Apathy for the Devil (33 page)

This was a lesson learned by Arden’s former enforcer Peter Grant - and it was one he would put to spectacular use when he came to manage Led Zeppelin in 1968. It was at this point that UK rock/pop management entered a new era - one where the musicians and performers were finally permitted to share generously in all the wealth they were generating but had previously never seen on their own bank statements.

In later years - the early nineties to be precise - McLaren would become obsessed with Grant’s music-biz accomplishments to the point of trying (unsuccessfully) to produce a film about his life, but in 1976 he was way more infatuated with the ongoing career trajectory of the Bay City Rollers than Led Zeppelin’s globe-straddling antics. The platinum-plated Rollers and their singularly creepy manager Tam Paton were proof enough that the Larry Parnes approach to pop Svengalism was still alive and capable of reaping big financial dividends in the seventies. To McLaren, the teeny-bopper Scottish quintet were the Beatles to his band’s Rolling Stones and in the early days he endlessly talked up the parallel as a way of getting the Pistols established in the public eye.

To him - like Parnes and Paton - the whole pop process was divided into two neat sub-headings: the puppets and the puppeteers. Musicians were the puppets, born to be endlessly manipulated like slow-witted peasants. The managers meanwhile were the string-pullers, the men with the plan, the princes guiding the paupers. Jones, Matlock and Cook never questioned McLaren’s basic scruples or possible hidden agenda in his dealings with
them - how sweet to be an idiot - until it was far too late. But John Lydon was onto him pretty much from the get-go.

When Lydon joined the Pistols in the autumn of ’75, McLaren should have sensed that he was bringing in someone who might soon turn out to be a thorn in his side. Unlike the other three, Lydon - though still a teenager - had a mind of his own. It wasn’t a particularly attractive or well-ordered mind - the guy was often on acid - but he was certainly its only occupant and wasn’t about to let some King’s Road fashion ponce claim squatter’s rights in it and then brainwash him into a state of pop-star servility.

McLaren and Lydon’s relationship at the outset was strained at best. I spent an evening with them one night in October at the Camden Town club known as Dingwalls. It was the first time I’d ever encountered the future Johnny Rotten. He wasn’t yet the viper-tongued larger-than-life entity we read about nowadays. He was sullen and withdrawn, an obvious victim of chronic shyness. He was physically fragile too and strangely sexless. At one point, an attractive woman approached our table simply to compliment Lydon on his (suspiciously Richard Hell-like) hairstyle. The gesture appeared to totally unnerve him. Straight afterwards he bolted from his chair and ran out of the building. McLaren and I looked at each other quizzically. How could a wallflower like this credibly front a band who called themselves the Sex Pistols?

Of course, we all know the answer to that question more than thirty years later. Lydon quickly banished all traces of post-adolescent wimpiness from his public persona and promptly rose to the occasion with a scary single-mindedness. Shortly after the Dingwalls incident, McLaren and the group invited me to one of their first-ever public appearances, at a party held by an effete artist and social gadfly named Andrew Logan.

There were only about thirty people present, amongst them Mick Jones and Brian James, both still in the process of forming bands of their own. Lydon was saucer-eyed from the LSD he’d just consumed, the other three were drunk as lords and their repertoire that night consisted of only one song - the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ - played over and over again until a seriously disturbed-looking Lydon began smashing up his mike stand. At this point Logan swanned over and suggested that maybe their set had reached its fitting conclusion.

It had been an odd spectacle to say the least, rather like seeing the early Stooges fronted not by a young white James Brown but a teenage version of Albert Steptoe, the miserable-old-geezer from much-loved British sitcom
Steptoe and Son
, instead. It was a mad blend to aim for and yet somehow it worked. Lydon’s very sexlessness and physical fragility only seemed to make his stage presence all the more menacing. He represented a radical departure from the conventional lead-singer-in-a-rock-band stereotypes of the time. His vocal range was limited to no more than three notes and its tone was instantly harsh and grating. It was an instrument that was nonetheless ideal for projecting a sense of overwhelming contempt over any subject the singer chose to sink his mangled teeth into.

