organising the flats, the one they got for Sid was on an even shorter lease than ours. Apparently she raised the issue with Malcolm and he said, ‘It’s OK, he’ll be dead by then,’ so maybe he did know the future.
To be fair to Malcolm, that wasn’t just him being cynical – Sid used to say that kind of thing all the time too. I don’t know if he was glassing people before punk happened. I think he felt like he had to act a certain way once he was christened Sid Vicious. If only we’d called him ‘Sid Kind’, he’d have been out running soup kitchens and helping old ladies across the road … Well, maybe. Sometimes it’s hard for people who didn’t know him to accept this on the basis of how he acted in public, but there was a sweet side to Sid as well; a kind of childlike quality he had about him.
Although Vicious coming in was the start of the Pistols going skew-whiff and becoming a bit of a mess, it also kind of made sense in terms of the image of us that was being sold in the media. The hype that was drawing people to the band was all about how outrageous and out of control we were, and then Sid was brought in to make that come true. I don’t think McLaren knew what was going to happen once we’d got Sid in the band – it was more a question of Sid taking on the role of being Sid, and then all the publicity happening and him just milking it more and more, rather than Malcolm specifically encouraging him to be an idiot.
Of all the people whose head the whole thing went to (and that was all of us – me included), it went to Sid’s head the most. To be fair, he was the one who got thrown in the deep end the most, too. We hadn’t been doing it for long, but at least we’d had a bit of time to adjust. He was this really gullible guy who came in when the madness was already at its height with the pressure of thinking that it was his job to keep it going. On the surface he was OK with that, but underneath I think he just didn’t know what to do.
At first he did at least attempt to fit in on the musical side. He tried hard at the rehearsals and for his first few gigs he started out with his bass held up really high so he could actually play it, not down by his knees where it ended up in America. Unfortunately, that horrible bird came along with the heroin, and from then on all he was interested in was getting high. It wasn’t totally her fault either – no one was twisting Sid’s arm to make him put a spike in it, not even Nancy.
Nancy Spungen turned up at the very first gig Sid played with us, which was our second Notre Dame Hall show in March 1977 (the first had been with Matlock the year before). I think she had some connection – no prizes for guessing which kind – with the Heartbreakers, and the vibes around her were bad from the beginning. Suddenly this groupie junkie chick from America who was a complete fucking outsider was hanging around at soundchecks and none of us were in any hurry to accept her. That’s not to say we were great judges of character – we probably wouldn’t have been accepting of any bird at that point, as the atmosphere around the band had become a bit more of a boys’ club than it had been at the beginning.
No one in the Sex Pistols had girlfriends around the band too much, maybe because they knew I’d end up shagging ’em. It had become what was expected of me at that point. So of course I took one for the team and fucked old Nancy. It was in the little room I stayed in sometimes at the back of Helen the midget’s house, round the corner from Bell Street. She was fun, Helen – she had to be, because apart from her I was a bit prejudiced against midgets; the little fuckers gave me vertigo. I really liked hanging out with her, though. There was never anything sexual between us, but she was a sweet person. I’d go round there and we’d smoke weed and listen to old Fifties songs together; it was kind of a safe place for me. I wonder where she is now – I hope she’s doing OK.
Anyway, back to La Spungen. I don’t know why I had to do it, fucking other people’s girlfriends was just a compulsion with me. It wasn’t to put one over on Sid, and I don’t think he ever found out, but I don’t think he’d have been too bothered even if he had – there was quite a bisexual kind of energy about him. She was so whiney I was bewildered by what he could’ve found attractive about her – she just seemed to have so little to recommend her as a person. So a part of me (and again, no prizes for guessing which part) was curious to try and find out for myself. I will spare you the gory details, just to prove that chivalry’s not dead.
