"This is the story of a Johnny Rotten."
The legendary John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) might be best known as the frontman of The Sex Pistols, but it's the outfit he moved on to — Public Image Ltd (PiL) — that might have had the bigger influence. Certainly, they've made the better records.
Arguably the first post-punk band, they shaped today's 'alternative' musical landscape and had some commercial success while they were at it, scoring five UK Top 20 singles and five UK Top 20 albums. In 2012, they released This Is PiL, their first album in almost two decades, to significant acclaim. But that's not what John wanted to talk about when I spoke to him.
During our freewheeling, hour-and-a-half-long chat, the voice of a generation set his sights on the Catholic Church, Michelle Shocked, Bono ("a good fella", but "not intellectually deep"), Neil Young, Malcolm McLaren, Occupy, Kickstarter, anarchy, the death of his father, and much more besides.
But perhaps it's best to start at the beginning.
"When I was young," Lydon remembers, "I had a very serious illness which almost killed me. It’s called meningitis. It was fluid on the brain, and the result of that was I lost my memory. It took me something like four years to get it back. I had to learn to trust in people. I had to create myself, with no evidence that I ever existed. That was a very rewarding process, because I landed in the right place.
"Listen, fella, could you imagine not recognising your own parents? Because that’s what I had to deal with. The nurses and the doctors at the hospital were going, ‘that’s your mum and dad!’ Not to me, they weren’t. It was like being thrown out and abandoned, because I’d become institutionalised by the hospital process. I was in there for a year. I had to learn trust, and that took time.
"Oh, my god, it breaks your heart when you realise it is your mum and dad, and you remember those scenarios from before. It all comes flooding back. And the guilt you go through… that, to me, is real guilt. Not the stupidity of religion, you know, the Catholic system. I was raised Catholic, but that kind of guilt is idiotic to me."
If it sounds to you like Lydon is gearing up for an assault on the Catholic Church, you'd be right.
"I look at these Popes, these bishops, these priests… I went through those sods trying to molest us when we were young. We were all sent to Catholic school, you see, and the torture I had to go through avoiding those monsters on a daily basis… now everybody’s celebrating the new Pope? New Pope, same as the old Pope. It’s all a bluff and a cover-up. They’ve got all of Latin America now behind this nonsense, but what about the children that had to take it up the booty?
"You couldn’t explain it to your parents, because the idea of accusing a priest of anything at all made you a monster. My mum and dad, they realised this years later. We had some very heartbreaking mental reunions about all of it, all of these situations. My younger brothers, my mum and dad took them out of Catholic school and sent them to regular state schools because of these experiences."
Today, of course, the abuses of the Church are well known, and wouldn't come as a shock to even the most devout churchgoer. How, then, does the Vatican maintain its influence?
"Fear! Fear! Fear! And it’s endemic in all societies. This willingness to not think for yourself, and to allow others to do your thinking for you, and thereby you accept absurdities because it’s just convenient. But that convenience turns you into an ant. You’re merely following the chemical trails of society at that point, and that’s just incredibly unhealthy.
"It is the demoralisation of society. These people that preach morals so vainly actually have no morals at all. I see myself as standing up for values, not morals, because I relate morals to religion, and therefore I have a serious problem with it, because it’s all based on conceit, deceit and fantasy.
"It’s a nice idea to explore the human mind through religion, but you’re not to take the fairy story too seriously. Is the modern human being really going to relate to sheep shaggers’ stories told endless centuries ago? These guys had no drainage, you know? They don’t got much to offer me."
I spoke to Lydon shortly after controversy erupted around singer-songwriter (and born-again Christian) Michelle Shocked, who told a San Francisco audience that California's gay marriage legislation would lead to the Christian apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it's not a stance Lydon agrees with.
"How can two people that have nothing to do with you be of any interest to you? Why do you feel the need to comment on their relationship and behavioural patterns? What gives any human being the right to dictate the practices and lifestyles of others? That's assuming that gay people 'choose' to be gay, and even if they did, even if that's the truth, that's fine by me. That's their choice.
