johnny rotten biography

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It is a well-worn story that John was spotted wearing a “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt and invited to audition as singer for a fledgling band that had been pestering Malcolm McLaren to manage them. If John hadn’t joined the band that would later become the Sex Pistols back in 1975 they would have been a very, very different band. Things just wouldn’t be the same at all…

When the Sex Pistols split in January 1978 John quickly moved onto Public Image Limited (PiL). McLaren tried to legally prevent him using the name “Rotten” – but regardless – this was a new beginning. Lydon’s unique vocal delivery and perceptive lyrics remained, however, PiL were nothing like the Sex Pistols.

Widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential bands of all time PiL’s music and vision earned them 5 UK Top 20 Singles and 5 UK Top 20 Albums. With a shifting line-up and unique sound John Lydon guided the band from their debut album ‘First Issue’ in 1978 through to 1992’s ‘That What Is Not’, before a 17 year hiatus.

Outside of PiL John has released several solo collaborations; most notably the groundbreaking rock/rap crossover ‘World Destruction’ with Africa Bambaataa in 1984, and the pioneering ‘Open Up’ with dance duo Leftfield in 1993. With PiL on temporary hiatus from 1992-2009 John continued to make his own records. “Solo” records in the real sense. He played, wrote and produced his first solo album ‘Psycho’s Path’ in 1997.

John has also brought quality TV to the masses. He launched his own ‘Rotten TV’ for VH1, and made a show-stealing appearance on the ITV reality show ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’. He fronted the series ‘John Lydon’s Megabugs’ for Discovery Channel; and two nature specials for Channel 5 in the UK: ‘John Lydon’s Shark Attack’ and ‘John Lydon Goes Ape’. Over the years he has made various travel, nature, music and documentary shows for networks in the UK, Europe and USA. He has also appeared in films such as ‘Order of Death’ with Harvey Keitel. And hosted his own radio series’ ‘Rotten Day’ and ‘Rotten Radio’.

After a drawn-out legal case against Malcolm McLaren, 1986 rightfully saw John reclaim the name “Rotten” and win a deal which gave control of the Sex Pistols assets back to the band themselves. He went on to publish his best-selling autobiography ‘Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ in 1994. The book featured contributions from Paul Cook and Steve Jones; together with various friends, family and associates.

The autobiography would help prompt a change of heart. Since 1978 – despite countless offers – John always said he would never reunite with the Sex Pistols. However, after meeting on their own terms in 1995 the original Sex Pistols – Lydon, Jones, Cook and Matlock – decided to return for the hugely successful ‘Filthy Lucre World Tour’ in 1996. John enjoyed playing with the Pistols so much he returned several times. And while he acknowledges the Pistols are a big part of his life it’s worth remembering that the majority of his career has been spent separate to the Sex Pistols. As he has commented, his body and mind is the Sex Pistols but his heart and soul is PiL.

John resurrected PiL in 2009 together with former members Lu Edmonds (Guitar & Misc) and Bruce Smith (Drums), plus new recruit Scott Firth (Bass). PiL have toured extensively and released two critically acclaimed albums ‘This is PiL’ in 2012 followed by ‘What The World Needs Now…’ in 2015. They are the longest stable line-up in the band’s history and continue to challenge and thrive. PiL documentary ‘The Public Image is Rotten’ was released in 2018 and is available to stream worldwide on various platforms.

‘Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored’ was published in 2014 and was John’s first complete autobiography covering his life from childhood through to the present day taking in Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd, along with his TV and media work.

PiL documentary ‘The Public Image is Rotten’ was released in 2018 and is available to stream worldwide on various platforms. In 2020 John also published ‘I Could be Wrong, I could be Right’, featuring John’s random thoughts about the way he sees life, along with anecdotes from his unique and extraordinary career.

John lives in LA with Nora. Mrs Rotten for nearly 30 years.

Further information: johnlydon.com

Picture Credits: (Top to Bottom) John Rotten, Queen Elizabeth River Boat, River Thames, London 7th June 1977 © Dave Wainright

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John Lydon on the Music That Made Him

John Lydon may be forever synonymous with Johnny Rotten, the sneering, red-haired terroriser, the antagonistic Sex Pistols singer that screamed of anarchy, nihilism, and a desire to tear down the British establishment in 1970s London. However, as powerful a grenade flash as the Pistols were, Lydon’s work through Public Image Ltd holds up as his most arresting, impactful, and durable musical project—a horizon-focused group that expanded and experimented across decades, whilst the Pistols’ outcome always seemed destined for imminent implosion.

PiL released eight studio albums between 1978 and 1992 before reconvening for This is PiL in 2012 and releasing their tenth album last year. Though the group has come to embody the experimental transition from punk to post-punk, most notably on their recently reissued 1979 masterpiece Metal Box , the project has endured because of the breadth of its tonal excursions and depth of its influences. PiL created a space in which pop and avant garde music collided and colluded, where beneath the electric storm of frenzied guitars lay dense and rumbling dub reggae bass lines, where Lydon would pinball between atonal screeches and melodic pitches—a living, throbbing culture clash. It makes sense then that the musical make-up of the group’s singer and founder would be a genre-hopping journey. Here, the 60 year old talks through the records that have shaped his memorable individuality, five years at a time.

Cliff Richard : “Move It!”

My parents had a fantastic collection. It wasn’t just Irish folk tunes and accordion diddly-doos, there was early Beatles and lots of Cliff Richard too. The first record I would have ever wanted to buy was “Move It!” by Cliff Richard. It was a really good song at the time and still is. Early Cliff was a riotous assembly of sorts, and he had moves that left a good impression on a 5 year old.

Alice Cooper : Pretties for You

At 7 I contracted meningitis. It affected my brain, and I slipped into a coma. I spent a year in hospital, and during that time music didn’t play much of a major part. I was in total confusion and frustration and really not recognizing the people in front of me who were telling me all manner of strange things. It was very, very hard to get to grips with myself, and it took a good four years to recover my memories. Music wasn’t really there.

By 10, though, I was running a mini-cab service, doing the bookings, which was the best job ever. I loved the responsibility, and people were surprised that a little boy was booking their journey. The money was great so I started buying music.

I was going to two record stores at that time: one in Finsbury Park, run by a sweet little white-haired old lady, that used to have nothing but Jimi Hendrix and big, deep, dense, dark dub—it was always full of Jamaicans. The other one was run by two long-haired chubby fellows who had great taste. That’s where I picked up Alice Cooper’s Pretties for You. It was a long time before he became popular. The idea of buying singles wasn’t good enough for me, albums were like wow, eight more songs , and the covers would absolutely fascinate me. A lot of times I would just buy things because of the artwork—but that’s not to say it was all good. Pretties for You is a really good example of bad artwork.

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band : Trout Mask Replica

There’s just so much on this: It’s a double album and by the time you finish it— if you can finish it—you can’t remember what you heard at the beginning. I liked that. It was anti-music in the most interesting and insane way, like kids learning to play violin—which I was going through at the time. So all the bum notes I was being told off for by the teachers were finally being released by well-known artists. That was my confirmation. From then on, there was room for everything.