One person even fewer people seem to have a good word for than Nancy was (and is) Richard Branson. But I had no problems with him. He was the only one out of all the label bosses we dealt with who you could actually talk to. All the others were just blokes in suits you never saw, who would probably cross the street to avoid you if your paths crossed outside the office. Even though Branson was a public school toff, he was definitely approachable. We went on his boat up by Maida Vale and he didn’t seem to mind us taking the piss out of the way he looked by calling him Catweazle. Fair play to him on signing us as well, because a lot of the other fuddy-duddy labels wouldn’t touch us with a shitty stick by then, and if it hadn’t have been for Branson, Never Mind the Bollocks … might never have found a home.
I don’t know if McLaren might have been thinking Branson was someone he could pull a fast one on, but Virgin was the only label that would have us by that stage. They were the smart ones – they’d seen the writing on the Berlin Wall. The good thing was they kind of needed us as much as we kind of needed them, because as a company they’d had their big moment a few years before with Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and then pissed all the money up the wall on jazzy prog shit like Henry Cow and Steve Hillage … Now, there was someone Sid should’ve glassed. Him or Rick Wakeman, who would’ve been a sitting duck in that cape of his.
Whatever Malcolm’s devious plan was, Tricky Dicky Branson would have the last laugh by flooding the market with substandard Pistols product once the whole thing went to shit and McLaren was out of the picture. But I didn’t even hold that against him, because that’s exactly what record companies are meant to do – capitalise on their assets – and Malcolm would have done worse if he’d had the chance. I guess he kind of did with The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle in a way.
The best thing about Virgin was that they rubber-stamped our choice of Chris Thomas to produce the album and then just let us get on with it, which was really good for me and Cookie as musicians. One of the factors in Never Mind the Bollocks … having such a distinctive sound is that bands normally start a recording with the rhythm section – bass and drums – and then add the guitar later, but because me and Cookie knew each other so well and we weren’t fucking about, we’d start with the guitar and drums and then I’d put the bass in after. ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is the only song on that album where Matlock’s on bass and it’s the three of us playing together, but even then we were so locked in that you can’t hear much difference.
Because a lot of later punk and post-punk bands would make a point of not being able to play, people don’t necessarily understand how well drilled we were. We didn’t go skipping into Wessex Studios saying, ‘Yay, let’s do it.’ We weren’t just having a laugh. We never wanted anything to be sloppy – the whole ‘anyone can do it’ element of punk had completely passed us by. In fact, me and Cookie were the opposite of that: we were really dedicated in the studio. Sometimes if he was dragging a bit on the beat, I’d say, ‘Let’s fucking do it again.’ And I spent many happy hours doing guitar overdubs with Chris Thomas. He and the engineer Bill Price were always willing to experiment to get things right, up to and beyond the point of leaving a flight case by the amp to ‘harden up’ the guitar sound. Fuck you, Phil Spector, we’re gonna drive a tank through your wall of sound and then build a better one on top.
The only reason all this was possible was because me and Cookie were left to our own devices. Not long after Sid joined the band, he was laid up in hospital with hepatitis for quite a long time and couldn’t do anything, which was a godsend really, cos it meant I could get on with playing the bass. We needed him hospitalised on a permanent basis. Unfortunately, when he got better he kept wanting to play. You can hear him farting around a bit on ‘Bodies’ – there’s two basses on that to make sure one of us gets it right – but I think that’s the only song you can really pick him out on.
Rotten leaving us in peace was even more of a miracle: the more he stayed away from the musical side and just wrote lyrics, the better we sounded, and he certainly didn’t need our help in the verbal department (once ‘Lazy Sod’ had pointed him in the right direction, of course). He’d never trust other people to do their jobs like that now – he’s got way too controlling.
Chris Thomas was the best possible example to us of how you should set up a creative environment. He’d listen to my ideas – ‘What about if I do this ’ere?’ – and when it came to me playing the bass, he’d tell me what he thought and I’d do my best to execute it. I had so much fun doing guitar overdubs in the studio with him – that was a fucking great experience, probably the best part of being in the Pistols for me. There was no publicity, none of the madness, we were just in the studio, grafting to make a great record.
