Apathy for the Devil (30 page)

In due course, the group downed tools and looked to us for some kind of verdict on what they’d just been playing. I told them I was enthusiastic about their self-penned stuff but warned them to banish ‘Everlasting Love’ and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ from the repertoire, ditch the underwhelming mid-sixties déjà vu vibe and start listening and learning from the more current US-BASED punk-rocker elite. McLaren then took over the discussion in heated tones. He immediately turned on poor Wally Nightingale, telling him he didn’t belong in the group, couldn’t play well enough and that he should just take his guitar and vanish: he was fired. This was a bold move on McLaren’s part. Wally
held the keys to the rehearsal space after all and was also probably the most proficient player of the lot of them. But McLaren couldn’t abide the fact that he wore glasses and was the most overtly sweet-natured of the bunch. He was already thinking in terms of image at the expense of musical prowess. I’d rarely seen anyone behave in such an overtly ruthless and tactless way towards another human being. Nightingale’s eyes were moist with tears as he exited the building: with no forewarning he’d just been viciously exiled from the gang he’d mucked around with since childhood. Not that his old cronies appeared to give a damn. A minute after he’d gone, both Cook and Jones started running him down, calling him a ‘cunt’ and ridiculing his teary-eyed departure. That’s when I got my first serious insight into what a bunch of flint-hearted little back-stabbers they really were.

But the surprises weren’t over yet. Nightingale’s sudden sacking meant there was now a big hole in the group’s sound. Steve Jones had worn a guitar around his neck when they’d played but - as he’d only started actually learning how to play the thing three months earlier - he’d employed it as a convenient stage prop rather than a musical instrument. ‘Who’s going to play guitar then?’ Glen Matlock asked McLaren. McLaren turned in my direction: ‘Nick plays guitar. He can be your new member.’ He didn’t ask me if I was interested in taking on the role - we’d had no prior words on the matter whatsoever. It was just presented as a fait accompli. Suddenly I was a Sex Pistol.

‘Well, why not?’ was my first and foremost reaction. At that exact moment in history, I wasn’t doing much with my time apart from hunting down heroin. At least it would make a change from lying horizontally on a broken-springed mattress and staring dreamily at the ceiling. But there was a lot of work to be done.
And they were still kids. There was only a four-year age difference between us but when you’re a worldly twenty-two-year-old and you’re suddenly thrown into the company of eighteen-year-old artful dodgers, relationships are never going to be balanced. It was a challenge - but a worthwhile challenge to take up, whatever the outcome. I’d never been in a group before and a part of me relished the experience of now being part of a music-making gang. Plus I sensed that - with or without me - they would become a successful act because they were still so young and so cocksure. At the very least, it would be something to tell the grandkids in years to come.

My Sex Pistols sojourn lasted roughly two months, possibly throughout July and August ’75. I can’t say for sure because time lines tend to become unreliably elastic when you’re as stoned as I was throughout that period. But that’s how it feels to me now, looking back from the vantage point of relative sobriety. We didn’t rehearse every day - more like once a week. We still used the old BBC building for these sessions. God knows how they’d squared this with spurned Wally and his caretaking dad but they managed to hold on to the space until autumn, when McLaren found them a basement in Denmark Street to work in. At first I busied myself working out the guitar parts of their existing repertoire. I made sure both ‘Everlasting Love’ and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ were given the heave-ho. McLaren then coerced us into covering two singles that were part of the oldies collection on his shop’s jukebox. Both songs were B-sides. One - ‘Don’t Give Me No Lip, Child’ - had first been recorded in the mid-sixties by an English singer called Dave Berry. The other - ‘Do You Really Love Me Too? (Fool’s Errand)’ - was a pop song performed by McLaren’s personal fetish object Billy Fury. Neither
number did the band’s evolving set list any great favours - to me they were just more wrong-headed retro tomfoolery - but at least learning and then struggling to rearrange them was more gratifying than just aimlessly jamming.

The most productive moments between us happened when Jones and Matlock came round to my place separately and I’d play them records and tapes in an attempt to locate new material and a new direction. Matlock wasn’t like the other two, which is to say he wasn’t particularly tricky or light-fingered. He was more middle-class - about to enrol in art college - and he’d actually read a few books. Jones, on the other hand, had been a borstal boy and was completely illiterate - unable to decipher a single printed word or even write his own name. That didn’t make him a fool in my book. What he lacked in basic schooling he’d more than made up for in accumulating street-survival savvy throughout his teens. But he was at a crossroads in his young life with only two career options open to his lack of qualifications. He could either follow the path he was already on and become a serious hard-core criminal robbing banks and the like. Or he could chance his arm and try and make it as a rock star. For the time being, the two roads were intertwined: he’d already stolen all the group’s equipment and continued to filch and then sell guitars - and other musical equipment - from various central London instrument stores. In fact, no one in Britain at that time had a greater talent for hiding guitars inside a large coat and then vanishing from the scene of the crime than Steve Jones. Now it was time to find out if that talent extended to actually playing them as well.

