The New Cue #294 June 19: John Lydon
"They’ve murdered the Sex Pistols. They’ve absolutely torn it to shreds..."
Good morning,
Hope you’re all doing A-OK. Today, we’re going to start your week with an epic chat with none other than John Lydon. As you may be aware, John’s wife of 40 years, Nora, very sadly passed away in April, but as this chat shows, grief hasn’t taken any of the Public Image/Sex Pistols’ frontman’s fire, passion, wit, wisdom and love away. It’s a crackerjack interview (if we say so ourselves).
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start the Week With… John Lydon
Formed from the wreckage of the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd have been a vehicle for the singular vision of John Lydon (a.k.a Rotten) since 1978. Founding members Keith Levene and Jah Wobble left in 1984 and following a hiatus in the 90s, Lydon reactivated the group in 2009 for a run of rather fine albums (This Is PiL, their first studio album in 20 years, in particular was great).
Due in August, their latest End Of the World is up there with some of Lydon’s best work. We were due to speak to John about the record in back April, but that day Nora, his wife of over four decades, sadly passed away follow a long battle with Alzheimer’s. John had been Nora’s carer in recent years and the track Hawaii which PiL entered for Eurovision at the start of the year (more on that later) was about their relationship and her illness. It came as a surprise last month, then, to hear that John still wanted to talk to us, so – after a few technical problems - Chris spoke to John over Zoom. He was understandably very emotional and there were some tears, but he was open and honest about everything from Nora’s death to PiL, the Sex Pistols, the Royal Family, Sid Vicious and much more…
Hello, John?
Hello? Can you hear me? Can you see me? Oh God, microchip technology! I’ve finally conquered it!
How’s your morning been so far?
Alright. It’s been hard to adjust to what I’ve had to adjust to. The house is extremely lonely. I get visits, but I prefer to be alone and sort it out that way. It’s very difficult for me to formulate thoughts or sentences or be rational about it. It’s a lot to go through, but this is an album that Nora really, really loved. I loved to share it with her. It thrilled her, some of these songs excited her no end. Hawaii wasn’t one of them!
She didn’t like Hawaii?
Well, because it’s about dying and she wasn’t prepared to accept that. So, it was inappropriate. [new single, out this week] Car Chase, she liked and North West Passage.
What about Pretty Awful? That’s a good one.
Oh yeah. Because she knows who that could be referring to. There was an awful lot of girls that did look pretty awful, but they were great. This goes back to the punk era when we first started. The girls would make wonderful things of themselves like misappropriating bin liners but ended up looking gorgeous. It’s a proud statement that song. I’m sure there’s some transvestites out there that will take great accolades in it. And God bless them, why not!
Given what you were going through this can’t have been an easy album to make…
It was very difficult to make. There were a lot of things had to be put on the shelf in order to explore other areas and topics. But I think ultimately, we did rather well with that. It could have ended up with just loads of self-pity and grief and sad sack stuff and it isn’t, because you shouldn’t be that way. There are some things you have to accept in life. That’s just me talking about my personal issue at the moment, and I’m going to come to grips with it. It’s exciting, some of these songs… [new album track] North West Passage, that just thrills me to pieces. It’s got some of the sharpest guitar playing I’ve ever heard on it. Lu [Edmonds, guitarist] took what would be contrived as a normal tune and took it into outer space and beyond. It rips my head off every time I hear it.
It obviously came from an incredibly difficult period for you, but you wouldn’t think that to listen to it at all. It sounds very joyous and life-affirming.
I would hope so. I’m not one to wallow in self-pity. My mum and dad taught me that, it gets you nowhere. It just arms your enemies and destroys yourself internally. And what’s the point of that? I want to make Nora proud, as I’ll always be proud of her.
Do you find that working makes things easier?
She would hate me moping around the house, moaning. That would not do her any good at all. And certainly, it would be the beginning of my own dismal end. And I’m not going to allow that. I’ve got more things to share with many more people besides what I’ve shared with Nora. And you have to continue that. [Chokes up] Sorry, I get a bit... hurt.
Don’t apologise.
