Post by Snoogans4Jay on Sept 6, 2008 20:12:35 GMT -5
Were he not physcially sitting next to me in his gap-toothed, wild-eyed, tartan trousered glory, I would not believe my ears. “Respect,” he says, “is Johnny Rotten's motto.” John Lydon, the man who at 52 remains Johnny Rotten to the very roots of his orange hair, revisits the topic frequently during our somewhat combustible dinner at a Kensington sushi restaurant. Heavy metal bands never treated their fans with respect; Sting showed no respect for Jamaican culture by “ripping off” reggae music with Roxanne; and those feral children on sink estates with no one around to give them a clip round the ear ... “Young kids” - and Johnny Rotten actually says this - “now ain't got no respect.”
But wasn't it his band, the Sex Pistols, that 30 years ago elevated disrespect into an art form? They called the Queen a moron. They used the F-word at teatime on Thames TV. He was an Antichrist. He was an anarchist. “You're awfully pedantic,” he says. “I suppose you can't help it, but don't try to pigeonhole us. It isn't like that. I'm not here preaching and never have done. This is the life I lead. If you don't like my life, I don't ask you to go along with it, or imitate it, or have anything to do with it at all. In fact, I'd rather you were completely different, because by being that you'd probably be more like me.”
At The Times's expense, Lydon is ordering for our table with expensive abandon. We - his anxious PR, his diminutive, would-be scary manager “Rambo” and I - get what he chooses. We may be eating Japanese, but I feel my head has fallen into a plate of spaghetti, the strands of which I am woefully failing to unravel. Maybe it is me, for mid-rant he accuses me of “jumping in a little too quick” and “mixing up” my thoughts. “You have a problem with this,” he advises.
Regardless, I jump in and ask him about the band Bloc Party, a clash with whom threatened to blemish a successful three-month world tour that officially ends tonight at the Hammersmith Apollo, a venue from which Lydon was once banned (though neither he, nor the Apollo, can now recall why). After that there's an extra gig in Spain, which was where Lydon was accused in July of abusing Bloc Party's vocalist, Kele Okereke. Lydon's “entourage” then, it was alleged, beat him up, although what seems to have upset Okereke was being told by one of them that, as a scion of Nigerians, he had “a black attitude”.
Times Archive, 1976: Catching up with punk
Rotten crackles with defiance: 'Don't accept the old order - get rid of it. Rod Stewart is for mums and dads. Don't have any heroes - they're all useless'
TV presenter suspended after Sex Pistols interview
EMI ends 'punk rock' group contract
Record sleeve of punk rock album ruled not indecent
Related Links
God save Johnny Rotten: he leads us to the darkness at the heart of the jungle
Sex Pistols
The sex behind the pistols
“He's talking nonsense, right. Bloc Party! What, you can't sell a record, so you need to try and tarnish my name? You mugs. I've done more for this world than that bunch of f***ing losers could ever hope to offer. All right? But for me, bands like that really wouldn't be existing. All right? Respect is Johnny Rotten's motto, but for that lot: none.”
So nothing happened? “As far as I'm aware. All I notice is a man who tries to butt into my free space and tries to get some free publicity out of it.”
And what of poor Duffy, the Welsh singer whom he reduced to tears at the Mojo Awards (he won one) when she also made the mistake of invading his territory? “I'm sorry. Any bird that jumps on my back for a photo opportunity is a friend of mine. What's the problem there? None at all. Lovely-looking thing. As barmaids go, she's definitely up there.”
I am not sure how one is supposed to approach Lydon. My approach is clearly wrong, an attempt to fact-check my version of his biography, the story of a working-class Londoner known at school, after missing almost a year's lessons while sick, as “Dummy Dum Dum”. He emerged from his meningitis-induced coma, hunchbacked, phlegmatic (hence the stagespitting), myopic (the evil-eye look) and angry. One afternoon, a sly Chelsea entrepreneur named Malcolm McLaren spotted this teenage oddity and knew that he had found the Sex Pistols' frontman.
