Punk Rock Singers

"When I first heard it, I thought that's extremely challenging, the vocal — it was almost hysterical, and it was so up there, the register, but it was absolutely fascinating. And I know at the time a lot of my friends couldn't bear it, they thought it was just "too much" — but that's exactly what drew me in."

"[On Sid Vicious] Yes I can take on England, but I couldn't take on one heroin addict."

"You don't write "God Save The Queen" because you hate the English race, you write a song like that because you love them; and you're fed up with them being mistreated."

"Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it."

"How can you ban language, words? How're words offensive? And why should I have to tolerate YOUR interpretation? I'm the one using the word. ASK me how I'm using it, don't TELL me. And if you don't like the way I'm using it, so what? It's my right. It's my freedom of expression. Without that, we're nothing but slaves. My language, now fuck off!!!"

"It's no more of that 12 bar ditty wavy hair in the breeze platform boots flap your flare nonsense. It's not a packaged image of third-rate idiots. It's not a pose. We just do our stuff. Hate it as it usually is, you know I was very shocked by the reviews of the last album. I believe none of them. They liked us for the wrong reasons, trendy reasons."

"[Replying to the question of the presenter: "where did the name "Sex Pistols" come from, who thought this name up?"] Some animal. I can't remember. It doesn't matter. It's history."

"I've never told anyone this, but I suffer from terrible stage fright. True. You can't tell though, can you? Unbelievable, the panic. I nearly die of fear before I go on stage. Something wicked. I can't eat a thing the day before a gig. It'd make me vomit. Once I come off? I could eat a scampied elephant between two buttered mattresses. But I'm kinda glad about the stage fright. I've read Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud about their terror. And I reckon it's what gets the adrenalin going."

"[On the lyrics of his songs] They meant a lot to my generation. And it's nice to know you've written songs that mean something to someone rather than some trivial pop dirge. I'm not thriving off a career slagging off the Queen. I think I have something valid to say. My words are my bullets. I like to brag that somehow I got it right."

"England's a violent place. Too violent for me. That's why I prefer it here (the USA). For a gun-toting nation, Americans are surprisingly passive. This place suits me and the wife."

"Joe Strummer, God bless him, he's gone and he shall be missed. But how dare he preach class war with an organisation like that [the late '80s Rock Against The Rich movement]. Living in a huge house in Holland Park. Every photo opportunity to be seen on a bus in his leather jacket, and then he went back to a palace. You're not getting it quite right there! That's where his image mattered more to him than the reality. He was trying to con us. In a nice way and for the right reasons but once you start lying it carries on and on and on."

"Punk is like looking at a mirror. I already have a mirror so I don't need the Offspring to remind me how gorgeous I am."

"If the Royal Family was going to assassinate someone, they would have gotten rid of me a long time ago."

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night!"

"I'm really not good with the pickups. I'm a klutz and don't have a line of gab. I'm only good if they know who I am. So I'll just sit and wait for somebody to say, "Aren't you ... ?" and then go from there."

"He showed up, no shirt, the tightest pants you've ever seen, and his package was peeking out. ... And then, in the video we shot, you see it. Whenever anybody first sees the video, they're like, "What! Is! In! His! Pants!""

"He didn't lose his virginity until he was twenty, but once he did, he went on a decade-long sex bender. He had a penchant for girls in their early teens: At the age of twenty-one, he was briefly married to a fourteen-year-old; at the age of twenty-two, he had a child (his only, Eric, now thirty-three) by another teenager; and at one early point, he had a thing for a thirteen-year-old named Betsy, of whom he has said, "She looked at me penetratingly. So I suppose you can figure out what happened next." After shows, he'd return home with some fan or other, have sex with her and tell her to get lost."

