We wouldn’t play live again till Crystal Palace, six years later. That’s how keen the four of us were to spend more time together. In the meantime, I quit smoking.
Surprisingly, I managed it at the first time of asking. I’d never tried before because all I’d heard from people was what a nightmare it was to give up, but I went to a hypnotist and it wasn’t too bad. Kerry Gaynor, the geezer’s name was, and he had an office on Santa Monica. It’s three visits altogether. The first one you don’t actually quit for, you just go and sit in his Lay-Z-Boy recliner and he talks to you about all the reasons you want to give up and why it ain’t a good thing to smoke. I was kind of talking myself out of quitting, but he’s got an answer for everything.
Then he says, ‘Now, you’re going down,’ and counts back, ‘10, 9, 8 …’ to put you to sleep like they do in the movies. I thought I was just playing along with it, but maybe I was fucking hypnotised and didn’t know it; all I do know is I quit and I’ve not been back on the fags since. I’m fucking grateful because I hate cigarettes and until I stopped I didn’t realise how shit smoking was. It’s technically illegal to light up anywhere in Beverly Hills now – it’s not like in Europe, you can’t smoke in restaurants. Of course lots of people still do, but if a cop wanted to be an arsehole (which obviously a lot of them do) he could actually give you a ticket.
I’d given everything else up – except hookers and cream pies – but I never thought I’d be able to leave the fags behind. It was always implanted in the back of my head: even subconsciously there was still this voice saying, ‘I’m eating all of this health food but I’m still smoking – it doesn’t make sense.’ I did want to stop, but I didn’t believe it was possible. I didn’t think I was good enough. I thought I’d carry on smoking till the day I died, so the fact that I’ve gone fifteen years without it is a miracle to me.
Of course, I still eat like an addict. That’s the last fucking one, the food thing. The pussy thing’s subsided a bit – though I still get bouts of it where I want to act out with birds who are strangers. It’s weird how those two bounce around: if I’m not getting any pussy, I’ll eat more, but if I am, I won’t eat as much. On reflection, maybe it’s the same for everyone.
The thieving seemed to drop off of its own accord once I didn’t need money for dope any more. Obviously that hadn’t been how it started, but it was how it ended up, and the humiliation of the Des Barres leather jacket episode was something I never wanted to feel again. On top of that, I saw a TV documentary about what goes on in American prisons that scared the living shit out of me. You might think I’ve got a bit of front with the tattoos and the bikes and everything, but when push comes to shove, I’m a total pussy.
I’ve given talks in LA County jail a couple of times, an experience that didn’t make me any keener to go back to my old ways. I also spoke on a panel at Wandsworth nick when I was back in England for the Crystal Palace show, and again when we did five nights at Brixton Academy, five years later. You usually get a good turnout with a captive audience, though you never know if it’s because people want to be sober, they like me cos I was in the Pistols, or most likely just because they want to get out of their cells for a bit. Either way, the punters seemed to appreciate it and I didn’t get any weirdness, but boy I was glad when I could walk out of there.
The same was true of those extra batches of Pistols shows, although the weirdness count always went up a bit by the end. Luckily we had the good sense to schedule some shorter tours, so we had a busy couple of weeks in America in 2003, with a good show on my birthday at the Warfield in San Francisco when Rotten got the crowd to sing me ‘Happy Birthday’. He’ll do something nice like that every now and again, just to keep me guessing. The 2007 dates in Britain weren’t too bad either, because we just did the shows at Brixton Academy, then one in Manchester and one in Scotland.
What we’ve learnt with Johnny is that he usually starts off a tour all right, because he’s nervous, so he behaves himself – we have a laugh, sometimes. But then we get good, so he gets cocky, and everything goes to shit. Why we forgot that important lesson when we were scheduling the extended three-month summer 2008 tour that basically fucked us for ever, I will never know. But before we get to that horrible nightmare, there were some big things going on in my life outside music that I need to bring you up to speed with.
It all started with a Justin Sterling Men’s Weekend. Oliver Leiber (the son of the Leiber half of the great songwriting team Leiber and Stoller), who was someone I knew, went through one and suggested it would be a good thing for me to do, so we went together. It was up in Oakland at this big Masonic temple. They’re brilliant buildings – I love those places. Even though I don’t have any links to the Sterling Institute any more, I’ll be a bit vague about the details of what happened at the weekend, because I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone who might be going.
Justin is quite a controversial character, but for me it was a fucking amazing experience. For a start, it was the first time I’d ever let myself cry in public. I’d never shed a tear in a meeting or in therapy before – if I felt myself welling up, I’d just damp it down and then bolt as soon as possible. But in that heightened atmosphere when one guy in the middle started bawling it just set everyone else off. We’d been learning all this good stuff about not letting women take our balls. Then suddenly we were all weeping about our own shit, and it felt good. That was one of the big benefits of the whole thing for me – to have a fucking breather from holding it all in.