Soon newspapers were declaring the Pistols a graver threat to the British way of life than Russia or hyperinflation. But the real danger, I suggest, was not to Britain but to the Pistols. In 1977, Jubilee Year, Rotten was wounded by neo-Nazis in a pub car park. He must have spent years in fear. This takes us from nought to umbrage in a sashimi bite. “I certainly wasn't afraid. I carried on, didn't I? Look here,” he says, pointing at something small on his forehead, “here's a scar recently from a gig. People like to occasionally have a word with me, but there ain't no fear in this boy.”
All along he thought he was being funny, music hall, taking after his Max Miller-besotted father (who died this year). But MPs thought that he should be tried, and the Home Office stamped
“moral turpitude” on his file. He escaped to Los Angeles, but it took 20 years to get his permanent resident's visa. On a DVD documentary made by the Pistols' old amanuensis Julien Temple, Lydon says he is no longer sure he wants it. But when I check, he says he is not coming back here either. “You charge me too much. I am not paying for those f****ers in Parliament. Guy Fawkes is my man.”
Seriously, though, it is the harassment he gets here that would make it impossible for him to live permanently in his place in Fulham, West London. He remembers after an early gig at the Screen on the Green in Islington being accosted in Upper Street even though he was disguised by a wig and a wedding dress. I read about the concert: a microphone stand had twanged back on him and he lost a front tooth. Except that somewhere else I also read that he'd lost it biting on a cherry stone.
“No, no, you're so wrong. You must pay attention to detail and time scale,” he scolds. These were different teeth and different decades. Our conversation never recovers from this, my lack of attention to detail and time scale. He hates people getting his history wrong, although it does not help that he adds to the misinformation. You may have read, for instance, that he has made a fortune in California as a real estate agent. That was a joke embroidered on a website. Nor has he, as he has claimed, married his long-term partner, Nora Forster (no ceremony, he promises, in the sense I would understand it). But if you thought Lydon had no reputation to lose, that is not how he sees it. He guards, in particular, his self-image as a multiculturalist who grew up in a mixed community in North London, and who helped to raise his step-grandchildren, who are half Jamaican. Hence his anger at the Bloc Party allegations.
That said, he is furious, too, with Roxanne Davis, an assistant producer on Bodog Battle of the Bands, a reality television programme on which he played judge. She is suing him for allegedly punching her in the face in a row over his hotel accommodation. When I ask about her, he sings a few bars of the hated Roxanne to calm himself down. If he had been assaulted, he would have called the police, not sued months later. He is not a woman-beater.
“If I was any of these bad things, I think it would have come out a hell of a lot more louder and I would have been a hell of a lot more prouder. Because Johnny Rotten stands for what he says. If I was those things, you would be hearing it. And I would have no problems. I would be waving those flags loud and proud.”
There is, way back near the birth of the Pistols, another legend that needs correcting: the legend of Sid Vicious, the school friend he recruited to the Pistols. Sid (John Simon Ritchie) was a heroin addict who was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, with a hunting knife. A few months later, while on bail, he was killed by an overdose. Lydon does not think that Sid did it.
“No, I do not. Not at all. Sid wouldn't hurt a butterfly. No, he loved her. And I don't care how much anybody says anything, there's some real serious wrongness in this. People love to rewrite. Oh, it's like a Norman Mailer novel, isn't it? Rewriting Sid, you know, at the Chelsea Hotel, a mad punk rocker with his carving knife stabbing his girlfriend. It's bullshit. Sending him off to Rikers [Island, a jail in New York City], and these wicked places! And he was a really sweet man really deep down inside. Bonkers, of course, but no man's coathanger.”
A good friend? “Very. Miss him. Not many days go by when I don't think well of him. I was emotionally f***ing wounded. And I've got to say, one of the very few people who came in with any kind of help was, oddly enough, Mick Jagger, who came up with a lawyer and stuff. Nobody else was paying attention. Malcolm [McLaren] was having a hissy fest of fear, which was his regular life situation, much like when he tried to go for mayor against Ken Livingstone, you know. An absolute bottler, coward.”
