John Lydon aka ‘Johnny Rotten’ chats The Sex Pistols, PiL, music, life and his Derry connection
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00:00My father's from a town called Choom, which is in Galway, just outside of Galway City,
00:07and my mother's side come from Gallyvoe, which is in Cork.
00:13Yeah, yeah. Your mother was a barry, I believe?
00:18A what? A barry?
00:19A barry, yeah. A very famous court name.
00:25Yeah. It's funny, the family tree. Some people suggest we come from Viking stock and others,
00:37you know, put it down to, well, all manner of things. I'm not a flag waver as such.
00:44Yeah.
00:46What I try to do is to take the best of all of these cultural influences and hopefully
00:52absorb them in a proper way. And that can be quite difficult.
00:58You know, Irish parents, when I was young in England, of course, the English kids would think
01:04you were Irish. And it'd be, this is all too confusing. And what we used to do as kids in
01:11that neighborhood, because there was a lot of Jamaicans, there were actually Germans and
01:17Italians who came over after World War Two. So it was very varied. And of course, lots of English,
01:25was that we just called ourselves Arsenal Land.
01:29Yeah.
01:30And yeah, because that was the football ground around the corner. And that solved all those
01:36issues where you'd be judged by the quality of your own honesty and integrity rather than
01:42anything else.
01:43Yeah, yeah. So it was that.
01:46Poverty can be a uniting thing. It can also cause great division. But in our case,
01:52it was wonderful growing up Arsenal.
01:54Yeah. And do you still follow them?
01:59Well, it's more like ballet these days, isn't it? From the slippers they wear onwards.
02:05And becoming more and more disassociated and disenfranchised from it, actually.
02:11It's damn too expensive. And I just feel, I feel guilty about going. I'm still a season
02:18ticket holder, but I give the tickets to my brother's kids.
02:24They live nearby. So it's traditional. I've always wanted to be a writer, an avid reader
02:32all my life. I love to learn. I've got a curious nature. And I study things and I come to
02:40resolutions in my mind. And all of that played really excellently into being the front man
02:46and songwriter of the Sex Pistols. It just, I knew what was going on and I said so. And
02:54bingo, a hell of a lot of people agreed with me.
02:59But could you have anticipated the force that it had, the sort of the explosive?
03:06No, no, no. As a band, we had no real prospects of any of this catching on.
03:15You know, it just it became overwhelming. And I got to say to the negativity of the media
03:24actually played into our hands. They did a marvellous job on us and it just guaranteed
03:31intrigue and interest. And I learned from that day on that there's no such thing as
03:37a bad headline. It's a headline. I was going to ask you about rise. It kind
03:41of came from, that was a direct lift from Ghaonaire in Beoghairleath. You got that from
03:49the Irish proverb. Oh, no. Yes. No, it's an old saying.
03:55Yeah, yeah.
03:58You know, Irish folk used all the time, you know, time to leave the pub, made a roll of
04:03rice with you. That's part of growing up. That's everyday language.
04:11Yeah. Did you get that from your ma or was that from just Irish?
04:15Yeah, yeah. Of course. And just, you know,
04:18frequenting the pubs at a very early age, too. You'd be hearing plenty of it.
04:25I don't know if I had any peers. I was oblivious to trying to sound or be like anybody else. I was
04:33taking everything from personal experience and still am to this day. That's my consistent theme
04:40by which I operate. There's plenty of music I love and adore, but I wouldn't say I sounded
04:46anything like it. One of my favorite records of all time is Captain Beefheart's trout mask
04:54replica. I don't think anybody can sound like that.
04:57No, fantastic record.
05:00It's a record, though, that makes many people very, very angry. Yet me, I can't go through
05:09with it without dying of laughter and feeling the joy in what they're doing.
05:16They're quite literally taking classic themes and mucking them up. And you learn so much,
05:21it lets your mind flow inside that celebration of life. You know, it's a start of a song,
05:30you know. Oh, my gosh. And it just wanders off into the most unexpected areas.
05:38And it's a record I can't get familiar with. I can't sit down and say,
05:42oh, yes, I know what's happening next. It's a total surprise every time you put it on.
05:48Yeah, but after a certain period, the punk movement had kind of played its way into
05:54a dead end, a bit of a corner. Yeah, there was too much corporate in many of the bands,
06:02and very quickly jumping into a very, very traditional punk outfit look, which annoyed
06:11the hell out of me. It's like, you know, I'm not singing and writing about my life
06:18here to fit into a uniform way of thinking. Yeah. But everything is so neatly packaged,
06:27and that then clearly defines you. How small minded can you be? Yeah. You grew up in the
06:32melting pot of North London. You're listening to a lot of Caribbean music, a lot of dub reggae and
06:38stuff. Yeah, well, before then, my early childhood was scat. A lot of traditional Irish.
