"At the 100 Club, Bernie (Rhodes) comes up to me and says, 'You're in the 101'ers, give me your number, I've got to call you about something'...we had a squat in Orsett Terrace... a few nights later at the Golden Lion Pub, Fulham Broadway, Bernie came down with Keith Levene. The 101'ers were going, 'who's this?' I went outside to talk to Bernie , we were hanging out ... and Bernie gave me an ultimatum and said, 'Look, I'll give you twenty four hours, I've got to go on this thing, so you're in or you're out, dial me in 24 hours' ...So I thought about it all night and I thought about it all day and I rang him and I just said 'I'm in.' and that was before meeting Mick and Paul. What really sold me was Keith Levene -- in those days, people looked really boring, and Keith looked different." (Joe Strummer on leaving the 101'ers)

"We was expecting Joe. We was sitting in the living room area, me and Mick, and then Keith Levene turns up with Joe. So we go into the rehearsal room which is a box, like five foot by five foot; it was cramped... That made a statement, well this is it, we're going from here onwards together. That was the first day of The Clash." (Paul Simonon describes the first day of The Clash)

"I grew up in North London. Southgate and Finsbury Park, just around the corner from John Lydon. I always loved music. I remember being so into the Beatles when I was just a kid: Sergeant Peppers and The White Album. I also loved classical music -- this big mental impression and dark sound landscape. I was very close to my Mum, and she got really worried about me, because I was so fascinated by music, right from when I was just a little boy. I was intrigued by the valves heating up in the dusty amplifier; this little dansette with a bass cone. I'd watch the records spin round -- The Beatles, 'I Wanna Hold your Hand', plus I was also totally taken with classical music. Prokoffiev's 'Peter and The Wolf.' I'd just sit there, watching the vinyl and not speaking. Sitting there in the cold in North London, listening to 'Peter and The Wolf'. That was where it was fucking at as far as I was concerned --I didn't care about the rest of the shit. I was just this weird kid, but in these sounds I sensed a strange vocabulary I could understand. This sound emanating from the speakers was what it was all about. Fuck it.

We knew by the time the mid 70's arrived that we were fucked. Doomed. England was a wasteland in those days. We were destined for the scrap heap unless we could figure out an escape from the mundanity. I got a job in a factory when I was fifteen, but all I cared about was playing guitar. There was a lot of noise in the factory -- white noise and wall to wall sheet metal din. A constant hammering; an ambience of industrial noise all the time, in this bleak dark place, which was like some Victorian factory from a Charles Dickens story or something -- but to tell you the truth, I started working and getting paid when I was about eight years old -- I used to run around the tailors in Petticoat Lane in East London and ask if I could do some work for them. So I used to work for these guys, and even then I was living on my wits. If one of these tailors didn't have a job for me to do, I'd ask them to send me to someone who did have something for me to do. Later I learned to sow, and I used to do work on the suits myself: sow up a shoulder or do some lining. My father was a really good tailor, and my sister made clothes really well too. That was her talent, and later she made clothes for PIL.

As for my destiny? I wasn't going to be a nine to five stiff. Any band I was going to be in was going to be cantankerous. Failing that, you consign your life to 9 to 5 drudgery. Fuck that -- my path was clear to me, even then. When I heard reggae 45's and 12" from people like Lee Perry and The Upsetters, it was incredible. I always used to flip them over and play the version. It was extraordinary, the feeling of being high without any Ganja. I remember getting into a fight with some kid at school because he'd stolen some reggae vinyl of mine, probably some old Bluebeat tunes! Later it was stuff like Keith Hudson that I loved, and the man Big Youth. To us he was Jah Youth! "Lightning flash and the weak heart drop!"