That’s why I was seeing so much of him
chez moi
. We’d sit around and work on our hopefully intertwining guitar parts.
McLaren had decided that the group needed a new singer and that Jones should just play guitar in the line-up from now on. As I just mentioned he’d only started three months earlier. But he was an incredibly quick learner. What had taken me literally years to put into practice on a fretboard he managed to master in a matter of weeks. Actually, that was the most exciting aspect of being in the Sex Pistols musical boot camp - watching Steve Jones find his own voice as a guitar player. Once his fingers could form a few rudimentary chord shapes he was off and running because those chords finally offered him a language to express himself in that had nothing to do with his nemesis, the written word. I tried to show him some minor chords but he wasn’t interested in them: they sounded too pretty and soft-laddish to his ears. He preferred just the big brash major barre chords. They better conveyed his inner spirit, I soon realised. Steve after all wasn’t given to introspection, musical or otherwise. He wasn’t the sort of bloke you’d try and introduce to the music of Nick Drake. I bombarded him with Stooges thug rock instead. ‘Forget the Small Faces - listen to Iggy and his boys. Adopt what the Stooges are doing on their records and make it the integral part of your sound’ became my mantra to the group. (I even phoned James Williamson’s LA phone number to tell Iggy about the Sex Pistols and attempt to persuade him to fly over and be their frontman. That was when I learned the news that he had in fact just been incarcerated in an LA mental hospital.) I also force-fed him and Matlock a cassette tape John Cale had given me of some studio recordings he’d produced for a Boston band called the Modern Lovers. Matlock became greatly enamoured of two tracks on that tape - ‘Pablo Picasso’ and ‘Roadrunner’ - and started pushing to feature the latter in the Pistols’ repertoire. I in turn became
increasingly insistent about covering ‘No Fun’ from the Stooges’ first album. That was my contribution to their musical development really: stripping away all the retro silliness and pointing them squarely towards the future.

McLaren meanwhile was focused on finding that elusive new singer. For reasons only he can tell you, he refused to go down the conventional route and place an advert in the ‘musicians wanted’ back pages of the weekly music comics. Instead he chose a more unorthodox approach: he’d hear about a group of teenagers who were performing at a minor social event being held around the outskirts of London and then drive to the event - with the rest of us in tow - to see if they had a singer worth poaching. I’ll never forget him guiding us to what turned out to be a bar mitzvah celebration out in Hemel Hempstead in order to check out the musical entertainment, which consisted of five spotty youths sleepwalking their way through the Bay City Rollers’ recent hits. After they’d finished playing, McLaren strode up to their singer - who looked and sang like a junior bank clerk - and went into his pre-rehearsed pitch. ‘I’m the manager of the Sex Pistols, the most exciting group to ever come out of London, the greatest city in the world. We’re the Rolling Stones to the Bay City Rollers’ Beatles and we’re looking for a singer. Do you fancy coming down to our rehearsal place and giving it a shot?’ The kid looked at him and the rest of us with a kind of clueless scepticism. ‘No thanks, mate’ was all he muttered before sidling off to a table on which several unopened beer cans were still loitering.

Undeterred, McLaren abandoned the bar mitzvah circuit and chose to continue his quest by frequenting the various gay London nightclubs that had sprung up over the past five years. One afternoon he turned up to the rehearsal room accompanied
by an extremely timid young man who stuttered whenever he spoke. McLaren immediately demanded that we audition him, insisting that this nerve-wracked youth might well be the answer to our prayers. Like good foot soldiers we did as we were told but I could tell that none of the group were happy about this latest turn of events. Malcolm then gave the lad an earnest pep-talk and told him to stand in front of the microphone stand and sing some notes. He got him positioned between Jones and me and we all started playing. But the youth just stood there silently trembling. This was someone who would have had difficulty saying boo to a goose, never mind fronting the Sex Pistols. McLaren started going ballistic. ‘Try putting a guitar round his neck,’ he suddenly demanded. ‘He can’t play anything but it might help put him in the mood to sing.’ So we hung a guitar around his neck - but it only made him look more awkward and ill at ease. Malcolm meanwhile was berating the guy for being so timid and Jones and I were looking at both of them with angry eyes. We tried one more run-through but it was evidently too much for our callow vocalist. He remained mute, staring into space with a stricken look in his eyes whilst a puddle of urine began to appear from out of his left trouser leg. If Jones hadn’t moved the mike stand, the poor chap would have probably been electrocuted for losing control of his own bladder. McLaren gave the weeping youth with the damp trousers cab fare home and we never mentioned the incident again. But it indicated to me at least that he didn’t have a clue about how to gainfully extend this outfit’s career trajectory.

