God bless Johnny Rotten
Charles Spencer
T used to hate those smug, middle-class 1 couples who would proudly announce: 'Oh we never watch television — it's all rubbish and frankly, we haven't got the time. Rupert's getting on with his book about Proust, I've got my Open University degree and Sebastian is far too busy with his prep and his flute practice to have time to waste watching the goggle-box.' I always worried about little Sebastian, cruelly cut off from his peers because he had no knowledge whatsoever of what was going on in Neighbours.
But in recent years I have frequently heard myself saying 'Oh I never watch the telly anymore,' and what's more it's almost true. I've even given up Newsnight. My job involves going out to watch stuff four or five nights a week and the idea of watching something else when I get home has become increasingly unattractive. Not that I do anything useful, mind you. My idea of a perfect weekday evening is a decent 90-minute play that gets you home before ten, followed by several hours in my reclining armchair, getting through an improbable number of cigarettes and mugs of tea with the CD player turned on and my mind turned off. It's like transcendental meditation, only ten times more enjoyable and, I fancy, beneficial.
But like little Sebastian I do sometimes feel left out when people start banging on about allegedly wonderful TV programmes like The Sopranos and The Office that I've never seen. Sometimes I think I might give them a go, but frankly the chair in my study upstairs is more comfortable than the sofa in the sitting room, and Mrs Spencer has in any case instituted a complete ban on smoking downstairs. So I remain faithful to Golden Virginia, PG Tips, Al Green, the Grateful Dead and Murray Perahia.
But with the whole country apparently in thrall to I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here and even the Daily Telegraph devoting yards of space to the inane antics in the Australian jungle, I thought I ought to see what it was like. I turned it on one evening and caught Jordan, that artificial archetype of pneumatic bliss, and a near-hysterical bimbo from Atomic Kitten (the eventual winner, the DT reports as I write) being forced to eat a variety of disgusting insects, and felt almost as sick as they did. As I stumped grumpily back up to my study I'm pretty sure the words `decline of civilisation as we know it' passed my lips.
Still, I had caught a glimpse of Johnny Rotten, being as bolshily entertaining as ever, and clearly regarding the proceedings in general, and Jordan in particular (that Page Three blow-up balloon'), with admirable contempt. No surprise at all that he chose to walk a few days later, following a flurry of four-lettered abuse for those viewers who stubbornly refused to vote him off the dire show officially. We wouldn't expect anything less from the great man, who has always known a heap of shit when he sees one.
It's a sad thing to admit, but although Johnny Rotten is only a few months younger than I am (we're both 48) I felt far too old and responsible to be a proper punk fan when 'the filth and the fury' burst upon the pop scene in 1976. While Johnny was malevolently screaming 'I am an antiChrist /I am an anarchist' (one of the truly heroic bad pop rhymes) I was more prosaically announcing myself as a trainee reporter on the Surrey Daily Advertiser at the planning committee of Godalming Borough Council. And while the Sex Pistols marked the Silver Jubilee by singing `God save the Queen/ She ain't no human being' I was patrolling a drenched Surrey in my beat-up VW Beetle, reporting on the street parties and fetes at which Her Maj's loyal subjects were pluckily celebrating her reign in the rain, But I've always had a sneaking affection for punk rockers in general and the Sex Pistols in particular. Pop music was in the doldrums in the mid-Seventies, dominated by lumberingly pretentious prog-rock dinosaurs. It absolutely required the dose of raw energy and outrage that punk provided. And though I can't claim that Never Mind the Bollocks — Here's the Sex Pistols is rarely off my turntable, it undoubtedly captures the nihilism of adolescence with perfect, potent precision.
And not just adolescence either. Those angry, amphetamine-charged songs dominated by Johnny's sneering, snarling vocals are just as effective in middle-age when you are feeling frustrated or angry; a cathartic musical expression of one of the most useful of all life's mantras, 'Oh, sod it all'. And come to think of it, 'Pretty Vacant', the title of one their best numbers, pretty much sums up the way I feel, most of the time.
So, God bless Johnny Rotten. The Queen should prove she's a human being by offering a knighthood to this permanent member of that great British institution, the awkward squad, though, unlike Mick Jagger, I suspect Rotten would have the grace and good sense to turn it down.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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