Sid had to fly back to London from Sweden on the 25th to appear in court on the 26th. This interview was done in Stockholm on July 27 and 28 1977.
- ''How d'ya dress for court, Sid?''
SID: ''Oh. I wore this real corny shirt my mum got me about five years ago and my steels. I've must have looked a right stroppy cunt. I hate the name Sid, it's a right poxy name, it's really vile. I stayed in for about two weeks because everybody kept calling me Sid, but they just wouldn't stop. Rotten started. He's horrible like that, he's always picking on me.''
JOHN: ''Sid's the philosopher of the band.''
SID: ''I'm an intellectual.''
JOHN: ''He's also an oaf. He listens to what everybody else says and thinks 'How can I get in to this?' ''
SID: ''No I don't. I'm a highly original thinker, man, he's just jealous because I'm the brains of the group. I've written all the songs, even right from the beginning when I wasn't even in the group. They was so useless they had to come to me because of they couldn't think of anything by themselves.''
- ''Why is the establishment more frightened by the Sex Pistols than any other previous rock'n'roll band?''
JOHN: ''Because they were all to some extent slightly controlled by the industry. There was always an element of the establishment behind it, but with us it's totally our own. We do what we want to do and there's no industry behind us.''
SID: ''Or rather, the industry is behind us rather than with us.''
- ''Hey, if the industry is behind you it's got a knife in it's hand!''
SID: ''Yeah, but we've got a Chieftain tank..''
JOHN: ''They can't control us, we're uncontrollable. They've predicted all down the line against us, and they've failed. This scares them. They've never been able to do that before. They've always known before that the money would come into it, but they've missed the boat so many times."
PAUL: ''The thing was that everyone in the beginning was so sure that no way it was going to take off. People like Nicky Horne said that they'd never play punk rock and now they don't play nothing but.''
- ''Which is an equally narrow attitude..''
JOHN: ''If not worse. With us it used to be 'They won't catch on 'cause we're going to stop it' and there've been a hell of a lot of organisations out to stop us, and they've all failed..''
- ''I don't think the Pistols can be stopped unless the kids are tired of them.''
JOHN: ''They're the ones who make all the decisions now. They're the ones that count, and I hope they've got the brains to suss it all out for themselves and not be told by the press 'This band is finished' and then think, 'yes, that's right,
they're finished and I'm not going to like them any more. I'm now going to like this.' They've got to decide for themselves.''
PAUL: ''I think it's gone beyond the point where people can be told. They wouldn't play God Save The Queen but that went to the top of the charts, and that usually dictates what goes in.''
- (Punk boutiques and music should just be an inspiration to people)
JOHN: ''That's what music should be about. I get very sick with the imitations. I despise them. They ruin it. They have no reason to be in it other than wanting money, which shows. You've got to have your own point of view. You can have an idol, like you may see a band and think 'God, that band are really fucking good, I'd like to be like that.' So you start up your own band, and then your own ideas come in as well on top of that and you have a foundation. But a lot of those bands don't leave that foundation and they stay in a rut and they listen to all the other songs in their morbid little circle and they do rewrites of them. Hence fifty thousand songs about how hard it is to be on the dole.''
SID: ''Been listening to the Clash obviously. The Clash only wrote those songs in the first place 'cause of me and 'im (John) moaning about living in a poxy squat in Hampstead. It was probably them coming up there and seeing the squalour we were living in that encouraged them to write all that shit.''
- ''Squalour in Hampstead, the bastion of liberalism?''
JOHN: ''Oh no, you shoulda seen it.''
SID: ''It was liberal, all right. It didn't even have a bathtub.''
- ''Was there any particular plan or strategy in mind right at the start of the Pistols?''
JOHN: ''Instinct. It hasn't really worked out like that. Wenever sat down and wrote a thesis. There's no rules, and no order. We just do it, which is more to the point. Do it and when you can't do it no more, then don't do it at all.''
SID: ''If it requires any real effort, then there's no point in doing it. It should just come. If you have to force it, then there's something wrong.''