I remember a kid in my area impressed me because he had a guitar which he just used to play non stop, and I thought right there, right then, 'so that's it, that's what I want to get into'. I'd been a roadie, but I thought fuck roadying, this is what I really want to do. I wanted to play guitar so badly -- I wanted to play guitar all the time. So that was it for me as far as I was concerned. If you like, this is where my initiation began: When I was just fifteen, I left school. My parents didn't agree with it, but what could they do? (Much later, a lot later, my Mum respected and understood what I was doing. My sister Jill helped her to understand. Jill would say, "Mum, don't worry about Keith, he isn't playing some shallow nonsense, Keith's band is changing things." So my Mum was good about everything. When PIL folded, I remember my Mum saying to me, "Keith, be patient now. It's going to take a year or two for you to adjust to this." My dad never understood what I was doing. Even now, he still doesn't understand my life as a musician. I think he just thinks I played music for a while, but never gave him any money.)

I moved in to my mate's house and we just played and played, all the time. I knew a lot of people around London, and we were all into music. I mean really into music. Very quickly, I worked out what was like a network of squats all over London. These were places I could stay, places my friends and I could get high, places I could hang out and play music. I had about five main squats I stayed at. Those squats were a lot of fun, but some heavy stuff went on: very sordid in a way. The ones I remember well were the Shepherd's Bush and Hampstead squats.

London was a very different place then. It was still in many ways, this fucking post war environment. You had loads of destroyed environments, wasteland areas. Lots of condemned houses, perfect for squatting. Very easy to get into. Just break in and change the locks and we were all hip to that you know? It was great. Just break in the early hours of the morning, and it's yours; you could make a place to hang out; a place to leave your records and your leather jacket and your guitar. We usually could only afford the cheapest guitar, bought between a few of us, and we'd share it. These squats were dark Victorian places. Forgotten places, almost ghostly and other worldly in the English winter. It was like living in some kind of Dickensian novel or

some Victorian melodrama in a way, we were so poor and living on our wits. But the mood wasn't dark -- it was electric. Cold, but like white heat.

What do you want to know about the period between 1975 to 1979? There was nothing. Just some terrible pub rock bands like Eddie and The Hot Rods, and The Stranglers or progressive rock. Then you had the Pistols at The Nashville. They just wiped the slate clean. I'd never seen anything like it. It was a cold rainy evening. I just walked into the Nashville off the London streets and from that moment on, my life was transformed: I knew this was fucking IT. Nothing could ever be quite the same again.  How could it be? You know it was like one of those moments in your life when everything just seems right, and I knew where I was standing was the right place for me to be in this world, and what I heard that night was firing; no one could touch The Pistols. I went to that Pistols gig with Bernie Rhodes, who went on to be the Clash manager, and Bernie is just freaking out, and he says 'Keith look at their guitar player! Check it out, because that fucking guy has Sylvain Sylvain's guitar! Malcolm just bought it in from New York' and I reply, 'Look Bernie, that's a detail lost on everyone here except for you, man! ' The Pistols were great. There's no questioning that. But no, what really stood out for me over an above the band as an entity, what really stood out that evening, was this young guy John Lydon. He just really captured my attention.

I'd known people like Mick Jones and Viv Albertine for some time. Paul Simonon was a great painter, and he looked good, but he couldn't play bass at that time, but that didn't matter. He looked great; these cheekbones, and black suits from a 2nd hand thrift store or somewhere that he'd just torn up and spray painted. Mick Jones would just say to Paul, "play these notes: Here, this is how it goes, ok?" and Paul would do it. We all loved reggae b lines; those huge stepping bass lines, and mic chanters; people like Big Youth, who was so hip at the time. "Screaming Target?"Hail Jah Youth!

I remember going down Portobello Road with Paul Simonon and Rat Scabies from The Damned: We all bought these 1940's style macs in different colours -- we looked like some kind of fucking gang. No one wore those clothes at that time and had shorn off hair. No one looked like that. I mean No one -- period. That was some kind of turning point for us, that day in Ladbroke Grove when we bought those old leather flight jacket macs. It felt right; it felt like we'd arrived. Our consciousness was consolidated, and we knew what was happening was special.

