Well, I’ve seen it like this: Nevermind Without the Bollocks. But “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was stunning. I never liked any of the Clash stuff, though. And I never considered the Clash punk. Joe [Strummer] was all right. He was very sweet-natured. But he came from a different music background. He’d already tried the pub-band circuit, and so he hopped onto punk.
That was after the Sex Pistols opened for his
earlier band, the 101ers.
Yeah, but that was all right! No resentment about
that. And he’s dead now, so bless him. But tell it like
it is. I’m trying to phrase this nicely, because I miss
Joe. You’ve got to get that. I know them as people.
The Buzzcocks were another band you’re
directly responsible for.
Pete Shelley writes a fantastic pop song. What-
ever the umbrella of punk was, its diversity was
extreme, but not in New York. They looked down
at us, and they shouldn’t have. We looked up at
them, because they were older.
Steve Jones has said he borrowed from New
York Doll Johnny Thunders’ playing.
Yeah, because Thunders would be playing with
three strings and a bit of elephant rope. [Laughs]
Anything that was available—that was a punk
ethos. We came from something. We’re not just
impossibly out of thin air.
The last straw: Rotten, Vicious, Jones, and Cook in 1977
song ever written about Johnny Thunders. Yeah. Done in the greatest possible taste! [Laughs] It’s a fun song, but it was taken as a bitter retort— it was far from it. It was accolades, is what it was! “God Save the Queen,” they say, is a bitter retort against the royal family. Well, I quite like the royal family—the pageantry and the flag-waving and the clothing. It’s good fun and sweet and innocent. But when you’re living in a repressive society, and that’s the only highlight in your life, it becomes quite a different scenario. And New York became oppressive to me. And I’d never even been there!
final show in San Francisco, in January 1978? I lived with Joe Stevens, a friend of Malcolm’s [McLaren, the Pistols’ manager]. Thank God, because I would’ve been left stranded in America with no money, nowhere to stay, and no plane ticket. Malcolm and them had buggered off and left me. Par for the course. I’ve got no bitterness about it. Much! Not. [Laughs] But I made quite a lot of money on that stage in San Francisco. You know [to an imaginary crowd]: “Give me some money.” And they did! People threw so many dollar bills; it was brilliant!
It doesn’t come down to good management. [Laughs] That’s the politest way I could look at that. Which was to our benefit, actually. As a band, we wouldn’t have stayed together as long if we’d had serious management. We’re too volatile with each other for anybody else.
didn’t have to sleep in the subway?
It wouldn’t have been of interest to me. I had no
responsibilities. What would I want money for?
people are trying to jump you?
That would be nice! But you would need a home
to go to first, and I didn’t have one.
Which explains 1996’s Filthy Lucre reunion tour. We did it because it would be the first time we’d ever been paid. It was a novel idea.
Then it all broke down again. All the old problems crept in, all the animosity between us. But in weird ways, that’s what made the songs, that tension. I was shy as fuck. I still am. I do not like to rehearse. I squeak in the corner and hope no one’s hearing.
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