Rotten by John Lydon

Author:John Lydon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466873209
Publisher: Picador

SEGMENT 11:

STEVE SEVERIN ON THE BROMLEY CONTINGENT

STEVE SEVERIN

BATTERSEA, LONDON

Bromley is in the south of London—the last stop before you hit real countryside. Bromley was its own breeding grounds, a mismatch of people who came from all parts of London. That included me at age eleven when my family moved from the Irish parts of North London. My father was a librarian for the Daily Express newspaper, and most of the time my mother was a dressmaker. I was also raised by my grandmother, who was fantastic.

Moving to Bromley was supposed to be a move up in the world in the sense that you could go from a terraced house to a semidetached abode. Bromley was greenery abound, where the schools and the facilities were supposed to be better. High Street was the center of town. Central London was only fifteen minutes away by train, far enough away from the hustle and bustle of London, though not quite enough for us to be considered isolated. Bromley isn’t just one town, it’s a cluster of them, so our “Bromley contingent” was just a rare collection of people from several different outlying towns in and around the south of London. And 1966 was a strange time for the area. What changed things for Bromley was that just down the road was a place called Catford, and it became one of the main arrival points for drugs coming into England. So Bromley was quite drug-infested. Nobody knew where the stuff came from, just that our part of south London was always awash in them. Maybe there were lots of small drug factories around there—who knew? Amphetamines, marijuana, and, of course, LSD were rather rampant. Perhaps that set the tone for the youth culture of this little town, which was otherwise perceived as a normal suburb.

BILLY IDOL: In 1970 we moved up to Bromley in Kent, a district on the farthest edge of the suburbs of London. Twelve and a half miles or a fast twenty-minute train ride and you were in the den of iniquity.

Something in the atmosphere of the time and the place made a lot of people want to break out and do something different. The catalyst ended up being the Sex Pistols and a clothes shop called Sex. By the time we’d hit our mid- to late teens, we were mainly going around as a group. This was even before the Sex Pistols came along. By definition, and out of need, we were into making our own fun. Because of the way we looked and the kind of music we liked, there weren’t that many places we could go in and around Bromley—even London, for that matter. Now there’s a club or a part of town for every different music cult or gang that you can imagine. Then it was either the Bee Gees or gay discos, so we gravitated toward the gay discos because they were much more tolerant of young people like us being different; they left us alone.

Everything sprang from that gay scene.

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