The one part of the process I didn’t enjoy was tuning up the guitars. That was the only bit that felt like work, and Chris always made me do it myself, which I hated. Luckily I had a strobe tuner which I’d nicked, ironically off Mr Thomas’ old friend and employer Bryan Ferry (though I never mentioned this to Chris at the time).
Island records had an office and a studio near the Chiswick flyover; I don’t know if it’s still there. One night when it was snowing – I think I’d been up till the early hours on speed – I saw a Ford Transit parked outside with just the windows at the end rather than the metal back door. That was always an incitement. I looked in and saw some tasty stuff so I put the window through and got in there. Inside was a strobe tuner and a Bryan Ferry gold disc, for the solo album where he’s wearing a white tux by the pool on the cover like James Bond. Obviously the tuner would come in handy, and there was no way I was leaving that gold disc behind. After all, I was a big fan.
In early June 1977, we took a brief break from our labours to overturn a few tables and piss in the punchbowl at the Queen’s silver jubilee party. Virgin did a good job getting the single of ‘God Save the Queen’ out in time for that. I never really paid much attention to all that jubilee bollocks, to be honest. That was more Rotten and McLaren’s end of things – I was too busy in the studio to notice. The gig on the Thames riverboat was a good stunt, though – one of McLaren’s best ideas. I don’t think he even had anything personal against the Queen, really – he was just being Brian Epstein, looking for strokes he could pull to get attention.
The weekend that the single would’ve gone to number one, the record industry fixed the chart to stop us. As if radio stations refusing to play the song in case it started a revolution wasn’t enough of an obstacle to get over, it came out in Branson’s autobiography that the British Phonographic Institute sent a special directive obliging the people who compiled the chart to discount returns from all shops associated with record labels (the main one being Virgin, which would have provided a lot of our sales), then mysteriously reversed it the week after. Who was the beneficiary who got to be played at the end of Top of the Pops instead of us? Who else but Rod fucking Stewart! I swear that man was stalking me.
Even though I was pissed off about it at the time, I realised afterwards that lots of shit people have got to the top of the charts, but no one else has managed to mobilise the whole might of the British record business to stop people knowing a single had got to number one. It’s a badge of honour I am proud to wear to this day.
In terms of how the public responded to us when we were out and about, ‘God Save the Queen’ was almost as big a gear-change as Grundy had been. But this time it definitely wasn’t a lurch in the right direction. The jubilee might not have meant shit to me, but it was a big deal to Britain’s racist Teddy boy community (which was quite substantial at the time), and egged on by the tabloid media, it was open fucking season on anyone who looked like a Sex Pistol. Cookie and Rotten and several other people around us got physically attacked in the street. I was lucky enough never to have any problems in that area – if I saw anyone dodgy coming towards me I’d just put my Cloak on. And the useless hairdresser’s hair I couldn’t sculpt into spikes like Vicious and Rotten’s probably did me a favour too.
Getting jumped by Teds and skinheads all the time didn’t do anything to bring the band closer together. It wasn’t like we had bodyguards or anything, we were just getting on buses and tubes the same as everyone else, and Rotten and Vicious attracted so much attention because of the way they looked – and behaved – that if you hung out with them it felt like you were making yourself a target.
Even Cookie was spiking his hair up by that point. In fact, I was getting totally left behind on the image front. I had to up my game if I wasn’t going to disappear off the radar altogether. So I started wearing the knotted white handkerchief on my head like a Gumby from Monty Python – to hide the shame of my giant unspiked bonce. I did it first around the time we were shooting the video for ‘God Save the Queen’. The cartoon element would not have come to the fore so much if Glen had still been in the band, but I figured if the end of the pier was the direction we were heading in, I might as well get there first.
Although the next single, ‘Pretty Vacant’, actually got us on Top of the Pops when it came out a month later, it seemed like – between the media, the police, the fucking bastards at the GLC, every other local council in Britain and Malcolm getting bored – there was some kind of conspiracy keeping us from playing live in the UK. So we fucked off to Scandinavia and did a tour there instead. It was true what they said about Sweden. It wasn’t just how good-looking the birds were, they were really into sex, as opposed to what we were used to, which was grudging Northern slags with big ankles and spotty backs. I’m sorry if the truth hurts.
