His mother’s death, Lydon’s bitterest ‘PiL’
HE sat beside me on a couch in a flat in North London ten years ago. He spent two hours playing reggae, crying and spitting endlessly into a bucket on the floor beside him.
Mr Gobby was born John Joseph Lydon in London on January 31, 1956, to Irish parents. The enfant terrible who changed popular culture as Johnny Rotten — with his band The Sex Pistols’ HRH-eviscerating ditty God Save The Queen, unleashed on the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 — grew up in what he described as a “Victorian monstrosity” of a building in Holloway.
He contracted meningitis from “rat-infested water in our yard” when he was seven. I imagine that the gobbing into a bucket a decade ago was somehow a consequence of his chronic childhood illness, which put him in a coma for seven months. When young John woke he had lost his memory, and didn’t recognise his parents. John had to trust them. He had, he said, nowhere else to go.
It was several years before his memory returned, and with the guilt John felt about forgetting who his parents were, “and for hurting them like that, was enormous. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I was ill.”
John recalled how the experience of his illness “alienates you, and in my songs I put that to good use”. He had plenty to put to use. At school, the teachers nicknamed him “Dummy Dum Dum”. He was, he said, “the strange one of the family, the one who couldn’t remember his name”.
His father, John, was a crane driver (who played the accordion in showbands) originally from Galway, while his Cork mother looked after the kids at home with very little support and even less money. John remembers his “quiet, loving” mother as being “always ill; endless miscarriages didn’t help her”. She died of stomach cancer in 1978, when John was 22.
He wrote Death Disco (‘Saw it in her eyes/Choking on a bed’) about her; the song appeared first as a Public Image Ltd single in June 1979, and then as an alternative version, called Swan Lake, on the band’s second album, Metal Box, the following November.
Simon Reynolds in Pitchfork described Metal Box — re-issued next month to mark its 40th anniversary — as a “near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled postpunk’s promise(s) to a degree rivalled only by Joy Division on Closer”.
Lydon wanted PiL to get as far away “as possible from the lingering shadow” of the Pistols, “because rules are for fools, and follow them and you sound like everyone else”.
Metal Box sounded like nobody else. Recorded with original PiL members Keith Levene and Jah Wobble, it was breech-born in Lydon’s flat in London’s Gunter Grove.
“We’d play records through different systems, a record deck and a reel-toreel tape recorder through different channels. Adding a slight delay did wonders for classic music! We were swimming in that underlay, which fed into Metal Box. There were lots of oddities and experiments in the studio, like when I put an ashtray on the piano strings and hit it from underneath.” (Jah Wobble will be in Dun Laoghaire at 4pm on Saturday, Nov 2, speaking as part of the