"I don't have to bend over and take it up the bottom; it's of no interest to me to tell my neighbours how to live. So long as they keep the noise down, you know? So long as there's a sense of respect for each other's dignity and space, that's absolutely of no consequence to another person. I cannot stand that religion teaches this attitude.
"It's all done through missionaries, this idea that God's given you the right to tell other people how to live. I know for a fact, because I've met many of these missionaries in my time, what a load of corrupt, selfish, self-centred, self-motivated evil dwellers they are.
"When my mother was dying of cancer — and this is one of the most appalling things — in came this Jesuit priest from Africa, well known as a faith healer, and he talked the biggest load of garbage in front of my mother about being possessed by the devil, and about how we needed exorcisms. That was it for me, and my mum and my dad and all of us. We washed our hands of this foolishness. This was just a man running around in a skirt, you know?
"So I love gay liberation and that, but don't be coming back to me and telling me that I have to suddenly be gay to make you happy. I don't have to be religious to make you happy. I don't have to be anything at all on this planet, other than myself. I don't steal from you. I don't want anything from you, except your friendship and your understanding and your respect."
Lydon doesn't think it's unfair that the rest of the venues on Shocked's tour have cancelled her shows.
"Due to a lack of interest from her original audience, I imagine! You know, what's crept in here is dictatorship. Very many musicians get themselves in these ugly positions of dictating to their audiences what they should or shouldn't eat, what their political beliefs should or shouldn't be, and for me, that's a great evil.
"I don't mean to pick on Chrissie Hynde, but it just came into my mind — I remember she held up a concert years ago at Wembley because she couldn't bear the smell of hot dogs. Until the hot dog concession stands were removed from the building, she wouldn't come on and perform. Well, how fucking precious."
Of course, Lydon doesn't necessarily have a problem with self-righteous rock stars. In fact, he counts Bono as a friend.
"Here's a laugh for you. This is about the last Pope. About a year and a half ago, I was in Canada at a film festival, promoting a film about Norwegian punks in '78. It was a great little film, and it was intriguing, because it was from a Norwegian point of view. It was a very healthy explanation of how people are the same all over. So anyway, at the afterparty, I ran into Bono.
"Now, I like Bono. We have good, good rows! Because we're Paddies, you know? Verbals are gonna fly! But I picked on him so bad that night, and I'm glad I did, because I thought about it later, and I was right. I said, 'what on earth are you doing, kissing the hand of that Pope when you don't know where that hand's been lately?' He had no answer for it. He's there, at these fundraisers, but he's sucking up to the very institutions that have created all of these problems for us! There's my dilemma with him.
"[But] he's a good fella. He really is. He's not intellectually deep, but he wants to do the right thing. But he goes about it, and he understands the world, in terms of the structures that we currently have to deal with. Whereas I tend to think outside of that box. I think, penultimately, I'll have the biggest influence. He'll just get sucked up into the system. Because he'll be seen, eventually, as part of the problem, not the solution.
"But as I say, the fella's alright! I hate his music, but I like him as a person. I really do! He's great fun, you know? He'll stand there and have a laugh with me, and we'll openly discuss things. And that's healthy. That's the kind of world I want to live in, where we don't agitate each other to the point of confrontation and violence. Quite the opposite. That's my angle with him, that's what I like about him. He's not about violence as an answer, and therefore he's a healthy person."
Bono isn't the only celeb Lydon tends to row with. Most self-professed 'liberals' earn his ire, as well.
"They think that's what they are, and I usually end up rowing with them. Because it's not liberal. It's 'this is what everyone should think', it's the attitude they absorb. Really, what they are is popularist. They don't think for themselves. There are many ways to run a universe, and I think all of them work well with each other. It's swings and roundabouts, left, right, yin, yang. One can't operate fully without the other. For instance, you'll never get a gang of anarchists working without a road system built by corporations, because they won't be able to travel.
