Dark luminosity, p.14
Dark Luminosity, page 14
Martin Atkins, John Lydon and me, pictured at Gunter Grove circa 1980
Strong Primal Undercurrents
There was another weirder aspect in regard to this incident. As I describe this other aspect, I have two requests. Firstly, forget dialogue, language or indeed speech of any kind; in fact, forget civilised refined behaviour as we would understand it – think primitive societies. Secondly, picture it all in slow motion; imagine it as an intense action scene from a movie where the director feels that he has no other option but to resort to slow motion in order both to accentuate the speed and intensity of ‘the moment’ and to convey the sheer primal horror of the particular scene that he is dealing with. Even Spielberg and Scorsese have on occasion resorted (effectively) to this clichéd procedure (the graphic opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan, and the fight scenes in Raging Bull, for example, use this technique).
So here we go: I came offstage (wild eyed and high on adrenalin) with Martin Atkins following me. The coterie of people standing side-stage parted before me. As soon as they caught my eye they looked away; it was as if they were trying to make themselves smaller before me. It was as if I had become, to them, a deity. When I got into the dressing room Jeanette moved in very close to me. She maintained eye contact, while keeping her head lowered, and became smaller and ‘fluffier’ and for the first (and last) time – I almost hate to admit this – attractive to me. She was making shy and tender touching movements to my hands and arms. It was the next best thing to ‘grooming me’; I was the king baboon. There were other girls around, they too seemed small and ‘fluffy’; it was as if they were displaying their privates, parading up and down like female baboons. I was the young lion surveying my pride. I was the woad-painted Celtic chieftain. I was the man. (It was all a bit like Captain Willard, when he appears at the entrance to Colonel Kurtz’s lair, after having topped the great man.) Suddenly that perspective disappeared; speech and thought and reason were back and I could hear myself howling and whining and effing and blinding. However, it reaffirmed something that I had already realised at a deeper level: PiL was a wolf pack, and I was beginning to be perceived as an ‘alpha male wolf’ rather than a maverick outsider lone wolf (albeit a lone wolf you would be ill advised to directly challenge). Essentially that was the problem.
America 2
The Sex Pistols were in the past and I was very keen to leave the whole punk thing behind, including the ‘auto-response’ sneers and hostile, confrontational attitude. It seemed so adolescent to me. I was now twenty-one and I didn’t want to be a member of a ‘teenage gang’. That’s why I really hated the walking offstage coupled with John’s seemingly non-stop bolshie sulky attitude. I thought it was stupid; he was no longer Johnny Rotten and it was no longer the Sex Pistols. He was now John Lydon and this was Public Image, and those crowds in America were, by and large, very open and receptive. They were not really ‘punk audiences’. They certainly were nothing like the audiences back home in the UK. They really understood that Metal Box contained light as well as dark. Over the years Metal Box has come to be referred to, largely by your bog-standard, dim-witted thirty-something music journalist, as a dark and morbid impenetrable classic. You always get the impression that most of these people who spout on about Metal Box have never really listened to it. (In a way, it reminds me of James Joyce’s Ulysses, insofar as it’s discussed far more than it is actually read.) Those Yanks, because of their wider musical vocabulary (especially in regard to modal jazz), really got PiL. I think that John, through his stupid stubborn obstinacy, missed a great opportunity with PiL.
At the time of my departure I felt sure that there was something deeply wrong with him. The number of ‘bad calls’ and decisions that he made just did not make sense. It was cutting off your nose to spite your face on a gargantuan level. Unlike every other person around him I couldn’t sit back and pretend that it was OK. I seem to remember that in the early days of PiL, and before, all that negative stuff would be tempered with a degree of humour and self-deprecation. By the time of the US tour he seemed to be utterly unbearable nearly all the time, and I had to get away. Of course, this sort of behaviour is by no means unusual in big stars (or even successful business tycoons).
