Me and Cookie had a great time down in Rio. Just being away somewhere new and not having to deal with Rotten and Sid and all the daily fucking fiascos any more was such a relief. It was sunny, it was tropical, it was great. Plus nobody in Brazil knew who the Sex Pistols were back then, so the pressure of everyone either loving us or hating us all the time was lifted from our shoulders from the minute we arrived.
It was a good laugh hanging out with Biggsy, too – he was just a normal guy trying to live up to the myth. I guess we had more in common with the notorious Great Train Robber than we realised at the time. Even though Ronnie was free, he was a prisoner in a way. The only reason he was allowed to stay in Brazil was because he had a kid there, and they had this bizarre rule that because he was a criminal he wasn’t allowed to work. So the only way he could make money was from English tourists who wanted to go and visit him. It was like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, only for criminals.
We were round at Biggsy’s gaff a couple of times when the tourists turned up. This little red bus would come trundling up to his gate, he would bullshit with them for a while – maybe give them a beer – they’d take a picture, someone would slip him a bit of money and then they’d fuck off. I don’t know how much he got out of it, not much probably, but I liked the way he handled the whole thing. He was fun.
In fact, I was enjoying myself so much that when we finished filming and Cookie and everyone else went home, I stayed on for a couple more weeks. It was relaxing to be by myself in the hotel for that fortnight. I only know one word of Portuguese, obrigado – it’s either ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, one of the two – but that was more than enough to get by.
Returning to London at the fag-end of the winter of 1978, I hit the ground with a fucking crash. I suppose we could have tried to sort things out with Rotten, straighten Sid out and get back to writing some new stuff. But Sid was too much of a mess by then to ever get clean, Malcolm and Johnny hated each other so much they couldn’t even be in a room together, and the one attempt we’d made at writing a song over the last few months of the Sex Pistols had been Sid bringing ‘Belsen Was a Gas’ to the table.
That was a pretty stale leftover from his early band The Flowers of Romance. There’s a photo of us playing the riff together and when I look at that picture I can actually remember thinking, ‘Oh man, this is not good, in fact it’s crap.’ It just kind of felt like, ‘What’s the fucking point?’ Too much had happened for anyone to be saying, ‘Oh, let’s write some songs and do another album.’ Those days were fucking gone and they were not coming back.
The best time to be in the Sex Pistols was before Grundy, when we were writing the songs that ended up on Never Mind the Bollocks. At that point we weren’t famous and we were all equal. There weren’t so many egos around … well, there were, but the tensions between Glen and John or me and Paul and John were bringing energy into the songs. Whether it was me crunching through Glen’s Beatle chords, or John battling to make himself heard over me and Paul, or all four of us kind of kicking back against Malcolm, the struggles within the band were taking on a creative form. That’s why there was no fixing the problems that ultimately destroyed us, because they were the same things that made the band work in the first place.
That’s also why, when you look at the big fucking picture, the whole thing was perfect the way it was – beginning, middle and end. There’s no point trying to dissect everything, saying, ‘Oh, if Glen had stayed in the band instead of bringing Sid in, we could’ve done this or that.’ Maybe the chemistry would’ve sustained us to do another album if Matlock had hung around, but it wasn’t our destiny to have a progressive phase where we made a folk record and went on tour with Barclay James Harvest. The Sex Pistols were born to crash and burn, and that’s exactly what we did.
I guess the one lesson you could learn from it all would be about trusting who you’re with and not trying to be too controlling, because the magic was always the bit that none of us could control. We just didn’t know how to handle how big we became after Grundy, really. We were like those fucking idiots who win the football pools, then blow all the money and end up committing suicide.
Instant gratification – always a weakness of mine – was a big part of the problem. Not so much in the traditional areas of sex and drugs (though obviously we weren’t holding back there either), as in terms of the kind of things we’d do to get attention. Once something which happened spontaneously on TV caused that much outrage it became a bit of a game. It was like we’d got the keys to the machinery – ‘If we do this, we’ll get on the front page’ – and the whole thing lost its innocence.