"I think [anarchy is] a mind game for the spoiled middle class and overly privileged, stupid children. When you meet these people, they're so volatile and angry, but always at the root of it is some parental hate that's going on. Something that they haven't worked out in their childhoods."
It might come as something of a shock for some anarchists to hear John Lydon — the man who sung 'Anarchy In The UK' — dismiss their belief system so blithely.
"They're not coming to my next gig now, are they? Not after this interview. Listen, I used the term really quite well [in 'Anarchy In The UK']. It was descriptive, it was volatile, but it was purposeful. It was to get you to start thinking and come to your own conclusions. But not in an aggressive, hateful way, and not in terms of 'us and them'. For me, there is no us and them. It's all of us.
"I don't think any political force at the moment works, because all of these groupings absolutely hate the idea of the individual. Because you're going to be the niggly bastard at the back of the hall with the one question that can't be answered. That describes me perfectly."
He doesn't have much time for hippies, either.
"They're the most corrupt of them all," he laughs. "Free love and all that... it was really about telling girls they didn't own their vaginas. I have to be a realist. I get to the bottom of what a thing is. A lot of them hippies went on to run these record labels, and became so corporately greedy. Because of their class background, they had no understanding or comprehension of anything at all about where people like me come from. They view us with disdain.
"To this very day, Britain can pretend all manner of ideologies, but it is class-riddled. And that's why I couldn't live there. I moved to America because here, the only class system I can see is those who have money and those who don't. That's an issue that's difficult to deal with, but it's less complicated than the social idiosyncrasies of British society."
He does, however, have more than a little time for the Occupy movement. In fact, for someone so often described as a nihilist (sneering "there's no future" in your most famous song will have that effect), he sounds downright optimistic when asked about it.
"I loved it," he beams. "I loved it very, very much. I thought it was very sweet and endearing. There were so many possibilities. They were leaderless, and therefore so many issues were raised! But the way America misrepresented it really made my blood boil. They loved to reduce it to hippies playing flutes in a tent. Rather than deal with, you know... Wall Street is an issue. It is an issue. Several thousand issues come from that issue.
"Occupy was an intriguing, brilliant, open-minded thing, and I'm always favourable to that kind of social movement that seems to come from nowhere. It's spontaneous. It's combustible, but not exploding in on itself. As long as things like this happen in the world, I think there's a great future for the human race.
"Once we all just roll over and sneer at each other... that's exactly what corporate thinking wants to happen. That will be the end of all of us, if we do become slaves to the system."
Lydon isn't sneering anymore, then. Rather, he's finding new ways to occupy his time.
"One of the greatest things I did in the last few years was get my diving license, so now I’m a deep sea ocean diver. That’s wonderful for me! The things I pick up when I’m down there; the brain starts coming up with new ways of approaching what you thought were insurmountable problems. It’s such a great cleansing, while at the same time, filling your brain with possibilities! And that, for me, is what life is all about. That’s why I view myself as only 56 years young. I’ve got at least another 50 years to fill up.
"Pete Townshend is a great friend of mine, but when he wrote that line, ‘I hope I die before I get old’… it had such an influence on youth culture, and that’s a great tragedy. I come from a period, a culture, where we listen out for the old fellas and the old ladies because they've got something to tell us about how things work, you know?
"We pick up that info and it helps us get smarter. But there’s this thing now of diassociating yourself from anything that’s self-evidently correct. The idea of sneering idiotically at what clearly works, and blindly accepting what’s clearly inefficient, it’s appalling."
The Townshend song he refers to, 'My Generation', certainly isn't the only one to express that sentiment. For instance, Lydon is namechecked in Neil Young's 'Hey Hey My My (Into The Black)', a song best known for the fatalist lyric, "it's better to burn out than to fade away".
"Well, there’s an interesting little story in that. I approached [Neil Young's] manager, via some people that said they were friends with him. I asked what the song was about, and I received an incredibly negative response. That was astounding to me, because I love Neil Young’s music. One of my favourite albums ever was Zuma. I love the way the tunes are almost fractionally distorting, almost falling apart, but never quite. I loved that approach, and I was really upset that he just denied my existence, basically, via his representatives.