Lydon loathed most of what passed for classic rock ’n’ roll. He despised Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and all the other pioneers - thought they were a bunch of gormless plooks. He disliked the Beatles too and thought the Rolling Stones were well past their sell-by date. Instead he listened intently to German avant-garde bands, even going so far as to model his own malevolent wailing on the sound made by the vocalist on Neu’s debut album. He was a bit of a closet art-rock aficionado. It must have driven Jones
and the others mad. But without his infuriating presence in the foreground spitting into a microphone, the rest of the group had no centre to galvanise their individual capabilities around. If he hadn’t been there, they’d have still been a good - and potentially successful - little rock act but they would never have been a bona fide cultural phenomenon.

Things changed radically within the group once they started getting written about in the UK press. As soon as Lydon saw his face staring back at him from the pages of the music comics, he was never the same again. His ego suddenly exploded to sky-rocket proportions, as did his sense of personal power. But this was only to be expected: after all, he was still a teenager whose childhood had been blighted by recurring bouts of chronic illness that had left him mentally disorientated until his adolescence.

McLaren’s reaction to sudden infamy though was even more dramatic and he had fewer excuses. He was considerably older than everyone else and therefore supposedly more mature and level-headed. And yet a full personality transformation occurred within him the moment his group started getting fêted by the media. Fame lifted up her skirt to him and little Malcolm became utterly transfixed by the sight he beheld. It ruined him for the rest of his life.

At the end of April ’76 he came to visit me, and his personal metamorphosis was obvious from the moment he entered my living room. Gone were the slight stutter and air of self-conscious nervousness that had so defined his demeanour in the immediate past. He now walked with the cocksure air of a young prince mingling with his lowly courtiers.

Chrissie Hynde was with him - fresh from her native Akron to
try her luck once again back in swinging London town. She didn’t seem too happy to see me again but McLaren immediately came to the point of why this visitation was taking place. He’d decided to extend his pop-Svengali instincts beyond the realm of the Sex Pistols and start a second band that he was fully intent on controlling with the same steely grip. Chrissie would be the singer and I’d play guitar. Mick Jones - then known only as ‘Brady’ - would be the bassist and a kid from Croydon called Chris Miller would be the drummer. The three of us - McLaren, Hynde and myself - even drove to Miller’s hotel room that same night somewhere on the outskirts of London to sound him out on the project. He seemed to be up for anything but was still taken aback when McLaren suddenly insisted that our group had to be called ‘the Masters of the Backside’.

The guy still couldn’t see past using musicians as glorified rent boys for his pimp-centric ambitions. The project was over for me as soon as he came up with that demeaning name. Plus Hynde and I were still far from comfortable in each other’s company. Time had not healed the old wounds that still festered between us. She came back to see me alone a few days later and our conversation soon degenerated into an almighty row that promptly spelt the end of ‘the Masters of the Backside’ before we’d even played a note of music together.

It was at this time also that my girlfriend Hermine discovered that her tightrope had been stolen. This was most inconvenient as she’d just been booked to walk it at a Women’s Lib festival somewhere in Cardiff during early May. Somehow this unfortunate state of affairs developed into a scenario where she would sing at the festival instead and I would back her up. It was then that Chris Miller turned up and offered to lend his musical support.
He had two friends with him: a black-haired guitarist called Brian Robertson some years his senior and a maladjusted youth called Ray who’d spent much of his adolescence devoid of parental guidance, even sleeping on Brighton beach for extended periods. In a couple of months’ time, Brian would change his surname to ‘James’, Ray would reinvent himself as ‘Captain Sensible’, Chris would take on the daunting sobriquet of ‘Rat Scabies’ - and with a horror-film obsessive who called himself Dave Vanian also in tow they’d begin playing around London as the Damned.

But before that they committed themselves to two performances as the Subterraneans - the name came courtesy of a Jack Kerouac novel I favoured at the time - in my old stomping ground of Wales’s capital city. Half the show consisted of us doing the least liberating-for-women songs ever conceived in rock - nasty misogynistic numbers like the Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ and the Crystals’ ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)’. The other half featured brand-new songs, most significantly Brian’s composition ‘New Rose’, which was premiered for the first time ever at the two concerts we gave. Not that anyone noticed: there were only eight people present in both audiences.