I taught Viv Albertine to play, and I used to play with Mick and Joe and the others, but I just wasn't going to join a band with a name like the London SS! Besides that, I wasn't into the music these guys were playing. I thought it was lame, I really did. I wasn't into people like Tony James at all. Joe Strummer looked good. He used to wear these mid 50's rockabilly styles, baggy suits and crepes, and was pure white heat energy on stage. It was me that got Joe into the Clash when I stole him from the 101'ers. I remember, I said to him "Joe, come round my squat and lets fucking play", so Joe comes round dressed in a creased 2nd hand Zoot Suit or 50's check shirt and battered motorbike boots or something (those were the styles he wore in those days) and we just set up our amps, plugged in , and ripped through tunes like "Janie Jones" or "What's my Name", yeah, those were the tunes we were working on, and he just grabs my guitar by the neck, stares me in the eyes intensely and says "Keith We really have something here, and I love the way you play it!" It was just one of those moments, burned in my consciousness -- the squat was dark and cold, the room we were playing in was just tiny, but the music was pure energy, raw power, sweat just rolling down my face.

We used to talk a lot; we used to talk about what were gonna call the band, and all of us were big reggae fans. 'Screaming Target' by Big Youth was getting played a lot in the squats were we lived and played, so we thought for a while about names like 'The Weak Heart Drops', which of course is drawn from the lyric, "Lightning flash and a weakheart drop!" but we didn't go for it in the end: it would have made a powerful name, no doubt, but there was also an inherent negativity and ambiguity to the name which we couldn't go for. Lightning flash upon Babylon is fine if you visualise Babylon as the weakheart, but we didn't want anyone to think we were the weak hearts, so we didn't go for that name. Joe Strummer in the 101'ers with Richard Dudanski on drums, circa 1975 >>

(Years later, many years later, I meet Joe in a recording studio in LA, and you know what? I was so pleased to see him I just wanted to just hug him, and he tries to pretend he didn't know me. Fuck that. He got what he wanted before he died; he got into the rock and roll hall of fame.) I thought Mick was ok, but I didn't like his style of playing. I thought the Clash were lame too. I wanted something much slower, heavier, more intense. Like what PIL music became some years down the line when me and John Lydon put our minds and vengeful spirit together.

By that time, we'd heard the first Ramones album too, which I just loved. That Ramones album was fucking it. What Roy Orbison or Buddy Holly were to rock and roll, The Ramones were to us. They were fucking brilliant. The Ramones were just it. It didn't influence the way I played though: No, not at all. I respected that rock and roll format for what it was, but what I wanted was a new vocabulary to work within. The blues weren't anything to do with me you know? I wanted to get away from that 12 bar bullshit. I remember with some bands I played with, I thought, "fuck, if I could just amputate one of your fingers, we'd get away from all that rock and roll 12 bar shit and get into something really important!" I mean, we didn't have any manifesto, but if we had one, that would have been it! The Ramones had been the ultimate in that 12 bar form, they had taken it to a logical extreme, but I wanted to investigate what lay beyond that.

That was why dub music and version on those Jamaican dub plates fascinated me, because they had nothing to do with accepted structures and formats at that time. Nothing to do with 12 bar structures! Nothing to do with the blues or rock music. Those dubs sounded so strange, like music from another planet -- they sounded like rhythms from an African settlement on Mars! I fucking loved them, and they influenced me a lot. John was influenced by them a lot too. But we never imitated them, you get me? What you hear on a PIL record is no fucking steal. I respected my influences enough to never imitate them. That was always very important to me. Still is. Dub had nothing to do with rock n roll vocabulary, but was dealing with frequencies and sounds that had never been even invented before that time!

Keith Levene, Paul Simonon and The Ramones circa 76

Anyway, my heart wasn't in The Clash sound at all -- I remember going to rehearsals and just being so depressed about their sound. They got it so wrong man, they thought I was depressed because I was having a bad amphetamine come down. So it happened like this :one day, I get to the rehearsal room which is this dark, damp room -- the band are sitting around, playing tunes from The Stooges and The MC5 and King Tubby's Hi Fi on their little cassette machine, waiting for me to arrive cos I'm late as usual. We plug in and start playing, and I remember Joe Strummer poking me in the arm and going, "Look Keith, just what is wrong with you man, are you into this or not". I'm not into it, so I just leave my guitar up against the amp, feedback howling back like mad, like white noise, and I just walk out.