"It was quite annoying, and very disturbing, because I had a great amount of respect for Neil Young up until that point. It doesn’t change how I love the records, so that’s healthy. But it’s disturbing; they said, ‘oh, it was only a rhyme, and it doesn’t mean anything’. Well, my god. ‘Hey hey, my my / the king is dead but not forgotten / this is the story of a Johnny Rotten’? That doesn’t mean anything? Let’s hear it for more unintelligent thinking, then, shall we?"
When Young wrote that song, the Johnny Rotten he had in mind was the 20-something firebrand viewed as the public face of the punk movement; emblematic of a new breed of rocker built only to destroy, not to last. He surely didn't anticipate that John Lydon would still be with us now, or that he'd star in an infamous commercial for Country Life butter in 2008.
"I don't think it's infamous at all," Lydon objects. "I think it's great and fantastic! It's the correct use of corporations. They gave me a free hand and I ran out in the field with cows and improvised.
"The wonderful truism in it all that hasn't been noted too much by negative journalists out there is that I was actually promoting the British dairy industry. In Britain, that was something that was sadly lacking. The huge importation of Danish butter and New Zealand butter was a serious problem. Every country should be more than capable of taking care of itself. If it needs to import other products, that's fine, too, but not to the detriment of the homegrown.
"But this has created terrible problems! I used to always fly on Air New Zealand, because it was cheap and cheerful, but that's not happening anymore. They accused me of drunken behaviour, and I'm just thinking, 'have I got involved in a butter war?'"
This is a story Lydon has told before, and I'm not convinced he really believes he was banned from flying Air New Zealand because he made a Country Life commercial. When pressed, he suggests it might also have something to do with a witch hunt against celebrities on aeroplanes.
"It's six of one, half a dozen of the other. A lot of it is just this tendency to give it to celebrities when they fly. 'You've had one drink too many, sir'. You know, my 'one drink too many' was the bottle of champagne they gave me while I was waiting to board the plane, because I gave my seat up to Victoria Beckham. She was pregnant at the time. My original seat was right next to the toilet, and I completely empathised and understood that that was the right thing to do. That got me a two year ban."
Lydon used the money from the commercial to get himself out from under the debts he owed to record companies, freeing himself up to finally reform PiL and, eventually, to release This Is PiL independently. But it wasn't the first time a large sum of money had been dangled in front of him.
"You know, years ago, I did that I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. I could have used that money big time! Absolutely could have. I could have made a huge dent in everything. But no, being what I am, I couldn't accept any money for a reality show. My heart and soul told me, no, no, no, don't be doing that."
So why go on the show, then?
"I did it for sheer fun and hilarity, and I also connected myself with quite a few charities and orphanages. Every penny earned, all of it went into those charities. I walked away with empty pockets, but healthy in mind. It stiffened my resolve to get myself back together properly. I was really quite proud of the fact that I could have dipped into that handbag but didn't.
"You know, every now and again you need to remind yourself of who and what you really are when you're given the opportunity. Tempt yourself. It's exhilarating to come out the better."
Though it's rarely publicised, Lydon says he continues to work with orphanages.
"To this day, I’m constantly funding orphanages in every way I can. I’m not one for selling my clothes or my old guitars on eBay, but I send them to orphanages and let them do that. Orphans have to go through the cruellest institutionalised hell. They come out of those places like rats. They have no fondness or understanding of love, because nobody’s ever loved them. And that’s an awfulness. I’ve always been affiliated with changing that perception and changing that situation.
"I know it comes from the meningitis, and from losing my memory, yes. Everything in life is an education. Learn from it. Don’t just wallow in self-pity and feel sorry for yourself. Learn how to share that pain and look out for other people."
Lydon hopes to continue releasing PiL records, and in 2013, there's no reason he should have to turn to butter commercials to fund them. But Lydon is wary of crowdfunding, and it's unlikely you'll find him on Kickstarter anytime soon.
