Retire? That’d be like suicide John Lydon

PiL’s John Lydon has no plans to hang up his megaphone...

Helloooo! Hur! Hur! Hur! Hur!’, with his trademark cackle John Lydon greets me in the way I would want Johnny Rotten to. One man, one nom-de-punk, one and the same. He shouted ‘Destroy!’ in 1977 but is still a vital presence in 2018. Though when I tell the man who also roared ‘I am an anti-Christ’ that the Pope will celebrate Mass in the Phoenix Park on the same day he plays in Dublin, he laughs: ‘Double-booked are we? I must talk to our agent… If you are going to see the Pope, tell him I said hello. Ah hur ha hur hur!’

He is, however, as provocative as ever in his other pronouncements in this interview, so be warned.

For the uninitiated, Lydon/Rotten first came spitting and snarling into the public consciousness as the lead singer of the Sex Pistols in Britain’s Jubilee summer of 1977. Formed in late 1975, they only remained together a little over two years but signposted the way for punk music with songs such as Anarchy In The UK, God Save The Queen and Pretty Vacant. After bans, chaotic live shows, an increasingly fractious relationship with his fellow band members and manager Malcolm McLaren, Lydon walked out on the Sex Pistols in January 1978.

He quickly formed Public Image Limited, sometimes shortened to Public Image or just PiL with friends Keith Levene and Jah Wobble. The Sex Pistols reformed for a number of live tours, headlining 2008’s Electric Picnic festival. Though not dismissive of his time with the Sex Pistols, it’s Public Image Limited, with whom he will play here in August, that Lydon sees as nearest to fulfilling his artistic vision. ‘Well the Pistols got out of control. It became a fiasco,’ he says. ‘I started Public Image Limited to write songs from the heart rather than the mind which is what the Sex Pistols were about. I did find my voice with the Pistols. But I found another voice and a heart in PiL. It’s genuine and that’s why it still functions after 40 years.’

I’ve seen the reformed Sex Pistols on two occasions, Public Image Limited on a couple more and I can attest, that his ‘heart’ is now most evident in PiL.

‘The shame of it is that the other Sex Pistols never really grasped that. It wasn’t coming from the heart,’ he says.

‘The reasons why we fell apart were completely obvious by the time of the reunion. That was so we could go back to being friends again. We quickly realised that we were never. Now that we aren’t working together, I do view them as friends. But they never really had the gusto to go forward to experiment and take bigger risks. Public Image destroyed all rules. Punk’s vision narrowed. It blinkered its own vision. I was called its king of punk, but I moved on and

stopped being a cliché.’

Lydon was the oldest of four, born to two Irish parents in Holloway, north London in 1956. When he sang of the death of his mother Eileen, in the harrowing Death Disco in 1979, it was as challenging, in its own way, as anything he had done just two years earlier with the Sex Pistols. ‘I was screaming in agony about the death of a parent over a disco beat combined with Swan Lake,’ he says. ‘I can see in the eyes of the audience, when I share that, that they’ve had similar experiences. That all feeds into a great result; a problem shared is a problem solved.’ Lydon has been married to Nora Forster since 1979. Nora had a daughter Arianna from a previous relationship. As Ari Up, Lydon’s stepdaughter fronted The Slits, an allfemale punk band that were all but dismissed at the time but are viewed as seminal now. I tell him that I recently saw the feature documentary never SEX AND DEATH: They risks, says had the gusto to take Lydon of his Pistols bandmates about the band called The Story of the Slits. After the band’s original drummer Palmolive left, Bruce Smith, who now plays with Public Image Limited, eventually joined The Slits. Lydon is upset at Ari Up’s former bandmates and the makers of the film. Arianna/Ari Up died in 2010 and Lydon says neither he nor his wife was approached about the making of the film.

‘I’m looking forward to seeing the film, but it is strange though that none of Arianna’s direct family had anything to do with it. That upsets us,’ he says.

‘Arianna died of cancer a few years back and there was no one really around her except me and Nora. That caused a lot of pain to us. I had to watch Arianna die. I had done the same thing with my mother and my dad. These things have hurt us deeply but eventually these things will come out in my songs.’

One song from Public Image Limited’s last album What The World Needs Now in 2015, Corporate, seems particularly prescient now in the Trump-era. Malibu, California resident Lydon has an ambivalent attitude, if not to Trump, then to the people who voted him into power. ‘What we’ve got to understand, is that politics, as usual, has no place in the modern world,’ he says.

‘Unfortunately for them [the Republican Party and the American people], they picked the wrong fella. He’s a businessman and he’s just doing what businessmen do. People in America were so desperate for something new, for a real change. Sometimes we have to understand is that change can be for the worst.’ He is well aware that Ireland is about to vote on an issue that will have far-reaching consequences, regardless of the outcome.

‘The Pope can pontificate when he comes to Ireland and then we in Public Image Limited will tell the truth in the evening,’ he says.

‘Let’s hope women have full rights by then. That’s what the abortion issue is about. It’s about a women’s right to choose and it must always be. Women never treat abortion casually. Any man who says that, does not understand women at all. The Pope is nothing but an accountant. Ah poor old fella. I think he believes in what he is doing but not fully.’

Is anger still an energy? I ask him, paraphrasing their hit Rise. Has he still the fire to continue? ‘Yes! Of course!’ he shouts. ‘If I retired that would be like giving up on life; an act of suicide quite literally. As long as I share this planet with my fellow human beings I’m never going to run out of ideas. ‘We have a purpose as a species and that is to be there to take care of each other. I believe most of all in peace and if you don’t believe in peace you can peace off!’

I DID FIND MY VOICE IN THE PISTOLS BUT I FOUND ANOTHER VOICE AND A HEART IN PiL

÷Public Image Limited play Bangor Seafront on August 25 and Dublin’s Vicar Street August 26.