Iggy and the Stooges : Raw Power

I’d never seen the Stooges as early punks or anything—that’s media manipulation of facts; I loved them, but I was always appalled with their long hair.

By this time my record collection was enormous and expanding, and my tastes were extremely varied. During the punk years, I really loved the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex and the Adverts, groups that were doing things way out on their own. There was plenty of experimentation going on musically in all areas, particularly reggae.

I lack prejudice except for music that I find to be reminiscent of somebody else’s work—I find no need for endless Chuck Berry versions, which was very popular at the time. And I had little time for what was coming out of America; bands like Television never really grabbed me, I just couldn’t connect. It was all too clever for its own good and wrapped up in too much Rimbaud poetry: Get over it and write about your own life, not what you find in books . I still can’t find a place in my heart for music like Television.

Kraftwerk : The Man-Machine

I met one of the members of Kraftwerk last year and was very surprised—they weren’t at all how I imagined them from looking at the album covers. They were in what I would call Beach Boys shirts. In an odd, twisted way they were saying I had an influence on them. I didn’t believe it for a second but I’ll take it.

I loved anything by them. Their cold, emotionless way of presenting a pop song was always entertaining to me, so novel and so deadpan and cynical and kind of heartwarming. So ahead of its time.

Alice Cooper : Killer

This was the mid-’80s, around the time PiL made Album . On that record, I was referring to the heavy metal scene, which had crawled up its own backside. It was endless bands imitating each other, the same nonsense that punk turned into. But great achievements were made in music around then too. Everything from madder folk outfits and pop music itself was becoming very interesting then. I was always pleasantly surprised that oddball stuff would creep in the charts from nowhere. Someone like Gary Numan gave pop music a very distinctive and clear tone that was all his own.

At this stage I would have been buying everything that was being made, but Alice Cooper’s [1971 album] Killer never left me. That easy way of growling he had was always impressive.

Nirvana : “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

I remember being very angry at their album title being  Nevermind . I thought  Nevermind? Have you lost your bollocks or something?  I was drawing a line on it all, perhaps too sharply, but I have to say “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one of pop music’s all-time greatest. That song is firmly embedded in my psyche. So, I forgive them. Most bands can’t come up with one complete song, and sometimes one is enough. By “Heart-Shaped Box,” it was all starting to sound a bit suicidal. I felt it coming.

Sex Pistols : Never Mind the Bollocks

At 40 I was pretending I was 21 again in the Pistols reunion. I was listening to a lot of things people were giving me at the time but I had to relearn  Never Mind the Bollocks . I’d forgotten how bloody fast that record is—even though a lot of the punk crowd was saying how slow it was when it was released. That’s how we wanted it though, we didn’t want that incredibly fast manic stuff. That’s the stuff that killed punk off. 

Various Artists: Barry Lyndon Soundtrack

I’d bought this record years ago and had forgotten about it. But the movie came on TV in America, and I went  oh my god  and immediately had to hunt it down. I’d left it in London; I went to London just for the Barry Lyndon Soundtrack . There’s a Mozart piece on there that is just stunning. It was different to the usual classical renderings, it just seemed to have more heart and soul and harpsichord. It’s still there now on the top of my pile, it’s one of those albums that doesn’t collect dust. I have a weird association with it because my mother’s maiden name was Barry, and Lyndon is obviously Lydon misspelt. It also reminded me of my mother’s death and all of that. I wanted to play this at my father’s funeral a few years back, but my dad had a specific Irish record that he loved, so we played that.

Sinéad O’Connor : “Nothing Compares 2 U”

For some weird reason Sinéad O’Connor came back into my life. I re-indulged and reconnected with her and I was such a happier person for it. I go through long periods of forgetting and then I’ll just have major sessions and listen to just that for weeks on end. I thought the way she handled “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the Prince song, was genius. It is so moving and sad. I must be a sentimentalist and I’ve never realized until now.

Oh, and Dolly Parton runs through all of this by the way. I’m a Dolly man—you can all knock “9 to 5,” but I love it. One of the greatest tragedies of my life so far is that I’ve never been able to make it to Dollywood. I think I’d have a hoot.

Kate Bush : “Wuthering Heights”

A lot of record shops were closing around this time, and I won’t use the internet to buy them. The internet is for porno, encyclopedias, and video games, of which I waste an awful lot of time on. So I slowed down in the purchasing around here and went back to old stuff like Kate Bush. On “Wuthering Heights,” her voice is almost hysterical but always in her own register. I find it very soothing for her to be squealing away up there, it’s fantastic. She’s a gift.

 I love PJ Harvey too. That’s one very interesting woman who doesn’t play the sex category. She strides in there at the level of any man, and I’m really proud for her in that respect, because that’s really what we wanted in punk—we wanted girls to be the equal to the boys, and she carries that great tradition. 

PiL : What the World Needs Now...

This year has been incredibly hard work. We’re trying to run our own label, we’re touring as much and as often as we can, and there’s very little time to sit and enjoy other people’s efforts. That’s one of the downfalls of things going well—you don’t have time to indulge in other music as much. I require total concentration and involvement to try to grab the atmosphere that an artist is creating—that’s where music holds everything for me, and you can’t get that if it’s in the background whilst you’re brushing your teeth. Maybe that’s the reason why I don’t brush my teeth.

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Music Interviews

John lydon on anarchy, politics and 'mr. rotten's songbook'.

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Mr. Rotten's Songbook hosts every lyric from John Lydon's 40-plus year career in punk. Courtesy of the artist hide caption

Mr. Rotten's Songbook hosts every lyric from John Lydon's 40-plus year career in punk.

For the past 40 years, John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten, has brandished his rebellious songs — first with the 1970s punk band The Sex Pistols , then with Public Image Ltd .

He's now 61 years old. He may be a bit rounder than he was in his youth, but he still has an impish glare and spiky hair. He's still punk rock.

"I'm a natural-born anarchist," Lydon says. "I've never in my life supported any government anywhere, and I never will."

Author Interviews

John lydon: the foul-mouthed yob sets the record straight.

Live in Concert

Public image ltd. returns for a thrilling live concert.

Lydon was born in London, the son of working-class Irish immigrants. When he was 7 years old, he contracted spinal meningitis, "which damned well nearly killed me," he recalls. "Apart from surviving that, it was the lack of memory when I came out of the coma. And that took me some four years to fully recover properly."

He says that experience fueled the turmoil he felt as a teenager in the 1970s — when he was recruited to join The Sex Pistols as "Johnny Rotten."

"That's my nickname," he says. "It was given to me because I had green teeth."

Lydon railed against the establishment, religion and politics, singing, "anger is an energy." You can hear all that in his lyrics, which he's collected in Mr. Rotten's Songbook -- a new, 300-page, limited-edition book with the words to every song he's ever written. He also illustrated it with doodles and sketches "so I could put myself right back in the moment and know what it was that was thundering away between me ears to make me write these lyrics," he says.