"Nothing makes sense unless you know who Iggy Pop was. Back then, right around 1969, while the rest of the world was going psychedelic, he presided over quite some reign of perverted rock & roll terror. He would slather his body in peanut butter; barf on his audience; cut himself up with broken glass; wear silver-lamè evening gloves onstage; shoot heroin; make frequent use of his big, beautiful penis; crash his car into trees; beg horrified record-label executives for drug money; pass out in bathrooms with the spike still in his arm; check himself in to a mental institution and score coke off David Bowie while there. Just in general, he lived the totally messed-up life and wrote the totally messed-up songs without which there could have been no angry punk-music explosion of the 1970s, much less anything that has evolved since, angry-punk-music-related. .... It's been twenty years since he last did heroin, four since he smoked dope or snorted coke, five since he enjoyed a cigarette. Except for a nightly glass of red wine and too much strong Cuban coffee, he's clean and leading a very regular kind of life. For love, he's got his statuesque, extra-buxom, super-sweet girlfriend, Nina Alu, who is half Nigerian, half Irish and twenty-five years his junior; for extra warmth at night, he's got their fluffy little dog Lucky."

"The best of all of them is what happened when he played the Whisky in Los Angeles ... It was a very star-studded, Jack-and-Anjelica-and-Warren night. He was waiting for his dealer, to cop, intent on getting his shot of heroin before he went on. But he had no money. So he went to the VIP booths one at a time and explained the situation. He said, "Look, you're here to see me, and I can't go on until my dealer is here, and he's waiting to be paid, so give me some money so I can fix up, and then you'll get your show." He got more than enough money. He stood off to the side and shot up. The lights went down, the music went up, he stood onstage and collapsed. Without a note being sung. He'd OD'd in front of everyone. And had to be carried off. I think that was one of his greatest shows ever ... It was so minimally perfect. It just says a very great deal."

"You know, I love Iggy Pop, and I respect him, but I don't think I could live with him. But Jim, Jim is sweet and peaceful and romantic; when we're having dinner or making love, that's Jim, and sometimes I'll catch him just looking at the trees and birds. It's endearing and almost childlike, just the way he looks at the world with those big eyes."

"You write about things of importance to you. And it's gotta be for real. Do I think about my dick? Oh, yeah, all the time. If I think about it all the time, I got a right to sing about it. If I wasn't thinking about it all the time but thought, "It's time to write a rock song, I'd better mention my dick," then I wouldn't even be able to say "dick" right. Besides, it's an ecological line. It's not, "My dick is all bad, motherfucker, wickety wackety woo." It's nature-oriented. [Pauses, looking serious, then laughs] It is!"

"Have you ever noticed that a small creature, like a mouse or a mole, when faced with danger, they just stop? I've had big, long periods in my life when I was a lot like that. I just froze. It was not fun, but it was what I thought I had to do. And that's how I lived, pretty much, at one time. I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival. The only thing missing from my life right now is what I've got, and it's peace. I have more than I ever had ... and not as much as I would like."

"If I don't terrorize, I'm not Pop."

"I almost always pee in the yard or the garden, because I like to pee on my estate."

"This is the key thing that has always been misunderstood about me. All this fucking crap they said I did ... I only did it because I believed I was playing the actual music that was appropriate and good to reflect that time and place. ... Frankly, I've always felt I was completely innocent."

"Bowie's a real man, and I'm a real woman — just like Catherine Deneuve."

"You say I look goofy? OK, great. You say it's comedy? Great. Whatever anyone thought, I didn't care. Could be goony, could be sexy, could be stupid, could be cool. I didn't know, but as long as it was something, you know?"

"As society has changed, what had formerly been unacceptable has become colorful, even the broken-glass thing. Although, you know, there's an archetypal element to that anyway. ... It's about the blood ... The Christians used that riff with Christ. What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen. And when they asked him, "Why are you hanging out with prostitutes and fishermen?" he said, "Because they need me." What a line, you know? But what your martial society really wants is blood. We need some blood. We need some suffering. Like, the individual must suffer for the good of the whole. I toy around with that. Early on, I wasn't looking at Jesus Christ, saying to myself, "What an angle." I wasn't trying to be Christ-y. But, after all, on one level, this is showbiz."

"Yeah, she's heard the war stories ... I tell it all to her. I think one has to, because one wants to know somebody, and one wants to feel that somebody knows one. I mean, the embarrassment quotient has been going down for a long time, and the fond amusement has been rising."

"This town is diverse as shit. I like it here a lot."

"I wore that because it makes me look beautiful. I stare at myself in the mirror and I think, "Wow, I'm really great-looking." ... I think I'm the greatest, anyway."

