"I'm going to interview Johnny Rotten," I said
"Oh," He smiled. "That will be fun."
"No". I said. "It won't."
"Really?" He said. "I always thought it was an act he put on rather than a character defect."
"That's not an either/or proposition," I should have said. As it was, I opted for character defect.
"Well." he said, "I saw him come through here once on his way to AMerica. He was traveling with his mother. I thought it was rather sweet."
According to the most recent surverys, 38.6 percent of the people who read this magazing are hosebags who write letters to the editor that say shit like, "Why don't you guys live up to the name of your magazing and use that space for a real musician like Phil Lesh/Rick Wakeman/Al Dimeola?" Under normal circumstances, I pay no attention to hosebags, don't even open their letters because I can smell hosebag attitude right through the envelope. but this article is not normal circumstances. This article is Johnny Rotten. And this one time, I gotta sympathize with you 38.6 percent hosebags: I also get unglued when I'm reminded that this Rotten dude exists on the same planet. So go ahead and send your droooling, stupid letters and know that I ache for you as I ache for King canute commanding the tide to roll back.
'Cause, see, the difference between you hosebags and myself is that you hosebags think Rotten shouldn't be in the magazine 'cause he has no talent. I say he shouldn't be in the magazine because whn I see his name in print, I am reminded that on five of the seven occasions when I met him since 1977, he came within a hair of givin me a nervous breakdown.... Yea, yea, I know : Yough job I have, flying around the world interviewing rich and famous people. But the next two years are gonna be tough on me and on all you hosebags. The Sex Pistols are coming back. A documdrama (apparently) centered on Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen is due out. It's direted by Alex Cox, who did "Repo Man", the best fictional treatment of punk on film ever. "The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle", the Sex Pistols' own sort of autobiographical movie, is finally going to get released in the States. And tehre are a number of books in the workds, not the least of which I'm hoping will be on my own "Blowin' Chunks: Punk Passage and Beyond" (Doubleday/Dolphin), a skewed social history of punk in which the Pistols figure heavily. And then there is the matter ROtten's own new "Album" ("Casette" in cassette, "Single" in single), which to universal surprise is listernable and interesting and - if his reputation with radio programmers doesn't sink him again - somewhat commercial.
Let us furthermore recall why the guy is important aesthetically and historically: He changed singing. No one sounded like him before him, and thousands have tried to sound like him since him. No band has ever declared itself to the world with such force and rage as when Johnny ROtten announced he was the anti-Christ on the Sex Pistols' first single, "Anarchy in the U.K.". No band did more to spawn the still-flourishing punk subculture than the Sex Pistols. Although it never broke the Billboard Hot 100 and radio programmers still loathe it, "Never Mind the Bollocks" remains one of the most influential if you count punk influence in other art forms.
And let me recall last summer, when I met Rotten in a Los Angelos saloon to get some information for my book. In two hours, the guy drinks ten screwdrivers, several of which are doubles, and. having asked every question I can think of, I figure I better get him home before he pulls his usual Jekyll and Hyde. He, however, wants sushi.
"I answered all your questions." he snarls.
Maybe food will sober him up, I'm figuring as I drive to Sushi on Sunset, where he eats about two grams of fish and pours down six or seven twenty-one-ounce Sapporos, growing ever more belligerent over a question I'd asked hours before. See, certain types of punks are homophobic and, like all Americans, they love to believe their heroes are homosexuals. I asked Rotten about certain rumors concerning him, which he denied (he's had a girlfriend for years), saying what difference did it make anyway? Fair enough, but as he gets drunker, he wants to deny it some more, getting increasingly irritated with me for asking in the first place, and flirting with all these women at the sushi bar to show how heterosexual he is. And he's getting louder and louder, really stinking out the joint for anyone interested in eating, and he 's ordering numerous Sapporos for all the women he's trying to flirt with on my tab. I'm tellin' ya, I was hoping for botulism in my tuna roll, or maybe in his tuna roll. Course, the bastard wouldn't have eaten it anyway.
So finally he stands on the bar and announces - nay, screams - to the entire restaurant: "NO ONE EVER SUCK THEIR WILLIE UP MY BUM!!!"
Then he totters off to take a leak. This woman he's been putting the moves on - she's got dyed -black spikey hair and is wearing a Rodeo Drive designer punk outfit in black and Day-Glo pink and has a skeleton eatting - leans over and asks, "Who is that guy?"
"John Lydon." I say
"Who's that?" she askss.
"Johnny Rotten."
"Who's that?"
"He sang for the Sex pistols... you never heard of the Sex Pistols?"