He flips through the book to find one of his best-known songs, "Anarchy in the U.K.," which he notes is "to be sung with love."

"I've got all these nice little anarchists running around with swords," he says, describing the drawings on the page, "and the black and red anarchist flag. And of course, the Union Jack."

Lydon wrote "Anarchy in the U.K." in 1976, a week before writing his sarcastic "God Save The Queen."

"I hit on the right note and tone of a country on that was on the verge of political collapse," he says. "You know, rigid conservative government, it was not open-minded about anything. Beginning to sound familiar, isn't it?"

Brian Cogan, author of The Encyclopedia Of Punk , says Lydon wrote songs that were designed to impress, shock and challenge.

"Lydon has always been a sort of a trickster fellow that is there to disrupt," Cogan says. "His lyrics had insight, they were witty, they were biting. And he was always trying to upset people in a lot of ways and trying to get them to rethink what they thought about the world."

Mr. Rotten's Songbook. Courtesy of the artist hide caption

Mr. Rotten's Songbook.

After The Sex Pistols broke up, Lydon formed Public Image Ltd. He wrote songs like "Death Disco," which he says was a tribute to his late mother, and "Rise," an anthem against apartheid in South Africa. "This is my international letter to the world," Lydon says of the latter. "It's about decency to your fellow human beings. 'Your time has come, your second skin.' 'You could be black, you could be white.' "

Lydon's songbook is eclectic: It includes the words to "Psycho's Path," about serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and "Out Of The Woods," about Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. And in "Deeper Waters," Lydon documented an underwater adventure of his, when he wore an old-fashioned diving suit to see sharks up close. With "500 pounds of iron" wrapped around his head, he says, "I could not move, not one inch. Monstrous sharks were hovering around."

Lydon says he was inspired to compile the songbook after playing a gig in China a few years ago. He says government officials there insisted on reading his lyrics before allowing him to perform.

"I thought the Chinese would be most wicked on censorship. No! Welcome arms," he says. "So I don't need to yodel on about Tibet. I need to, like, sing my stuff to the peoples out there."

These days, Lydon lives with his wife in Los Angeles, near the ocean. And he's made some changes. "I really liked what Obama was promising and that's when I became an American citizen," he says.

When the conversation turns to President Trump, Lydon is provocative as ever.

"I think he's absolutely magnificent. He's a total cat amongst the pigeons," Lydon says of Trump. "It's got everybody now involving themselves in a political way. And I've been struggling for years to get people to wake up and do that."

As he heads off to promote his songbook at a record store, John Lydon — Johnny Rotten — bids farewell with this saying:

"May the road rise with you and your enemies always be behind you. May you scatter, flatter, batter and shatter."

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Rotten : no Irish, no Blacks, no dogs : the authorized autobiography : Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols

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10 Things You Didn’t Know about John Lydon

At 19 years old, John Lydon became Johnny Rotten, the iconic frontman of the Sex Pistols . The band imploded after just 2 and a half years, but in that time, they helped change the face of music. In 1978, he formed Public Image Limited, a similarly influential band that’s still around, still touring, and still breaking new ground. Find out more with these 10 things you didn’t know about John Lydon .

1. He owes his stare to meningitis

When Lydon was seven, he contracted spinal meningitis. He spent the next year of his life in hospital, suffering nausea, hallucinations, comas, and severe memory loss. Part of the treatment involved extracting fluid from his spine with surgical needles, a process that left him with a permanent spinal curvature. A hunchback wasn’t the only thing he left hospital with: the illness affected his eyesight, leaving him with what would later become known as the “Lydon stare.”

2. He got kicked out of Joni Mitchell’s house

According to Exclaim! , Lydon once managed to annoy singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell so much, she kicked him out of her house. Richard Branson had invited him to Jamaica to check out some potential new signings to Virgin’s new reggae subsidiary label. Somehow, he managed to wangle an invite to the villa Mitchell was renting. After Lydon complained about the music that was being played, Mitchell cooly informed him it was her new album and promptly booted him out.

3. He foresaw the Jimmy Saville scandal

People nurtured suspicions about Jimmy Saville for decades, but no one voiced them. No one except Lydon, that is. During a 1978 interview with BBC Radio 1, Lydon made reference not just to the sexual abuses committed by the DJ, but to the suppression of any suggestion of those abuses by the BBC and mainstream press. “I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile; I think he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumors,” he said, adding “I bet none of this will be allowed out.” He was right. Not only did the interview never get aired, but he found himself blacklisted by the BBC for years after.

4. He wasn’t surprised by Sid Vicious’ death

Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose on 1 February 1979. His death didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, least of all his former bandmate Lydon. “Sid was my mate and all that, but I watched him slowly destroy himself,” he later told The Guardian . “I’ve got to be honest – it came as no surprise. Most people who mess about with heroin, they lose their souls way earlier, it’s just waiting for the body to keel over.”

5. He’s got no regrets about selling out

The last person you’d expect to pop up in a butter commercial is Johnny Rotten. Yet in 2008, that’s exactly what happened after he teamed up with Country Life to promote their range of dairy products. He had a good reason to do it though, as he later explained.‘It’s bizarre and odd, but the only way to buy my way out of the stifling contracts that I was tied into from the Sex Pistols was by promoting British dairy products,” he said. “The working-class chap in me wasn’t going to turn away a gift horse – and it was actually a good piece of work! I brought humor back to advertising.” Weirdly, the ads were a huge success, resulting in an 85% spike in sales.

6. He should be dead

By rights, Lydon should be long dead. Back in 1988, he and his wife Nora were booked on the doomed Pan Am flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie when a terrorist bomb exploded on board. All 258 passengers were killed, along with 11 people on the ground. The only reason he managed to escape was that his wife took so long to pack, they ended up missing the flight.

7. His teeth inspired his stage name

Despite what some Americans think, not all British people have bad teeth. Lydon did though. His lack of oral hygiene eventually led his teeth to go green. When the Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones saw the state of Lydon’s less than pearly whites, he explained “You’re rotten, you are,” thus inspiring Lydon’s stage name. Johnny Rotten’s not quite so rotten anymore, however: in 2008, he forked out $22,000 to transform his smile after his rotten teeth began to “seriously corrupt” his system.

8. He’s a one-woman man

He may be punk, but there’s one tradition Lydon has never revolted against: marriage. He and his wife Nora have been married since 1979. They’ve never had children, but Lydon adopted Nora’s daughter Ariane (later known as Ari Up, the lead singer of The Slits), and later, the couple became legal guardians to Ariane’s three children. In 2018, Lydon revealed that Nora was battling Alzheimer’s disease. Last year, he confirmed he had become her full-time career following a deterioration in her condition. He’s said that while she tends to forget most things, she never forgets him, saying “a bit of love goes a long way.”

9. He’s addicted to iPad games

As Time Out reveals , Lydon has spent a fortune on Ipad games after getting turned on to them by his band. “My band recommended an iPad to me – well! That was whisky to the Indians. I got well fascinated with the games: the car racing games, the battleship games, the war games. I love ’em. I suppose you could call it somewhat addictive. You can’t stop and you have to let it run its course, and then when the bill comes in… haha! Reality bites.” It must do… in 2014 alone, he spend a mammoth $10,000 on games.

