The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘They were out to destroy me’
Bruised, broke and betrayed by his Sex Pistols bandmates, John Lydon is angrier than ever – and coming to a town near you
As far as Johnny Rotten is concerned, the Sex Pistols are finished for ever. “For me, that band has ceased to exist,” he says. “It is not viable or valid. It offers nothing but money-grubbing greedy b------- with no regard for the truth whatsoever.”
More than 45 years after the punk pioneers first burst on to the scene, their famously scabrous frontman, aka John Lydon, is “angry… upset… and emotional” about the latest development in their turbulent history. Last month, in the High Court, Lydon lost a lawsuit brought by his former bandmates, guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, backed by bassist Glen Matlock and the estate of Sid Vicious. Judge Anthony Mann ruled that Lydon was bound by a 1998 majority rule band agreement, allowing the other members to license the Sex Pistols’ music for a forthcoming television drama about the band’s early days – Pistol, directed by Danny Boyle and financed by FX, a subsidiary of Disney.
“This became Walt Disney money versus me,” says Lydon. “Who do you think’s gonna win? Money talks and Johnny Rotten takes a walk. It’s a strange, strange world we live in. The Sex Pistols have become the property of Mickey f---ing Mouse.”
Lydon cackles. “Steve Jones and Paul Cook both said they knew this [legal] action would destroy the band. Then why do it? They really are poison, because they don’t mind selling you a lie.”
As Lydon speaks, he grins fiercely, his eyes bulge behind thick glasses, his whole body bobs and weaves. Although he peppers his comments with jokes and comic asides, there is no disguising the emotion that boils beneath the surface. “I’m trying to tell you through humour how I have to deal with this, because if I ever allowed sorrow or self-pity to creep in, that would be disastrous,” he admits. “Let’s be real serious. This entire juggernaut of confusion has cost me millions. Such a hideous, nasty onslaught; I never expected Steve, Paul and Glen to be that evil. And we never even sat down and had a conversation about it.”
Lydon makes a painful admission. “I’m brassic, fella,” he says, using the cockney rhyming slang for broke (boracic lint – skint). “I’m seriously in a state of financial ruin. I’ve got no more savings, no more loans, no pensions. I’ve got nothing. All right? I’m practically this close to zero. And I’ve got a lovely wife I have to take care of who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, which is a hideously expensive illness. I’m f---ed, and I’m scuppered in so many different ways. All I’ve got at age 65 is the chance to start again.”
Lydon is talking via Zoom from his house in London, where he is in quarantine having just flown to Britain from the home in Malibu that he shares with Nora, his wife of 42 years. (He also owns another Californian property in Venice Beach, so I suspect that the wolf is not at the door just yet.) He is evidently feeling unsettled by this enforced separation from Nora, who is too ill to travel. “Being at the old house without Nora, it feels such emptiness to me,” he tells me. “It’s catastrophic emotionally, really. So hard, but there it is. This is what God gives us.”
Lydon married Nora Forster, a German publishing heiress 13 years his senior, in 1979 and remains deeply devoted to her. All the while he was punk rock’s public enemy number one, he was also maintaining a quiet domestic life. He became stepfather to Nora’s tearaway daughter Ari Up, of punk band the Slits, and later assumed legal guardianship of Ari’s three children, taking a hands-on role in raising them when she was struggling to cope. Ari died of cancer in 2010. Then, in 2018, Lydon revealed that Nora was in the mid-stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and that he was serving as her full-time carer.
“To me, it’s a journey I have to travel,” he says now, “and I’m not going to abandon her.” But, at 78, her health is deteriorating rapidly. Lydon has arranged full-time care for her while he is in the UK promoting a new book of his musings, and embarking on an intensive 57-day speaking tour of theatres across Britain. “I’ve always worked. I was on building sites before the Sex Pistols,” he says. “For working-class people to progress in this world, we have to work for it. And guess what? We like it that way, because we know what we’ve earned has been earned.”
You don’t so much interview Lydon as bear witness. He spouts and declaims in long, discursive monologues full of unlikely juxtapositions and melodramatic flourishes. Outrage over the court case percolates through every part of our conversation, as he mocks his bandmates, or restates his own legal arguments, but every now and again this performance dries up to reveal something fretful gnawing away at him.
At 65, even this former punk has started to worry about his own
mortality. “If anything happened to me, what could happen to Nora? Seeing as they’ve stolen all my money. It’s a very serious problem, fella. I’m gonna have to work really hard to gain anything like a fundamentally stable environment to take care of my loved ones. This is what they’ve done to me. Thanks, boys!”
The court judgment ultimately boiled down to the interpretation of a clause in the Sex Pistols’ contract. Also in play, though, lay the complex relationships of bandmates who had never really got along, and whose enduring fame was based on a few furious years in London in the 1970s.
When manager Malcolm McLaren was trying to assemble a rock group with Steve Jones in 1975, they couldn’t help but notice this odd teenager hanging around outside McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Chelsea clothing store wearing safety pins and a homemade I HATE PINK FLOYD T-shirt. “They had no ideas of their own,” sniffs Lydon, who quickly commandeered the group, bringing in his friend John Ritchie – aka Sid Vicious – on bass. The Sex Pistols ignited punk with a succession of incendiary singles and one of the greatest albums in rock history, 1977’s Never Mind the Bollocks.