Yeah. What I’ve done really is I’ve kept myself away from a lot of people because I don’t want to hear vacuous thoughts. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss…’ Stop that. That’s not getting us anywhere. It should be, ‘I’m so glad you had such a happy life together.’ By the way, before we get into the album, I used the Coronation as a great excuse for a party. If she was here, she would have loved it. I took pageantry to an absolute nth degree. I bought cardboard cutouts of Charles and Camilla and had family and friends poking their heads through to be Camilla. The neighbours came over, it was great. I covered everything in flags. I knew Nora would have enjoyed that. Ludicrous, but at the same time it had a great deal of poignancy. It was a really nice farewell.
As you say, you’re lucky to have spent four decades with someone who gave you so much happiness and who had such a great outlook on life herself.
Yeah, and that will continue. Her spirit is in me and it always will be. Some people might be horrified but she was cremated and I sleep with her ashes next to the bed. I find it gives me incredible comfort. It’s really, really lovely.
You mentioned that you didn’t want to stop and wallow in self-pity, but you didn’t stop at all. The album was announced less that a week after Nora passed.
That was preordained. You can’t stop these things. Life does go on, fortunately. As I said, I spent the last few weeks playing it to her and she really loved it. She loved to hold my hand and bounced like that with it. Some of the songs just thrilled her because they were so full of life. The last thing we wanted in her last days was for her to be morbid and moped upon. Nora was always an individual, even with Alzheimer’s, her personality and character was there and I’m ever so happy that I wrote songs that got to her. Music, I discovered, was a great way of keeping her together. That’s why when she did die, it was such a shock. It was the hope that she was getting better. Because she was. She’d connect immediately. She never forgot my name right to the end. That was a fantastic reward. We didn’t have to endure dementia.
And she got to see you doing Hawaii on the telly.
Oh yeah! She loved the suit I wore, she picked it herself. It was fantastic. I was just going through the internet with her and we found this site that sold really cheap tartan suits and she went for the pink one! I wore it around the house and she just loved it. It excited her eyeballs.
PiL performing Hawaii on The Late Late Show Eurosong special.
It was really moving to watch. Who’s idea was it for you to compete for Eurovision?
Not ours! We were approached years and years earlier to do it. We were going to write a new song for it, but they turned us down and then out of the blue they came back and we thought, ‘Well, how bloody appropriate, we’ve got exactly the song for them...’ It was a great opportunity, but very, very hard for me to do live. Because I had to go to Ireland and leave her here. And that was a worry in itself, that that could create problems for her because every night she would ask where I was. So the whole time I was away I spent on the on the internet to her, which was difficult because she’d always be looking behind the iPad to see where the rest of me was! But when I came back and played it to her it amused her greatly. But I think my sadness came through, it wasn’t the greatest show on earth for her, she was expecting a bit more energy out of me but I couldn’t do that at that time. Now, it will be a pleasure to sing live.
And you did The Masked Singer too.
She really loved me on the Masked Singer, that was a joy to behold. She guessed it was me straight away. You get these staunch fanatics going, ‘How can you do a show like that!?!’ Well, hello, my reasons are more serious than fashion. Don’t allow the dictate of fans to enter your life or they’ll ruin you. Once they push that extreme button, they feel like they can dominate your directions and that’s lethal. I’m no man’s toy. They think they know who I really am and force false values on me. False manifestos. I have no prejudices about anything in the world. I want to use every medium possible. There’s no point in closeting yourself away like a hermit in a cave pretending that you’re doing it for the benefit of mankind, the only way to benefit mankind is to be seen and heard.
Do you get a kick out of confounding expectations and annoying some of the old punks?
I do because it annoys some people SO much. They’re wasting their lives and their spirit and their energy. It’s ridiculous to be so harsh a critic on things like that. You mustn’t close your mind to anything. The second you do that, you’re the enemy.
Is that idea of self-censorship and not being allowed to say or do certain things in the song Being Stupid Again?