06:48Scat lights and punks. A lot of pop music. Dusty Springfield pops into my mind for
06:55good reasons. A lot of Cypriot, because there was a big Cypriot culture, a lot of Greek and a lot of
07:02Turk, and a lot of British pop. I love the mod movement, but even before that, I loved rock and
07:12roll. My dad was very, like, very close to being a teddy boy. Right. And so all those influences
07:22from Sweet Gene Vincent onwards are an integral part of me. Yeah, yeah. What Irish stuff?
07:30I've been quoted, misquoted as not liking rock and roll. No, I love rock and roll. I just don't
07:39want to imitate it. You understand? It's been done at that time, and it's specific to a mood
07:47and a method of operating as a youth in them times. Yeah. But it's got to advance. Everything
07:56must advance, because that's where learning comes in. The more you learn, the more different you
08:04become. And that's absolutely essential. Otherwise, you just might as well not exist.
08:11Yeah. Well, did your mother and father have Dubliners records, Clonte Brothers records,
08:18stuff like that? Everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that would be mixed in with the kinks.
08:23Yeah. One of my all-time favourite records, he really got me. Yeah. So it would be a three for
08:32all. Lots of Calypso, lots of Scar, lots of everything. Everything. You can't really carry
08:41off what you did without being very serious and almost taking it as a... Because I mean it. Yeah,
08:46that's what I mean. I absolutely mean it. Every single word has been well thought and well placed.
08:54It absolutely summarises my emotions at that exact period of time when I wrote it. And I
09:03frame myself in those different scenarios that way. On top of that, also because I got really
09:10bad eyesight from meningitis when I was young, which put me in a coma. It took me four years
09:18to bring my memories back, but my eyesight never recovered fully. So for me, it takes a long time
09:25to focus and that gets misinterpreted into the rotten stare. Public image limited. Was it a relief
09:34to sort of be able to pour all those other influences into that? To show that, you know,
09:41yeah, I come from a very, very musical background. And so it was quite natural for me
09:48to want to bring in all these other elements. And luckily, when I formed Pill, I found a bunch of
09:56really good friends. I'd known them all for a long while, except the drummer from Canada,
10:02Jim Walker. But then we had like five or six different drummers. Now I come to think of it.
10:07But yes, it was to go forth and expand. The Pistols did what we did, and that was great.
10:15But next level, please. Otherwise, it would be, as I said at the time, very much like the Rolling
10:23Stones had become. But they were just doing the same songs really on each and every album.
10:30You worked with Barnes and Daly in Leftfield with the Open Up vocal, and it was the biggest
10:42record on that, or the biggest hit on that brilliant record. But did you find something
10:47that there was almost like a kindred spirit about that whole underground electronic music?
10:54Well, yes, of course. It's dances in my background. From Pamela to Disco,
11:03these are all things that I grew up with as much as anything else. They are great lads,
11:08and they're experimenting off it. You have to work with the dancers, but they've got other
11:15ideas flirting in it. There's alien textures, should we say, of normal thinking.
11:24Have you ever been up in the Derry Donegal direction during your travels?
11:30Yeah, of course. I've got brothers outside of Derry. Yeah, he lives there.
11:38I think they run a caravan site at the moment. Or should I not give that information out?
11:45Whereabouts is that? Is it Benone now?
11:48I don't know. He keeps asking me to go out there and visit. I played in London Derry with Phil.
11:57That was a very, very great gig. A good meeting of the minds. You hear all the stories and all the
12:06fears and phobias, and not being able to get gigs in Ireland for so long, both North and South,
12:13because the promoters just wouldn't respond properly.
12:18I turned up at one of my talk shows just on my own. I turned up at one,
12:26it was fucking wonderful to say hello to him. Did you like their stuff?
12:34Some of it, but his voice kind of irritated me at that. I don't know, it was a little too perfect
12:42voice for me at that time. I wasn't ready for it, but he's a wonderful human being. I don't have to
12:48like the music of people to like people. Yeah, he was a champion singer in Derry. You'd probably be
12:58familiar from Cork and Galway, but they have Feshine, or Feshes, which are competitions in
13:05Irish. Yeah, yeah. That might be my foyer wall, that he sounded well-trained.
13:15I couldn't focus on the content. I was just irritated by the
13:19well-issued beauty of it. What brought your mother and father to London?
13:27Poverty and the Catholic Church being so overwhelmingly oppressive.
13:36Both of them grew up as Gaelic speakers, obviously from entire different worlds, Galway and Cork,
13:43but they had to learn English very quick, because that's what the school teachers insisted on, and
13:51it was beaten into them, and the sheer cruelty of it, and the little bits and snippets they tell me
13:57about their childhood, it was frightening. Do you have any Irish yourself? Do you speak Irish?
14:02No. No? No. Both mum and dad, you spoke different games, would not teach me not one word.