sarramkrop

PiL:
NME, May 27th, 1978

Transcribed (and additional notes) by Karsten Roekens,
with thanks to Tom Berglund
© 1978 NME / Neil Spencer
INTRODUCING JOHNNY ROTTEN'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
Neil Spencer meets and hears John Lydon's new combo. Joe Stevens took the pics.
JOHNNY ROTTEN DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

"Here, lend us a fiver Neil." John Lydon's upturned palm pokes toward The Guest Journalist, an expectant eyebrow arching above the famed John Rotten stare. Britain's most famous rock star is tapping me for a hand-out.
Is he joking? Is this another arch put-on, in the grand Johnny Rotten tradition of arch put-ons?
"I'm broke," he says flatly. "Completely penniless. There's no money coming in at all. He has it all..."
The eyes roll in silent reference to well-known and heeled King's Road anarchist and rag trade magnate Malcolm McLaren, ex-New York Dolls manager and currently protagonist of a flurry of lawsuits against Pistols photographer Ray Stevenson and now film maker and ex-Roxy Club DJ, rasta Don Letts.
Presently too, it seems, McLaren and his Glitterbest organisation will be engaged in another legal tussle, this time with his former protégé and Sex Pistols frontman, a situation that under British law precludes all but the vaguest references to and conjectures about relations between the two parties concerned.
Suffice to say that on the Lydon side of the tracks, the wounds inflicted by the Pistols break-up and subsequent events are deep and bloody. The resentments held are bitter and savage. The resolutions for the future though are considered and determined. No matter what happens, you feel – and as much should be clear from past events – John Lydon is not a man to be kept down.
Which is just as well considering not only the current financial embarrassment of both Lydon and the slightly motley musical trio rehearsing with him, but also the immediate prospects for its relief.
"Frankly," says Wobble, the band's bassman, "with John's business affairs the way they are, I reckon it could be six to twelve months before this band is gigging."
In the meantime the quartet of Lydon (vocals), Jah Wobble (bass), Keith Levene (guitar) and Jim Walker (drums) face the usual precarious hand-to-mouth existence that's the lot of any unsigned rock band, and quite a few signed and successful ones, to come to that. Just because we put these guys on the NME cover it doesn't necessarily mean that they can afford the time of day.
They do at least have somewhere to live though. "This," says Lydon with a gesture that takes in the scraggy three-story terraced house that he bought with Pistols proceeds and which overlooks a thundering inner London juggernaut artery, "is all I got out of it... the Pistols. It's very nice, but now I can't afford to pay the bills, the rates, nothing..."
The three other members of the band sit dolefully on the sagging sofa, and Wobble and Levene compare sympathetic notes on the injustices of being struck off the social security as a result of their joining forces with Lydon in this line-up. Jim Walker sits quietly on one side, resisting all attempts by the others to haggle him into going to the off-licence, with the ackers dutifully coughed up by The Visiting Journalist.
On the wall 'Anarchy' posters are relieved only by the occasional photograph of the Kray brothers. On the turntable it's reggae.
It is not what certain members of the rock press touchingly refer to as an 'interview situation' – that comes later once Lydon is conveniently absent. He's never liked committing himself to tape, least of all now he's faced with a minefield of legal complications.
The conversation roams around, centering mostly – and inevitably disparagingly – on the activities of former Sex Pistols and McLaren. Tales and incidents are related, some sinister, some downright laughable. John – he responds to a passing reference to 'Johnny Rotten' with a wry "he's not here" – seems particularly concerned lest the tapes that Paul Cook and Steve Jones apparently made with Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs in Rio de Janeiro are released under the Pistols name.
The former Pistol describes Biggs as "someone to avoid at all costs rather than seek out. People seem to have forgotten that that train driver is still a vegetable." (Actually, he's dead – Ed.) [1]
Lydon also has a small fund of stories to relate about his recent visit to Jamaica and the attempts by Boogie, a former Pistols roadie, to film him there – attempts which went so far as to involve the hapless cameraman hiding in the bushes by the Sheraton Hotel swimming pool.
Mention of the way some people closely involved with the Pistols have changed their 'anarchistic' attitude over recent months spurs me to trot out the old George Orwell adage about 'all power corrupting'. [2]
"Well, that ain't true," says Wobble. "Just look at John, it ain't corrupted him. He used to be far worse than he is now."
"It's true," agrees Lydon with a cackle. "I was far more corrupt when I started than now. These days I'm not corrupt at all..."
Jah Wobble – he acquired the Jamaican prefix as a result of his obsession with reggae – is better placed than most to pass judgement. He's known John Lydon some five years now, first encountering him when they were enrolling at Kingsway College of Further Education together.
"I thought he was a Led Zeppelin fan," he recalls. "I was queueing up behind him and we had a bit of a quarrel about who was going to put their names down first... After that he just started crawling around after me and I let him be my mate. He used to have to buy me drinks though, 'cos no-one liked him then. He used to wind everyone up, everyone. People who say he's a bastard now should have seen him then."
Wobble himself was still something of a skinhead at the time, fresh up from his native Whitechapel and the terraces of West Ham [5], which easily outstripped the current rock scene as a source of inspiration. His heroes at the time, he says, were the West Ham team. "Trevor Brooking definitely. Not just 'cos he's a good footballer, but the way he plays the game... you can relate that to life - style, elegance. Musically I've always been into black music, always. First soul, then reggae, which I followed through from my skinhead days. Bit of a cliché, but it's true."
It's worth mentioning at this point that Wobble has acquired himself a reputation in some quarters as something of a bruiser, and there are comparisons drawn between him and Sid Vicious, whom Lydon also met at the Kingsway College and who of course also went on to play bass alongside Lydon. Furthermore, it was Wobble who played back-up to Vicious in the seedy fracas at a Pistols gig at the 100 Club in summer '76 [3] when NME's Nick Kent, in the words of Malcolm McLaren, "got what was coming to him" and was 'done' by Vicious and his chain.
The Vicious/Wobble comparisons, though, don't really wash. Wobble is not the type to share Vicious' taste either for exotic pharmaceuticals, crazed American ladies of high parentage, or the cranky exhibitions of bloody self-destruction which Vicious has paraded before the world.
Wobble's interest in the rock scene began only with the Pistols' emergence in late '75. Since then he's entertained the notion of playing bass without ever taking up the instrument seriously until a month or so ago.
At the other extreme, Keith Levene started playing guitar at the age of seven and received classical training in both guitar and piano well into his teens [6].
He describes his major point of interest in rock before Pistols as Bowie. "I was a skinhead for four weeks... I was a hippie first, then a skin, 'cos I wanted to be different, but all the skinhead I knew were stupid and would just fight all the time, so I became a hippie again, a hippie in skinhead clothes."
A follower of the fledgling punk scene from its earliest inception, Levene belonged to The Clash in their earliest incarnation, surviving only a matter of weeks before his departure/expulsion for reasons which he says should be "obvious... I wasn't into politics."
A flirtation with drugs was apparently another reason why Levene didn't stay the course with the City Rockers, certainly 'Deny' on The Clash's first album is widely reputed to refer to him at this time, a period when he also met Wobble and Lydon for the first time.




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