It wasn’t just about the one weekend, either. Sometimes you’d have to be a staff member, which meant watching the door at the weekends so no one could run out – it does get pretty uncomfortable in there at times. I was fucked after being on my feet for twelve hours doing that. Also when those first two days are done, they put you in a team according to where you’re from. You have to come up with a name for the group, and then meet up every weekend and do something to better yourself. I lasted a full year, so you can tell I got a lot out of it.
What you learn in the group is mostly old-school proper geezer shit, like from the Forties and Fifties, which hopefully turns you from a bloke into a gentleman. One of my big weaknesses in life used to be that I always showed up late. I never thought it was a big deal until I arrived late once for the team and they made me accountable for it. As a kind of punishment, they made me sing in front of a crowded restaurant. I just had to stand there and belt a song out – it was worse than that Salter’s Cafe gig in ’75, cos I didn’t even have a microphone.
I fucking hated it, but I did it. There were no Rod Stewart covers this time – I went for something a bit less predictable and sang ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’, which was just about the only thing I remember from school. The rest of the team stood outside watching to make sure I did it, and I was never late again. Shit like that makes you a man.
A big part of what Justin Sterling teaches you about respecting yourself was ‘forgive your fathers’, so I tried to apply that to my stepfather, since he seemed to be the only game in town in that division.
Early on in sobriety, on a therapist’s advice, I’d sent my mum a letter explaining about the fiddling. Finally telling someone what had happened to me in Benbow Road had taken some of the weight off, so I thought it might be worth taking the whole openness thing a bit further. Unfortunately, we hit a brick wall. I don’t know if Ron intercepted the letter, or what happened, but I got a reply back from my mum basically saying, ‘What are you talking about?’ It was full of all the usual denials that seem to happen when people get called up on that shit. I guess she just didn’t want to deal with it.
The next time I met up with my mum and Ron after this had happened, it had been quite a long while since I’d last seen them. He looked like such a feeble little dude and I seemed so much bigger than him that I could tell the power relation was reversed. Now I was the big guy and he was the one who was shitting himself. So because I’d done this Justin Sterling thing and I was trying to be the better man, I gave him a hug, and he kind of seized up like he thought I was gonna fucking stick a knife in him – that was the feeling I got.
It was the only hug I ever gave him, and I wasn’t inclined to give him another one afterwards. To be honest, it wasn’t my instinct to try to make it up with him, so I suppose I was just going through the motions of following other people’s advice, but at least I tried. Unfortunately, I didn’t really feel any benefit from it. I still hated the cunt and had a hard time forgiving him. I’ve always felt that what he did steered me in a direction which meant that to this day I’m no good at maintaining relationships with women. Obviously I’ve got to take responsibility for my own actions in adult life too; it’s not all Ron’s fault. But it’s hard to forgive someone who won’t even admit what they’ve done wrong. And he’s brown bread now, so that’s never going to happen; not that it was really on the cards anyway.
There was a more positive side to my ‘forgiving the fathers’ initiative, though – a few years later I managed to track down and meet my real dad. I should say at first that it wasn’t my idea to do this, but in the end I was really glad I did it. One of the big benefits of sobriety is that I’ve got some friends who aren’t fuck-ups, and two of the best of them are a couple called Laurie and Richard, who’ve got a lovely place out in Malibu where I go and stay sometimes. I knew them before their business took off and they’re kind of a normal family with kids and everything – they’ve welcomed me into their home just like Cookie’s mum and dad did. It’s the same old ‘Lonely Boy’ thing – nothing changes, except something did, and it was all down to Laurie. She had told me about her dad’s Dutch cousin whose job was tracking people down – sometimes from families that had been separated since World War II. I wasn’t sure if this was a can of worms I really wanted to open, but Laurie kept pushing me, until eventually I gave him the name Don Jarvis, and all the information I had, which wasn’t much.
He came back to me a couple of times over the course of about a year, and eventually he called and said, ‘I’ve found him.’ He’d tracked down a picture of my dad boxing and then phoned him – saying he was doing a documentary about amateur boxers, to check it was the right guy – but my dad twigged it straight away. I think maybe one of his son’s kids had guessed because he was a metal fan who had seen the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury where I actually mention his name. I was happy that when the Dutch geezer told him his son wanted to speak to him he just said, ‘Yeah.’ My biggest fear was that he was gonna say, ‘No, fuck off, I don’t want anything to do with him’ … again. Once in a lifetime is enough for that shit.