Brian Clough and Margaret Thatcher are the two other strong characters that John reminded me of the most. I honestly think that in terms of personality John and ‘Cloughie’ are doppelgängers. I think that in essence their strengths and weaknesses were very similar. Examine how they both conduct themselves in interviews; their body language, coupled with their flamboyant and confrontational styles. If an interviewer points out an apparent inconsistency or failing in either of them, the offending questioner will ruthlessly be cut down to size for daring to step out of line. Both had/have an intense charisma and they both have/had an absolute strength of will. Both are/were determined to win at all costs. When they put their mind to it they could engender tremendous and fierce loyalty in those around them. Both of them really liked a pound note, to the extent that it had a detrimental effect on their work relationships. Richard E. Grant’s Withnail character also comes strongly to mind when I think of John, especially pre-PiL. These comparisons to Clough and Withnail are ultimately a compliment. I love both those characters.
Narcissistic Tendencies
It’s very easy when writing an autobiography to lay down the law and point the finger at everybody else, but please don’t think that I am painting myself as Mr Normal and Well Adjusted, because, at that time, I most certainly was not. I was the proverbial ‘loose cannon’. I too had more than a degree of the old narcissistic tendencies. Indeed, I can still have flashes of them. I understand that ‘arrogant high’ when everyone around you seems so feeble, inconsistent, untrustworthy and unreliable. I also know the other side to that coin: the low depths of self-hatred and depression, and the absolute absence of self-esteem. Of course, both aspects are an unrealistic nonsense. They are to be gently laughed at. I think that it is a good idea to get these narcissistic tendencies out in the open, where they are revealed as absurd. They then tend to wither and die. They don’t like it in the light. They like the dark, where they can hide behind lies and untruth and self-deception. Anyway, I must go; I am sitting writing this in a five-star hotel (five? I wouldn’t give it two). I called room service and ordered the caesar salad, but they have brought me the Greek salad. I’m furious. I’m going to have to call the duty manager. To be honest, I feel like jumping in a taxi and going straight to the airport. I feel like going home. I can’t take this, I’m cracking up. None of you know what it’s like in this business. The shit I have to put up with. None of you understand. You’re all little people.
America 3
The day after the Palladium show John and Keith acted like nothing had happened, but I knew that there was a lot going on under the surface. The people from the record company showed us the reviews of the show that had been published in the press. As I recall they were all stunning. This was a very different situation as compared to the UK, where PiL hardly ever got a decent review.
The New York Times in particular went to town. They gave it the same sort of respect that you would expect them to give to an Ornette Coleman concert. I thought that was fantastic, because we would not have got that in the UK. Most UK journalists didn’t know what to make of PiL. I came up ‘smelling of roses’ in the New York Times review. Everyone was very happy for me; I know that, because they told me they were.
Funnily enough, the next couple of days were probably the best on that tour. Martin Scorsese was making a film, Raging Bull, and he wanted to have a meeting in regard to us doing the soundtrack. I went to see him with John. We ended up sitting in a penthouse apartment with Scorsese. Because of the combination of my first-ever jet lag, speed comedown, booze and general tour weirdness, I was very spaced out (I think I must have had a puff as well). My memory is a bit hazy, but I seem to remember that John left soon after we arrived with some biggish geezer who worked for Scorsese. I don’t know where they went. They may well have explained where they were going, but in the state I was in I probably just grinned inanely at them. So anyway, I was left in the apartment with Scorsese. I was very happy because the bloke was an absolute hero to me. Taxi Driver, as far as I was concerned, was a masterpiece. Paul Schrader wrote the incredible screenplay. Apparently, Schrader was brought up in a strictly Calvinist household, and didn’t see a movie until he was eighteen; he’s a very interesting bloke. The soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann is also something I never tire of.
