No matter what hell you think you’re going through, you’re also in heaven because you’re alive. Heaven is on earth. Don’t let the bastards grind you down and make you think otherwise.
— John Lydon
It’s about the comedown of drug depression and trying to clear yourself up and out of that. And that’s something all of us, I think, know about. Ya know? We’ve all had a bad moment and if you haven’t…one’s coming! Ya know? That’s reality. You’re gonna find yourself caught up in a dilemma. That’s the insidiousness of drugs and alcohol, they can hook slowly and sneakily into ya. It’s a very difficult thing to try to crawl back out of into sanity. And I know that.
— John Lydon about his song/poem, “The Room I Am In”.
Generally though, I think a lot of the people I meet these days are too much in their own heads — they read too much, and don’t work out their own opinions from what life itself teaches them. I believe that concepts and ideas already exist in a perfect form outside of us. It’s up to us then, to access them, to realize them through our own inspiration — to make them a reality in our own life, to give form to them.
— Keith Levene
1982 PiL interview with JJ Jackson
This is one of my favorite PiL interviews. JJ Jackson was an excellent interviewer who obviously did his research and, in turn, John and Keith gave a decent interview with honest answers. They had some great ideas, it’s unfortunate that most of them fell apart.
And just how psychic was Keith about MTV? He knew exactly where MTV was going before they did!
“What you can’t have, you want more of.”