"No,"
Young people today, they got no respect for tradition. They don't deserve to know who this JOhn LYdon/Johnny ROtten of the Sex Pistols/PiL is. Fuck 'em. On the other hand, I want lots of young people to give me their money when my book comes out, so I'll lay out a portion of my stuff.
First of all, Johnny Rotten is one of the least informative interviews this side of politics. Interviewers tend not to notice they are getting nothing, because he is such a difficult personality that they are overly grateful or overly resentful of any small tidbit he tosses their way. I plead guilty on both counts.
His first impulse is not to reveal but to calculate how much to reveal and/or provoke. He almost never volunteers information if you bring up a general subject in hopes that he'll ramble for awhile and drop a few factoids on you. He rarely tells anecdotes, mostly just throws thunder-bolts of judgement.
One of the tricks of interviewing is to shut up for a moment and let the interviewee rush to fill up the silence. Try it sometime : Conversation abhors a vacuum, and people will say anything to fill up those uncomfortable pauses. Rotten is the only person I ever interviewed (excluding a couple of lawyers) who is smart and sadistic enough not to fill up those silences. He loves to look haughty as I squirm and stutter to forumulate the next question out of the absolute minimum of information he has revealed.
There is also the problem of what to do with one's eyes when talking to Rotten. To return his glare is to be blasted with two laser beams of contempt; it is to know you are in the presence of someone who is quite sure you are ridiculous. If you look elsewhere on his face, you are confronted with massive, deep, red, poisonous zits, the sort you could squeeze until you cry and still never pop the rot infection. his scalp is piled with hairballs so vile they would get any stray dog euthanized immediately as a public health hazard. And his body, these days, it bloated.
The biggest problem, however, is figuring out when he is telling the truth. The first insight I had into the guy's character came in 1977 when I was interviewing Sid Vicious for a cover story on the Pistols. Vicious had attended Kingsbury College (a "colege of further education" which is the equivalent of American high school), and recalled that John had once skipped school and returned with the excuse that he had piles to long they were hanging out his pants and he had to cut them off with a razor. The teachers had believe him, even sent him flowers. Rotten confirmed the story in 1977 (describibng himself as na "atrocious liar") and again in 1986. Like any good politician, he learned early that the most outrageously absurd lie, ir propounded with enough emotional force, will be believed. At the same time, his life has been so strange that you cannot dismiss anything out of hand. one of the early stories about ROtten was that he once had a job as a rat killer in a cesspool. To the extent the story has been repeated, it has been assumed to be part of the Sex Pistols' hype, a lie calculated to build their legend. But he really was a rat killer in a cesspool. (158)
"He used to work with me in the crane when he was young," says John Lydon, Sr. "He used to spend his holidays as my banksman. We were digging out cesspits and they were full of rats. When I would chuck out the dragline, the rats used to grab the rope and climb it back toward me. We had an gent there sometimes and he used to shoot them. But John would chuck them off with an ax."
The elder Lydon appears to be a roubustly healthy man of fifty-four, his complexion ruddy and weathered by years of working the oil rigs in the North Sea. Margarite Byrne, Mr. Lydon's girlfriend and widow of his first cousin, divides her attention between the interview and the English version of "The Dating Game" on the living room telly. I tell him the story of John's piles.
"I didn't know this, you see," he says. "Even if it was true, he wouldn't tell me, because I would bring him back to school and sort it out.
'Cause if the master called him a liar in front of me, I'd smack him in the mouth."
You didn't actually smack the schoolmaster in the mouth, did you?
"But I would have. 'Cause I've been in pubs with John and I've had me jacket off more than once. ALl the time. I used to sort out all the problems in the pub. Whenever there was a row, I was the first one in it. Well, you know Irish people. They have a temper."
You would fight over John in the pubs?
"Regualr it used to happen. In the pub across the street. We used to go there and you'd have girls come in and a girl would say 'Hallo, Johnny, darling, can we have your autograph?' And then her boyfriend would call him a wanker. Then the punch-up started. I've had all me knuckles broken fighting there. John will tell you that himself. I've had three fights in one night."
Over John?
"Yeah, it's jealousy, isn't it? If anybody is famous at all, some girl wants to kiss him. Expecially in the pub. That's where it all starts. When he comes home, we go to the pub. If there's a problem, we sort it out between us. We just have a go. Win or lose, what do you do? That's what life is all about, isn't it?"
Seems like it would make life difficult.
