Uncut, Magazine
August, 2007

John Lydon

"I couldn't stay in England. I was being nicked twice a week. It was ridiculous. My life became excruciating. A joke at my eternal expense. What a waste of police time and public money. What a waste of me."

Sitting in his LA home John Lydon, who always sounds more measured and correct than his Sex Pistols alter ego, Johnny Rotten, is attempting to explain why he left England and moved to the Hollywood hills. He was, he says, being chased.

"Chasing me, they were. And for nothing. And now of course it's almost normal. Drunken pop star found passed out in an Oxford St doorway? They get a pat on the head. 'Go home, you naughty boy.' But with us, with The Sex Pistols, it was a little more serious. Stuff got really, really vindictive. Stuff got seriously violent. People truly hated us."

He's not wrong. Thirty years ago, The Sex Pistols released one of the most inflammatory singles of all time, "God Save The Queen". They assaulted the monarchy. In doing so Lydon became a unique object of hatred and the subsequent poster-boy for every armchair anarchist and G8 petrol bomber.

Listening to him now, half amused, half bemused, you get a feeling of the horror he felt back then. Lydon, though rightly proud of the work he did with The Sex Pistols and later Public Image Ltd, does not have happy memories of1977. The boat trip, in which the Pistols sailed past the House of Commons playing songs that enraged millions and later inspired millions more, ended in disaster.

The Met, clearly convinced that Lydon and the band were the vanguard of some imminent and ghastly republican revolution, attacked the Pistols' vessel, arresting practically everyone on it.

Ironically, Britain's most despised punk, Johnny, escaped, while Britain's favourite entrepreneur, Richard Branson, was nicked. It is one of the few bits of luck John /Johnny had back then.

What are your memories of the Summer of Punk?

The Summer of Punk? What a meaningless and preposterous term. It sounds like some fool wants to put a compilation album out. I mean, it's all very well and good for you liars in the media. But I intensely dislike that term. It's emotionally meaningless and historically untrue. An obnoxiously romantic take on the reality we suffered. Rather like receiving a bouquet of dead roses. It was grim for us. And part of the reason for that was that people assumed we were grim and nihilistic. The memory remains bitter to this day.

Does it rile you when people talk about punk in terms of a scam?

That's Malcolm McLaren talk. The truth should be far more obvious. I wrote from the heart and the band played from the heart. The fact that we struck a chord was fortunate. But let us not talk about punk as this great movement. As though we all
held hands together and threw rocks at McDonald's. There was no great movement. It didn't have anything to do with uniforms and conformity.

Was it dispiriting to see kids dyeing their hair red and wearing Vivienne Westwood 'Destroy' T-shirts?

No! Then was then. If you were able to do that, if you had the guts, it meant you were taking serious risks. Because to dress like that was to risk real physical violence. So everyone who did that earned his or her wings, so to speak. If there are any physical pats on the back to be had, then it's for those people. If, on the other hand, you are now supposedly fighting for freedom in order for the right to imitate us, then what sort of freedom are you fighting for? The freedom to copy and imitate. That sounds like another sort of prison to me.

Did you always feel like an outsider?

It goes way before that. I could read before I was four, before I even went to school where I was educated by sadistic nuns. Then I got meningitis and forgot who I was for two or three years. I forgot my name, I forgot the names of everyone else, and I could not even remember what my mum and dad looked like. So I had to start off from scratch again. So you must understand that the intrigue in me, the curiosity, it's not some pose. I am terrified of forgetting things.

To not know who you are, or where you are, or who anybody is, is a powerful thing. After that you tend to be very vigilant. Because at anytime I know I could forget everything and just stand there in a void. Believe me, losing your mind makes you very careful about keeping it once you've recovered it.

Let's get back to 1977, the Jubilee, "God Save The Queen" and that boat trip in which every member of your number was kicked, nicked and abused. What was that actually like?

Well, there was one particular moment, which still haunts me. Remember, on that day, there was supposed to be an amnesty. The pubs were open, there was supposed to be some sort of 36-hour celebration of Her Majesty and her less-than -glorious Britain. However, the police did not quite see our boat trip as such. So on that night, what with patriotic emotions being tragically high, the police harassment was truly unbelievable. Just about everybody was grabbed. The only reason I didn't get nicked was because an especially stupid copper asked me where Johnny Rotten was. And I just pointed to the upper deck. Just pointed in mid-air, and the coppers followed my finger.

