Sex Pistols: 90 Days at EMI

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INTRODUCTION

"The whole thing was like Peyton Place, Coronation Street and Eastenders all mixed up into one and most of the time we were the last people to know what was going on."

I don’t think I blame EMI for what happened. I know that if none of that had happened at EMI then the whole Sex Pistols myth and mystique just wouldn’t have been what it was.

The big picture is that, in a way, it helped us no end although everything to do with the Pistols and EMI is kinda’ cause and effect – if that hadn’t happened then maybe we would have stayed together longer and had a different career. Far better that it happened rather than we just put out another record, it stiffed and we all ended up as window cleaners.

Right from the beginning the big thing behind the Sex Pistols was that we were an unknown quantity and our supporters were spotty kids, full of spunk, being 17 and alive in the streets – and people were frightened of this new we won’t have the wool pulled over our eyes kind of attitude.

When we signed to EMI there weren’t many other options. There wasn’t the glut of small labels that came in the aftermath of us doing what we did. During the summer of 1976 we were out gigging all over the place and didn’t really know what was going on. We just assumed that Malcolm McLaren was out meeting all the right people.

From the early part of that year we went from being hardly anybody to playing gigs where it was jam packed and, on the back of that, Malcolm was obviously courting EMI and other people.

We did some demos with Chris Spedding which, as far as we knew, turned out to be paid for by Mickie Most at RAK so I suppose we could have signed there and Chris Parry at Polydor thought he had it all agreed for us to sign there. I remember him turning up at the studios one day and me telling him we’d signed to EMI. He broke down in tears. After that I heard he lost the Clash as well but he did get the Jam as a third consolation prize.

But really we wanted to sign with a big label, we were a proper band and we wanted to get our music out to as many people as possible and the record company was the tool to get us away.

Actually signing to EMI seemed a bit like signing to the BBC or something – very English, very middle England, very kinda’ corporate. But at the same time the first guys I met were the A&R people – Mike Thorne, Nick Mobbs and Dave Ambrose plus Terry Slater from music publishing – and they all seemed all right. We never actually met people like Bob Mercer and Leslie Hill until the signing party they held for us.

Malcolm was very keen for us to sign to EMI but there was talk at some stage of putting us on the Harvest label, which was Pink Floyd’s label. We made it clear we didn’t want to go on that because it was all hippie shit. Malcolm wanted us to be on EMI proper and we all dug that idea as well. We felt there was a certain ironic cache about being on the same label as Cliff and Cilia.

And if we’d signed to RAK or Polydor or Chrysalis instead of EMI would we still be talking about the Sex Pistols 30 years later?

Bizarrely the Grundy TV show was something we didn’t want to do in the first place. There was a series of phone calls and we said we weren’t going to do it but then we were told that if we didn’t do it we wouldn’t get our wages that week. So we agreed.

Someone in Fleet Street told me that Bill Grundy didn’t want to interview us, not because he didn’t like us but because he felt that he didn’t know anything about us. He was a big wheel at Thames and thought he should have a say in who was on the show. There was a whole thing going on behind the scenes and he was told that he had to do the interview.

Maybe because of that he tied a few drinks on before the interview and tried to take it out on us but he picked on the wrong blokes. Even so Steve was pissed – he’d drunk a bottle of Blue Nun or something – and that kicked in halfway through the interview.

Even then we didn’t go on the show to swear and we certainly couldn’t have anticipated what went around the country afterwards. As it all happened, Malcolm was just a couple of feet behind the camera and he was bricking it and going ‘Oh my God’. In fact it all wrapped up pretty quickly and I was all for going back into the green room but Malcolm grabbed me and pulled us all into the limo which was just as well because as we pulled away a black Maria turned up.

The reaction to that TV show was extraordinary. On the one hand I thought, does the punishment fit the crime? And the answer was ‘No it doesn’t and in a big way’. The press reaction just seemed to fit the bill as a total diversion from talking about what was really going on in the country at the time.

Put it into context. There had been three-day-weeks, power cuts, rubbish piled high in the streets. I went to Liverpool and read in the local paper how they were going to bury people in the Mersey estuary because the gravediggers were on strike.

It did seem like the whole fabric of British society was crumbling and we’re going out and singing no future and we did believe there was no future and that there would be no future unless you go out and do something about it yourself.