"No, not really. I'm hot-tempered, you see. I drive a heavy goods lorry in the city, and when you drive a truck down a narrow street, everybody is going like this to each other." Mr. Lydon makes what I always interpreted to be a "V" for victory sign but which means "up yours" in London. "And that's it, then. I have sort-outs in the streets every day. Every day I have a punch-up. Well, not every day. Most days I have a punch-up."
Mr. Lydon tells a long story about throttling another lorry driver who sneaked in fron of him at a construction site and ended up bleeding in the gutter. ("I don't see why I should let him slip me the mickey"). Sheba, the family dog, a muscular cross of Labrador and Doverman, grows restless and Mergarite shoos her from the room.
"The dog has one fault," says Mr. Lydon. "If we take her out, she'll be walking along the green, calm as can be, and for no reason out of the blue she'll chomp on someone. All of a sudden she's just got someone in her teeth, and she's got some teeth. Like a tiger. We just have her to keep the blacks away. Something about them that dogs don't like. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the color of the skin."
The Lydons live in a two-story flat - the same in which Johnny grew up - in a housing estate (project) in the Finsbury Park section of London, a working-class Irish neighborhood that has in recent years become racially mixed. Of the four Lydon sons, two have been seriously hurt in fights, according to their father, with blacks.
"Jimmy was almost as famous as Johnny," says Mr. Lydon of his second eldest, standing proudly next to his pretty young wife and baby in a snapshot. "He had his own band, the 4" Be 2", you know. But he married a school-teacher and she put the block on it. He's quite content now, painting and decorating."
One of Jimmy's first projects was his living room, which he redecorated like a pub in the green and gold colors of Ireland. Various aspects of his handiwork are displayed in the photographs, but it is hard to keep from looking at his face. His right eye socket is a grotesque mass of red scar tissue.
"He lost his eye about five years ago. He was at a stag party on a Frieday night. He came out of the pub carrying a wedding present at half past three in the morning. When he got to the corner he met nine darkies. They said, 'What have you got in the bag?' He said, 'Aw, go away.' So they jumped him. Tswo of them picked up bottles and they both got him in the eye. Cut the eye clean out of his head. You've seen guys fight, but you've never seen anyone who could fight like Jimmy. Since he lost his eye, he's terrific. He's got the method, and he never loses, not now. If somebody cut your eye yout, they'd never do it again to you, you'd make sure of that, wouldn't you?"
Bobby, the third eldest (the youngest, Martin, works for John as a roadie), has a semicircular, almost glowing red scar from just below his right earlobe to the corner of his mouth.
"It was August a year, a year last August. He was coming in at midnight and there was two colored guys playing their radio down there. And he sleeps in the front room, over the front door, and he said, 'Go away, it's a bit late to be shouting outside the door.' One went inside and the other said, 'What did you say, man?' Bobby said, 'You heard me. Piss off.' And as he turned around, the colord guy stuck a Stanely knife in his neck. Just nipped the jugular. WHen he come in, his head was hanging off him. You could see into his neck. We almost lost him, he lost so much blood. He's very lucky. Tough to control him afterward because he wanted to get the guys. He couldnt get the bloke who did it, because he's inside. Got three years. But Bobby got five of his mates. Caught them at the chip shop and gave them a good hiding."
Born in Galway, Ireland, Mr. Lydon moved to Scotland on his own at the age of fourteen, supporting himself on the pipelines and eventually working his way down to London. He met his wife there, the former Eileen Barry of Cork, at an Irish dance club.
"She was so quiet. It was funny: My son has a wife and sh'e exactly the same as mine is, Jimmy's wife is. And all she lives for is the baby and him. Nothing else in the world. And my wife was exactly the same. She idolized the children all the time. Except church. She was a really good Catholic. If there was a church that said mass twice a day, she'd make you go twice a day. She was a great Catholic. And as the lads grew up, they could never do anything wrong in her eyes. Anything. She backed Johnny all the way."
It was up to you to whack him when he got out of line?
"She'd never let you hit him. No way. You'd say, 'I'm going to give you a smack on the ear', and she wouldn't let you touch him, no way. She'd say, 'Go away with your Irish temper and elave the lad al one.' They got on very well together, all the kids. But Johnny was more attacked to her than anybody. It was always mum and John. She was so calm, she would sit down and talk to him for hours and hours. He wouldn't go nowhere without telling her. He woudln't go outside the door without telling her where he was going. Maybe it was the meningitis that he got to depend on her so much.