Although he thinks I called him one, a coward Lydon is not. His steadfastness impresses me. He has been with Nora, the daughter of a wealthy German publisher, for 31 years. Other middle-aged rock stars fire their wives at their first grey hair. Nora is 14 years Lydon's senior. Also, and at some risk to his street cred, he has consistently spoken out against drugs, particularly heroin.
He once said that the Sex Pistols had “won”. I ask what he meant. “We manage to survive the shitstem,” he says carefully crediting the coinage to a reggae song he now forgets.
More than survive, surely. He succeeded. “Success! Have I had any? Is this success? Seriously, would you call this successful? It is the harder road to have been taken.”
But he changed our view of the world. “It is not for me to tell you whether my point of view is ultimately righteous or wrongeous.”
I do wonder what Lydon, who got six O and two A levels, would have done with a proper education. In 90 minutes he talks confidently of Shakespeare's “Lincolnshire” accent, Irish “self-deprivation” (self-deprecation) and the fauna of Sierra Leone when he means Sri Lanka (or vice versa). When I gently check if he is referencing David or Dickie Attenborough, he turns nasty.
“You're playing games. There you are. Caught you! Gotcha!” He had lost me, I promise. “I'm going lose you very quickly. I've been nice enough to come here and talk to you, don't you f***ing ever try and mug me off.”
“John, John, John,” says Rambo and they walk out, but only for a cigarette break. When he returns he is decent enough to apologise. He cannot expect others to follow his thinking. “You can call me Rick O'Shea, the mad Irishman bouncing inside four enclosed walls. Ricochet. Without those four enclosed walls this is all utterly pointless. You need the fencing to really be creative.”
What are his walls? “Usually other human beings. Hence unity. So I work well in bands.”
“Shall we wrap this up, John?” asks Rambo. “And when banned!” Lydon quips on before, in a sinister, Baby Jane voice, he says: “Johnny got to go now.”
I ask for the bill. Rambo shoulders his way towards me. “Don't f*** us over. OK? Don't. We don't like it.” Frankly, the bill is scarier.
You have to smile. Respect? Despite his boss's fixation, this lot know so little about it that they don't even realise they tore it down in 1977 and nobody ever put Humpty together again. Lydon was indeed a revolutionary, but he was an accidental one, the product of a glorious coincidence of casting, talent and timing. Yet, I realise, for this street urchin surviving would have been victory enough. The rest may not even be a bonus.
The Sex Pistols play the Hammersmith Apollo tonight. The Sex Pistols: There'll Always Be an England DVD is out now
Pistols from dawn: three decades of anarchy
Nov 6, 1975 Sex Pistols play their first live show with John Lydon at St Martin's College of Art in London.
Nov 26, 1976 Debut single Anarchy in the UK released on EMI, but the label drops the band and withdraws the single two months later. The Pistols keep their £40,000 advance.
Dec 1, 1976 The band earn overnight infamy after a live interview packed with four- letter words on Bill Grundy's teatime London news show, Today. A Daily Mirror headline reads: “The Filth and the Fury”.
June 7, 1977 Mocking the Silver Jubilee with their new single, God Save the Queen the Pistols play on a Thames riverboat. Police board the boat and arrest 11 people.
Oct 28, 1977 The album Never Mind the Bollocks is released, prompting a court case for obscenity, successfully defended by the playwright and barrister John Mortimer.
Jan 14, 1978 The band end their first US tour in San Francisco, then split acrimoniously.
Feb 2, 1979 The former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious dies of a heroin overdose in New York while awaiting trial for the murder of Nancy Spungen.
Mar 18, 1996 The Pistols announce the Filthy Lucre Tour, a reunion featuring all four original members: Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock.
Feb 24, 2005 Refusing to attend their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, the Pistols condemn the ceremony as a “piss stain”.
STEPHEN DALTON
[/b]
Okay. Great interview given by John. What I take offense to though is once again a member of the media is baiting John and trying to make it look like HE and Mr. Rambo have the attitude problem. The writer states that it all started to go bad when he mentioned how John lost his tooth. The writer has two different incidents that took place nearly 25 years apart confused. And he is galled that John might think he didn't do his homework due to that. WELL DUH
. The reporter's attitude about that leads me to conclude that he probably brought up that subject to John in a condecending "you have told two different versions of this" type way. Well NO WONDER John became upset, wouldn't YOU? OOOOOOO it just irritates me from my frizzy head of hair down to my last toenail when reporters do that then whine that John was rude and Mr. Rambo warned them to be accurate 
. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK........excuse me while I pull my hair out and run around the room....... 