Scorsese was like a cat on a hot tin roof, just couldn’t sit still. He was jabbering away like crazy. I recall him beckoning me to the window. He pointed down at the people milling around on Broadway. (We were several floors up in a skyscraper.) He asked me if I would care if ‘one of those little “dots” suddenly stopped moving’. I immediately knew what he was on about: he was reciting Orson Welles’s speech from Carol Reed’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, the one where Orson is on the Ferris wheel and goes on about ‘the Renaissance’, ‘cuckoo clocks’, ‘the Borgias’ and ‘Switzerland’. Basically Scorsese did a performance. He was very wired and his delivery was far more urgent and imploring than Orson’s. His face was no more than two feet from mine.
I certainly wasn’t disappointed with Scorsese, he more than lived up to any expectations that I had. To tell the truth I don’t like all his films, but when I do I love them: Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, Casino, Last Temptation … and Kundun are the ones for me.
I can’t remember how the encounter ended, but eventually John came back. I dimly remember Raging Bull being discussed, the storyline and all that. I don’t think they showed us scenes from the film, or anything. I vaguely remember thinking that they weren’t really serious. Anyway, we never did the soundtrack for Raging Bull.
The next day we played another gig in New York, this time an ad hoc affair at a club called Great Gildersleeves. I think that the purpose of the gig was twofold: to raise extra revenue for the tour, and to keep Warner’s, the record label, sweet. It’s not unusual to do an ‘extra show’ at a small venue when touring so that all the people from the record company and retailers can come and meet you. So you get introduced to ‘Bud from Midwest Radio Promotions’. You are supposed to pump Bud’s hand enthusiastically, and when he bellows, ‘Are you having a great time in the USA?’ you are supposed to bellow back, ‘Hell, yes!’ Everyone tells you that ‘your album is amazing!’ and ‘we all love you here!’
When you get taken around the record company offices these same bullshit mantras are repeated endlessly and enthusiastically by all concerned. You get taken into offices where fat vice-presidental blokes are in the process of practising their golf putting while talking on hands-free telephone receivers that are attached to their heads. This has been one of the many Groundhog Day aspects of my life in the music industry. Of course, it never does turn out that ‘everything’s great!’ You normally end up being dropped by the American label a few months later. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining: I think it’s bloody amazing that I still got those US deals. After all, it’s not as if I ever sold a million albums there.) Incredibly, in 2020, I signed to Cleopatra Records in LA. They released Metal Box – Rebuilt in Dub. I made that record with the superb guitarist/producer Jon Klien (ex-Banshees, the Batcave). By the time this book is published, our album Brief History of Now should have been released. Brian Perera, the president of the label, and his VP/head of A&R, Matt Green, are totally switched on and nothing like the aforementioned Midwest radio guy.
The show at Gildersleeves was, I think, the best of that tour. No one left the stage early, and the vibe was OK. The evening got off to a good start when the bloke doing the ‘MCing’ got ‘pied’ courtesy of the famous ‘Pieman’ of the late-sixties ‘Yippie movement’. It was all my doing. I had heard a lot about the Yippies, and wanted to meet them while I was in New York. They were to me what hippies should have been: they were lively and humorous, and decidedly to the left. It was Joe Stevens, NME’s resident photographer in New York, who introduced me to them.
I was desperate for the Yippies to introduce me to the legendary ‘Pieman’. The Pieman was known for publicly ‘pieing’ establishment figures such as Edward Teller and Andy Warhol. The Yippies set the meeting up. The whole thing was conducted as if we were organising a gangland hit. I was told to return to my hotel and I would be contacted. A woman called and told me to go alone to such-and-such a diner and to sit at a certain booth and to have thirty dollars (or however much it was) in an envelope as well as a photograph of ‘the hit’. So off I went, and I was sitting there having a hot dog when a bloke sat down behind me. ‘Have you got the money?’ he said to me in hushed tones, so I passed him the envelope and said to him, ‘The photo and name of the bloke you have to hit is in there as well.’ ‘When and where?’ he replied. ‘Gildersleeves, tonight,’ I said, ‘just before Public Image go onstage.’ ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What flavour?’ ‘What?’ ‘What flavour?’ he repeated. ‘Blueberry, strawberry, chocolate, cherry, custard – what do you want?’ ‘Strawberry,’ I said, thinking that was the end of it. ‘What size?’ I took the biggest. So that night the poor old MC (I think he was a DJ), who Martin had befriended after the Boston show, got pied. He came onstage to announce us and just as he opened his mouth he got ‘whacked’. He was an OK bloke and did see the funny side. I must admit that it made the stage a bit slippery.