Anyway, I called him and we spoke on the phone. It was a very odd feeling, to speak to him for the first time that way. Since the band was gearing up for the big tour at that point, it was simple enough to arrange to meet him once we were all settled in London. I got a train up to Nottingham (where he lived) and met him at the station, then we went to some cafe round the corner and bullshitted for probably two hours, before I got the train back down south again.
When I was looking into the crowd to find my dad at the station, I knew who he was straight away. He was quite dressed up, with a cardigan on and a shirt and tie beneath it. I sensed that he had made an effort with what he was wearing, which I thought was cute. Talking to him was a bit nerve-racking at first, but once we sat down and started chatting properly, it just felt normal. Thinking back, it was funny that it didn’t feel more strange, as shit like that doesn’t happen to you every day.
If you saw the two of us standing next to each other, I think you would probably guess that Don was my dad. He did remind me of myself a bit – he has the same handsome features, his voice is exactly the same and a lot of his mannerisms were quite familiar. Obviously that was a new experience for me, having always felt like I was on my own in the world, with no brothers and sisters or anything. I wouldn’t say it was confusing; the surreal thing was that because I’d never been with him since I was a baby, I kind of felt like that baby inside again, even though I was fifty-two at the time.
He started apologising for not having been around but I said, ‘I’m not here for apologies – I was just curious to find out what you looked like, if you were healthy and whether you still had your hair.’ He still had it, so that’s a good omen, and he seemed a happy enough dude – I got a good vibe from him. It turned out he’d been sent to Nottingham to do National Service soon after I was born, and not long after that he met the woman he married and they’ve been together ever since. So it’s not like he was some cunt who was just going around shagging everything, like I did. He’s got two boys and a girl – all grown up now, with kids of their own – who I suppose are my half-brothers and half-sister, although I don’t feel that much connection to them.
I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times after our first meeting, and then that was kind of it. I guess it would be nice to meet up with him again some time, now that the dust has settled. Maybe then I could really see him, because it was a very intense thing – to be meeting your dad, who made you happen – and I felt like it all unfolded in a fog. But I think it’s too late in the game, now, for us to have any kind of real relationship. A lone wolf can’t change his spots.
I’m glad I finally got to speak to him, though, as it was a very positive experience. In fact, there were no negatives about it. It was one of those great things – like getting a bank account and a driving licence, and learning to read and write properly – that would never have happened if I wasn’t sober, because I wouldn’t have followed through with it. Did it change me a lot? I don’t think so. There wasn’t some great flash of enlightenment where suddenly I had a new picture of myself in my mind.
I suppose I’ve never found it too hard to put myself in my dad’s shoes.
Did he fuck off?
Yes.
Was that a horrible thing to do?
Not really.
If you’re not in love with someone and you’ve had sex on a whim and she gets pregnant, what are you gonna do? I don’t think I should be mad at that. Despite all my mum’s moaning over the years – which I can understand too, from her point of view – he did settle down afterwards, which proves he was a good guy. Overall I’ve got no grudges against Don Jarvis whatsoever.
One thing I do have now is a picture of him in the ring. It’s a bit frayed around the edges, but that doesn’t matter. I think his boxing record was that he lost more times than he won, so it’s not a ‘coulda been a contender’ situation. There’s also a clearer photo, of him and his mates when he was young where they’re all dressed as Teddy boys outside a boozer. Malcolm would have liked that one.
And talking of Malcolm, meeting my dad brought back to my mind an incident from the time when I was first hanging around in his shop. There was a girl who came round to the flats in Battersea once when I wasn’t there and told my mum I’d got her pregnant. I did remember shagging her in Battersea Park one night when we were walking home from the King’s Road after being in the Bird’s Nest pub. It was near the hotdog stand by Chelsea Bridge, where the Teddy boys used to hang out. We went back to the flats, I guess I shagged her again, then she just split in the morning, and that was the end of the story, for all I knew.
Between then and the time she came round, I’d had that fight with my stepdad and fucked off, so I didn’t hear about this till later. And my mum gave me mixed messages as to whether the girl ended up having the baby or getting the money for an abortion. Then the trail went cold. So, for all I know, there could be at least one grown-up person out there whose existence is down to me the same way mine was down to my dad’s. It would be a miracle if there wasn’t, really, under the circumstances.
I was based in London for the duration of that big tour in the summer of 2008, so I went to see my mum a few times. I don’t enjoy going back to England. Even when I’m working – which is the only reason I’d be there – that lonely kid still kind of comes to the fore again. There’s a lot of deep-rooted stuff inside me that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. On this occasion I was trying to face it down and it didn’t go too well, so it ended up being quite a dark time for me.