Yes! Hello, students! I hope they’re mortally offended. No, but they shouldn’t be. They should see the humour in that. It’s a tongue-in-cheek approach rather than ‘us and them’. I give everybody a chance, a fair crack at the whip. There’s a lot of extremism coming out of those places of education that doesn’t actually make sense for all of us as a species and we need to think more about that. Marxism, I’m unhappy to say, is still prevalent to those that think they’re learning but they’re not. They’re like sheep that just babble it backwards. That’s the enslavement of all of us with no future at all.
Do you think there’s a lack of empathy in discourse these days?
Yeah, and it’s coming from both the left and right wing. I find it really, really sad. It’s dangerous, because it’s almost mindless. But there’s somebody at the back of it, manipulating it this way. Divided we fall, that’s the game that’s at hand.
This year marks 45 years of Public Image.
Celebrations all round. We’ve shown great longevity, the years have not tormented us.
What do you put that down to?
It was based on emotions, real feelings and empathy. And [the idea was] to deal with life honestly and openly. We’re not just selling you an image and then wearing smarty costumes to wrap around it. This is not a performance piece. It’s an example of life. It’s the oddest thing in the world, but I get enjoyment out of sharing my pain with other people, because they can see it in their eyes that they’re experiencing the same thing themselves, with variances of course, and they’re very happy that somebody is there with them in those moments. And so am I. It absolutely kills the loneliness.
You can play a song like Penge, then Hawaii or [1979 track] Death Disco which is about your mum dying…
Yeah, and they’re all valuable areas of being a human being. These are all the emotions and things we go through. And all these things sometimes can all be happening at once inside your head. There are times when I get serious brain farts because of overthinking everything all at once. You have to explore each and every avenue independently. It’s about looking for an answer. There will be pain and there will ultimately be death. You can make that as sad sack tragic as you want, or you can see it as a necessary learning curve to endure and carry on until it’s your time. You’ve done your bit, time to go. Where do you go? Well, that’s debatable. I like to think there’s some way I can meet up with my lovely darling, so I have some hopes for that. Would they be religious in their foundations? Possibly, you’re bought up a Catholic and that creeps into your very soul. I’d rather have that hope than just thinking it all means nothing at all.
Going back to the start of PiL, Keith Levene passed away last year. Had you been in contact with him at all in recent years?
Keith chose his own path and he chose the path of drugs and animosity. So it was very difficult to get past those barriers. Towards the end, he did make some kind of attempt, but it was too little too late. He couldn’t see the wood through the trees sometimes, poor boy, and you can’t work with people that put their drug habits before anything else. You just can’t. It all becomes a way to look for the money to get to the next drug source which it becomes an unbearable pressure on everybody else. It was unfair to ask us to tolerate that. I saw the same thing with Sid and heroin. When they get into that drug, they get surrounded by people who over exaggerate their own importance and it does affect the drug victim. Which is how I view Sid and Keith. It’s really sad to watch that happen. There doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to change it and at the time I was way too young to know how to cope with that. It becomes such an emotional problem to throw on you, they become oblivious to the fact that you have your life and your own problems but no, it becomes all about them and their own needs. It doesn’t work and it creates a really unhealthy tension in a group of human beings. You have to push yourself into a world of absurdity to believe a heroin addict. It’s not genius that’s going on there anymore, it’s not creativity. It’s a very selfish thing.
Does it make you angry, this romanticising of Sid and his lifestyle? That’s your friend people are talking about…
Yeah. And they just don’t want to know. They’ve already built up this cartoon character and that’s it. It’s damaging and it hurts those who actually survive around that issue.
How do you feel about the Pistols legacy these days?
They’ve murdered it. They’ve just absolutely torn it to shreds and taken anything of value and purpose out of it and turned it into a commercial farce. It was very sad to have seen that documentary [Danny Boyle-directed series Pistol, based on Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones autobiography]. I expected better from Boyle.
Did you watch it?
Yeah, it was painful. Painful, misguided and mis-directed. Openly abusing something that was truly real - and terrifying at that time - into some kind of middle-class schoolboy fantasy. It felt like it was a script for Grange Hill. The advance publicity of it was incredibly difficult for me.
As that the years go by and you start to lose people, is that one of the sad things about all this, that you might not have a kind word with Steve or Paul [Cook, drummer] ever again?
