Zen

I try and think like a Samurai. Samurai’s think in a very Zen way. Zen is a set of games that you can play with your mind and with nature, with the world. Some of the schools of Zen are very strict, but there’s the Drunken School of Zen, where they get really drunk and then paint with their hair. Everybody who looks at the paintings knows what they’re supposed to be, they’re paintings of drunkenness. And they had a drunken martial art. I subscribe to the drunken school of Zen. But I never get as drunk as these guys, these guys get ludicrously drunk, they believe being drunk unlocks their subconcious. And it does, it reveals the truth, all your emotions come out, all your anger. Everything becomes totally uninhibited. No hang-ups at all.

Enlightenment

I’m suspicious of this instant enlightenment crap, because it’s not meant to be instant. You’re not meant to put on a tape and become enlightened. If you played one of those instant enlightenment tapes to a Shaolin monk, he’d just piss himself laughing. He’d say ‘What the fuck is this rubbish? It doesn’t rhyme, it isn’t funny, you can’t eat it.’ But if it makes you happy, great. There must be hundreds of ways to the same place. I just think I might as well do it the way I know.

Tour

You go mad on tour very quickly. People thought I was mad already, but I never thought I was mad, not even when people said I was. I just did what came naturally. But by the end, I was really sick of being on tour and I was very paranoid because touring used to make me paranoid. There’s two very definite sides to touring and one is very paranoid and painful and nasty and the other is a lot of fun. The paranoid side is the side that drives people mad. It’s just not a natural lifestyle, in any sense of the word.

Punk

The music that punks listened to was the latest soul and reggae imports. That was what they danced to, in the clubs. There were no punk records, in those days, so reggae was very big.

Face of 77

I was interviewed by the Evening Standard as the Face of 77. I was known as the Face of 77. I was always good at self-publicity. I was always at the right place at the right time and getting my ear bitten off helped, and putting out Bondage. The Evening Standard did a two page spread on me. They asked me what it was all about and I told them it was about being blank and vacant, how we didn’t give a shit about anything except having a good time. And we weren’t interested in love or boring old rockstars. And Johnny Rotten was our philosopher. Things like that. I was interviewed by a lot of record companies for a job as A&R man, but my natural hatred of authority put them off. I was very rude to them, I went in and said ‘It’s not what you can give me, it’s what I can give you.’