"Johnny was eight years old when he had meningitis, you know. And he was in the hospital for months, I'd say three months. It's water on the brain, meningitis, isn't it? He kept getting pain in the back of his head. He used to have these lumbar punctures, you know, big needles into the spine, and they would draw the fluid. I used to have to hold him down on the bed when they gave him the lumbar. He wouldn't let them give the lumbar punctures unless I was there. And he forgot everything in the hospital that he had learned in school. Lost his memory completely, couldn't remember who he was. And she taught him everything again herself. She was a genius at math, you know. You can have a calculator and she could do the problem in her head, and she could beat you to the answer. I'll be damned if I know where she learned it, but she could beat accountants with A-levels in mathematics."
When Johnny returned home, he lived mostly an indoors existence, reading books and listening to music alone in his room. There is a football (soccor) pitch right outside their back door, but even when he could be coaxed onto the field, he would refuse to kick the ball, just sort of waft his foot at it if it rolled directly to him. He was equally resistant to his formal education, getting expelled from Catholic school at the age of fourteen.
"It was a silly old master there, kept dictating to him", says Mr. Lydon. "JOhnny had a bit of an accident, twisted his ankle one day. I took him up to casualty and they gave him a little card saying he'd been there. The master said he didn't want to hear any bloody excuses, didn't want to see it, it was all lies. They almost had a punch-up, you know what I mean, and he got expelled over it.
"Johnny was standing there with a sprained ankle and a card from the hospital and the master wouldn't believe him?
"More or less called Johnny a lyin' b, and he got expelled."
Despite Mrs. Lydon prevailling on the Bishop of London to pay a surprise visit one SUnday morning ("I felt bad about it because you can't let the Bishop see you with a hangover, can you?") and promise to reinstate the lad, John transferred to Kingsbury College and fellow student Sid Vicious was soon a regular visitor to the Lydon home.
"My wife used to feed him here. She thought as much of Sid as she did of John, and Sid had never had nothing, really. I'd come home and if I'd had a few drinks, I'd say, 'Who's that wanker?' And she'd say, 'That's Johnny's friend. Leave off.' And she'd be pushing me out the door. I used to be a bit wild, you know. Martin, I'd pick him up and sling him under me arm. But she wouldn't let you do that. Even a colored person. If a colored person passed the door and he was hungry, she'd bring him in and give him a meal. She was that type. Me, I'd shoot him. The difference in people, it's unbelieable, isn't it?"
John and Sid went on to make history, causing hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic with the Sex Pistols, John getting thrown out of the band for being an asshole at the end of their brief American tour, Sid more or less murdering his girlfriend and committing suicide. The biggest blow to John, however, came in the fall of 1978, just after a trip to America with his mother to discuss plans for a solo career.
"She thought she had a tummyache from all the parties and food and drink. They couldn't find anything at the hospital, but she got bad and they opened her up and they discovered she had malignant cancer. He took it really bad. Because he was really attacked to her, you know. He adored his mother. Really. From the meningitis. He set there all the time with her, day and night he set in the chait. The way he felt at the time was he thought it was all his problems that was causing this to her, his punk rock. But it wasn't. Cancer is a disease, and there's nothing you can do. We talked to four experts and they all said not even a miracle could cure her. He wouldn't beleive the doctors couldn't do anything. I don't think he's trusted them since."
Wasn't he also mad at the priest?
"He was alcoholic. Before she died, she wanted to be anointed, and he was dead drunk at four o'clock in the afternoon. We'd been calling him all morning.
Someone who goes to church every Sunday, and you can't get the priest to come when she's dying. She'd already been anointed four times because they expected her to die. They were giving her so many injections in trying to keep her alive that they were killing her. It seems like you could save people from suffering some of that agony and misery, but they won't let you."
Sheba the dog trots back into the living room looking for a little affection and Mr. Lydon gives her a pat on the head. "Only one bad habit out dog has," he says. "You mention the word black and she'll smack up against the window, trying to attack whoever's out there. She's prejudiced. She doesn't like colord people."
Johnny ROtten's solo career, it seems to me, can be characterized as a lot of trashing around looking for someone to blame for his pain. It has often been musically adventurous, but not very listenable unless you are into narcissism, despair, and scapegoating. Unlike his work with the Pistols, there is little funny about it. In his personal life, he has left many of his friends behind, angery and embittered and full of accusations that he lies. He seems more comfortable holding on to his enemies, like the Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren, always the mongoose to John's cobra, and recently John's victim in a court suit in which he and surviving Pistols and Sid Vicious' mom won complete control of Glitterbest, McLaren's management company, and Matrixbest, McLaren's movie company. After a disastrous first album for Elektra in 1984 (a half-million-dollar advance and thirty thousand copies sold) and an equally disastrous tour, Rotten is again selling albums with "Album" and is going to assemble yet another version of his ever-shifting band, Public Image, Ltd., for a tour.
