John Lydon, still live and dangerous (Image: Getty)
That familiar face veers into view on Zoom. “It lives!” John Lydon cackles over his breakfast pint before unleashing a cascade of caustic opinions certain to unsettle Bafta bigwigs. For starters, he’s enjoying Trump’s presidency. “It’s joyous,” John says, grinning broadly. “His distractors are distraught, but public money had been wasted and now there’s a businessman in charge. He stops the waste, cleans up the rubbish and makes it efficient. What a novel idea!
“I’m sorry folks, but he is the Sex Pistols of politics. I like that he’ll do what he says. He doesn’t make banal promises. It’s not politics as usual. That’s why the BBC hate it. They and those like them are who caused this to happen.”
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The BBC famously banned Lydon in 1978 after he made unbroadcast comments about Jimmy Savile that turned out to be true.
“I was the first, then Status Quo said it and for that we got banned,” he says, translating BBC as “biased, bourgeois” and we’ll skip the C.
“What a topsy turvy place Britain has become under that odd man, Keir Starmer. He was running the CPS when they didn’t prosecute Savile, lest we forget.”
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John beams broadly. “I’m still making friends and influencing people.
Lydon, 69, is still revered as Johnny Rotten, the iconic face of punk rock, even though he left the Sex Pistols to form Public Image Ltd 43 years ago.
John hit a rough patch in 2023, losing both Nora, his smart, beautiful German wife of 44 years, and his lifelong friend and manager John ‘Rambo’ Stevens.
“I’ve done moping and feeling sorry for myself,” he tells me. “I thought for a while that I might just retire, that nobody was interested in what I was doing. It was a self-taught lie. We can’t just rest easy.”
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John’s new manager is Alan McGee, of Oasis fame. “He’s relentless, he’s enthralling. He’s brought in many people, we’ve changed promoters. I’m writing songs now without having to think about it…”
So much so that he tells me he fell asleep while writing the night before. “I gave myself a nose bleed,” he says. “I woke up to find a pencil up my nose, spurting blood all over the gaff.”
Lydon will tour the UK and Ireland for four solid months with PiL, followed by his own one-man show – “the Titanic sails, but this time it gets there,” he laughs.
Nora was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018; John was her carer. Now he meets and greets his audience before his one-man show so people can tell him their stories which he incorporates on stage.
“It’s an old English vibe, finding something in common and no doubt helping people who have to deal with Alzheimer’s.”
John lost his 2021 legal battle to stop his former bandmates using Sex Pistols music in the Disney+ series Pistol. “I’m out numbered,” he says, his voice hardening. “I was in a court case, in the middle of my wife dying, with the Sex Pistols represented by the Disney corporation…
“The Sex Pistols, now owned by Mickey Mouse.”
He dismisses the band, who have been gigging with Frank Carter on vocals, as “karaoke – they’d be a great act on a cruise ship; they haven’t written any new songs since I left. I just said: ‘Don’t use my words, because it’s clear you don’t understand them’.”
Netflix series The Crown started their fall-out. “Netflix wanted to have Anarchy In The UK and God Save The Queen playing over riot scenes at the Jubilee. But that did not happen. There were no riots. I said no, which drove the others nuts. They’re denying their own history. The only people who stood up at the Jubilee were the Sex Pistols. That was real, not this banal fantasy.
“In the court case they stated that The Crown was Steve Jones’s favourite TV show. What? I was laughing. What next Punk Gardening with Steve Jones pushing up daisies? It’s the Kiss approach: cash is everything. It’s detrimental to the songs. Their manager isn’t British.”
Lydon’s strong sense of right and wrong are products of his upbringing. “The values I grew up with – not morals; morals are religious, we have values, you didn’t steal from your own, you looked out for one and another.”
Chippy and forthright, John Joseph Lydon was the eldest of four brothers born in Finsbury Park, north London, to Irish immigrants John and Mary. He grew up in a two-bedroom flat in Benwell Road, right by Arsenal’s Highbury stadium, all sharing two rooms with no indoor toilet.
