John Lydon on Sid Vicious, and memories of his grandparents' house in Co Cork
John Lydon brings Public Image Limited to Dublin in June. Picture By: Duncan Bryceland
John Lydon is sporting a smart red tartan waistcoat during our chat on Zoom. Tartan has been a significant element of the singer’s apparel since the Sex Pistols in the 1970s but he suggests his love for the material began long before punk. “My mum used to make tartan waistcoats for me when I was a kid, she was very good at making them and would doll us up, I’ve got that affection for tartan from my mother,” says Lydon.
A picture of Lydon wearing the garment as a boy was featured in his 2014 autobiography Anger Is An Energy, a follow-up to Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. The son of an Irish father (Jimmy) born in Galway, and mother (Eileen Barry) from Carrigrohane near Ballincollig in Cork, Lydon informs me he remembers the Examiner before adding the family cottage “never bothered with floorboards, it was covered in newspaper and dirt.
"We stayed there every year in the summer, it was a run-down farmhouse with a lovely view of a lighthouse. It all sounds very romantic but we had all kinds of multi-legged naughty things crawling around, even the chickens would run through the house. There was no running water, my grandad built the house over a stream instead of having taps, it all felt very medieval.”
Lydon, 66, will arrive in Ireland to perform in June with Public Image Ltd at the National Stadium in Dublin, this time travelling with an Irish passport. “It’s not for romantic reasons because I was fed up being anally examined at Heathrow; I’d had quite enough of that,” he says.
Lydon, also known as Johnny Rotten since his time fronting the Sex Pistols, will be travelling in better circumstances. His last journey from his home in California meant having to leave his wife Nora suffering from Alzheimer’s “with strangers” for a court case involving his former band. This time she will be looked after by one of his three brothers.
In the legal case, Lydon was trying to prevent the Pistols’ music being used in Danny Boyle’s mini-series about the band that’s coming to Disney+ next month.
“It’s just so wrong,” says Lydon. “The Sex Pistols is its own universe, you don’t need to water the well! I was the boy that kept it clean and they’ve bitterly resented me for it and put this film together.”
He rails against the “secrecy” of his former bandmates in the lead-up to the deal. “It’s a vendetta and I can’t see any truth coming out of it because you’ve left the man out who created the image and wrote the songs.”
Looking back on his early days with the Sex Pistols, Lydon says the band were “music-hall in the proper working-class way”. He’s also still prone to an occasional listen to Never Mind The Bollocks on vinyl. “I play the whole thing through and that’s how it's supposed to be. From the sleeve onwards I was heavily involved in everything.” Perhaps the only person Lydon feels some tangible affection for from the period is the late Sid Vicious, who died of a drug overdose while on bail for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
“He was a wonderful chap to hang out with,” recalls Lydon, “senseless and a bit of a coat-hanger really but a good piss-taking imitator. If you had the slightest blemish on your face he would crucify you all day long; ‘Oh look; here comes Spotty Muldoon’.
“Sid was an absolute die-hard Bowie fan, that and Can was his other big influence and bits of Miles Davis, I think those two were his mum’s influence. Also Roxy Music and Abba, that was Sid’s background.” Would it have made a difference if Sid had learned to play the bass properly? “We got Lemmy [from Motorhead] to try and teach him, he called and said: ‘I’ve got to tell ya; he’s got no aptitude whatsoever’.”
Within all that chaos Lydon remembers another London-Irish son who would regularly feature in the audience at Pistols gigs. “Shane (MacGowan) was a crazy character in the Union Jack shirt; then he got into the Irish thing later but that’s alright.”
Lydon’s brother Jimmy was also involved in several post-punk records - perhaps most famously ‘Why Don’t Rangers Sign A Catholic’ – and he also had a band named 4" Be 2”. It was on a trip to Dublin with that group in 1980 that John Lydon famously ended up in Mountjoy Prison.
“That band got me locked up in Dublin, I never made it to the gig; I was arrested for attacking two sets of policeman’s fists with my face!” he says.
He would write about the experience on PIL’s 1981 single Flowers of Romance. The incident discouraged him from playing in Ireland for almost 30 years but shows since with both the Sex Pistols and PIL have helped build the bridges again.
The latter’s live shows are known for creating a sense of catharsis and after two years in lock-down, he anticipates an emotional release.
“It's all about eye contact with the audience, they are the fifth member and they supply us with a hall full of people crying with joy, the emotion in the songs is a full-bodied thing. ‘Death Disco’ is about the death of my mum and it’s since gone into the death of a few friends and the death of my father. It’s an open book because there’s more to come.”
Lydon refuses to take the fashionable point of view on many subjects. He suggests he was given a BBC ban in 1978 for speaking out against Jimmy Savile. In another recent interview, he put politics aside to criticise those celebrating Margaret Thatcher’s death. He also has some sympathy for Queen Elizabeth II, describing her family as “seriously stupid and highly self-righteous at the same time, what a dangerous combination.”
That empathy feels a long way from the Pistols’ classic God Save The Queen in 1978, with lyrics such as “She’s not a human being”. The track reputedly entered the UK charts at No 1 but was removed from the top spot after a ban by the BBC.
“You shouldn’t put a gag on anyone; that is a great evil,” says Lydon, still vexed at the censorship he was subjected to. “One of the greatest gifts of nature is our ability to communicate through words, think and have empathy with other humans. If you censor someone that is a greater evil and should be exposed as such because if you can’t argue against something then don’t censor it because that’s spite. This woke nonsense is seriously f**king stupid. We all want to be equal but if you are trying to censor someone and change words to suit your selfish ideology that’s unacceptable.”
PiL hit Rise, with its famous refrain of “Anger is an energy”, is ostensibly about Apartheid-era South Africa, but it also drew inspiration from the traditional Irish blessing ‘go n-éirí an bóthar leat’ (May the road rise up to meet you).
“I wanted to work with Irish folk melodies and I love a lot of African rhythms,” says Lydon of the 1986 hit. “The more I studied Irish traditional music I found it to be very close to African traditional and I loved that sonic weaving in the melody, it flowed naturally. I got my music taste from my mum and dad they were very open-minded about everything. Where I grew up in London there was reggae, Greek, Turkish and Irish folk. Chuck in Petula Clark and Jimi Hendrix and you’re rocking in the free world!”
Public Image Limited play National Stadium, Dublin, on June 9. Tickets on sale now
