World Johnny Rotten: Forever hopeful, that’s me
Back on the road again, John Lydon, alias Johnny Rotten, talks to Neil McCormick about the Sex Pistols, selling out and his unlikely creative inspiration
JOHNNY ROTTEN is shy. This may come as a surprise to anyone who has followed his career, or indeed spent any time in his company, but the singer insists it is the case. ‘‘Shyness is always going to be an issue for me,’’ he persistently remarks. ‘‘Especially up close and personal, self-doubt and fear and shyness, it’s always there.’’
‘‘You don’t seem shy to me,’’ I point out.
‘‘Well, an interview is a performance, of course it is,’’ he retorts. ‘‘I use it like a suit of armour, really. It’s not quite acting. But promoting my lifestyle, I can just put on a shirt and bounce into that reality. I overcome shyness with props. It’s only proper!’’
When I first arrive for our interview, John Lydon is noisily and enthusiastically tearing open a package that contains hair spray, which he blasts over his cropped and dyed hair.
‘‘I should be bald by now the amount of products I’ve put in my hair,’’ the 59-year old punk icon announces, chuckling extravagantly. ‘‘But the opposite is true. It’s holding firm. It’s about the only thing.’’
He is wearing an almost sheer shirt, draped over his bulky body. ‘‘You have the privilege of seeing my nipples,’’ he declares, pointing them out. ‘‘Don’t look away!’’ When a cup of strong tea is proffered, he regards it sceptically. ‘‘That’s a nice half cup. Are you afraid of milk?’’ The tea is withdrawn yet all the while Lydon is laughing. ‘‘The bitch is back!’’ he guffaws. The allegedly shy but certainly not retiring star is promoting a new album and tour with his experimental rock ensemble Public Image Limited (or PiL).
What The World Needs Now ... is a typically perverse but brilliant mash-up of punk, funk and dub grooves across which Lydon sings, chants and rants with his usual audacity, offering up provocative and frequently quite foul-mouthed thoughts on pornographic American culture (Betty Page), the evils of capitalism (Corporate) and the usefulness of domestic cleaning products in soothing relationship problems (Double Trouble).
The cover features Lydon’s lurid painting of a winking devilish figure bouncing the world like a basketball. ‘‘The joker, the clown, there’s one in every society, but he’s the one who usually tells the truth. And that would be a Johnny Rotten type character right there.’’
The title track finds Lydon howling ‘‘What the world needs now is another .... off!’’ but he doesn’t believe pop will ever be convulsed by the kind of brutal culture shock his seminal band The Sex Pistols provided at the vanguard of punk.
‘‘I don’t hold out much confidence in a teenage rebellion. I think that’s been eliminated. Music used to be a great rallying point. Not any more.’’
What the world actually needs, he suggests, is ‘‘comedy, a sense of fun, because it’s getting to be a very miserable place. The intellectuals who run our media are really being too dreary by half and offering us no hope. I don’t like the despondency creeping into everything.’’
When I point out that Lydon rose to prominence roaring that there was ‘‘No future’’, he brushes away the contradiction. ‘‘There is a future, of course there’s a future. I’m sick of people preaching misery. Forever hopeful, that’s me.’’
Lydon has a high-handed way of delivering statements that brook no argument, as if he is pronouncing self-evident truths.
After almost 40 years in the public eye his rictus grin, bugeyed stare and jaw thrusting scowl are instantly familiar, but his intimidating fierceness is defused by twinkly mischievousness. He laughs a lot.
But he proves difficult to interview because he is genuinely enamoured with the sound of his own voice and the thoughts crisscrossing his hyperactive mind. All you can really do is bear witness to a constantly unfolding monologue.
‘‘You let your mind wander, let it follow whatever avenue it fancies,’’ he says, describing an approach to songwriting which seems equally true of his approach to conversation. ‘‘That’s my major hobby, indulging my brain.’’
He says the first time he saw Robin Williams perform stand-up comedy, he recognised a kindred spirit.
‘‘I loved him, absolutely freeform thoughts running all over the place, and I thought, ‘That’s how I am, that’s what’s going on up here, but I’m too shy to express it.’ Music gave me the outlet. It gave me the voice.’’
In his recent autobiography,
John Lydon Anger Is An Energy, Lydon disclosed that a bout of childhood meningitis wiped out all his memories for several years, to the point that he didn’t even recognise his parents. This, he has belatedly recognised, is somehow at the root of his striking individuality.
‘‘I’m still trying to search for what it is that I am. Between seven and 11, I was fighting to regain myself. It was agony. To not know who you are, and not belong to anyone, to be so utterly and completely left alone, no angels harking in the sky to save me, it was pure pain.
‘‘It’s still a problem for me at night to go to sleep because of the fear that I might wake up and not remember. But enduring all of that made me what I am today, a person continually searching for the correct answer. Just get it right! That’s my driving force.’’
Labelled a simpleton in his repressive north London Catholic school, he effectively educated himself in his local library.
He became a voracious reader, a budding artist (he has painted enthusiastically since his teens) and a music obsessive with iconoclastic tastes.
When manager Malcolm McClaren was seeking a frontman for his prototype punk outfit in 1975, the weird kid hanging around his Chelsea clothing shop seemed a peculiarly perfect fit.
‘‘It seems an amazing contradiction, that I could be so shy and be Johnny Rotten so instantly, but that’s the fury going on inside me.
‘‘Music was its outlet. It was a chance to kick back . . . at the institutions, the religions, the school, the illnesses. I was ready and raring to go from minute one.’’
After one album with The Sex Pistols in 1977, he left the band and reverted to his given name.
‘‘Johnny Rotten was turning into a cartoon character.’’
He formed PiL and embarked on a wayward career at the cult margins of rock, but he certainly has not been above exploiting his punk celebrity, dabbling in reality TV, nostalgia tours and fronting an ad campaign for Country Life butter in 2008. ‘‘As you can see, I do eat a lot of butter,’’ he says, patting his belly.
He is breezily dismissive of any notion that he might have let the spirit of punk down.
‘‘I get it but don’t waste my energy on that. This is how I survive, you can like it or lump it.’’ He points out that he used his earnings to revive PiL, a band no one could accuse of pandering to commercial forces.
‘‘I want it to be something that I am proud of, because it’s the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but.’’
But even as he makes this statement, he seems ready to disagree with himself. ‘‘But what is truth? Truth is in the eye of the beholder.’’
He rolls his eyes, comically. ‘‘There you go, that’s my brain jumping all over the place. I’m a work in progress. I’ve only been doing this 40 years. Overcoming shyness is a lifetime’s job.’’