JOHN: ''Yeah, if you have to sit down in your room and go 'I've got to write a song, but what about?'...that's rubbish. It just comes. It's there.''
- ''Yeah I know just what you mean, John. Pure, untainted, burning creativity...''
JOHN: ''Oh yeah man. far out. It's very easy to fall into these hippie bullshit phrases because some of them were good, some of them actually meant something. It's just a shame that they ruined a lot of them with silly ideas about 'Yeah man, I wanna be free,' which meant fuck all.''
SID: ''Free from what they never said.''
- '' 'Course we did, man, free from the same things you want free from; preplanning existence, boring jobs, stifling media...''
PAUL: ''Yeah, but they were like that themselves, weren't they?''
JOHN: ''I can remember going to those concerts and seeing all those hippies being far out and together, maaaaan, despising me because I was about twenty tears younger than they were and having short hair. That's when I saw through their bullshit. A lot of punks are like that as well, which makes me really sick.''
PAUL: ''The only memory of hippies I have was when I was in a park once when we was skinheads and we were throwing conkers at these hippies and they were going, 'Hey that's really nice, man, I really love conkers.' ''
JOHN: ''Well, that made you a fool then, didn't it? I think they won hands down, because you were wasting your energy and they were laughing at you.''
- (John was thrown out of school because his hair was too long, the old find-out-what-the-kids-are-doing-and-make-them-stop trick)
JOHN: ''Yeah, but when they find out it's always too late. In five years' time they'll have schoolteacher with safety pins in their ears. It's so predictable with those oafs.''
SID: ''The definition of a grown-up is someone who catches on just as something becomes redundant.''
(The kids John went to school with weren't really into music)
JOHN: ''except the geezers I hung around with. It was in skinhead times and they couldn't understand how a skinhead could like the Velvet Underground. It was quite apt. I went to the Catholic School in Caledonian Road, opposite the prison. What a dungeon!''
- ''Forcefeeding you religion along with the lessons?''
JOHN: ''Yeah, it was terrible. They really destroy you with what they do to your soul. They try and take away any kind of thought that might in any way be original. You know when caning was banned? In catholic schools that didn't apply, because they're not state-run. They get aid from the state, but there not entirely state-run. I don't know where they get there money from.....I'd like to know. It's probably some Irish mafia. What they try to do is turn you out a robot. When it comes to allocating jobs for a student who's about to be kicked out into the wild world, it's always jobs like bank clerk....be a railroad attendant or a ticket collecto. Even the ones who stayed on for A-levels...''
The interview by Charles Shaar Murray is taken from the NME Aug 6 1977 issue which had a great 4 page report from the SWEDISH tour.
JOHN: ''The ones that were got sacked very quickly. Everything was taught in a very strict style, in the same way that they taught religion: this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and if you don't like it you're gonna get caned. But Catholic schools build rebels: a lot went along with it, but a lot didn't. There was always a riot in religion classes.''
- ''Nobody likes that subject.''
JOHN: ''I got kicked out when I was nearly 15 - 14 and a half - because I had too long hair. I had really long hair....''
SID: ''A balding old hippie with a big pair of platforms on, that's what you were. I went to the same college as him...''
JOHN: ''...to get O-levels. I waited a year and a bit because I went on building sites working, and then I went to get some O-levels because I still had it in me that O-levels were the way to heaven........ plus I didn't want to work no more. I got a grant. It was very easy. For some reason I always liked Technical Drawing and Geography. At college, I did maths, English, physics, technical drawing and chemistry...''
PAUL: ''I've got an O-level in woodwork.''
SID: ''I've got two O-levels....English and English Literature...and I'm very intelligent.''
JOHN: ''English Literature was a joke. I passed that with flying colours without even trying. It was stupid fucking Keats poetry, because I did my English in Catholic school. They kicked me out halfway through the course because they said I'd never pass, but they'd already entered me, so I went and took the exam privately because I was still entitled to down at the County Hall. And I passed with an A....and I went down there with the certificate and showed it to them.''
