My promotion into the junkie premier league came in the latter stages of filming The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. If babysitting Sid through the recording of ‘My Way’ in Paris wasn’t going to put me off the dope, I guess nothing was. That trip was beyond a fucking nightmare.
So Sid’s off to Paris with Nancy, and he’s got six big bottles of methadone he’s taking over with him. I guess he’s getting it legally now because he’s trying to kick – that old routine. Anyway, they’re filming over there and I’ve somehow got pulled into the mix to go over and be the musical director in this little studio with these French session guys. At that point, being around him and that bird ranked a little below hell on earth as a place you’d want to be. To be fair to Sid, he was totally out of it, and methadone is a nasty fucking drug. I heard the Nazis came up with it, although I don’t know if that’s true. Either way, because you drink it in liquid form, it doesn’t have such an immediate impact, but it lasts way longer. As a result, it’s actually harder to kick than heroin is.
Anyway, while Sid was busy climbing the walls, I got these guys to cut the track. I think the original plan was for him to do it slow all the way through, but once we realised that probably wasn’t going to happen, speeding it up was the only way to go. The way the twiddly bit goes into time with the bass player came out all right in the end, and to his credit, Sid did kind of turn up for the vocal. When I took the masters back to England, I was actually quite proud of what turned out to be my first credit as a producer. These days I always get a chuckle out of the end of the movie Goodfellas, where my name is the last word you see on the screen.
I still don’t think I’ve ever been fucking paid for producing ‘My Way’, to be honest, but it felt good to be doing something new. Once Malcolm had got some guy to write out string charts and they’d put the orchestra on, it sounded pretty good. Unfortunately, I’d started to go downhill with the smack myself by then, so I wasn’t as interested as I should’ve been. I kind of came off it for a while when I got the call to go over to San Francisco and work with The Avengers and Joan Jett, but I was smoking a lot of weed and drinking too much to fill the hole when I was out there, to the extent that I might as well have been on fucking heroin half the time.
I was actually working with The Avengers when I got the call to say that Sid had died. Obviously Nancy had gone ahead of him to see if she could find a connection in the afterlife. I know that will sound dark, but it was a dark time. I’ve got no inside knowledge of what happened to either of them, but it was fucking grim. When I was told that Sid had died, I didn’t have a lot of feelings about it. I didn’t have a lot of feelings about anything at that stage, to be honest, so when some guy from Rolling Stone called me up, I just said the first thing that came into my head, which was: ‘Well, at least we’ll sell some records now.’
In hindsight it was probably a stupid response, and I could tell that the guy was shocked. But it was also a very Sex Pistols thing to say, which in a strange way – as the idea of the band meant as much to him as it did to any of us – was maybe what Sid would’ve wanted. Later on, I did feel sad about what happened, especially through talking to his mum, who I got on with pretty well. Sid was not an idiot, he was quite an intelligent bloke, but once he was in the band the logic of his situation pushed him down a very dark track. As I’ve said, if we’d called him Sid Kind or Sid Gentle, he might’ve tried to live up to that instead, but I don’t suppose he’d still be on so many T-shirts.
I think John carries a lot of guilt to this day over Sid’s death, even though it’s buried so deep in his head he doesn’t always recognise that’s what it is. But I don’t think Lydon deserves any more of the blame for what happened to Sid than anyone else does. It was his own responsibility how he chose to fuck up his life. Sometimes destiny is a motherfucker and that’s all there is to it.
With Sid’s death, it was finally clear to everyone – even Malcolm – that the band was over. Did it feel weird not to be a Sex Pistol any more? Well, you’re always associated with it, and I guess my image of myself at that point was that I still had to act a certain way, even if I didn’t really want to. My time in the band felt so close that I didn’t know yet who I was going to be if I wasn’t going to be that. It wouldn’t be till the mid/late Eighties, when I’d gone to LA and got sober and let my hair grow long and started riding motorbikes and writing mellow songs, that I’d begin finding another way to be.
Rotten was smart enough to begin that process straight away, by ditching his punk name and going back to being plain old John Lydon the minute he started doing Public Image Ltd. The other thing he was smart enough to do was take Malcolm to court. This was difficult for me at first, because I was still pals with McLaren and I didn’t want to have to take John’s side against him. When the receivers got put in and found out what a mess all the finances were it was really fucking depressing, but the more time went on, the clearer it became that it had to be done, and hats off to Rotten for doing it. I give him a lot of credit for having the balls to take that initiative.
Obviously he was doing it for his own good rather than mine and Cookie’s, but it benefited us, too, in the long run. It took the courts six or seven years to sort the whole thing out, but the basic problem was that Malcolm had spent money on the film that should’ve been ours. Whether you view that as straight robbery – as John did, and still does – or take the more sympathetic view that if McLaren was just a thief, he would have nicked the money for himself rather than to make The Swindle, the fact remains that this wasn’t his call to make. And if he hadn’t stitched us up by getting his own lawyer to do all our contracts, he wouldn’t have been in a position to get away with it for as long as he did.