But wasn't it his band, the Sex Pistols, that 30 years ago elevated disrespect into an art form? They called the Queen a moron. They used the F-word at teatime on Thames TV. He was an Antichrist. He was an anarchist. “You're awfully pedantic,” he says. “I suppose you can't help it, but don't try to pigeonhole us. It isn't like that. I'm not here preaching and never have done. This is the life I lead. If you don't like my life, I don't ask you to go along with it, or imitate it, or have anything to do with it at all. In fact, I'd rather you were completely different, because by being that you'd probably be more like me.”
At The Times's expense, Lydon is ordering for our table with expensive abandon. We - his anxious PR, his diminutive, would-be scary manager “Rambo” and I - get what he chooses. We may be eating Japanese, but I feel my head has fallen into a plate of spaghetti, the strands of which I am woefully failing to unravel. Maybe it is me, for mid-rant he accuses me of “jumping in a little too quick” and “mixing up” my thoughts. “You have a problem with this,” he advises.
Regardless, I jump in and ask him about the band Bloc Party, a clash with whom threatened to blemish a successful three-month world tour that officially ends tonight at the Hammersmith Apollo, a venue from which Lydon was once banned (though neither he, nor the Apollo, can now recall why). After that there's an extra gig in Spain, which was where Lydon was accused in July of abusing Bloc Party's vocalist, Kele Okereke. Lydon's “entourage” then, it was alleged, beat him up, although what seems to have upset Okereke was being told by one of them that, as a scion of Nigerians, he had “a black attitude”.
Times Archive, 1976: Catching up with punk
Rotten crackles with defiance: 'Don't accept the old order - get rid of it. Rod Stewart is for mums and dads. Don't have any heroes - they're all useless'
TV presenter suspended after Sex Pistols interview
EMI ends 'punk rock' group contract
Record sleeve of punk rock album ruled not indecent
Related Links
God save Johnny Rotten: he leads us to the darkness at the heart of the jungle
Sex Pistols
The sex behind the pistols
“He's talking nonsense, right. Bloc Party! What, you can't sell a record, so you need to try and tarnish my name? You mugs. I've done more for this world than that bunch of f***ing losers could ever hope to offer. All right? But for me, bands like that really wouldn't be existing. All right? Respect is Johnny Rotten's motto, but for that lot: none.”
So nothing happened? “As far as I'm aware. All I notice is a man who tries to butt into my free space and tries to get some free publicity out of it.”
And what of poor Duffy, the Welsh singer whom he reduced to tears at the Mojo Awards (he won one) when she also made the mistake of invading his territory? “I'm sorry. Any bird that jumps on my back for a photo opportunity is a friend of mine. What's the problem there? None at all. Lovely-looking thing. As barmaids go, she's definitely up there.”
I am not sure how one is supposed to approach Lydon. My approach is clearly wrong, an attempt to fact-check my version of his biography, the story of a working-class Londoner known at school, after missing almost a year's lessons while sick, as “Dummy Dum Dum”. He emerged from his meningitis-induced coma, hunchbacked, phlegmatic (hence the stagespitting), myopic (the evil-eye look) and angry. One afternoon, a sly Chelsea entrepreneur named Malcolm McLaren spotted this teenage oddity and knew that he had found the Sex Pistols' frontman.
Soon newspapers were declaring the Pistols a graver threat to the British way of life than Russia or hyperinflation. But the real danger, I suggest, was not to Britain but to the Pistols. In 1977, Jubilee Year, Rotten was wounded by neo-Nazis in a pub car park. He must have spent years in fear. This takes us from nought to umbrage in a sashimi bite. “I certainly wasn't afraid. I carried on, didn't I? Look here,” he says, pointing at something small on his forehead, “here's a scar recently from a gig. People like to occasionally have a word with me, but there ain't no fear in this boy.”