10. He’s a US citizen

Lydon has been living in the US for years, but he waited until 2013 before applying for citizenship. He says the reason he changed his mind was Obamacare, which he said showed “America has the potential to be a nation that actually cares for its afflicted and wounded and ill and disenfranchised.”

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Linda has been writing professionally since November 2012. She began at a small local paper covering up and coming bands. She covers numerous genres of music but her favorites are Pop, Rock, Heavy Metal, Rap, and even the classics. If you catch Linda at a wedding be sure to check out the dance floor. She doesn't hold back.

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'Zeppelin? I Love 'Em': The Confessions Of John Lydon

Think you knew the man they once called Johnny Rotten? Think again.

On December 1, 1976, John Lydon – or Rotten, as he was then known – was instantaneously catapulted from metropolitan obscurity to national infamy just for uttering a single, mischievous profanity while appearing on a live, pre-watershed local television show.

Saying “shit” to Bill Grundy, as a 20-year old, defined the subsequent course of John Lydon’s life. Forever ‘Rotten’ in the mainstream consciousness, he has spent the better part of four decades endeavouring to cultivate a more accurate public image than that of a foul-mouthed yob, gobbing nihilism and casually breaking Britain while unapologetically saying the unsayable. 

The original Sex Pistols era took up less than 30 surly months of Lydon’s life yet still marks his every move. However much influence various incarnations of Public Image Ltd might exert, there’ll always be countless media hacks queuing up to goad John’s inner Rotten. But not this time. Lydon is in his adoptive home of Los Angeles, where he has lived with his wife, Nora, for more than 20 years. As he boils a kettle to make his morning tea (it whistles shrilly as he pads from couch to kitchen), he’s fully primed to promote the soon-to-come tenth PiL album, the modestly titled What The World Needs Now …

We begin where most Lydon biogs conclude: in the Pistols aftermath. As we wend our way through the late 70s and beyond, we drift back and forth into Lydon’s private psyche. There we find a driven soul, haunted by feelings of guilt since a childhood incident born of a four-year battle with meningitis; a tireless musical evangelist; a struggling stepfather who’s as baffled as the next man by the arcane processes essential to successful parenting; an early-to-bed, early-to-rise home bird, deeply in love with his wife, who laughs easily, adores Led Zeppelin and just happens to have once been Johnny Rotten.

The first thing you did on leaving the Sex Pistols at the beginning of 1978 was make an A&R trip to Jamaica, funded by the Pistols’ label, Virgin. How was that? Did it give you the headspace to formulate your next move, the total reinvention that was Public Image Ltd?

Well, it showed that Virgin had some good intent as a record label towards me. Although at the same time there was shenanigans going on behind the scenes with the others [ex-Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook] putting together a pile of tapes that they called The Professionals. It was presented to me when I came back from Jamaica, actually when I’d just started PiL, as: “Would you just put some voices over it? Put some words to this.” Very annoying. Me, well, I knew about reggae, it’s in my culture, and so any opportunity really for a bit of a holiday. It turned out to be fantastic. I brought [photographer] Dennis Morris and [DJ] Don Letts with me. We had a hoot, and indeed really helped form Front Line, Virgin’s reggae label. It was different times way back then to what it is now.

Were there any specific artists you were instrumental in getting signed to Front Line?

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No, I didn’t actually, physically sit down with anyone. I just handed over an enormous list of recommendations. There was a lot of auditioning going on out there, [but] I kept away from that. I was just a magnet, but if anybody asked me about contracts, my clear-cut advice was: don’t do it.

You always had a broad palette of influences: Krautrock, Hawkwind, dub, Van der Graaf Generator, Captain Beefheart, even your parents’ record collection with their Celtic influence was in there somewhere. It wasn’t stuff from Top Of The Pops or even The Old Grey Whistle Test. Where were you finding all this?

Well, that would be there, and you’d see it, and know it was in existence, but for me, from quite an early age, record stores thrilled me, just like book stores did, and libraries. So whatever jobs I had I’d be saving up and rushing out in my spare time or at the weekends, Saturday afternoons usually, and just raid record stores. It was a very good hobby of mine and because I like art too, I was attracted to just the covers of records, many times. Things like [forgotten early 70s prog band] Paladin come to mind there. The man who did that artwork [Roger Dean] also did the Yes albums, but I knew them and friends had them and there was just no need for me to go off into that angle.

Did you have a group of friends that you could swap albums with?

Oh, you would never swap because you know someone would put a thumbprint on your vinyl and that’s how to lose a friend [laughs]. But you would share – you can’t do all this alone, it’s a group thing.

Malcolm McLaren was a New York Dolls groupie-turned-manager when you first met him. Were they your thing as well?

Well, I always assumed that they were following the likes of, say, Kiss. It was a style of glam rock, more closely associated with Kiss, without anything I could hook into culturally. Just talking about being a drag queen from New York didn’t really offer too much exciting imagery to me, so there was the difference there. What I loved about them was the fact that they really, really, really couldn’t play, and that was an enjoyable thing. I discussed this years later with Todd Rundgren. I asked him what was it like recording them, and he said the same thing: the chaos theory in it was good to work with, refreshing.

And they carried it off with such chutzpah.

Yeah, and that’s a lovely thing. Music doesn’t always have to be perfect and well played in order to get its message across. Thinking back to the New York Dolls, I remember loving that line in Babylon: [sings] ‘I got to get away to Babylon, I can’t stay.’ I didn’t realise that Babylon was actually an area in New York City. I thought it was a biblical reference.

Yeah, and with so many connotations to someone coming from a reggae background.

[Laughs] Well yeah, so you can understand my interest in those angles and aspects.

The first incarnation of PiL featured you, bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levene. How did the relationship between the three of you develop and ultimately fall apart?

They were mates from before. Keith because he was in The Clash and fell out with them, and Wobble from approved school. So we were off to a flying start. When I started PiL, I wanted it to be a level playing field, but what that really meant was that I was the one paying all the bills and everyone collecting equal profit. Then egos started to creep in and made the whole thing kind of sad. It took a long, long time for me to get a band back into that position of level playing field and egos left at the door, thank you. I mean, I sacrificed my own voice just to get more bass into the grooves, that’s the way I was approaching the studio, which was kind of ahead of the technology at that time.

Ultimately though, there was a clash of egos.

Yeah, you’ll find this with people and, well, they’re your mates and so you endure and you hope that something good will come out of the end of it, but usually it doesn’t. If somebody shows signs of selfishness, it’s a no-no. But that’s alright because they went on to do whatever they went on to, and so for me, no animosity in it.

Before that, the three of you made PiL’s second album, 1979’s Metal Box . If Never Mind The Bollocks was the road map for punk, Metal Box was the road map for post-punk. With the benefit of hindsight, which of the two are you most proud of?