I can still hear that feedback whine as I leave the studio and walk onto the street. Fuck them. And they thought it was a bad speed come down. You wanna know the truth? The truth is I hated their sound. Even though I wrote some of their first album, I can't listen to it. That's the truth. There is the printed version of what happened, and then there is the real version of what happened. It didn't bother me when I left The Clash, not at all. I mean, how could I be in a band which played songs like 'White Riot'! Fuck off! What did we have to riot about? Then there were the fucking stupid lyrics like "No Elvis, no Beatles and the Rolling Stones." Fuck off! I didn't want anything to do with it. Then there was some bullshit like Mick Jones told me he predicted the death of Elvis. Bullshit.

So I didn't care. I knew John Lydon anyway through Sid Vicious. Sid was my mate, and he'd told me a lot about John at the different the parties and clubs we used to go to. Sid would say, "Keith, let me tell you, there's this guy called John, and you two just really have to meet" so I knew a lot about John before we'd even met. And when The Clash supported the Sex Pistols, that's when me and John Lydon made a kind of agreement. Neither of us was happy with our band situation that night, and John was looking ahead to quite different ideas from the other guys in The Pistols. So right off, me and John understood each other. There was a hatred, a cynicism, a kind of darkness, a nihilistic energy, but also a lot of mad humour. We both wanted to see the death of rock and roll, and to kick the ghost of rock in the arse once and for all; give the ghost a shove as he fell into the grave.

I'd met Sid years before that on a train. I always used to see him around North London, and I thought, "he looks like an interesting person". One day, I went up to him, and said, "What's your name, we should talk and hang out, go places." So we did. I remember I took him to one of our squats; it was in Hampstead I think, cut his hair, put this mac on him, and a pair of wrap around sunglasses. He looked fucking great! Sid was great, and Sid was not Vicious. I hate it when I read the shit that people write about punk in general and Sid in particular. For a start, I don't even really like that word -- punk is just a label. Sid was fucking great; a really funny, nice person. People were stupid because they under estimated Sid, and didn't give him enough credit for what he actually was. Sid wasn't stupid; on the contrary, he was smart. Sid was hilarious too: he was so tall, and he had a kind of Dee Dee Ramone walk and goofy manner. Some people at the time, and some people now, under estimate Sid. Big mistake. It pisses me off. People speak and write a load of nonsense about punk. I deliberately avoid reading books about that period, and I'm not interested in watching films of that period either.

Photo credit, Dennis Morris 1977

So me and Sid formed The Flowers of Romance along with people like Viv Albertine (who as I said, I'd taught to play) but of course all that folded when Sid joined The Pistols. I remember when we were doing the Flowers of Romance, we used to jam a lot. Sid tried to play the drums, but I remember, he also used to ask me about playing the bass. Could Sid play bass? I don't know, but one thing I do know, was that Sid did things quickly. One night, he played the first Ramones album non stop, all night, then next morning, Sid could play the bass -- that was it, he was ready! I told you, Sid did things quickly! Sid always used to have some catchphrase he found funny. He used to go on and on, "Hey Keith, you know Belsen was a gas." So I used to say to him, "What the fuck is that?" and he'd just say, "Yeah Keith, Belsen was a gas" So I said, "Belsen was a gas huh? Well, I'll show you Belsen was a fucking gas; THIS is how it goes man." and I banged out the riff to the tune, which later The Pistols covered. PIL also played it too. We were nihilists in a way, but we were never political in any conventional sense of that word. What we truly were was nihilists, destructive nihilists, but we weren't pessimistic. Fuck no. We were interested in the ruins, the destruction, but then we were interested in what we could build out of the rubble. What light could come out of the darkness?

Lemmy and his drummer Philthy Animal Taylor were on the scene too at that time, and of course the punks understood them! Lemmy fucking scared people. He enjoyed the fact that he scared people! And he can fucking play too. Let me tell you, to play that way, the way Lemmy does on a Rickenbacker ain't easy, and he plays in a really original way too. We used to have massive speed sessions together in the squat. I remember fucking raging speed sessions in these tiny rooms, up for days and nights. What are you going to do when you are with Lemmy? Come on, you're not going to get intellectual are you? Fuck off. You're going to talk about music, talk

about Rickenbackers and take speed! Lemmy is great. Sid lived at one of Lemmy's squats for a while, and Lemmy tried to teach him bass but it didn't work! Lemmy was very much on the scene, and also ended up playing with his version of The Damned called The Doomed. The name was very fucking apt. He wanted to call his first band "Bastard".