“You had to be funny to survive. But most people in our area were in similar situations, so it didn’t feel like we were neglected until colour telly arrived. We saw adverts for Axminster carpets and wallpaper. Wow that’s novel!”
It was a very mixed area – “we didn’t need Labour to tell us to be diverse.”
The roar of Gunners home games enthralled him. His crane-driver father took him to see his first match when he was four. “I’m still a season ticket holder, my family use it. The new stadium is right on top of the squalor I grew up in.”
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Football’s gentrification does not impress him, nor does modern comedy.
“I don’t find left-wing comedians very funny, trying to lecture me. Middle-class students, always a problem. They’re educated but have no originality. They see us as beneath them.”
Woke, he says, is another word for judgemental. John’s comedy heroes are Tommy Cooper and Norman Wisdom – “a flyweight boxer with a heart, spectacular; I loved that tatty image.
“Kenneth Williams and the Carry On crew – infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me. The audacity!
“I spent many an hour with Nora watching Steptoe and Son. She learnt English better watching that than any other way, the subtleties, the subterfuge, the innuendo…”
John left England for California 41 years ago, partly for health reasons. At seven, meningitis left him in a coma, wiping his memory, and tormenting him with hallucinogenic visions, which still sometimes return.
Dismissed as “dummy dumb-dumb” by nuns at his Catholic school, he self-educated, reading voraciously, and developed life-long loves of painting and music. Lydon was fascinated by youth culture – “Watching the gangs change from Ted to mods to skinheads in the space of a few years.”
He had his own look – dyed green hair, safety pins and a home-made I Hate Pink Floyd t-shirt before he even met punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren.
The Pistols’ incendiary anthems traumatised polite society and kickstarted a worldwide phenomenon.
“People try and say punk owes a lot to America. It owes nothing at all to America. Everything I wrote was about my immediate surroundings. How was God Save The Queen influenced by the Ramones? The Ramones were fine, but they were a long-haired pop band with nothing meaningful to say.”
The famously scabrous “Rotten” was a shy teen who adopted arrogance as a survival tool.
In 1977, he asked Motorhead’s Lemmy to teach his doomed pal John ‘Sid Vicious’ Ritchie the bass.
“It’s an instrument anyone can learn. Not Sid. Lemmy rang me up and said, ‘John, he’s got no talent at all, he’s tone deaf and he can’t follow a tune’.”
Lydon quit after the Pistols’ shambolic US tour in January 1978; by May he was rehearsing PiL whose hits include Public Image, Rise, This Is Not A Love Song and Death Disco, written for his dying mother.
They will finish writing their next album, their 12th, on the UK tour bus – “much better than arguing about the chocolate biscuits.”
Growing up, John loved music. “Reggae, some classical, Hawkwind…I held Status Quo in high regard, the Pink Fairies too.” He relaxes by “blasting out music at full volume, I like my record-player to sound like a PA. There wasn’t a band in the 70s that I missed. I remember hopping the train at 13 to see Free at the Isle of Wight. I was furious with the middle-class hippy audience for not loving what they were hearing.”
He still gets asked to work with other musicians but says, ‘I don’t feel it. I get offered a lot of money but I’m not a session singer. I’m not a singer at all except in the fine tradition of the sewing machine.
“I don’t want to part of the system. I don’t like people who take themselves too seriously.”
*John Lydon and Public Image Ltd will be on tour in the UK and Europe this summer, opening in Bristol on May 22nd. John takes his solo Q&A tour on the road throughout the UK and Ireland from September 4th - November 24th. Ticket links for both tours can be found
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* John Lydon will perform with Public Image Ltd at Forever Now Festival on June 22, 2025 alongside Kraftwerk, The The, Billy Idol and more. For tickets, visit forevernowfestival.co.uk