My most important achievement in life was surviving meningitis, and recovering my memory [Lydon contracted spinal meningitis at the age of seven]. All other things really are just cherries on top of a very, very serious death cake, and that’s really the reason for putting out the last book, Anger Is An Energy . It’s very important to me that people understand that I came fully loaded into all of this. I wasn’t discovered under a leaf, desperate to be a pop star. My desperation was to try and get out the fact that I had found myself and I was full and vibrant, and eager to grab the bit. The Pistols I really used songwriting-wise to attack institutions that told us we were hopeless and without point or purpose, kind of woke that cause up, and then moved on to PiL, which was really self-analysis.

PiL’s marriage of that raw self-analysis with your diverse musical influences seemed to work perfectly.

Not at the time, because the press were being so bad-minded towards me. Then again, that’s the story of my life. I always seem to be ahead of the curve.

A nice place to be?

Not really, not all the time, because it makes you feel like you’re on the executioner’s block in an almost permanent way. Then again, it’s a lot healthier than being faced with: “Oh, you’re wonderful,” because then you could fall into laziness. Luckily I’ve never been allowed to do that [laughs]. My most enduring musical restrictions have really been financial. Not having the money to really go to town on things, but I seem to like the cheap and cheerful approach a lot better. I suppose it’s a constant reminder of when I went to Jamaica, of going into the studios and seeing just how little equipment was there yet hearing just how much goodness they could squeak out of it.

You’ve spoken of your enduring feelings of guilt associated with not recognising your parents when you were stricken with meningitis as a child, but it wasn’t your fault.

That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter…

Do you think that guilt may have been symptomatic of a Catholic education?

No, it’s just how flimsy a personality can be, and how something like that can just take that away, and then you slowly have to crawl your way back. You cannot ever forget that feeling of guilt when it just clicked one day: “Oh my God, this is my mother.” In many ways it’s a gift, it’s an ironic gift, because it makes you stronger, it gives you the will to survive and endure all manner of tragic situations thereafter. I really didn’t have too long a time before my mum died, so it’s short-lived.

Following the trauma of your illness, did you draw closer to your parents?

Not initially, no. No, no, quite the opposite – there was a kind of cold static in-between us. I didn’t know how to express sadness, you see – it’s taken me years to really sit down, and through PiL I learnt to analyse myself and really tear down those walls I had perfected as self-defence.

Did that coincide with a time of normal youthful rebellion? Did a generational divide suddenly exist between yourself and your father?

No, there was never anything like that in my house. Their record collection alone would prove that wrong. They were very open-minded with music, always had been, and that was a very good thing indeed. My dad didn’t understand my love of books, but my mum did. They were very loving. I just didn’t know how to reciprocate that love. I felt I had no skills in it. I had a good four years of my life missing there and I suppose they are very important developmentally, of family bonding, because you can’t go back to pretending you’re seven, not at eleven, so it’s an awful lot of catching up to do and that takes time.

Your mother’s death in 1978 had a profound effect on you, which you worked through, very publicly and at the height of significant police harassment, with the PiL song Death Disco . Not long after, you left your dad and brothers in London when you moved to the States – another wrench…

My dad wasn’t left. That isn’t how we viewed each other at all. We’re dotted all over the planet. My own band at the moment, I mean, Lu [Edmonds, guitar] is in Siberia, Bruce [Smith, drums] is in New York, Scott [Firth, bass] is in Norwich and I’m in LA, but we don’t view each other as being left behind. My dad too, I’ve got to tell you, is a bit of a gyppo and travelling is in his nature. He was always working away from home and so, healthily, that indicated to me that space is not distance.

Around that time, you had helped out your brother Jimmy with his band the 4” Be 2”. In fact, you were on tour with them in Ireland when you were arrested for walking into a policeman’s fist…

It was actually two policemen’s fists [laughs]. I’m really good at that, very clumsy indeed. But good came out of all of these bad situations, because when I got out of jail I went straight back to London and rushed into making [PiL’s third album] The Flowers Of Romance.

The Flowers Of Romance was another bold move. Jah Wobble had left, so you reinvented your sound without bass guitar. Next thing you know, you’d stumbled upon something else, a sound that a lot of drummers, including Phil Collins, took heed of.

Yeah, I had less than a week to work with Martin Atkins, the drummer at the time, because he was off on a tour with Brian Brain, and Keith just wasn’t interested at all, so I had a free run, more or less, and enjoyed every second of it.

The production on a song like Four Enclosed Walls evokes the same sort of paranoia as the Pistols’ Holidays In The Sun . It sounds really claustrophobic, do you know what I mean?

Well, wow… No, I don’t [laughs]. God, it’s only my voice and drums [laughs]. And if I could create that impression just by using drum loops, which is what we had to do, well… I suppose what I was exploring was non-structure inside structure. Four Enclosed Walls has turned out to be quite a forward-thinking song in light of what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment.

Exactly. And it has such a Middle Eastern sound to it as well .

From a Crusader’s point of view.

Shortly after The Flowers Of Romance was released in 1981, you moved to New York. What was the final incident that convinced you that you had to leave London?

As Public Image we found finding gigs in England completely hopeless. We’d very quickly worn out our welcome. There was a hangover from the Pistol days, of fire marshals and local councils having their say, and promoters not trusting any concert that I’d be a part of. So, we had to go to pastures new. We kind of accidentally ended up in New York and, eventually, in Los Angeles [in the early 90s]. It was a long, long process. One thing leads to another in life, a series of small steps.

What was your social life like when you moved to the US? You used to be a really social character when you were in London. Did that carry on in the States?

No, I kind of quietened down in New York and I’ve been that way ever since, really. I don’t like to go out to do clubbing or anything like that. I like getting up very early in the morning and I like going to bed early at night, and it’s mostly just me and Nora; very few distractions. And we like it that way where we keep each other company and we don’t tear each other’s heads off. Sometimes all that running around and chatting to endless people, it’s taxing on the brain to remember who half of them are the next day, and I don’t like that. I’m one for very, very deep commitments in my friendships and everything else.

Why has your relationship with Nora remained so strong? I may be wrong, but I expect you can be a little difficult to live with. How have you not driven her to distraction? Does her presence change your behaviour?

Well, that could be said about either of us, but together? No [laughs]. And if other people found us difficult to live with, well, that’s because we shouldn’t be living with them.

You’ve been together for a long time, since London, since punk. She’s the single constant in your life.

Well, what’s that, thirty-five, forty years now? I’m not counting – time flies by when you’re having arguments.

Could you have stood moving to LA without her?

I had to, really, because the business was what drew me here, it was where I needed to be, and we hooked up again properly. I suppose in a weird way I was like the advance guard. I’d also considered, around that time, moving to Germany, but there’d be a language barrier and Stuttgart’s not exactly the centre of the universe, although the idea did appeal to me.

The notion of John Lydon settled in Los Angeles is almost counterintuitive. LA seems like the least likely place you’d ever call home.

Well, it appealed because we played here so much, we became a very well-known California band, and quite a lot of the audience really didn’t know much, or relate to the Sex Pistols background, which was very, very relieving. For many years, I was running two completely different audiences.