You can always ask whether rock artists are so forward looking that people should rally behind them like some sort of Messiah or do they just kinda’ tap into the collective consciousness of dissent that already exists and put a voice to it?

Maybe we didn’t tap into it but a lot of things were being left unsaid and John’s lyrics totally encapsulated what a lot of dissatisfied people around the country were thinking. They rallied behind us because they believed in what we were saying.

I was told that one of the people who called up and complained about us was Diana Rigg who apparently said that EMI was supposed to be like the BBC and not bring filth to our screens.

We were all a bit confused. I was getting one line from Malcolm that there was this sort of Pistols party line we had to go with while from Mike Thorne and Nick Mobbs at EMI I got this feeling that they thought it was all great but even then their hands were being tied by the people above them. Then Malcolm started on about EMI being just one down from Satan as far as forward looking rock’n’roll was concerned. Maybe that wasn’t 100 per cent true but I sensed it wasn’t far from the truth.

The biggest pointer towards EMI’s attitude to us was this guy, John Bagnall, who worked in the records division. When we first went in he had slightly flared trousers and slightly long hair – everything was slightly. Then when we signed he made a big change and had slightly tight trousers, very small safety pins and hair behind his ears. But then after we did the Grundy show it was all change again and he was back to being slightly flared.

Doing the Grundy show did bring about a sea change. As soon as we had done that and people around the country saw what was going on, there were hundreds of bands formed overnight. This was a direct consequence of us sticking our heads above the parapet in a national way rather than just being in something like Melody Maker.

For me the worst thing to cope with in all this – although I could see the funny side – was that my mum used to work part time at the Gas Board and after the Grundy show all the girls she worked with called her Mrs Sex Pistol. She hated me for that and my dad hated me because he was getting grief from my mum. Of all the shit I had to deal with that was the worst.

Even if EMI had all the pressures of brain scanners and all that on top of dealing with us, they were still in a damn good position with all the publicity and interest we generated. You could spend a million pounds and still not get publicity like that.

For us the big thing was getting our point across and having a career while doing it and if that was awkward for EMI then tough. Steve Jones told me he thought that from the Grundy thing onwards was what broke the band up. If the original line up had stayed together we would have been like the Who – we would have had a career as a band. As it was the band became sensation upon sensation and all at Malcolm’s behest.

The [‘Anarchy’] tour was not a lot better. We lost a fortune on that, going up and down across the Pennines from gig to gig. We had to turn up to and be able to play but we never knew whether the show was going to be cancelled or not.

We were followed by a fleet of cars from Fleet Street and every time we stopped we had to run this gauntlet of reporters. I overheard them talking to each other and one said, ‘Did you get a quote from anybody?’ and the other one said, ‘No how about you?’ and then the first one said, ‘Yeah, it was great, I got two fucks and a shit from Johnny Rotten.’

This was the level it had sunk to – it was ridiculous. The whole Leeds hotel foyer thing was set up by some bloke on one of the tabloids and you’d have thought that people would have been able to see through that.

Then after the record stopped being played and stopped selling we were stuck again but we did think in the back of our minds that EMI wasn’t the only record company in the world. If other companies had been trying to sign us in the first place then there was always something to fall back on. Nevertheless we did feel pretty shitty that you get a record out, you get all this action and then they withdraw it – that was bad. Then there was the question of censorship. It was all pretty heavy stuff but even then I knew what was going on with the shop floor guys at EMI Records who wanted to keep us. They were under a lot of pressure and it did assuage the fact that our record had been pulled.

When we went to Holland it all came to a head between me and John so I was dealing with that as well. As soon as we started getting all the press he just changed overnight and the democracy we had in the band just went away. The whole power structure changed and it really annoyed me. I really felt that Steve and Paul, who after all started the band in the first place, should have backed me up but they didn’t.

On top of all that a bloke from the Daily Mirror rang me in Amsterdam and told me that our contract was being terminated. I just thought where do we go from here, what do we do now?

While EMI and Malcolm were sorting things out with the contract, Mike Thorne said they hoped I could sort things out with the band but that EMI saw me as the main songwriter in the band and they would be interested in backing anything I came up with. I was 19 years old, not the happiest bunny in the world, getting grief all the time from John while Malcolm was stirring things up – I’m thinking ‘this is interesting’.

After I left the band they signed to A&M and the MD Derek Green later told me that when the band went into A&M with Sid Vicious that was the first he knew about it. My name was still on the contract as being in the band.