When it came to the legal crunch, the clincher was that we were all under twenty-one when we signed our original contract. It was dodgy all down the line. We didn’t fucking know what we were agreeing to – or how wrong it was for us not to have our own lawyers. How were we supposed to know that wasn’t normal? We were too busy having fun. It was a shame for Malcolm that it all ended the way it did and he came away from the Sex Pistols with no financial reward, but he had no one to blame but himself. If he’d have just taken the credit for the things he did do instead of spending all our money on a film which made us out to be a bunch of muppets who couldn’t play our instruments, it would’ve been fine.
In the gap between The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle being finished and it finally coming out, me and Cookie were still working as a team – proving the film wrong by getting as much work as we could, and playing on some pretty good records in the process. Us sharing that place at Bell Street hadn’t really worked out – amazing, really, given what a pleasure I must have been to live with – so while there was still a bit of cash in the Pistols’ kitty, I’d ended up with my own place on Canfield Gardens, between West Hampstead and Swiss Cottage. You could see how dodgy the finances were by the way the money for that just magically appeared, almost like it was out of a petty cash box.
It was a short lease – maybe forty-five years – which was why it only cost fourteen grand. You might get the door for that now. There wasn’t a long thought, process involved in the purchase on my part – I just looked at the place and thought, ‘Yeah, this is great’ – but I did put a lot of effort into doing it up. It was kind of ridiculous because I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I made a shower and even put a little stage in there – showbiz or what? No one else in my family had owned their own place before, so I guess from the outside it must have seemed like I was a high achiever, but it didn’t feel like that at all … I mean, I shagged a lot of birds in that flat, no problem. I had a little drawer in the coffee table with the blow, the heroin, the downers, the uppers, whatever, in it, and the birds kind of flocked around that: threesomes, foursomes … In retrospect it all looked great, and in a way it was.
I had a couple of nice second-hand cars around that time, even though I still had no licence or insurance. The first one was a black BMW 2002 which I bought off an Asian kid I went to school with and souped up into a really fucking tasty motor. Me and Jimmy Macken – who was back on the scene a bit, although he and Cookie weren’t getting on too well – would drive it around London really fast late at night after going to gigs at the Music Machine. We’d be fucking drunk and flying around like lunatics, to the extent that I can’t believe we never had a crash.
Later I bought a big copper-coloured Jaguar Vanden Plas. It was a cool car but it fucking guzzled petrol, which was a major nause because by the time I had that one, the 1979 fuel crisis was in full swing, so I’d have to queue for hours to get petrol then the tank would be empty again a couple of hours later. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Serves you right, you flash bastard, why weren’t you driving a shit-heap like the rest of us?’
Me and Cookie were kind of guns for hire at that time, and our credit was still good in the industry, so we were getting to work with a lot of people who had been our heroes. When Johnny Thunders got a solo deal after the Heartbreakers ended, I played on some of the tracks on his first record So Alone. Looking back on it, one of the sad things about that album was that he did a version of ‘Daddy Rollin’ Stone’ – Otis Blackwell, I think it’s by – with Cookie on drums, me on guitar, and a different singer on each of the three verses. Phil Lynott did a verse, Steve Marriott did a verse and Johnny Thunders did a verse. I’m glad I didn’t do one, as they were all dead by 1992.
We also teamed up with Lynott a few times as a kind of punk/hard-rock supergroup called The Greedy Bastards. We did a few gigs mixing up Pistols songs and Thin Lizzy songs, and we even had a Christmas hit together in 1979. We had a laugh, and I really liked Phil, but things turned a bit ugly between us towards the end once we were both on heroin. There’s a white Falcon guitar of mine in his museum in Ireland which he conned out of me for a bag of dope, but you win some, you lose some. People who’ve nicked coats off The Rolling Stones shouldn’t live in glass houses, as I think the old saying goes.
I liked playing with other people, and probably my favourite band to play with was The Clash. I got up onstage with them a few times to do ‘Janie Jones’ or ‘White Riot’ or ‘… USA’ – those were the three main ones – and always really enjoyed it. Once (I think it was after doing Top of the Pops with Thin Lizzy on the Thursday night) I drove all the way up to Birmingham on my own to do a song with them.
To be honest, although I never mentioned this to anyone at the time, I’d have quite liked to be in The Clash then – it seemed more fun than what I was doing. It was before The Professionals were happening and I think I just felt a bit lost. I guess it was like me imagining the perfect family as a kid. I never got a feeling of rivalry from that band; they were always warm to me and I was always a fan of theirs.
I know the grass is always greener on the other side of the tour bus, and I’m sure The Clash had their own internal turmoil to deal with, but I related to those guys in a way I never could to Lydon. You could have a laugh with Joe or Mick Jones backstage and it was like, ‘Oh, OK, so not everyone is a complete cunt like Rotten.’ The problem with Johnny is that he’s always ‘on’. And if you can’t even shut the dressing room door and be real with someone you’re in a band with because he’s always got to be that guy, then what the fuck is the point?