"Everybody's a little more worldly now, and there's more exposure to things. When I made Fun House, back in 1970, nobody wanted to interview me. It was wonderful. I was like one of those little white things you find living under rocks, that every once in a while people pull up by mistake and go, "aagh!" But now everybody has a video camera, and that may have changed the nature of "the message from below," as it were."

"You know, I'm fifty-two now and I call myself a singer. Before I kick it I want to be able to carry a tune in a living room if called upon. Of course, mine come out all dark and twisted and weird."

"I feel like God peed on all my enemies. For a long time I was very bitter that the people who controlled the means of anybody ever hearing my songs were never gonna play them. They only favored music that I specifically and particularly hated, and I wanted them dead. Suddenly, there was another avenue. I started hearing my stuff coming out of bars and then it started to happen little by little — a movie song here or a TV ad there."

"I think I helped wipe out the sixties."

"The industrialism in Detroit...what I heard walking around...boom boom bah - 10 cars...boom boom bah - 20 cars...I get a lot of my influence from the electric shaver..."

"What I do on stage has utterly no purpose."

"I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll. I don't know Johnny Rotten.. but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?"

"I've never had any sort of macho revulsion of fags, but Bowie and I — never, never, never, never. Everybody would think that, but I never saw him be that way anyway. I'll tell you this. That guy got more p-u-s-s-y. I couldn't believe it. Talk about a bitch magnet. Damn! Actresses, heiresses, waitresses, skateresses. And me? I was just left holding my dick most of the time. I had this short haircut, and I looked like a duck. But I got lucky sometimes. I got a good song out of a girl I was knocking off at the time, and it became "China Girl.""

"I used to catch myself — maybe we'd be having dinner with the future king of Spain, and I'd be grumpy, like, "What are we doing here, hanging out with these swells?" And then, right away, I'd realize, "Dude, you're jealous." It got very hard on a certain level. He was a person of affairs, in the worldly sense, with a lot of choices laid out on his smorgasbord. I had no choices whatsoever. I was a pariah. But a very fortunate one, in that he saw something worthwhile in me, and he made me two terrific records. He gave me the break I needed to continue living life. He is my benefactor."

"Nobody understands me, I'm really sensitive. Everyone thinks I should be so happy, fucking all these chicks, and all the drugs and being a star. But I hurt. And I'm lonely."

"What's obvious to me isn't always obvious to other people."

"If it's some style, especially some shrink-wrapped thing hanging on a wall at Toys 'R' Us, then it won't live, it won't be dynamic … It becomes exactly what the marketing people want — a genre, something to make their job easier. But if it's something like, "Everybody's telling me the wall's over there, but I'm going to push against it and see if it's really there" — to me, that's what punk is. An idealistic attitude."

"hurts I have are my fault but I'm sure gonna learn from it and hopefully anyone reading this will too. the lesson: stay aware on a bicycle and look up the road in front of you at all times to make sure you can deal w/what's coming and the condition of the road you're gonna be rolling down!"

"Navy housing is like tract homes. … All the houses look the same. Everybody's pop was the same rank. There's a lot of negative to the military — like, most of it. But one good thing was I lived with all kinds of people, as far as ethnic background or whatever. Because the navy was integrated. That was kind of neat. And with everybody's pop being chiefs, you could see that no one was above or below anyone else. You know how neighborhoods get all caught up in different things? Well, in the military you're not like that. You're all together. So I will say that was one positive thing that came out of it."

"The 'minute' meant more like minute … Like we were small compared to a big arena rock band. And the other reason for the name — I had a bunch of names on a paper, and D. Boon picked that one. He liked it because there was some right-wing group who used the name. We thought, we'll call ourselves the same thing — there goes their power! It'll dilute it and confuse things."

"I think that the idea of straight edge, the song that I wrote, and the way people have related it it, there's some people who have abused it, they've allowed their fundamentalism to interfere with the real message, which in my mind, was that people should be allowed to live their lives the way they want to."

"When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance."

"An unlocked door means that, occasionally, you might get a devil come in, but a locked door means you have thousands of angels just walk by."

"I had someone come up to me at "Top Of The Pops" and say they thought our records were excellent. "Yeah," I replied. "I think yours are fucking shit." It was awful really."