“I don’t want to blow me own
trumpet, mate, but I wrote all those lyrics,” Lydon says. “I gave that band their image. I was the frontman, I took all the guns and warfare put against us, and I’ve stood up there and shivved through the lot. I’m not bragging here, but I can’t imagine the Sex Pistols without Johnny Rotten amounting to very much at all.”
He stresses that Johnny Rotten is “not a persona” and nothing like David Bowie being Ziggy Stardust. “This is me, telling my truth.” There is a fiercely original quality to Lydon, who was raised in quite extreme poverty among a large family of Irish immigrants sharing a two-room flat in Holloway, north London. A year-long bout of meningitis at the age of seven left him suffering from such serious amnesia that, he says, “I didn’t even know who I was” – which may be the key to his extreme personality. “That led to me doubting and questioning everything. I had to form my own mind, and my own opinions. And so that’s what I did, always asking questions, and I was highly resented for it, too.”
After the Sex Pistols broke up in 1978, Lydon went on to forge a maverick career of his own, first with his experimental ensemble PiL (Public Image Ltd), then with diversions into reality television, books, nature documentaries and a notorious 2008 advertising campaign for Country Life butter, which reportedly increased sales by a whopping 85 per cent.
But since 1996, the Sex Pistols have periodically reunited for lucrative tours and other commercial opportunities. The band’s current falling out seems to have its roots in the moment that Lydon vetoed the
Sex Pistols being portrayed in the most recent series of Netflix’s royal drama, The Crown. “They wanted to use Anarchy in the UK and God Save the Queen over scenes of riots at the Jubilee in 1977,” he recalls. “Why would I allow the propagation of such a lie? There were no riots, there was only the Sex Pistols. That is a historical fact. Now, if you’re going to let a TV show imply there were riots up and down the country, you are selling your own legacy. For what? Cash?”
Although he wrote the excoriating anti-monarchy lyrics to God Save the Queen, Lydon actually has a great deal of sympathy for the Royal family. “I’ve always felt they’re poor little birdies trapped in cages,” he says. “Gold cages, but they’re still entombed.” When I ask if he has ever watched The Crown, he bristles. “How can anyone? It’s ridiculous, propagating lies and myths, rubbishing the history of Britain.”
Lydon suspects that his stubborn stance on The Crown led to his bandmates concealing information about Pistol until the Sex Pistols’ involvement with the series was effectively a fait accompli. Jones and Cook dispute Lydon’s interpretation of events and have released a statement insisting he was “informed of the Pistol TV series, offered meetings with the director and to be involved in the show months before principal photography began”.
Lydon’s response was to brand them “filthy liars” and “two-faced hypocrites”. He says to me that he was first told about the series on January 4 this year, only seven days before it was officially announced by FX, and that filming started in March, while the music rights were still in dispute.
“This was being developed for three years, with not one word said to me,” he fumes. “I never denied rights, I just asked questions. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be agreeing or disagreeing with. So this is quite an alarming situation I was put into. I didn’t ask to go to court. They did. Smells rotten to me.” He calls director Danny Boyle “a rat” and snarls, “I’d rather be in the bankruptcy prison of life than support that f---ing nonsense.”
It is not hard to feel some sympathy for Lydon while also appreciating why his bandmates might have opted to keep him at arm’s length. He is an instinctive contrarian, a natural agitator, whom you suspect sometimes takes a position just to annoy as many people as possible. That would certainly help explain his current enthusiasm for Nigel
‘It’s a strange world. The Sex Pistols have become the property of Mickey Mouse’
Farage. “He’s the most unlikeable fella in the world,” Lydon cackles. “But I think the world needs people like him. He’s my favourite comedian. I love him to death. He gets you thrilled about subjects and that surely is what we need in a modern world. Not this ‘Ugh! Can’t say this or that in case it offends everybody who’s woke.’ Well, wake up! None of you c---s are woke. You’re just judgmental. Less of that. More open debate. More ludicrousness, please!”
Given that his new book is a collection of his thoughts titled I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right (a quote from PiL’s 1986 hit Rise), I ask Lydon what he can admit to being wrong about. “I feel I could have been wrong about every single thing in my entire life,” he says, surprisingly.
As our interview draws to a close, Lydon becomes uncharacteristically subdued. “God bless, man, I just needed to talk to a human being, because I feel really pressured and trapped. I’ve got such a heavy workload and I’m expecting nothing but enemies. It’s been pain on pain on pain,” he sighs. “These guys were out to destroy me. But it ain’t gonna happen. You can steal my money, but you cannot steal my soul.”
‘I’ve always felt the Royal family are poor little birdies trapped in cages. Gold cages’
John Lydon will appear at the Camberley Theatre, Surrey, tonight, then touring. A limited-edition version of I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right is available now at £45. For details, see johnlydon.com