Having seen you play in various PiL and Pistols incarnations over the years, both in the UK and mainland Europe, one thing that strikes me is that people just won’t stop spitting and throwing shit. I’m guessing you don’t get that in the States?

It’s not even like that was ever a part of the Pistols thing. It comes across to me almost like some kind of resentment for whatever it is I do, and well, lo and behold, there it is. Life’s hard, but there are quite a few people out there determined to make it harder for me, and view things in very childish ways. And a lot of this has been media-led, and of course gossip-led too, by people who really should have known better. The alleged adults who were apparently supposed to have looked after me in my early years, mismanagement and the seven deadly sins, and it’s very hard to crawl your way back out of that. That’s not exactly the character I’ve ever portrayed myself as, so I don’t quite know what people expect me to be when they behave like that, other than I feel like turning a hose on them.

The night you brought the Album tour to Brixton springs to mind. People who’d paid to get in were delighting in forcing the band offstage. It’s like that was the show for them, that’s what they’d come for.

The lowest common denominator took over and so the whole ideology of punk developed into something selfish, disastrous and small-minded. Around that time in the mid-eighties they were inches away from seig heil-ing. I can’t endure that. I’m just going to get on with PiL and not bother with it, and hope that the stupidity dies down. It’s taken a long time, but it has. When PiL went out on tour again in the nineties, there was much less of that nonsense and more people remembering punk as it really was. It’s always the imitators that behave in that negative way. I suppose it’s the thrill of trying to out-rotten Johnny Rotten. You know, I’ve created a very, very strong character there that instantly creates resentment [laughs]. I don’t quite know how it happened, but there we go.

You don’t seem to have been altered at all by your environment. Even after 35 years in LA you still show no outward signs of having become intrinsically Californian. But what about Finsbury Park? Do you still feel at home there?

No, I don’t suppose I’ve ever felt like I truly, totally belong to any lump of soil. I’m fairly transient and I’m not easily affected by my surroundings to the point where I feel I need to imitate the locals in order to fit in. You know, you take me or you leave me – either way, I’m just going to continue to be what I am. The main attraction for coming to California was the all-year-round similar weather. In fact, we don’t have weather here – it’s consistent and that’s very, very good for my physical health. Meningitis left me with many, many problems. All physical, I mean. I just can’t bear living in England for another November. It’s guaranteed pneumonia.

In 1983, after you moved to the US, PiL had their biggest hit with the single This Is Not A Love Song .

Yeah, eventually it was, in a very roundabout way. Virgin didn’t want to release it at first and that forced me into the position of releasing it somewhat erroneously on a German label and in Japan, and it took off in those two markets – amazingly, frighteningly, because it immediately brought to attention that, “Oh dear, I might have a contract problem here.” And Virgin could have played a bad ball here, but they had in mind, “Oh no, look, we’ve told him he doesn’t stand a chance of making any money with his silly new music, and here he is doing exactly that. We might as well go with the flow for a bit.” That’s a simplistic way of putting it, but that’s basically what happened. And then, of course, they jumped down my throat on the next bunch of stuff I’d be putting up, telling me I wasn’t commercial enough

The fact that no one knew what you were going to do next had become your selling point. As if to prove that point, you went off to do 1984’s World Destruction with the pioneering hip-hop DJ Afrika Bambaataa.

Bambaataa played a lovely, oddball collection of music at his gigs and that drew me in. We found we knew the same people that were hanging around the dance club scene in New York. That’s where I met [avant garde musician and producer] Bill Laswell.

Then there was another career tangent with 1986’s technically faultless, comparatively heavy Album , which Bill Laswell produced. It featured an incarnation of PiL that included Steve Vai, Ginger Baker, Tony Williams, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Bernie Worrell. Was that line-up contrived at Laswell’s suggestion?

No, I had a very young band from California at the time, very young kids, but when I took them to New York to make Album with Bill, they panicked and shit themselves in the studio. They couldn’t handle the pressure, so I had to just knock that on the head and get in anyone who was available as quickly as possible. It was quite literally on the phone: “Look, can you do this? Can you do that?” The songs were already there, they had to just come in and give it a quick listen and see where we could go from there on in. Because [PiL’s label] Elektra were on our case, and so we released the album without mentioning anyone who was on it, and it went straight in at No.80 in the American charts. And that same week, Mr Krasnow, the head of Elektra, asked to have a meeting with me and told me he’d have to let me go. The plan was that they were going to invest all their money in Metallica, and they couldn’t really see a future for my kind of music. And so, there we go, we parted our ways. It was only after the event that they found out who was actually on the album they’d dismissed. The irony is not lost on me.

And how ironic that the NME had previously reported that Ginger Baker had joined Public Image Ltd as an April Fool’s Day news story, only for him to then appear on Album.

I know, the joke backfired on even them [laughs]. Working with Ginger was fantastic – what a nutter. Wow… free-range talent that one.

He’s almost more Johnny Rotten than Johnny Rotten.

Similar backgrounds you see, and so there was a lot of good point and purpose to it. I could understand his rage very, very easily. Steve Vai was a terrific bloke, and terrific to work with. He’d never attempted in his whole life any kind of rhythm guitar up until working on that record, and he wasn’t quite sure that he’d be capable of doing it, or achieving it, so what we did was, we all just went out and got drunk on saké and came back in, and lo and behold, there it is. Once the pressure’s off, the stuff starts to flow.

The biggest hit from Album was Rise . Only an Irishman could have come up with that record. It’s very Celtic in both its sound and sentiment.

Yeah, with possibly a bit of Zulu thrown in for good measure [laughs]. I was listening to an awful lot of African music at the time. A lot of that was to do with Ginger, of course, because he’d come with the African nations wrapped around him. So yeah, you’re right, the song is an Irishman’s song but it shape-shifted into many other things besides. The song came first and the lads who came on board brought in other aspects, and so we played around with that. It was the first time ever that I was really in a proper big-time studio and treated with some kind of respect, where I wasn’t told, you know, “Don’t sit there unless you put a plastic bag down.”

I remember waiting in the bar for you to come on during the Album tour, hearing Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir coming over the PA, and thinking the DJ was having some kind of breakdown, but it turned out to be the first song in PiL’s set. Quite an audacious move.

Yeah, I know. I was supposed to run on and do the Robert Plant bit, but no, I can’t [laughs]. I mean, we’d rehearsed it, but it never, ever felt right to [do it]. I thought I’d be standing in someone else’s shoes at that point, but it was a good homage to a band that we do love. Although, yes, I’ve never mentioned Zeppelin very much, Physical Graffiti is one of my favourite albums. The sheer terror and ferocity of it… beautiful landscaping.

And there’s a very similar Middle Eastern influence to that found in Four Enclosed Walls at the very heart of Kashmir.

Even though none of us think about it. Come on, the boys came from Birmingham – there’s curry houses all over the place, mate [laughs]. You know what I mean? It’s your surroundings.

You put PiL on indefinite hiatus in 1993, following a couple of water-treading albums. But you followed that with Open Up , an inspired 1995 collaboration with techno duo Leftfield. How did that come about?