In "God Save The Queen" the frightening line is "No future", not because it is nihilistic, but because it seems to propose a warning...

Yes. It was a warning. But it was also irony. If you don't stand up and do something there is no future, at any rate no future you decide upon. And equally there should be no future for a royal family that do precisely nothing. My opinions of the royal family are not, "Eliminate them at dawn." Far from it. I mean, the pomp, pageantry and circumstance of it all I find highly entertaining.

How do you feel about the monarchy now?

I have always been against anything that tells me I am less of a human being than they are. And the monarchy, with nonsense like hereditary privilege, does that on a grand scale. And that was what the monarchy was up to then and that is what it's up to now, and since then we have really discovered what a bunch of half-wits they are. We attacked it full on and we demanded answers. And if there was anything scurrilous or dishonest in that song, or any of our songs, nobody would have tolerated it. They were looking for any angle to lock us away. We were discussed in the Houses of Parliament under the Treason act, and you know what the penalty for that was at the time, don't you? Death! Isn't that fabulous?

You mentioned the hereditary principle. Is that what you primarily object to?

Well, in am going to be sent to war, in am going to be cannon fodder, then it has to be for a good cause. And Queen and country is not a good cause. The Second World War, now that was a good cause. The buggers had to be stopped, at any price. My natural inclination is that of a pacifist, but not to the point where I would allow something as evil as Nazism to prevail.

Would you say there was something both tragic and comical about punk?

Well of course there was. That is obvious, but there was also a really caring, earnest side to us. We really cared about what we were doing. But the rulebooks were constantly being thrown at us. Oh that's not music, this is music. Well who says? Who writes these absurd guidelines we were supposed to adhere to? All the doors were slammed in our faces. We had to build our own doors. So I would like to thank absolutely no one.

One of the most striking things about the documentary, The Filth And The Fury, was how upset you were about the death of Sid...

I get upset about any death. I do not believe in any afterlife that will somehow magically redeem us all. So to get back to Sid, if you take somebody else's , life, or take your own life, that is a tragedy. He should be here today; he should be with us all.

I always imagined that if Sid had left the Pistols, and become a fine artist...

Well quite. If only he had been able to grow out of the drug thing. He went into that thing like such a child. He did it in such a goofy, innocent way; he just waltzed into it. For him it was this gloriously, fantastically decadent world that he assumed carried applause with it. And he was horribly rewarded, because people would think he was special because he was so off his tree. But deep down inside, poor old Sid knew he was not special. : That's what we are as human beings, we are full of self-doubt and fear, and that is no bad thing.

Do you think heroin was what killed Sid or was heroin simply a symptom of some deeper pain?

I would guess that heroin was indeed a symptom of a deeper pain. It was a very risque thing to do when we brought him into the band at that late stage. You see, I never felt a full member of it, so I was just hoping to have someone on my side.

What are your feelings about that drug now?

I despise drugs. Though I am far from a puritan in this respect. Any thing that makes me slip my mind, is totally uninteresting to me, including all the filth doctors prescribe. I loathe the idea that there might be some false sense of chemical security. As far as heroin goes, it certainly eliminates self-hatred, but it also makes you invulnerable to all that is good. And finally, it makes you a terrible thief. For me it would eliminate what, to my mind, is the best part of my personality. Which is abject fear. Complacent contentment is physical and moral death.

Looking back on it, is there any way you could have prevented Sid from getting into smack?

No, absolutely not. But the knowledge that I could have done nothing, does not help me at all. I guess I just wish that what I know now I knew at 17 or 18. I wish I had heard warning bells, my friend, Sid, is in trouble. If he had been into that stuff before the band he would have been fine, 'cos I probably would have been able to pull him away from it. But once he was in the band, shadows crept in. There was the management aspect; there's the who's-your-best-mate-in-the-band aspect; and then there's the girlfriend aspect, which in Sid's case turned out to absolutely tragic. And then suddenly we were all lost at sea. It was all horribly close to Spinal Tap and therefore deeply funny at the same time as being disgustingly tragic. I am making light of a very dark subject. But I have to; it's really the only way I can cope.