"I honestly didn't think this album would be commercial in any way," he says, sitting behind the desk of some absent executive at Virgin Records in London. "I thought it would be perceived as absolutely preposterous for me to delve into that kind of music, particularly using those guitars. I thought it would drive people against me, but it's done the exact opposite."
The first time I heard it, I thought you'd brought in Eddie Van Halen for solos.
"He couldn't play that good. He'd have beaten it to death. Hah, hah, hah. I wanted to make a jolly good rock album, and that appeared to be the best way. I've worked with [producer] Bill Laswell before and we're a good team."
It's getting quite a bit of play in dance clubs, especially the single "Rise". When I heard the chorus - "May the road rise with you" - my first thought was, what's thig uy doing in a good mood?
"Hah, hah, hah. I deserve to be. Hah, hah, hah. What a thing to say to me: 'You have no right to be happy. It's against all my preconceptions.' "
It is against all my preconceptions. Preconceptions based on getting verbally eviscerated, physically threatened, thoroughly embarassed in previous meetings, recently hearing that you hit a friend of mine over the head with a beer can and shot blanks from a submachine gun at bystanders on the set of the video for "Rise" and -
"Got any cigarettes?" Rotten burps. "No? I'll go get some." Upon his return, I tell him I talked with his father. "What lies did he tell you? Did he get out the family snapshots?"
Some.
"My God. Was he currently in jail, or just getting out, or what?"
No. BUt all his stories were about giving someone a good hiding. He seemed proud of it.
"I know."
I got this vision of you as a small child in a house like that.
"Hah, hah, hah."
Obviously you know what I'm getting at.
"Yes. No comment. Hah, hah, hah. I definetely decided that was not going to be my life-style."
Another thing he talked about was the blacks who live in the estates.
"Oh, the race-hate nonsense. I can't stand that. Most of the working-class people here have that problem. It seems to be the only thing that unites them, their hatred for eachother. It's outrageous. If it isn't against blacks, its against people who live on the other side of the Thames, or Northerners and Southerners. It's just on and on and on. I am my own person. I woudln't allow any of that nonsence to infiltrate my sensible brain, thank you."
A small child doesn't have a choice about that.
"It does, you know. I cannot be easily swayed. I've always felt what was right and what was wrong."
From the beginning you felt your father was wrong about black people? Or was there a single incident that turned your mind around?
"I don't think violence is the answer to anything." Rotten says but doesn't answer. "Never have, never will."
Two of your brothers were carved up by blacks.
"More coincidence than anything else. They're such raving loonies, the lot of them. They don't mind going out and scrapping with anybody or anything. I'd rather not talk about it. It depressses me, as it happens."
I found it kind of depresssing, sitting there.
"I know - wondering when someone is gonig to turn on you."
I chyange the subject to his childhood meningitis.
"I blame it on the pork chops. I haven't eaten pork since. I was in a coma for a long time. I don't remember too much about it."
Your father held you down while you had your spinal shots?
"Yeah, that was bad. Every fucking six hours. That was torture. You can't imagine that thing."
Every six hours for how many days?
Every six hours for six months you got a hypodermic needle up your spine?
"Yeah. I nearly died."
Your father said that you'd forgotten everything you'd learned in school.
"THat's true. I had to start all over again."
Your mother taught you your schooling?
"No, I taught myself. I'm self-taught."
At this point, Rotten whispers something to himself which I don't catch during the actual interview. Two weeks later, I play the tape back twelve times and Rotten is distinctly saying, "Don't you listen! I'm bored! Don't you listen!" For this I see threee possible explanations. (1) He is possessed by Satan, who is not a fan of psychoanalysis; (2) he is commanding himself not to listen ebcause questions about his mom are painful; and (3) he thinks I don't listen and finds the entire interview a snore. In any case, his manager, perhaps by extrasensory perception, seems to pick up on Explanation #3 and interrupts with a suggestion that we finish, which I do by asking if he's seen his family lately.
"They're doing all right. They're still fighting."
IT's a hell of a way to get through life.
"You can't change them. They won't have it. They're self-righteous about it."
What I'm trying to figure out is why you're different.
"I can fight if I"m pushed into it. I've had very good training."
Yeah, but your face is not a mass of scar tissue.
"And it won't be."
-Charles M. Young
-Printed without permission by annonomous because I have no regaurd for copyright laws