Sweden and Norway were mental, and then just to show the grudging Northern slags we hadn’t forgotten about them, we actually managed to do some proper shows in England. The S.P.O.T.S. tour (it stood for Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly) was as good as it was going to get for us playing live with Sid in the band. Our disguises – all the different names we used – were just good enough to fool the authorities but not so good as to leave us playing to empty venues. Tax Exiles, Special Guest, Acne Rabble, The Hamsters, A Mystery Band of International Repute – sounds like a festival worth going to. It was exciting – the clubs were all full of kids who really wanted to see us; just what a secret tour should be. I remember Malcolm not being around so much – probably busy doing our American deal with Warner’s or fucking about with the film he was determined to make – but those were fun times. Sid was wrecked by the end of it, though.
By the time Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols finally came out – at the end of October 1977 – we were a very different band to the one we’d been when the earliest songs on it were written, two years before. But the great thing about the album was, not only did it still sound fresh, it felt like the defining work of a band putting all their ideas into practice at once. I’d supplied the title – half-inched from a cheeky-chappy hot dog guy at Piccadilly Circus who I’d heard say ‘Never mind the bollocks …’ a few times when I was off to Soho on my red-light missions.
There was definitely a connection between my raging fucking libido and how the album sounded. Being a bit of a drummer on the quiet gave me a very percussive way of playing – that rhythmic djung-djung-djung-djung. It seemed like the automatic thing to do. I didn’t feel comfortable going dah-dah-dah and then leaving air. If you take a song like, let’s say for instance ‘All Right Now’ by Free, there are gaps in it. Now I love that song, but I could never write or play anything like it, because I always wanted to keep driving, and the concept of not doing that just seemed really bizarre to me. Even with ‘Submission’, where it goes djung-djung dah-dah, I’m still kind of djunging in between. That’s my thing – I just can’t leave a hole unfilled.
With the album there was no record business conspiracy to keep us off the top of the charts (although a Virgin record shop did get sued for displaying the word ‘Bollocks’, like it was a retail version of flashing). They actually won the case. We got our number one at last, and it seemed appropriate that the Sex Pistols should have established a legal precedent for people showing their bollocks in public. We celebrated by doing a couple of special Christmas Day shows for striking firemen in Huddersfield, a matinee for the kids and then a proper show at night. There are some funny pictures from that afternoon of Sid with the kids, like both sides are trying to work out which is the biggest child.
It was getting pretty dark around him by that time, even if it didn’t look that way when all those kids were throwing pies around. Trouble was also starting to boil up in terms of tensions between Rotten and Malcolm, between me and Cookie and the other two, and even between Sid and Rotten, who weren’t getting on too well either. Once Malcolm’s brilliant plan to kidnap Nancy and force her to go back to America had failed, Sid was pretty much lost to the heroin, and John had a big problem with that. It didn’t feel like the writing was on the wall yet, though, and we had no idea when we were playing it that the gig for the firemen would be our last show in the UK and that by the end of the short American tour we were about to go on, the band would have broken up.
At first we were refused entry to the US for visa reasons – they were trying to save us from ourselves. Our stack of criminal convictions (we all had a few, but I had the most) meant that Warner Brothers had to pay a load of money to the American government as a bond to guarantee our good behaviour. Betting on the Sex Pistols to keep the peace at that time was like backing a three-legged chihuahua to win the Grand National – not the best investment they would ever make – and Warner’s sent this record company enforcer guy called Noel Monk along to protect it.
That tour was a complete fucking circus from the very beginning – I think the couple of Vietnam vets Warner’s assigned to do security for Sid wished they were back fighting in the jungles by the end of it. We were very big news in America then, and there were so many people following us around trying to get exclusives – which of course Sid was only too happy to provide – that the whole thing was crazy. Almost as soon as we arrived, the magazine High Times filmed him shooting up in a hotel room. That was enough to get us slung out of the country on its own, but somehow it got squashed by Warner Brothers. It’s amazing what they can get you off when you’re making them money.
