"WE ALL SPOKE OUR MINDS"

I THINK WE were fighting against apathy. Old fuddyduddies. Boring music that didn’t speak to the kids. Steve, Paul and myself were interested in being in a band like the early Who. A band by the kids for the kids, that spoke about their lives. Out of all the stuff that we started writing, even before John was in the band, there wasn’t one love song. One of the earliest songs we ever wrote was Pretty Vacant – it’s not a political song, it’s not a love song, it’s a primal scream. Reflecting what was going on in mid-’70s London. You can’t take the band out of that time period. There was almost a hung Parliament – like now – everybody was on strike, there was power cuts, the IRA were rampaging, rubbish piled high in the streets… a real air of despondency. You could argue most kids feel like that when they haven’t got anything and they see people wandering around with pots of money. But at that particular time in London it was more pointed. John joined the band and he could put our feelings into words. John came from a different neck of the woods in London, he had his Irish background – he had more of an axe to grind. He was a very caustic, acerbic person, and he had the gift of the gab in a way that maybe Jonathan Swift had. And collectively, we all spoke our minds. I didn’t experience the violent backlash to the extent John did. One of the daft things was I’d managed to get a deposit on a flat and when I went to pick up the keys from the janitor, he said, ‘There’s a problem: the other residents have got a petition against you. They think all the Sex Pistols are moving in…’ But the fact is, John got attacked and Paul got attacked, and it was terrible. All for just speaking their minds. The people who attacked them were meathead right-wing reactionaries, lunkheads. Teddy Boys determined to live in the past. Whereas we wanted to move on. For good and bad, punk made a big chink in the end of the age of deference. Musically it was loads of different things coming together. I like that quote by Sir Isaac Newton – he was standing on the shoulders of giants. And our giants were The Kingsmen and The Kinks and Captain Beefheart, Lennon and The Who. But we were amidst the quagmire of Barclay fucking James fucking Harvest. We did change the world. It’s something that I’m proud of. But it’s a double-edged sword. I’ve written loads of songs that haven’t seen the light of day because they’re all measured against the Pistols. But I’ve got a great album in the can. The title is Cloudcuckooland. That’s where we’re all living. As told to Keith Cameron