The Clash weren’t the only band of people from around the scene making it pretty big by that time. I can’t deny that seeing everyone jumping on the punk bandwagon bugged me a bit. Even though the ethos was meant to be ‘Anyone can do this’, when they all did you just thought, ‘Oh, fuck off!’ Or at least I did. I didn’t feel that way about the Bromley people, though, because they’d been there from the beginning.
I hadn’t paid too much attention when Siouxsie played her first gig at the 100 Club with Vicious drumming, because they were shit. But I appreciated the way she looked – she really went for it – and she obviously had some talent because the Banshees turned into a decent band in the end. Not so much after they went Goth in the Eighties (that applied to The Damned as well: their first LP, before the line-up changed, when Sensible was still on bass instead of guitar – that was always the one for me), but certainly before that. ‘Hong Kong Garden’ is still a pretty cool tune – they probably have a blue plaque outside the Chinese takeaway that was about – and I played on a few tracks on Kaleidoscope, their album where the writing goes round in a circle on the back sleeve.
Siouxsie gets a page pretty much to herself in the Steve Jones sexual scrapbook as one of the very few who got away. I definitely had an opportunity one night – unless I’m daydreaming – when the two of us drove out to the airport together. We’d both been up the West End doing speed and I had the bright idea of driving to Heathrow to watch the planes take off and land (I don’t think she’d have believed me if I’d offered her a look at my etchings). That’s how smooth I was in those days; it was years before they did it in Wayne’s World as well.
Now that I remember, this was in another, different car – a Lancia I’d bought off a guy called Fachtna O’Kelly who managed The Professionals for a while – so it must’ve happened a year or so later. Either way, the two of us drove out to the airport and parked up. Unfortunately, by the time we got there I’d had so much speed I couldn’t even think about making a move. It was fun watching the sun come up, but missing the chance to get hold of Siouxsie is one of my biggest regrets. Now who says true romance is dead?
Joan Jett stayed over in Canfield Gardens for a couple of nights when we did the demo for ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’, too. That song would end up being her biggest hit; well, I say ‘her’ biggest hit, but it was written by The Arrows. It was all covers with Joan.
Those were the good times, but there was also some horrible dark shit going on in that period when I was living on Canfield Road and lapsing into heroin. I guess the band which had been the closest thing I’d had to a home didn’t exist any more and I’d lost my bearings. I’m not making excuses for going down to that shop in Islington (run by an old Sixties rocker but I won’t mention his name as he’s still alive and he might sue me) which sold Nazi regalia and buying a couple of old swastika flags to put up on the walls in the living room; I’m just trying to explain where my head was at, and why this dark shit was so in sync with how I felt.
I hadn’t really got my head around the concept of the concentration camps by the time the Sex Pistols were happening – history being one of the many subjects at school I didn’t pay attention to – so to me Vivienne’s ‘Destroy’ T-shirts with swastikas on were just about being shocking. In the late Seventies those Nazi images broke out from there and took on a life of their own. There’s one picture which crops up every now and again of me hanging out with Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69, when we were thinking of doing something together after the Pistols. I’ve got this Harrington on and under it there’s a T-shirt which is just this big blatant fucking swastika. That and nothing else – no writing or anything.
Every time I see that, it makes me cringe. It was weird, really, because I’m not a racist and never have been. I suppose it was just a way of summing up the darkness I felt. I’d done the progressive phase and the manager-of-Poco phase, so the Nazi phase was the logical next step.
One thing that didn’t turn out to be the logical step was working with Jimmy Pursey. When me and Cookie gave Jimmy a try, it was never going to be the Sex Pistols in our minds, we always thought of it as a new group. The odd thing about it was that we liked him, but when we got together to try and write some songs in a studio out in the country, he couldn’t fucking come up with anything. His cover was blown – he didn’t have the talents or intelligence that Rotten did; nowhere near. It was like the world was conspiring to make us miss Johnny.
I remember hanging out with Pursey one time in the dark phase. I went down with him and some of his mates to see The Undertones – the Irish guys who did ‘Teenage Kicks’ – at a gig on Jimmy’s home turf in the outskirts of London, the Guildford Civic Hall, I think it was. This was in May ’79. We didn’t have anything against The Undertones, the plan was just to get up and jam with ’em, but it went cockeyed for no good reason that I could understand and all of a sudden these skinheads who were Jimmy’s entourage kicked the band off the stage and started smashing their stuff up. I should’ve tried to stop it but I didn’t. It was very bizarre but kind of fun in a dark sort of way. I don’t think it was fun for The Undertones, though, because they had to run and hide in the dressing room.
I had a little thing going with Sporty Spice years later – not sexually, just playing on her solo record. She told me her auntie was The Undertones’ tour manager at the time and had told her they’d all been scared shitless by how heavy and violent and horrible it was. And these were people who grew up in Northern Ireland in the Seventies! There was certainly a weird vibe around Pursey. I wasn’t surprised to hear he’d ended up doing interpretative dance on TV a while later. I remember everyone going back to his house to party and me thinking, ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ and he was taking a bath … I thought that was weird. In fact, even thinking about this time is giving me anxiety because of how depressing it was. I’d like to be able to say that I’d reached my lowest ebb, but it wouldn’t be true. Far from it.