Meanwhile Malcolm was still on his wanting-us-not-to-be-like-any-other-band trip, so instead of playing in New York or LA, where there would’ve been a real buzz, we had to play all these fucking cowboy places like Texas and Atlanta. Maybe this was a good idea in theory, but in practice it meant all the fucking Bible-thumping redneck crazies coming along to throw dead animals at us. Obviously shit like that didn’t bother McLaren, because he never had to actually go onstage and deal with it, but it was the worst, man.
We might have got through it if the four of us could’ve put on a united front. But the band was splitting into two camps because me and Cookie couldn’t stand being around Johnny and Sid any more. You couldn’t turn round for a minute without Sid starting a fight with some cowboy at a bar or smashing his bass over some geezer’s head. We were just trying to get by and he was busy being Sid Vicious and making life impossible for everyone.
Then on top of that you had Rotten, who was on his own trip and basically thought he was God by that stage. Even Sid had lost respect for him with his outfits and his silly hats. They’d been mates at the start, but from the moment Vicious joined the band they kind of pulled away from each other. I guess there was a bit of rivalry there, and they argued about Nancy and the heroin. Rotten is always moaning about junkies, but the effects of excess booze are just as terrible.
I hated flying, but anything was better than being stuck on the bus with those two. The whole thing was such a horrible nightmare that I’ve kind of blocked it out. Cookie says the plane we were on got struck by lightning going into Memphis and I don’t even remember that. By the time we got to San Francisco at the end of the tour, I’d got the flu. The Winterland seemed like a great venue for a proper rock ’n’ roll show, not like the shitty cow palaces we’d been booked into up till then. Unfortunately, we were awful. My guitars were all out of tune as I’d bought this fucking Firebird that was shit, and Sid was being a complete clown. Looking at it from the audience’s point of view maybe they thought, ‘Wow, this is wild, this is crazy,’ but from my point of view, we were just utterly fucked.
A load of new West Coast punk bands like The Avengers and The Nuns played before us. It should’ve been exciting to think we were inspiring all these bands to form in America the same way we did with The Clash and The Damned back home, but I don’t think I heard them play a note. I couldn’t have cared less about the music by then. I was too busy concubining it up backstage.
I went to town at the Miyako hotel after the show that night. Even though I had flu, none of the conveyor belt of birds going through my room – in you come, suck that and thank you very much – seemed to be bothered about catching it (or anything else). I lost count of how many there were but let’s say it was six because that’s how many chambers there are in a magazine, and this Sex Pistol had just shot his last fucking bullet.
The pressure had got too much, so I did what I always did – I bolted. Rotten has tried to twist what happened next to look like he broke the band up, but he loved the Pistols and really wanted us to carry on. His plan was for us to get rid of Malcolm and continue. Looking back, he was right in a way, because McLaren’s ego was destroying everything, but when it came to the crunch of choosing sides between our manager and our singer, there was only one place Cookie’s and my loyalties could lie.
However much of a nightmare Malcolm had become, he was still a big part of the whole thing and we couldn’t just ditch him. I’d been staying at his house for years before the Pistols even got off the ground, and I considered him an ally and a friend. Plus Malcolm was giving us the chance to do the Ronnie Biggs thing in Brazil and finish the film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle – both of which we were quite excited about. They certainly seemed way more appealing as options than sacking Malcolm and trying to make the Pistols work with Rotten and Sid, who was overdosing every five minutes by then. At the end of the day, it came down to who we felt more comfortable spending time with, and that was a no-brainer. So me and Cookie fucked off to Rio to have fun with a Great Train Robber, Lydon went to Jamaica on Branson’s dollar to discover reggae, and Sid and Nancy got a one-way ticket to their own public junkie hell.