John Lydon
John Joseph Lydon, also known by his former stage name Johnny Rotten, is a British-born singer, songwriter, author, and television personality. He was the lead vocalist of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, which was active from 1975 to 1978, and again for various revivals during the 1990s and 2000s. He is also the lead vocalist of post-punk band Public Image Ltd, which he founded and fronted from 1978 until 1993, and again since 2009.
Lydon's outspoken personality, rebellious image and fashion style convinced Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren to invite Lydon to join the group as its lead vocalist. With the Sex Pistols, he co-wrote singles including "Anarchy in the U.K.", "God Save the Queen", and "Holidays in the Sun", the content of which precipitated what one commentator described as the "last and greatest outbreak of pop-based moral pandemonium" in Britain. The band scandalised much of the media, and Lydon was seen as a figurehead of the burgeoning punk movement. Due to their controversial lyrics and disrepute at the time, they are regarded as one of the most influential acts in the history of popular music.
After the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978, Lydon founded his own band, Public Image Ltd, which was far more experimental in nature and described in a 2005 review by NME as "arguably the first post-rock group". The band produced eight studio albums and a string of singles, including "Public Image", "Death Disco", and "Rise", before they went on hiatus in 1993, reforming in 2009. In subsequent years, Lydon has hosted television series in the UK, US, and Belgium, in 2004 appeared on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in the UK, appeared in advertisements on UK television promoting Country Life, a brand of British butter, written two autobiographies, and produced solo musical work, such as the studio album Psycho's Path. In 2005, he released a compilation album, The Best of British £1 Notes.
In 2015, there was a revival of a 1980s movement to have Lydon knighted for his achievements with the Sex Pistols, although he declined an MBE for services to music. Q magazine remarked that "somehow he's assumed the status of national treasure".
Early life
John Joseph Lydon was born in London on 31 January 1956. His parents, Eileen Mary, and John Christopher Lydon, were working-class immigrants from Ireland who moved into a two-room Victorian flat in Benwell Road, in the Holloway area of north London. The flat is adjacent to the Highbury Stadium, the former home ground of Premier League football club Arsenal F.C. of whom Lydon has been an avid fan since the age of four. At the time, the area was largely impoverished, with a high crime rate and a population consisting predominantly of working-class Irish and Jamaican people. Lydon spent summer holidays in his mother's native County Cork, where he suffered name-calling for having an English accent, a prejudice he claims he still receives today even though he travels under an Irish passport.In his autobiography, Rotten – No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, Lydon wrote of being from an Irish background in London in the 1960s: "Londoners had no choice but to accept the Irish because there were so many of us, and we do blend in better than the Jamaicans. When I was very young and going to school, I remember bricks thrown at me by English parents... We were the Irish scum. But it's fun being scum, too."
Lydon, the eldest of four brothers, had to look after his siblings due to his mother's regular illnesses. As a child, he lived on the edge of an industrial estate and would often play with friends in the factories when they were closed. He belonged to a local gang of neighbourhood children and would often end up in fights with other groups, something he would later look back on with fond memories: "Hilarious fiascoes, not at all like the knives and guns of today. The meanness wasn't there. It was more like yelling, shouting, throwing stones, and running away giggling. Maybe the reality was coloured by my youth." Describing himself as a "very shy" and "very retiring" kid who was "nervous as hell", he hated going to school, where he would get caned as punishment and where he "had several embarrassing incidents... I would shit my pants and be too scared to ask the teacher to leave the class. I'd sit there in a pants load of poo all day long."
At the age of seven, Lydon contracted spinal meningitis and spent a year in St Ann's Hospital in Haringey, London. Throughout the entire experience, he suffered from hallucinations, nausea, headaches, periods of coma, and a severe memory loss that lasted for four years, whilst the treatments administered by the nurses involved drawing fluid out of his spine with a surgical needle, leaving him with a permanent spinal curvature. The meningitis was responsible for giving him what he would later describe as the "Lydon stare"; this experience was "the first step that put me on the road to Rotten".
With his father often away, employed variously on building sites or oil rigs, Lydon got his first job aged ten as a minicab dispatcher, something he kept up for a year while the family was in financial difficulty. He disliked his secondary school, the St. William of York Roman Catholic School in Islington, where initially he was bullied, but at fourteen or fifteen he "broke out of the mould" and began to fight back at what he saw as the oppressive nature of the school teachers, who he felt instigated and encouraged the children to all be the same and be "anti-anyone-who-doesn't-quite-fit-the-mould". Following the completion of his O-Levels at school, he got into a row with his father, who disliked Lydon's long hair, and so, agreeing to get it cut, the teenager not only had it cut, but in an act of rebellion, he dyed it bright green. As a teenager, he listened to rock bands like Hawkwind, Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, and the Stooges – bands his mother also used to like, which somewhat embarrassed him – as well as more mainstream acts such as David Bowie, T. Rex, Slade and Gary Glitter.