The sense of us being an actual band got swept away in a flood of tabloid bullshit. Malcolm got more and more obsessed with the circus element to the detriment of the music – that was how Sid ended up in the band – but we were all guilty of it. I remember one time somewhere in Europe – could have been Amsterdam or Luxembourg, I don’t fucking know, I didn’t keep a diary – where I fucked this old fat bird from one of the big Fleet Street rags because I knew she’d give me a good spread in the paper if I did it. There I was on the page a few days later, the young stud running through the forest with these boots and a T-shirt on, and I felt kind of ashamed afterwards.
It was embarrassing, man, and that side of things got worse as time went on. I remember going to the Palm Restaurant in Los Angeles with Malcolm after the Pistols had split up. His ego had exploded by that time so all he would do was think of supposedly outrageous stunts to get more publicity, and on this occasion, he instigated me messing about with these lobsters in the restaurant in the hope that when we went outside there would be some big paparazzi thing. And there was – a bit, but not a lot.
Unfortunately, the impulse to prove what a master manipulator he was turned out to be what was driving McLaren when it came to The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle as well. Russ Meyer had been and gone as director before we’d even left for the American tour. I think it was his appointment that gave John a bad vibe that the whole thing was heading in more of a ‘Carry On’ direction from the beginning, and he was totally down on the project from then on. All I knew was that this geezer made movies about birds with big tits, and that sounded great to me.
As it turned out, once Julien Temple took over, I ended up having to kind of carry the whole film by playing the part of the detective who was trying to work out where the money had gone. Now you could say – and John probably would say – that I was helping Malcolm make us all look like idiots by doing this, but as far as I was concerned no one who knew anything about what had really happened was taking anything McLaren said seriously by that time. He certainly wasn’t going to be winning any Oscars for his acting. He was so hopeless at learning his lines that they had to write them on scraps of paper and leave them stuck on things just out of camera range. That’s why his eyes keep moving in weird directions in that noncey scene where he’s in the bath and the naked girl is standing there.
I found learning lines much easier than Malcolm did, despite not being able to read or write properly, and I enjoyed the acting side of it. That didn’t mean I was having a good time in general, though. We’d been the talk of the town for the last few years and there’d been a lot of excitement around us, then all of a sudden, it was over. Filming The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle felt like a bit of a lifeline, but looking back it probably made things worse. All the stuff in the film where we’re auditioning Edward Tudor-Pole and a load of other singers to stand in for Rotten, for instance … I suppose that was Malcolm’s way of showing Johnny that the band didn’t need him, but what it actually showed was the opposite.
I remember getting up onstage with Tenpole Tudor a couple of times at the Hope & Anchor – drunk off my arse. Me and Cookie did a few songs together for the soundtrack, like ‘Frigging in the Rigging’ and ‘Silly Thing’, where there are two different versions with me singing on one and Cookie singing on the other. Of course my version is better, but his isn’t bad either – it’s got a funny vibe to it, and the song ended up being one of our biggest hits. Still, the more records came out with our names on and had success, the more obvious it was that the band was over.
I’d walked away from Johnny and Sid in San Francisco because it didn’t seem worth being around their madness any more, but it only took me a few months after the end of the band till I was tumbling into some madness of my own. You’d think being around Sid at that time would’ve been enough to put someone off heroin for life, but it didn’t turn out that way. I’d always had a feeling of emptiness inside me which I guess the band had helped me fill. But once all that was gone, the gaping hole opened up even wider and dope was a perfect fit for it.
I suppose if I hadn’t had access to heroin, I would’ve probably just stepped up the drinking. I remember me and Cookie getting sloshed pretty regularly to keep the fear and loneliness at bay when we had to do all these Virgin record shop signings on our own up North around the release of ‘Silly Thing’, but why take an Uber of addiction when a chauffeur-driven limousine is available?
The strange thing was, I’d done heroin a couple of times while I was in the Pistols and not liked it either time: once on my birthday in Paris, and another with Johnny Thunders at Leee Childers’ flat on Wardour Street in Soho. I certainly wasn’t one of those heroin addicts who has it for the first time and thinks, ‘Oh, this is it for me.’ In fact, both times I remember snorting it, throwing up afterwards, and not really liking the feeling.