I knew Neil [Barnes, Leftfield founder] from working in the play centres, which was the job I had before the Sex Pistols. Where you’d look after children whose parents worked late after school, and in with that lot were, of course, some problem kids too, who needed to be kept off the streets and so you provide some kind of attention for them. I loved that job – set me up lovely for the Pistols, by the way – but Neil did similar work, so that was the connection through a friend called John Gray. 

Years later, one thing led to another when they were starting with Leftfield and I always got on, I thought, very well with Paul [Daley, Leftfield co-founder]. The only trouble was that the pair of them didn’t seem to get on very well with each other, which leaves you thinking, “Oh my God, all bands seem to be like this.” It took a few years to actually get it into the studio because their original demo idea was, for me, too slow. Then someone had the bright spark of saying, “Look, we’ll just speed it up!” So I heard that, ran straight in and made it up on the spot. We did it very, very quickly, in less than one evening. It was great fun to do, and then, of course, when it was released six months later, I was accused in America of profiteering on the fires that were burning down the Hollywood Hills because of the line ‘Burn Hollywood, Burn.’

My God, you can’t win, can you?

You can’t win [laughs]. Hello, there’s a journalist here trying to tear me a new arsehole and, for God’s sake, just get it right. I mean, even you clowns must know that it takes six months before you get a record released. But there we have it.

It’s interesting you saying how your experience with the play centres helped you with working with the Pistols.

Yeah, problem kids [laughs].

Do you think your relationship with Steve, Paul and Glen was broken from the beginning? After Malcolm recruited you, they didn’t even turn up for your first rehearsal.

Yeah, it was a very, very bad, ugly thing to do.

Do you think they might have preferred Malcolm to have found them a Rod Stewart type so they could have simply become a new version of The Faces?

Listen, I’ve got to tell you that as people, outside of making records or rehearsing or anything like that, I really like these fellas, and so that’s what drew me back in. One consistent factor of the Pistols that made it work was that Paul Cook is so level-headed and he’s the voice or reason when we’re all yelling and trying to tear each other apart, and that kind of works. He was the maypole we danced around, and that’s why to me he will always be one of the best drummers I’ve ever heard in my whole life. Not only has he got perfect timing, he keeps it nice and simple, but he has a personality you can trust.

Yeah, that’s important in a drummer.

Bloody hell, yeah. And here I am, having worked with the other ultimate extremes in life and I can tell you there’s good and bad in everything. Whatever the situation is, make the best of it. There’s no time for wallowing in self-pity. You have to get into it, because you’re here for this purpose, and for me, this is the only thing I’ve found in my whole life that I was actually made for. Illnesses and all the horrible situations in my life fully well-rounded me to be able to do this. Songwriting is my thing. I’ve found myself, and I’m not going to throw that gift away by making commercial crap. Even though the term ‘sell-out’ has been thrown at me since day one [laughs]. And, my God, people accusing the Sex Pistols of being a boy band? Well, I look back now and go, “Yeah, we were a boy band… unlike any other.”

What compelled you to take complete control with your first solo album, 1997’s Psycho’s Path, where you played all the instruments, as well as self-producing it?

Not all of it, just bits and pieces. There’s always someone skilful working in the background. I like to put myself in these high-risk situations. When I feel that amount of energy and tension building in me, there’s only one place to go, and that’s straight into the studio. I built a studio in LA so I can just go in and mess about all day long. I far prefer working with other people. I like to be sprung off, get other ideas outside of my own, just as much, probably more so, to avoid the conceit of actually studying the violin, or the piano, or the saxophone. All my hard work really goes into the vocal side. I’m trying to drag things out of my personality that maybe I’d rather keep buried, but if you’re going to write a good book, it has to be an honest book. If you’re going to make a good record, it has to be an honest record, and this is what you have to do.

It’s the process of dealing with a lot of stuff, I guess, because you can’t voice it in any other way really.

No you can’t, and there’s no self-pity in it, because this is something my mum and dad never would have allowed. I’m always aware of that. They’re still in there, lurking about inside my head, giving me a good slap if I go on to a wallow.

Following Psycho’s Path, you tried a lot of new stuff away from music, including dipping your toes into the world of reality TV with I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here . Were you disillusioned with music as a whole or just the business of making music?

I found myself stranded and abandoned, and at the same time hugely in debt. If I tried to form any kind of band there would be outstanding bills to be paid, so I needed to make money elsewhere for a while. I was financially crippled by the labels and that was very punishing. I couldn’t even get a new label because I was still connected with debts from the old ones. So any new adventure that crossed my path, I thought, “Ha, I can do that.”

And you had a right laugh with it, obviously.

Yeah, only because I was able to pick and choose. I had a very, very good time with eYada – it was an internet radio broadcaster. I’d broadcast live from my house every weekend for four hours, and that was a great, great time, because the people I wanted to talk to weren’t rock stars, they were American intellectuals, philosophers and politicians, and I really, really enjoyed that, and I did intersperse that with all manner of oddball bits of music I’d find. I continuously raided record stores because music’s for sharing. So are ideas, and if you can combine the two together, wow.

Interestingly, while Never Mind The Bollocks and Metal Box shaped a lot of people’s musical future, the radio show you presented on Capital Radio in 1977 with Tommy Vance was of equal influence on that generation. Pistols fans who tuned in for a lesson in punk were presented with Krautrock, dub and various esoteric sounds that had never been broadcast before.

Well, it’s what I like, it’s what I am, it’s part of what’s been the making of me, and why on earth would I want to deny that and pretend to be something I’m not? Here’s where the rows with the management started.

Malcolm McLaren really hated you doing that radio show, didn’t he?

Yeah, absolutely. Thought that was ruining the image. You cheeky bastard! What image? I am the image. I write the fucking songs, don’t I? [Laughs] I’m the one what had to stand up there and endure. While Malcolm’s swigging Bloody Marys, I’m the one what had to stand there behind the microphone and take whatever comes, so anybody who had the audacity to tell me what my image was or wasn’t, it wasn’t going to go down too well.

And you had to be the front, and suffer the consequences, for all his often-ruinous ideas.

Yeah, and all his ideas were reverse engineering.

And he wasn’t terribly supportive. When he sent you out on tour through the ultra-conservative southern states of America, he was notable by his absence.

Well, that was a good idea because we found it verydifficult to get gigs anywhere as the Pistols, and to tour the south just seemed extremely audacious, and proved to be a very, very wise move. Go straight into the heart of the alleged enemy and, Ithink, you’ll find that they’reyourtotal friends.

You’ve done the Pistols reunion thing twice. Is that permanently finished with now?

I wouldn’t call it a reunion; I don’t like that word. For us it was a make up or break up, and we made up and now we’ve broken up. We’ve got it out of our systems; now we can get back to being friends. It’s very important that be understood – I value them all as human beings far more than I do as me in a band with them.

And you really don’t want to become the Rolling Stones, doyou?