I had a lot of heavy-duty shit to be dealing with, and the one thing a doctor probably wouldn’t prescribe for a person in that situation would be three months of Johnny Rotten. I’d agreed to do the tour on the basis that we wouldn’t be travelling together and I wouldn’t have to see him between shows. Of course that was never gonna be the way of it. We were based in London, then flying off to do festivals at the weekend in the worst fucking shithole places in the former Eastern bloc – Russia, Slovakia, Estonia, Poland. Dealing with John in those situations was a nightmare.
The worst thing you could ever hear when you’re waiting in the airport to go somewhere with him is ‘Flight so-and-so has been delayed’, because then you know he’s going to start drinking and the darkness is going to descend. A lot of the time you’re on chartered flights – not private jets, two-bob fucking mini-planes with the whole crew of maybe twenty people on board and one prop held together with a rubber band. Early on we were on one of these flights and for some reason – maybe he was a fan – the pilot let Rotten smoke upfront in the cabin.
Cut to two months later. We’re on the same kind of plane, so Johnny has got it in his mind that it’s OK for him to smoke, but it’s a different pilot who – quite rightly – isn’t having it. Rotten goes absolutely ballistic. He’s like a fucking baby having a tantrum – banging on the pilot’s door, trying to open the windows and doors in the fuselage, basically risking all our lives cos someone’s told him he’s got to wait a couple of hours to have a fag. It’s two in the morning, we’re all knackered and everyone’s trying to make out they’re kipping, but no one is, cos a man in his fifties has gone into a full-on meltdown about not getting his own way.
I know where we were going – from Norway to Ireland – and because it was such a small plane it had to stop on the way to refuel. When we landed I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, he’s nicked.’ But nothing happened: no policemen came to take him away, he just stands smoking by the side of the plane while they refuel and off we go again. I think what I hate the most about these situations is that I can’t be myself around him. With anyone else, you could just tell them to fucking pull their head in, but because in recent years he’s surrounded himself with people who don’t just tolerate his childishness and aggression, they actively encourage it, anyone who dares to prick that bubble will just be making life unbearable for everyone else. So you have to kind of go along with it – Yes, John, no, John, three bags full, John.
The funny thing was that, quite early on in the tour, we’d done a warm-up show in Austria before playing the Isle of Wight Festival the next day. Rotten decided out of the blue that he was going to change the set-list, he and Cookie got into it, and things turned really nasty straight away. This was the second show of the tour and we had thirty-two more to do. At that point, I was seriously tempted to fuck off. I was wondering if I could get out of the tour by pretending to break my back onstage at the Isle of Wight. I actually spoke to a couple of people about how to feign a spinal injury in a way that would seem legit. I guess there were a few Premiership footballers who could’ve helped me out with that.
I know it would’ve been letting down the fans who wanted to see us, but all I could see was the next few months stretching in front of me with Johnny’s need to control everything festering throughout them. I was in hell. Of course when it came to the – fake – crunch, I couldn’t go through with it. And I’m glad I didn’t, because even though my prediction of how the tour was going to turn out proved roughly accurate, the Hammersmith Apollo show right at the end was worth … well, maybe not all the pain, but certainly most of it.
I fucking loved playing that gig, because I had so much history tied up in the venue. It was bizarre, when you think about all the times I’d been there to watch Bowie and Mott the Hoople (and to steal Bowie’s amps). But I wasn’t the kid lurking in the rafters like the phantom of the Odeon any more – now I was actually on the stage, standing in the same spot where Ariel Bender had stood. It was strange walking through all the corridors and dressing rooms. They hadn’t really changed in the intervening thirty years since I used to break in round the back; they’re quite clinical little rooms, there’s not really any magic to them. But all in all it was a pretty good moment, to have come full circle and be back there sober, playing our songs to a crowd who really wanted to hear them.
It’s always hard to absorb the significance of these things when they’re happening, though, and I was kind of spaced out by it. It was the night before my birthday and Rotten did the ‘Happy Birthday’ routine with the crowd again, which I was touched by. That really added to how special it was. I remember playing ‘No Feelings’ and Cookie coming in wrong and it all being a mess – maybe because there actually were some fucking feelings involved. And after the gig, I felt satisfied. Me and Cookie even went and hung out for a while at this pub down the street from him which was his dad’s local.
It would’ve been the perfect way to finish the tour. The show was a blinder – it meant something to me, and I’d have loved to have knocked it on the head there and then and relaxed. Unfortunately, we had one more poxy gig to do a few days later in that bit of Spain where they don’t want to be called Spanish. My fairy-tale ending had been fucked by the Basques … and after all I’d done for them!