"No, I don't like the combination of events that go into these things. I don't find it too healthy, and I don't quite know who's in control. And I never want to find myself, ever, in a position where I have to rely on the decisions of others. That's what happened with the record company commitments I had. I'm never going to get myself involved with these consortiums. I don't trust the outcome.
"Look, you come to a PiL gig or you don't. If you do, you're funding the next album. There it goes, alright, on a one-to-one personal basis. I like it like that. I don't like any idea of a business, or an attitude about business, to be creeping in between the two of us."
Whether or not you agree with Lydon's stance on crowdfunding, attending a PiL show probably isn't a bad idea.
"You have to go to live music anyway," Lydon insists, "because that's the only real form of communication… you're not going to find any joy in listening to the radio. You have to directly connect yourself with fellow human beings. All live music is valid. Internet gossip circles and Facebook are not."
If you could have donated to the recording of This Is PiL, it would have been money well spent — particularly considering the hurdles Lydon had to overcome to make it.
"There were some serious dramas going on. My father died. Arianna [Forster, aka Ari Up], the lead singer of The Slits and my step-daughter, she died of cancer. My own brother contracted throat cancer, but luckily he's in remission. And all of this was running while I had to raise the money and put this together. So I understand calamity very well, but I would not let it turn the record into a morose, dour thing.
"One of the most poignant things my mum and dad taught me when I was young, and it's always stayed with me, is that you cry at weddings and you laugh at funerals. You turn a problem upside down and you find an energy in it, no matter how tragic it is, in order to be able to continue. This is all about being alive.
"Being alive is all I really know and understand. I don't know where people go when they die, but I miss them like mad. It hurts me down to my very soul, and that includes enemies. I miss their space and presence on earth."
But there are exceptions to every rule. Surely he couldn't miss Malcolm McLaren, the former svengali of The Sex Pistols and a longtime Lydon sparring partner, who died in 2010?
"I miss him like mad! I miss him. I miss his space on this planet. He was an intriguing human being. This is my credo, really. This is what I'm trying to say, that it's better to have people than to not have them.
"We're all interconnected and interrelated, and if you're going to waste your time hating another human being, well, you could save a lot of energy and just hate yourself. Most hatreds are really just a case of transposing your own faults onto your fellow human beings. When you can recognise your faults in another, that's when you love to be a hangman jury."
Of all the people he's lost recently, it might be his father that he misses the most.
"I was always frightened of my father until the day I moved out, because I never quite fully understood him. From there on in, once I didn’t live at home, I slowly but surely formed a really good and deep relationship with my father. I understood that he was very young when he sired The Rotten One, and nobody gives you a manual on how to be a parent. It’s fair game all round, really. Everything is a hilarious collaboration of mistakes in life, and it’s how we fare after… as long as we don’t judge each other too harshly, there’s room for progression."
Considering all those losses, and all the battles he's waged over almost four decades in the music industry, you'd understand if he harboured regrets. Does Johnny Rotten ever feel like he's been cheated?
"No! I'm not one of those people that will go back and wallow in a thing. I intend to live really properly and good. I want to be a proper person! And I mean that from the bottom of my heart as a football hooligan.
"There have been some people who have made some very bad moves against me over the years, some of them in bands. Band members I pulled in from nothing, and they’ve just gone wicked. It’s all part and parcel of the same agenda, really. I’ve got to get people thinking.
"Let’s get back into the Garden of Eden. Fuck you, Jesus, and your snake friend, Satan. Neither of you have offered any of us anything, really. We just need to learn to respect each other. It’s a great place to be."
Public Image Ltd Australia Tour Dates
Tue Apr 09 — The Hi-Fi (Brisbane) (w/ We Set Sail)Wed Apr 10 — Enmore Theatre (Sydney) (w/ Death Mattel)
Thu Apr 11 — Palace Theatre (Melbourne) (w/ Harmony)
This Is PiL is available now.