No. I don’t, no. Forever trotting out the same monotony? No. No, no. I can truly, honestly say I’ve never done this for the money. I think the evidence is overwhelming [laughs]. I laugh at it myself because if I go back and I look at my life, Ithink, “My God, you know, are you a bit silly? Youcould have tea-cosied there for a bit.” Nope, can’t have it. There’s just something in me that just says, “No, I won’t wake up and feel good about myself.” So there it goes. So integrity is the word Ihover around, hoping that that is indeed what it is, because there’s every chance, if you fully believe in integrity, that that’s not what it is at all. This is the trouble with over-thinking yourself. You know, I mean it when I say I’m my own worst enemy, so no matter what bad can ever be said about me, it ain’t nothing that I’ve not already considered.

Surely you can’t lie in bed awake all night worrying if you’ve got integrity.

Well, I can’t lie to myself. It took me four years to remember who I was and I’m not going to let that one slip, never, ever again.

Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith have been members of PiL since the 80s. Why do you think you’ve been able towork so well together for so long?

Because Lu’s a bit nuts. I suppose he’s a bit like myself. He could have taken the easy road and just been a punk guitarist – of some good repute too, let it be said – but he got bored with that. His ideology is to explore every sound and find good in everything, and that’s very similar to me. When on stage, we’ll put in leading notes or drop hints and take the songs into other areas, and Bruce is very, very in tune with us in that respect, and Scott most definitely. After all these years we’re finally getting to where we want to be, so the pressure’s off – we don’t record just for the sake of it, and we don’t have to make commercial crap. We do what we do, we’re now fully independent and no one waves a finger over us saying, “No, no, no,” or“I’llcancel the cheque.”

Double Trouble , the lead single from the new PiL album, sounds incredibly contemporary. Put it next tothe Sleaford Mods and it sounds fresh as a daisy.

Yeah? I would have thought that was one of my more old-fashioned styles [laughs]. Well, there you go. You know, we do what we do. The sound and the attitude of it are completely appropriate to the subject matter, and that’s what you end up with.

And very appropriate to the time we’re living in.

Well, yes – if you’ve got a broken toilet, fix it. I don’t think I could get more political than that.

One of the worst things that’s happened to you in recent years was the death of Ari Up, the daughter of your wife Nora and former singer of The Slits, in 2010.

The death of Ari absolutely shattered Nora, so we’ve had a lot to endure. But the night before Ari died, we went to visit her in the hospital. I’d been refusing to go, because I thought it’s just going to be another row about not raising her kids properly [Lydon and Nora were closely involved in the upbringing of Ari’s three sons], but we got on really well and sang Four Enclosed Walls . The hospital staff let her scream her head off and she fell asleep happy and just stayed asleep. That was a lovely way for us to part. The only one who sang in tune in the whole thing was Nora [laughs].

I’m guessing Ari’s children must feel a lot like your own kids by now.

To me, yes, but they’re very, very difficult now. Stepdad is a very difficult position to find yourself in. Sometimes, no matter what good you think you’re doing, it’s always perceived as somehow wrong, and it’s very, very difficult.

Do you sometimes look at the children and think how different their upbringing has been to your own in Finsbury Park?

We might have made it too easy for the twins. We tended to spoil them. Can’t help it. I’ve always had kids wrapped around me. I’m one of those people that doesn’t mind children making noise on an aeroplane – it’s not irritating to me at all.

What’s your attitude to mortality? You made your feelings clear on Religion from PiL’s first album, but is there a small part of you that retains any iota of faith, and the afterlife that goes with it?

Afterlife? Well, that’s presuming there is such a thing as death [laughs]. I have no answer to that, no man-made religion is supplying me with anything like enough information. Out of the dust we come, back to the dust we go. It seems to be the rightful thing to do.

And there we leave him, even more buoyant than we found him: open, optimistic, gleefully self-deprecating, as far from the combative tabloid-created Rotten as it’s humanly possible to get.

“May the roads rise and your enemies always be behind you,” offers punk’s erstwhile firebrand by way of parting gesture. “May they scatter, flatter, batter and shatter,” he continues, cooling ever further toward a state that can only reasonably be described as contentment, before concluding with a forthright, exclamatory “Peace!”

Who knew the day would ever come when John Lydon would say it, let alone find it.

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records. 

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John Lydon (I)

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• Soundtrack ("Criminal")

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• 5′ 8″ (1.73 m)
• January 31 , 1956
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• Trivia He was supposed to be on Pan American World Airways Flight 103 from London's Heathrow International Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on December 21, 1988, but missed the flight because his wife Nora, hadn't packed in time. The plane crashed over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland when a terrorist bomb exploded in the forward cargo hold, killing all 259 passengers and crew.
• Quotes On acting: "I hated it. It was too long, too stressful; two minutes' working day and 12 hours' fear and nausea. And no improvising; you're just a hired robot. That might be all right for people that don't have any kind of personality, but if you have anything going for your own self, it's very, very frustrating that way."
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Johnny Rotten

Learn about this topic in these articles:, sex pistols.

The original members were vocalist Johnny Rotten (byname of John Lydon; b. January 31, 1956, London, England), guitarist Steve Jones (b. May 3, 1955, London), drummer Paul Cook (b. July 20, 1956, London), and bassist Glen Matlock (b. August 27, 1956, London). A later member was bassist Sid Vicious

…made the Sex Pistols’ singer, Johnny Rotten, the main character in “Hey Hey, My My.” Thus, Young’s reenergized reaction to punk sharply contrasted with that of his aging peers, who generally felt dismissed or threatened. It also demonstrated how resistant he was to nostalgia—a by-product of his creative restlessness.

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Becoming Johnny Rotten, When John Lydon Would Rather You Didn’t

Anson Boon went through a grueling process to play the punk star in “Pistol,” even though the original wanted nothing to do with the project.

By Douglas Greenwood

LONDON — Anson Boon gave playing Johnny Rotten everything he had, including a front tooth.

Boon embodies the punk frontman in “ Pistol ,” a new limited series charting the meteoric rise and fall of Rotten’s band the Sex Pistols, and the tooth was lost recreating one of Rotten’s “most animated performances,” the 22-year-old actor said in a recent interview. “I slammed my face into the microphone by accident.”

Sitting in a north London park, a mile from where Rotten grew up, Boon reeled off a list of other injuries sustained over six months of filming: He fractured his coccyx when he fell over a drum kit; zealous singing dislocated his jaw; he spent several hours a day hunched over to emulate the musician’s posture, and still has back pain from it today.

This roll call is, in some ways, appropriate. Rotten — who now goes by his real name, John Lydon — was one of the pioneers of London’s 1970s punk movement, known for his “divine insanity,” as John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1977, and for overseeing concerts where chairs were thrown and noses bloodied.

“Pistol” — which begins streaming Tuesday on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in other territories — is Boon’s most significant screen role to date, following parts onstage in London and in films like Sam Mendes’s “1917.”

Despite the injuries, he “loved the intensity” of playing the Pistols frontman, Boon said. Besides, “It’s not Rotten to give up. I just had to power through,” he added.

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