Lydon was expelled from school at the age of fifteen after a run-in with a teacher, and went on to attend Hackney College, where he befriended Simon John Ritchie, before attending Kingsway College. Lydon gave Ritchie the nickname "Sid Vicious", after his parents' pet hamster. Lydon and Vicious began squatting in a house in the Hampstead area with a group of ageing hippies and stopped bothering to go to college, which was often far away from where they were living. Meanwhile, he began working on building sites during the summer, assisted by his father. Friends recommended him for a job at a children's play centre in Finsbury Park, teaching woodwork to some of the older children, but he was sacked when parents complained that somebody "weird" with bright-green hair was teaching their children. Lydon and his friends, including Vicious, John Gray, Jah Wobble, Dave Crowe and Tony Purcell, began going to many of the London clubs, such as the Lacy Lady in Seven Kings, and frequented both reggae and gay clubs, enjoying the latter because "you could be yourself, nobody bothered you" there.
Lydon during this stage of his life was described as "the vilest geezer I ever met – all misshapen, no 'air, 'unchback, flat feet." He later left England and moved to America because "It's become such a police state in England. So 1984-like. It's very grim... That's why I left. Also I don't get any support over there."
Career
1975–1978: Sex Pistols and the punk movement
In 1975, Lydon was among a group of youths who regularly hung around Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's fetish clothing shop Sex. McLaren had returned from a brief stint touring with American proto-punk band the New York Dolls, and he was working on promoting a new band formed by Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook called the Sex Pistols. McLaren was impressed with Lydon's ragged look and unique sense of style, particularly his orange hair and modified Pink Floyd T-shirt. After tunelessly singing Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" to the accompaniment of the shop's jukebox, Lydon was chosen as the band's lead vocalist. In August 1977, the band released "God Save the Queen" during the week of Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee. At that time, Lydon commented: "Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it." During the media furore over the single, Lydon and producers Bill Price and Chris Thomas were subject to a razor attack outside a pub in Highbury, London.Lydon was interested in dub music. McLaren was said to have been upset when Lydon revealed during a radio interview that his influences included progressive experimentalists like Magma, Can, Captain Beefheart and Van der Graaf Generator. Tensions between Lydon and bassist Glen Matlock arose. The reasons for this are disputed, but Lydon claimed in his autobiography that he believed Matlock to be too white-collar and middle-class and that Matlock was "always going on about nice things like the Beatles". Matlock stated in his own autobiography that most of the tension in the band, and between himself and Lydon, was orchestrated by McLaren. Matlock quit and as a replacement, Lydon recommended his school friend Simon John Ritchie, who used the stage name Sid Vicious. Although Vicious was an incompetent bassist, McLaren agreed that he had the look the band wanted: pale, emaciated, spike-haired, with ripped clothes and a perpetual sneer. In 1977, the Sex Pistols released their only and highly influential studio album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.
Vicious' chaotic relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and his worsening heroin addiction, caused a great deal of friction among the band members, particularly with Lydon, whose sarcastic remarks often exacerbated the situation. Lydon closed the final Sid Vicious-era Sex Pistols concert in San Francisco's Winterland in January 1978 with a rhetorical question to the audience: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Shortly thereafter, McLaren, Jones, and Cook went to Brazil to meet and record with former train robber Ronnie Biggs. Lydon declined to go, deriding the concept as a whole and feeling that they were attempting to make a hero out of a criminal who attacked a train driver and stole "working-class money".
The Sex Pistols' disintegration was documented in Julien Temple's satirical pseudo-biographical film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, in which Jones, Cook and Vicious each played a character. Matlock only appeared in previously recorded live footage and as an animation and did not participate personally. Lydon refused to have anything to do with it, feeling that McLaren had far too much control over the project. Although Lydon was highly critical of the film, many years later he agreed to let Temple direct the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, a film that included new interviews with the band members' faces hidden in silhouette, and also featured an uncharacteristically emotional Lydon choking up as he discussed Vicious' decline and death. Lydon had previously denounced previous journalistic works regarding the Sex Pistols in the introduction to his autobiography, Rotten – No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, which he described as "as close to the truth as one can get".
Lydon is portrayed by Anson Boon in the 2022 Craig Pearce–Danny Boyle FX biographical drama miniseries Pistol.