When I started out, everyone seemed to be adopting these names… Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. I wasn’t really Rotten or Vicious or Nasty, so I wanted something a bit more funny – yet something that seemed real rock ‘n’ roll… something that acknowledged my ambition.
There was a time when my whole life was in chaos, really, and I didn’t help myself sort it out. But one day I came to my senses, and I think I was lucky because a lot of people don’t.
I’m rolling in the feces of my greatest hits – that’s a bit of a wild way of looking at it, but I am a man, and we do like rolling in our own feces at times.
I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I put it all down – I’m out on a limb here, so watch my back.
My hair used to be real long, and my parents were encouraged when I cut it. They thought I was going ‘straight,’ but I was just getting weirder – at least in their eyes. I was getting into the punk thing.