All along he thought he was being funny, music hall, taking after his Max Miller-besotted father (who died this year). But MPs thought that he should be tried, and the Home Office stamped
“moral turpitude” on his file. He escaped to Los Angeles, but it took 20 years to get his permanent resident's visa. On a DVD documentary made by the Pistols' old amanuensis Julien Temple, Lydon says he is no longer sure he wants it. But when I check, he says he is not coming back here either. “You charge me too much. I am not paying for those f****ers in Parliament. Guy Fawkes is my man.”
Seriously, though, it is the harassment he gets here that would make it impossible for him to live permanently in his place in Fulham, West London. He remembers after an early gig at the Screen on the Green in Islington being accosted in Upper Street even though he was disguised by a wig and a wedding dress. I read about the concert: a microphone stand had twanged back on him and he lost a front tooth. Except that somewhere else I also read that he'd lost it biting on a cherry stone.
“No, no, you're so wrong. You must pay attention to detail and time scale,” he scolds. These were different teeth and different decades. Our conversation never recovers from this, my lack of attention to detail and time scale. He hates people getting his history wrong, although it does not help that he adds to the misinformation. You may have read, for instance, that he has made a fortune in California as a real estate agent. That was a joke embroidered on a website. Nor has he, as he has claimed, married his long-term partner, Nora Forster (no ceremony, he promises, in the sense I would understand it). But if you thought Lydon had no reputation to lose, that is not how he sees it. He guards, in particular, his self-image as a multiculturalist who grew up in a mixed community in North London, and who helped to raise his step-grandchildren, who are half Jamaican. Hence his anger at the Bloc Party allegations.
That said, he is furious, too, with Roxanne Davis, an assistant producer on Bodog Battle of the Bands, a reality television programme on which he played judge. She is suing him for allegedly punching her in the face in a row over his hotel accommodation. When I ask about her, he sings a few bars of the hated Roxanne to calm himself down. If he had been assaulted, he would have called the police, not sued months later. He is not a woman-beater.
“If I was any of these bad things, I think it would have come out a hell of a lot more louder and I would have been a hell of a lot more prouder. Because Johnny Rotten stands for what he says. If I was those things, you would be hearing it. And I would have no problems. I would be waving those flags loud and proud.”
There is, way back near the birth of the Pistols, another legend that needs correcting: the legend of Sid Vicious, the school friend he recruited to the Pistols. Sid (John Simon Ritchie) was a heroin addict who was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, with a hunting knife. A few months later, while on bail, he was killed by an overdose. Lydon does not think that Sid did it.
“No, I do not. Not at all. Sid wouldn't hurt a butterfly. No, he loved her. And I don't care how much anybody says anything, there's some real serious wrongness in this. People love to rewrite. Oh, it's like a Norman Mailer novel, isn't it? Rewriting Sid, you know, at the Chelsea Hotel, a mad punk rocker with his carving knife stabbing his girlfriend. It's bullshit. Sending him off to Rikers [Island, a jail in New York City], and these wicked places! And he was a really sweet man really deep down inside. Bonkers, of course, but no man's coathanger.”
A good friend? “Very. Miss him. Not many days go by when I don't think well of him. I was emotionally f***ing wounded. And I've got to say, one of the very few people who came in with any kind of help was, oddly enough, Mick Jagger, who came up with a lawyer and stuff. Nobody else was paying attention. Malcolm [McLaren] was having a hissy fest of fear, which was his regular life situation, much like when he tried to go for mayor against Ken Livingstone, you know. An absolute bottler, coward.”
Although he thinks I called him one, a coward Lydon is not. His steadfastness impresses me. He has been with Nora, the daughter of a wealthy German publisher, for 31 years. Other middle-aged rock stars fire their wives at their first grey hair. Nora is 14 years Lydon's senior. Also, and at some risk to his street cred, he has consistently spoken out against drugs, particularly heroin.
He once said that the Sex Pistols had “won”. I ask what he meant. “We manage to survive the shitstem,” he says carefully crediting the coinage to a reggae song he now forgets.