Back in London, though, a fierce conflict was brewing between Malcolm McLaren and anyone he perceived to be threatening his pre-eminence as the Pygmalion of punk. Anyone operating outside of his personal radar was suddenly marked out for instant retribution. He’d lately become so caught up in his new-found power that he’d started a new trend at his group’s London shows: setting members of the audience up for a bloody beating.

Lydon - intimidated by the rest of the Pistols - had opted to bring some of his own hooligan cohorts into the group’s
immediate entourage - proper bad boys like John ‘Sid’ Beverley and Jah Wobble. Watching their former school pal suddenly become the poster boy of late-seventies rock revolution had made them equally determined to make their mark on this new scene. At this exact moment their capacities for music-making were at best minimal but not to worry: little Malcolm conscripted them instead into his own private thug army. They could run wild at Pistols concerts, punching and stabbing and blood-letting with complete impunity.

When Beverley blinded a young girl during a show at the 100 Club that summer, few amongst the media chose to draw attention to the incident. McLaren had them all hypnotised like chickens. Some bright spark at
Melody Maker
had just come up with a new ‘punk’ manifesto. 1976 was ‘year zero’. The old rock ’n’ roll was dead. Punk was the new reality and anyone who disagreed was a walking fossil. A kind of mass hysteria was being conjured forth that threw the old music-industry guard based in Britain into a complete panic.

No one knew what to think of this new music for fear of being suddenly judged old and obsolete. And no one dared to directly address the savagery and barbarism of its protagonists. Like sex, physical violence isn’t something the English generally feel too confident about exploring. When it erupts before them, they tend to cower back, hide in the shadows and pretend that nothing untoward is going on. Thus it was that McLaren and his bully boys were able to terrorise London club-goers over and over again and still receive a clean bill of health from the city’s jobbing journos.

The first time I saw ‘Sid’ Beverley was on the 27th of May, 1976. He was lurking around the backstage entrance of a Rolling Stones
concert being held in the huge Earls Court exhibition show-room, unsuccessfully trying to chance his way into the venue. In an ill-fitting second-hand suit and electric-shock hair, he looked like a juvenile Dickensian chimney sweep.

The second time I saw him - just two weeks later at a Pistols show at the 100 Club - he left more of an impact. The atmosphere that night was tense in the extreme. McLaren was doing his puppet-master routine, setting up more dupes for a public thrashing. Two members of Eddie and the Hot Rods’ entourage - their logo designer Michael Beal and A&R man Howard Thompson - were in the house, and to the Pistols this was tantamount to a rival gang invading their turf. Just before his band started playing, McLaren stood on the stage alongside John Lydon and beckoned to ‘Sid’ to join them. They then pointed seemingly in the direction of the two interlopers and grinned conspiratorially. Sid pulled out his chain and immediately went to work. But I was mistaken: McLaren and Lydon hadn’t dispatched him to beat up the Hot Rods intruders. They’d sent him to beat me up instead.

Sid didn’t waste any words. He just lurched over and started kicking merry hell out of my seated frame whilst brandishing his bike chain just above my head. One of the Hot Rods guys intervened momentarily, only to have his face lacerated by the chain. Whilst this was happening, Vicious’s accomplice Jah Wobble materialised before me. He held an open penknife and was waving it no more than two inches from my eyes. There was dried blood on the blade and a look of pure sadistic delight in his piggy eyes as though he was about to experience an impromptu orgasm at any second.

Then he stepped back, allowing Sid dead aim at my skull. He took three or four bike-chain swings but only managed to
connect with me once. I was so stoned that night that I didn’t even feel the blow. But I could tell that something potentially life-threatening had transpired because there was blood everywhere: on the wall behind me in a wide crimson arc and all over the back of my jacket. If two more of those chain-swings had actually reached me, I’d probably have been killed by the head trauma. And what was the audience doing whilst this was going on? Just standing there, afraid to react, taking it all in voyeuristically. Finally a bouncer grabbed ‘Sid’ from behind, disarmed him and dragged him towards the nearest exit. As I was being led out, Vivienne Westwood ran up and started apologising profusely for what had happened: ‘The boy who did that - he’s just this psychopath who’s fastened on to the group. We’ll make sure he’s never allowed into one of our shows again.’ Blah-blah-blah. McLaren told me the same thing when he phoned up a day later to try and mend fences.