There is an argument, postulated by Uncut's Simon Reynolds, that PiL were a more important band than the Pistols. What do you reckon to that?

Whoever Simon Reynolds is, he's wrong. He has no knowledge of what happened back then and he dares to compare one aspect of my life to another. He shoves in his two-bobs' worth of self-important nonsense and expects me to applaud. Well, I am sorry, but, 'No!' For me, The Sex Pistols were my first step in life, and they were for countless others, too. The Pistols were as important to me as when I fell out of the pram and learnt to walk.

Do you think there has been any band that has had as much influence as The Sex pistols or PiL?

Gosh, I don't know. I do not consider myself able to express an opinion on that front. There have been very many bands who have greatly influenced me. If only in their approach to life. But some of them have been incredibly unmusical. Like Primal Scream, I adore them, they appear to be having so much fun and they sound like a total racket. Like the best of The Beatles and John Lennon, the Primals can pull themselves out of their box and think about other people. And that is vital.

Would it be fair to say that gangsta rap is a sort of African-American punk?

What tawdry rubbish. There is no truth in that whatsoever. It is many, many things, the most obvious being that it is white businessmen exploiting black people. And creatively it has become a total dead end. I mean, I love some of the things that waft off a Jay-Z record, but I found it was better done when Captain Beefheart did it. And, at the end of the day, I don't want people shouting at me about gold chains and and greed and murder. It is tedious and, I would assume, self-defeating for the people who listen to it.

And in that sense it is hideously right-wing. People are always shocked when they discover that a certain rapper votes Republican. But has anybody bothered listening to what these men are saying? What do they expect these goons to vote for?

For someone so opinionated, is it hard living in a place as deferential and polite as LA?

Not remotely. Though of course I do still end up hurting people's feelings sometimes. Normally institutions rather than individuals. But I regard that as fairly healthy.

Are you thinking perhaps of your refusal to be included in the Rock'n'RolI Hall Of Fame?

Among other things. We told them to shove it up their arse. Our message was simple. We do not want your baubles and rewards. And neither do we want our history to be butchered, altered or unadulterated. The bio that the Hall Of Fame had put out on the Pistols was so inaccurate, so wrong and so fucking evil, there was no way we were going to accept their disgusting award. So much shit is being said about us every day. The information society is a wonderful thing, but the word missing from that term is 'accurate'. And this runs through everything.

The war?

Well of course the war, or rather the wars. The one thing I cannot abide is this right-wing interfering, fact- manipulating nonsense. We were taken to war by two right-wing religious half-wits. Bush and Blair. They have this crazy desire to see the whole world made in their own image. What a horrible idea. I would certainly not want the whole world to be like me.

Whenever you move any large military force into another country, the people of that country are bound to be somewhat annoyed. In the case of Iraq : they are now so annoyed they no longer just take it out on us but, and this is a true tragedy, on each other. We should accept sometimes that we couldn't all get along. Bush trying to turn Iraq into an American-style democracy is a perfect example of a non-meeting of two mindsets.

Bush is not actually an idiot. He is, unlike idiots, capable of skullduggery. But he is morally bankrupt. He can distinguish between right and : wrong, he just always chooses wrong. That is what appals Americans. From their point of view America is a force for good, and yet their president : keeps proving the contrary. It is highly puzzling for them. And it is considered un-American to even ask a question.

Staying with politics, in your song ,"Religion", you attack theism for its hypocrisy. Would it be right to say that what's really scary about religion now is not it's dishonestly but its integrity?

Oh, very clever, Ben. You seem to be getting some sort of intellectual titillation out of a calamity, several calamities in fact. Having said that, I would agree that both Christians and Muslims do have a strange ability to turn their hope-fest into utter bloody stupidity. Religion is prehistoric There may have been a time when this stuff was absolutely necessary. But it's a fake, a plagiarism and distortion of what human hearts felt... it does not provide answers to anything. It just provides instructions, and those instructions cannot be questioned.

Would you say you have mellowed at all?

Here's the thing about age, it takes away all of the shock value you had as a youngster. And the sad thing about being young is that you are never taken seriously. Work that out if you will. [Laughs]

So when can we expect the next public Image LP?

Whenever I find a recording deal. Meantime I am happy to do my shows about biology.

Real reality TV?

Well-put, sir.