More than survive, surely. He succeeded. “Success! Have I had any? Is this success? Seriously, would you call this successful? It is the harder road to have been taken.”
But he changed our view of the world. “It is not for me to tell you whether my point of view is ultimately righteous or wrongeous.”
I do wonder what Lydon, who got six O and two A levels, would have done with a proper education. In 90 minutes he talks confidently of Shakespeare's “Lincolnshire” accent, Irish “self-deprivation” (self-deprecation) and the fauna of Sierra Leone when he means Sri Lanka (or vice versa). When I gently check if he is referencing David or Dickie Attenborough, he turns nasty.
“You're playing games. There you are. Caught you! Gotcha!” He had lost me, I promise. “I'm going lose you very quickly. I've been nice enough to come here and talk to you, don't you f***ing ever try and mug me off.”
“John, John, John,” says Rambo and they walk out, but only for a cigarette break. When he returns he is decent enough to apologise. He cannot expect others to follow his thinking. “You can call me Rick O'Shea, the mad Irishman bouncing inside four enclosed walls. Ricochet. Without those four enclosed walls this is all utterly pointless. You need the fencing to really be creative.”
What are his walls? “Usually other human beings. Hence unity. So I work well in bands.”
“Shall we wrap this up, John?” asks Rambo. “And when banned!” Lydon quips on before, in a sinister, Baby Jane voice, he says: “Johnny got to go now.”
I ask for the bill. Rambo shoulders his way towards me. “Don't f*** us over. OK? Don't. We don't like it.” Frankly, the bill is scarier.
You have to smile. Respect? Despite his boss's fixation, this lot know so little about it that they don't even realise they tore it down in 1977 and nobody ever put Humpty together again. Lydon was indeed a revolutionary, but he was an accidental one, the product of a glorious coincidence of casting, talent and timing. Yet, I realise, for this street urchin surviving would have been victory enough. The rest may not even be a bonus.
The Sex Pistols play the Hammersmith Apollo tonight. The Sex Pistols: There'll Always Be an England DVD is out now
Pistols from dawn: three decades of anarchy
Nov 6, 1975 Sex Pistols play their first live show with John Lydon at St Martin's College of Art in London.
Nov 26, 1976 Debut single Anarchy in the UK released on EMI, but the label drops the band and withdraws the single two months later. The Pistols keep their £40,000 advance.
Dec 1, 1976 The band earn overnight infamy after a live interview packed with four- letter words on Bill Grundy's teatime London news show, Today. A Daily Mirror headline reads: “The Filth and the Fury”.
June 7, 1977 Mocking the Silver Jubilee with their new single, God Save the Queen the Pistols play on a Thames riverboat. Police board the boat and arrest 11 people.
Oct 28, 1977 The album Never Mind the Bollocks is released, prompting a court case for obscenity, successfully defended by the playwright and barrister John Mortimer.
Jan 14, 1978 The band end their first US tour in San Francisco, then split acrimoniously.
Feb 2, 1979 The former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious dies of a heroin overdose in New York while awaiting trial for the murder of Nancy Spungen.
Mar 18, 1996 The Pistols announce the Filthy Lucre Tour, a reunion featuring all four original members: Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock.
Feb 24, 2005 Refusing to attend their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, the Pistols condemn the ceremony as a “piss stain”.
STEPHEN DALTON
[/b]
Okay. Great interview given by John. What I take offense to though is once again a member of the media is baiting John and trying to make it look like HE and Mr. Rambo have the attitude problem. The writer states that it all started to go bad when he mentioned how John lost his tooth. The writer has two different incidents that took place nearly 25 years apart confused. And he is galled that John might think he didn't do his homework due to that. WELL DUH
. The reporter's attitude about that leads me to conclude that he probably brought up that subject to John in a condecending "you have told two different versions of this" type way. Well NO WONDER John became upset, wouldn't YOU? OOOOOOO it just irritates me from my frizzy head of hair down to my last toenail when reporters do that then whine that John was rude and Mr. Rambo warned them to be accurate . EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK........excuse me while I pull my hair out and run around the room.......