- ''There's no reggae in the Pistols' repertoire?''
JOHN: ''I find that slightly condescending - and that's not a slag-off of the Clash. I'm white and I'm rock. I don't like rock music but I like what we do with it. How could we sing about 'Jah Rastafarai'? Even 'Police And Thieves' is full of innuendo, it's about three in one God on the cross and on each side are the police and the thieves; Rasta in the middle. That's what the song implies. It doesn't need to say more, because a Jamaican will know straight away. Besides I don't like Junior Murvin's voice.''
- ''He's very much like Curtis Mayfield.''
JOHN: ''Very much like Curtis Mayfield.''
- ''And you don't like Curtis Mayfield?''
JOHN: ''Yeah, I do. I like the music, there's a different feel about it.''
- ''Do black kids dig your music? Do they understand it as part of the same thing?''
JOHN: ''For sure. Where was that gig where a lot of dreads turned up? That was really shocking. I think it was an early Nashville, years ago. There was a few of them at the back, and I was really shocked that they'd be there. I talked to them afterwards and they said, 'Understand, just understand, man will understand, mon'. You never get any trouble from blacks. They understand it's the same movement.''
- ''Yeah, but reggae singers talk about what they love at least as much as they do about what they hate.''
JOHN: ''Don't we?''
- ''Only by implication; in the sense that if it's known what you stand against it can then be inferred what you stand for.''
JOHN: ''Yeah, but it's the same with reggae. There are so many people who refuse to listen to them: 'Oh, no, it's all a big con. All this terrible Jah and Rasta stuff, it's all a big con to make money.' There's been loads of reviews....that one by Nick Kent was just classic ignorance, comparing reggae with hippies.''
- (Maybe people feel happier thinking that Rotten's controlled by McLaren, then they do feeling he isn't controlled at all)
JOHN: ''They need to do that because they don't want to think differently than they already do. They like their safe world. They don't like realising the way things actually are.''
PAUL: ''They fucking do that with everybody. They don't like admitting that anybody actually is the way they are. They always say 'They got it from them, they're just like them'.''
SID: ''The trouble is that the general public is so contrived themselves that they can't imagine how anybody else could not be contrived. Therefore, if you're not contrived they've got to find some way of justifying their own contrivance...''
- ''Talking about the Pistols nearly always ends up as talking about violence so - in the words of Gary Gilmore - let's do it!''
JOHN: ''When they push you into a corner like that, what are you gonna do? You either kill them or give up, which is very sad, because we're fighting poeople who ought to be on our side...or are on our side, but don't know it. They say we're using them, but the real people who are using them they don't even know about.''
SID: ''We're quite nice friendly chappies, really, but everyone has a beastly side to them, don't they? I can't think of anyone I know who if somebody messed around with them they wouldn't do 'em over.''
JOHN: ''People are sick of being used, but they're now attacking the wrong people, eg, us. When I was a skinhead, everyone I know used to go to the football games, and the match had nothing to do with it. What else was there to do? Disco? The Youth Club? Talkin' 'bout my generation...there was nothing else except alcohol.''
- ''Yeah, but having a barney with a bunch of people who're there to have one too is one thing, but random picking-on in the streets - like some skinheads used to do to hippies - is a whole other ball game.''
JOHN: ''Yeah, but to a skinhead it looked like: 'These geezers are having fun doing what they're doing we're not just because of the way we look, so smash 'em up and stop their fun.' It's just like the Raggare here and the Teds in London, 'cause like I said, when I had a crop and I went to a festival, the reaction I had was terrible. Violence is always the end result of nothing to do. And it's very easy and it's very stupid.''
This is a swedish
trading card from
1977. The picture
on it is from the
gig in HALMSTAD
July 15 1977.
The rest of the SUMMER OF HATE fanzine has a lot more SEX PISTOLS articles, reviews, links and news. And tons of other Punk Rock stuff too!