I should say at this point that heroin wasn’t nearly such a known thing then as it is now. I hadn’t really encountered it, growing up, when it was mainly toffs who were doing dope and blow, and the street drugs were speed, hash, booze and downers. I suppose Nick Kent was one of the first people I came across who I knew was doing it, but it felt like that was more of a pose, where he was pretending to nod out to make himself look (even) more like Keith Richards. The perception at the time was that in terms of punk it was really the New York people – specifically Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers – who brought it over. That was certainly true (via Nancy) of Sid, and there was an element of truth in it as far as I was concerned too.
Did that New York junkie cool thing draw me in? Johnny was very influential in terms of my guitar-playing, and when you met him he was very slick and had a lot of charisma. But did I start taking heroin cos I wanted to be like him? I don’t think so. I liked the Heartbreakers, they were a great live rock ’n’ roll band, but I don’t think I realised at the time the extent to which they were junkies and their whole life was just about trying to get dope all the time. That one wouldn’t click until it was too late and I was dangerously close to being in the same position myself. For the moment, heroin was just another medicine – like stealing and sex had been – which could stop me having to deal with reality.
The moment I realised I was in trouble was actually on the set of The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle – filming with the porn star Mary Millington up at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. Mary seemed a sweet girl but she was very fucked up – she’d be dead before the film came out, just as Sid would. By then I’d been snorting heroin every day for about six months, but for some reason that morning I left home without it. When I got there I thought, ‘I don’t feel good – what’s wrong with me? … Oh fuck!’ I split straight away, went back to my flat, had a bit of dope there and felt better immediately.
It was a horrible feeling, being dependent like that, but it just felt too powerful to fight against. All I remember thinking was: ‘Even though I don’t want to, I’m going to go down this road and there’s nothing I can really do about it.’
I did make a couple of half-assed attempts to put the brakes on. I’d heard Pete Townshend had done this black box treatment where you put pads behind your ears and pressed them every time you wanted drugs. It was an acupuncture kind of thing, but when I went to this woman’s office in Bayswater and had a go, I was just pressing them every fucking second. It was a joke, really. I also tried buying methadone off the street, but it was watered-down shit that didn’t work. Cookie saw what was happening and tried to help, but you’re powerless over other people in that situation. You can’t stop anybody who’s not ready to do it for themselves, and I had a good few years of addiction ahead of me before I’d get to that point.
The big step up, out of the second tier of junkie fuckwits and into the top flight, is obviously when you start injecting. I guess you could say the Heartbreakers played an inspirational role in this for me, but only because one of the two guys who started me off (actually the same guy who brought Nancy to see us at the Notre Dame Hall that time – yeah, cheers, mate) thought he was a Johnny Thunders lookalike. His parents owned a hotel off Kensington High Street and he and his mate, a black guy called Barry, lived in this flat round the corner. At that time, I’d been snorting dope – but only snorting it, because I didn’t know what it was like to shoot yet – for what felt like about a year. I was hanging out with them one night when they copped some and shot up. They looked like they were having a better time than me, so I said, ‘Fucking do it!’ I hated needles then, but it was all over from the moment that thing was in me. When you snort heroin, it takes a little while to get to you, but the instant rush of this was like a whole other fix in itself. It’s in your bloodstream straight away and it’s like, wallop! Two minutes later, you’re in a coma.
It wasn’t first time lucky in every respect, though. This was the only time I ever shared a needle and I’m pretty sure I managed to contract hepatitis C, but that wouldn’t show up for a few years, and since I wasn’t going to doctors for general health check-ups, it took a long while for the bad news to come through. Don’t share needles, kids! Now who says this book doesn’t have a responsible public health message?
In the meantime, I was hooked. The most demoralising thing about it was that the way you copped dope in the UK at that time was by going round to the dealer’s house. So I’d have to sit around in this miserable hippie geezer’s front room listening to Yes and Genesis for six hours just to get a sliver or sometimes even a few crumbs of dope. The indignity of it! The Sex Pistols were meant to have got rid of all that shit, and now there I was, a captive audience for Rick fucking Wakeman …