Anyway, like I said, it was a great show. Just as at the Palladium, there were a lot of celebrities present. Towards the end of the show a load of punters got up onstage, dancing. They weren’t bad dancers either from what I can recall. I saw some of that show on YouTube recently. It was the first time I had ever seen live PiL footage. I thought that it was pretty good. The sound, as we all know, is normally crap on ‘bootleg’-type footage, owing to it not having gone ‘through the sound desk’, but whatever, it is still pretty good. To look at it you wouldn’t think I was so pissed off; I just look very impatient in between numbers. Anyway, the band sounds, bar a little bit of dodgy tuning, nice and tight. I remember being very happy with that show at the time.
We played Atlanta a couple of days later and things really took a dip again. John once more walked offstage early on in proceedings. I told him he was out of order. I had chatted to some of the punters outside the venue earlier in the day, and it turned out that some of them had driven all the way from Florida, which probably entailed a ten-hour drive. As we left the stage he made some disparaging remark about me ‘wanting to play to the kids, man’, taking the piss, basically, making it sound like I was being a ‘fake rock reactionary’, or something. Well, I wasn’t like Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock or Sid. I wasn’t going to tamely put up with that crap. I knocked off the nutty-looking safari hat that he was wearing as soon as we got off stage and effed and blinded a bit. I felt like knocking his block off. I think that he knew that he had overstepped the mark. I think that we hardly talked again after that, not properly in the way that mates would – the friendship was on its last legs by then anyway. But at least we went back out there and finished the set.
However, the whole walking on and off thing caused some bad feeling in certain sectors of the crowd, some of whom were still lurking around well after the show finished. A few of these punters had a vaguely hillbilly sort of vibe – battered cowboy hats and tatty denims – and were ‘ugly drunk’. Two of these ‘hillbillies’ approached me at the rear of the venue as I left. There were two blokes from Warner Bros there too; I think that they were keeping an eye on me because they sensed I was on a bit of a hair trigger after the events of the evening. The two hillbillies said to me, in a very aggressive manner (and to get the full benefit of this you have to imagine them speaking with Southern accents), ‘Y’all [referring to PiL] didn’t even bleed, man … at least Iggy [Pop] bled.’ I swear that those are the exact words that they used. I remember them because I thought that the language they used was marvellously evocative, and for months afterwards, whenever I had a drink in me, I addressed people in exactly those words, using the same Southern drawl that those good ol’ boys had used.
Don’t get me wrong, though, they were a nasty pair of cunts who wished me ill. I must admit that following the earlier events of the evening I was feeling rather belligerent, so I assumed the character of an Edwardian gentleman and said to the one who had admonished me, ‘Sir! Sir! I put it to you that you are a homosexual, and that this tough macho attitude that you are displaying is simply an act. Sir! Sir! I put it to you that you have a crush on Iggy Pop, sir! I accuse you of being a faggot!’ Well, talk about light the blue touch paper and stand well back: those two geezers went mental. The blokes from Warner’s went mad at me because I had made a bad situation considerably worse. They flung themselves in front of the good ol’ boys, and screamed for back-up from the venue’s security, which duly arrived, but, to be honest, I wouldn’t have worried if the Warner’s blokes had pissed off and left me with the two good ol’ boys; those hillbillies didn’t realise that I also contained a high degree of pent-up aggression and would happily have set about them with maximum speed and vindictiveness.