I can’t. I can’t because it comes from an ideology of jealousy and resentment and greed. And it’s impossible to go back on that. There was some pretty damn insulting things done about Nora around that time-frame from them. I could not take that. There were things implied that were really hurtful. They knew Nora was ill, Paul Cook definitely knew, and they showed no care in the world and just marched me into court and basically cost me a lot of money which I could have done helping Nora. They left me in a pretty shit financial state, thank you very much, and then put that out there. Ridiculous nonsense. I don’t mean to mock it, but it does upset me what they’ve done. They’ve killed the energy of it.
Do you have much power over any of it?
They out vote me now on everything and the end result is pretty pitiful. I saw the other day Glen Matlock yapping on about how he was going to rewrite the lyrics to God Save The Queen to be God Save The King. Wow! Genius! The stupidity of it. That was a song that, actually, when he was in the band, he hated it and wouldn’t perform it live. He stormed off stage because he couldn’t the lyrics, that they meant we were fascists. No dear boy, I’m calling the Royal Family fascists. They’re the ones that hung out with Hitler, not me!
There are so many people from the punk era who are now very happy to trade off nostalgia. You and Paul Weller seem to be the only two notable exceptions…
In Paul’s case, it’s because he has the talent to move on. He’s not a one idea person. In my case dot-dot-dot-question mark. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being big headed! You’re making me laugh, it’s kind of helpful. What’s that word? Catharsis. I always thought that said cart and horses. They’ve used that in a song, [starts singing] I’m horse and cart, me, right at the start… hahahaha!
Didn’t you and your dad once turn up to the Q Awards on a rag and bone cart or have I imagined that?
Yep. Yes, we did. With Nora and [long-serving Lydon minder and manager] Rambo sitting on a fridge in the back, giving it the royal wave. It was a laugh, but the horse wouldn’t stop so we had to jump off!.
Were you and your dad a bit like Steptoe and Son?
Yeah, in the sense of humour. He was just so deep and witty. It’s funny, until the day I left home I never quite got him. But after that, gosh, we got on really well. He respected me just going my own way. I took the risks and I made my own life and that was exactly the lesson he taught me.
How did he react when everything kicked off with the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy etc?
I had to be at home for a period of that because I was under probation, and they needed a permanent address. So it was kind of hard on him and hard on me. [Irish accent] Why can’t you just write a hit single for fuck’s sake you little gobshite!
You got an almost number one with God Save The Queen.
Yes, when there was no number one that week. He got it eventually.
Have you ever thought what you might have done if you didn’t join the Sex Pistols? What other pathway you might have taken at 19?
It would have probably have been something criminal. I would have loved to have been a writer. But writing without the music? As soon as I got into that band it was ‘Ahhh…’ I didn’t care whether what they were doing was tuneless or beautifully orchestrated. It gave me a purpose to hinge what I was thinking and put that on top. Like a maypole to dance around. And once I discovered that I never looked back. I loved it. It’s a gift from the gods and it’s such a great opportunity that I’ve never, ever wasted that. I’ve never been flippant about it or taken it lightly or mocked it or abused it or ripped people off with it. Your choices are your own. This is how I view my life. Some people don’t want people to know who they are, they use subterfuge and try to hide and run away from themselves and PiL are the exact opposite of that.
Is that what you want people to take from 45 years of PiL?
Yeah. I’ll reference God Save The Queen: We meant it, maaaan.
That seems like the perfect place to end it. Thank you so much for talking to us, John. What are you going to do with the rest of the day?
Nothing. I’m going to just sit here for a while, it’s raining. I’ve got some plants that the neighbours gave me and I’m going to plant them in the garden because that would make Nora happy. I’ve developed a real liking now for all those things that she always loved, but I never had the time to do. Because I was 24/7 taking care of her, so things just fell apart and I really regret that. If she could see the garden now she’d be really happy.
Take care John, thank you.
Peace and love, sir.
PiL’s latest single Car Chase is out this week. End of World is out 11 August on PiL Official via Cargo UK Distribution, followed by a 38-date UK and European Tour. Head here for tickets.
CC