I remember when I hung out with all the Heartbreakers and The Ramones when they came over to London. It was then that I was introduced to smack. I was intrigued by their longing. It would always get to the point that Johnny Thunders and Dee Dee Ramone would be just so desperate to score. I couldn't understand it at first. What was it, why was the urge so powerful. What was this hidden mystery? Why was it so important, this longing? The Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan was hilarious, just like a cartoon! I remember he was also a hairdresser, and would run around cutting peoples hair when they were all gone on smack. He looked like a cartoon figure. The first time I got smack sickness I rang up Viv Albertine and said, "Viv, I feel really sick." Sid was also intrigued and powerfully drawn to the world of smack -- he idolised Thunders and Dee Dee and in
the end Sid's mind was twisted by a kind of smack psychosis which is just so sad. I think he got into drugs through his mum as well. Sid was a lovely, very funny person, and not as stupid as people are led to believe. Not at all. Sid was my mate.

On the point of smack though, there are a lot of double standards that piss me off -- why is it considered ok for Keith Richards to be have been a junkie for so long? Why is it romantic for Iggy and the Stooges to have been into smack, some kind of heroic romance for The Chilli Peppers, but for Keith Levene it's like a fucking taboo which people always associate with me? Then there is the other PIL cliché, "four different band members on four different drugs" Bullshit. Most of the people in PIL were doing all kinds of diverse drugs it's true, but we weren't all on different drugs. And anyway, in the whole scene at the time, a lot of people were doing a lot of drugs! C'mon! We were punks for God's sake, we weren't fucking choir boys! We didn't invent taking drugs; it came with the territory at that time. We were poor punks who couldn't afford more than a cheap guitar between three people.

The Slits were friends of mine too -- I knew Viv Albertine closely. We used to play a lot together. We were into something we called guitar depression, in which we transferred all our feelings and mentality through the fucking guitar. The guitar was a medium for our mental make up. This intense vibe that emerged from the amp then, was our mental catharsis, our mental noise. But it had its own purity. Out of the doom, and out of the banality that was London in the mid 70's, we had our fucking buzz, an aspiration for new forms. You know I've changed focus to bass recently, and just last week I had my first bass depression! I'm getting so into the bass now.

Tessa Pollitt, The Slits bassist, was always very quiet, reserved and shy, but I could see she was a good person, and that she had her own darkness. Her own dark side. I liked her, and she was so much a part of what The Slits were about. It was so obvious she was so sensitive and a good person. Years later there were all kind of rumours about Tessa OD'ing on a cocktail of smack and other drugs, because she'd gone AWOL, just disappeared. It's only years later, I read she'd gone off to the desert in Ethiopia or some place. I heard some Slits tunes the other day, perhaps for the first time in over twenty years, and I was quite taken aback, I thought, 'fuck! These girls did it; they had some fucking good tunes!' Tracks like 'New Town' with that good groove, and of course I like 'Instant Hit' because I know what it's about -- it's about my friends -- it's about Sid and John. Some of the things I read Viv Albertine writing now, it makes me feel affection for them, and I wish they could have made their ideas known to me then all those years ago.

But in another way, its frustrating and irritating for me when people only want to talk to me about Sid or The Clash -- I don't want to talk about Joe Strummer. As I say, Joe got what he wanted. He got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When people want to talk to me all the time about the past though, it's like they want to live their life through a picture of how I was, or John was, or Sid was back in 1976. It's very strange, and quite unreal. A projection, living your life through an image of another person, an idea of how things were. It's like the lyric of that Pistols song,-- "Down down, down down, let me take you down to the underground! Down in the dark, and down in the crypt, down in the dark where the typewriters flick. Down, with your pen and pad, ready to kill, to make me ill. Wanna be someone, ruin someone, ruin me." John Lydon with Johnny Ramone circa 1976 >>