Steve Jones nursed similar doubts. It was his band, after all - his gang, his equipment. But McLaren had suddenly elected himself as the boss-man and had told Jones he was no longer the
singer. This would have been more acceptable if McLaren actually had a red-hot vocalist waiting in the wings, but he didn’t and his attempts to drag any juvenile Tom, Dick or Harry into the role were becoming more and more excruciating to observe. Jones and I would discuss McLaren’s increasingly wacky approach to group management when he’d come round to visit. I’d know he’d arrived when I heard the window to my first-storey garret creak open and saw him climb through. Being an inveterate cat burglar, Steve rarely entered any building through the front door - it was against his religion. Anyway, one evening a guy called Alan Callan who lived one street away and who worked for Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song record label called up and invited us to record something at his home studio. Jones and I wrote a song on the spot-I played guitar and he sang. It was a slow number called ‘Ease Your Mind’. I haven’t heard it since the night we recorded it so I can’t give you an objective take on its merits. Ultimately it was just a fun way of passing the evening and nothing more. But when McLaren heard about it, he saw the session as me trying to undermine his control over the project. He banded the other three together and told them I was a disruptive influence that needed to be exiled forthwith. He then sent Glen Matlock round to give me my marching orders.

In all honesty, I wasn’t that surprised or upset. It had always been something of an uphill struggle trying to find common ground with those guys, musically and socially speaking. It wasn’t just the age discrepancy: I was a middle-class druggie fop and they were working-class spivs who’d steal the gold out of their mothers’ teeth. The fops had owned the first half of the seventies but the spivs would take it over in 1976 lock, stock and barrel. In other words, for the Sex Pistols to be accepted as an
authentic working-class rebel youth phenomenon they needed to rid people like me from their ranks. But I already knew that virtually from the moment I stepped into their web. What we had was never going to be a long-term relationship. I didn’t want it to be. I knew from the outset that these were the kind of people that you couldn’t trust on any level whatsoever.

But the scales fell from my eyes with regard to McLaren. For eighteen months I’d viewed him as a trusted friend. I’d been wrong. The guy was just another control-seeking snake in the grass. I’d underestimated the ego that lurked within his Machiavellian mindset. For a couple of months following my firing it was amusing to hear the stories about how the group’s career was developing. Malcolm found them a singer: himself. A little-known event in the early Sex Pistols career, it was also extremely short-lived and ended abruptly after he imprudently suggested they cover a Syd Barrett song from the early Pink Floyd repertoire.

It must have been sometime in October when I found myself walking down Charing Cross Road and suddenly turned to see him sidling up alongside me. There was a spring in his step and gleam in his eyes. He excitedly began telling me that the Pistols were now rehearsing in Denmark Street and had just achieved the seemingly impossible: they’d found the singer who was destined to make them all immortal. ‘He’s this really weird kid . . . looks a bit like a spastic . . . and he’s on acid all the time. But he’s the best thing in the group. He came in the other day with the lyrics to a song he’d just written. The title’s “You’re Only Twenty-Nine - You’ve Got a Lot to Learn”. Absolutely bloody brilliant.’ And we both laughed out loud because indeed it did sound brilliant. The ‘really weird kid’ of course turned out to be John Lydon and it’s
fair to say that the Sex Pistols didn’t really become the Sex Pistols until he came into the frame. I’d been involved in a work in progress in other words-a project yet to reach full fruition. I can’t help thinking now of that line uttered near the end of Roddy Doyle’s book
The Commitments
when the old-timer trumpet player says words to the effect that being in a group is mostly about dull routine but the early days are the ones to cherish - the ones filled with poetry. Well, there wasn’t much poetry in the Sex Pistols’ early days as far as I was aware. A lot of ducking and diving, bad manners and brute force, certainly - but no grace-filled epiphanies or magic moments to wax nostalgic over. It’s funny looking back: none of us knew just what we were unleashing on the world. The rest is history of course - or ‘my story’ as both McLaren and John Lydon egocentrically like to view the 1976 punk-rock explosion throughout Great Britain. I’m just glad I got out when I did. I don’t think my nervous system could have withstood being a Sex Pistol right to the end of the line.