'My granddad was a fisherman': John Lydon on Trump, MacGowan, and fishing in East Cork
John Lydon will do a spoken word tour of Ireland, and is also coming with PiL to perform in Cork and Dublin. Picture: Paul Heartfield
John Lydon never sits still. He turned 69 in January, but there’s no time to slow down. His band Public Image Ltd (PiL) is touring its eleventh studio album, , across Europe this year. Later, in autumn, Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, will take his spoken word show to theatres across Ireland and the UK for three months. He also paints. And the man who has homes in Malibu, California and London, loves to swim.
“The way I get myself fit and healthy is swimming every morning, rain, snow, whatever,” says Lydon. “Out there, testicle shrinkage, the lot. You gotta get the lungs going, and there's nothing better than a near-drowning experience to get your lungs working.”
Lydon has also acted in his day. In 1983, he starred alongside Harvey Keitel in a crime thriller. “I thought it was acting,” he confirms. “I'm not going to be pretentious about that one – I feel I was thrown in at the deep end. Me and my youthful arrogance – ‘I can play this tortured soul easily.’ The best scene in it was when he was stuffing my head into an oven to gas me. ‘Ah, at last, Johnny, you're doing some acting there.’
“When I did that scene at the time, it reminded me of Sid [Vicious]. To get his hair to stand up like Dave Bowie, he would go backwards into the oven. Those were gas ovens so many is the time he set fire to his fringe. That was my mate – that’s the Sid I knew. We never thought of hair dryers. We were young louts looking around for what was available. It showed great improvisation. Working class at work.”
Sid Vicious joined Lydon in the Sex Pistols in 1977, when the punk band, to borrow an expression from Lydon, had declared war on England without meaning to. The Sex Pistols’ antics unleashed a wave of moral panic in the UK. Lydon, the band’s lead singer and lyricist, was memorably described as “the biggest threat to our youth since Hitler”.
The band broke up in January 1978, while touring in the United States. Lydon founded PiL a few months later.
Shane MacGowan, along with Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol, was one of the Sex Pistols’ fans who carved out successful careers in music. Lydon implies that MacGowan played the Irish card when it came time to create The Pogues in 1982.
“Shane was a great friend originally. He was one of the earliest Pistol fans. He always turned up with a Union Jack shirt, and talked like a proper Londoner. Then suddenly he became this, ah, you know, ‘Brrhhhh’, as if he’d been sucking on a fucking flute all morning,” he says, adopting a stage-Irish accent while playing an air flute.
He adds: “But is one of my all-time favourite records. Love Shane to death. Didn't like to see his demise because of him getting into drugs. He had a collection of people around him that was intolerably corrupt. I've warned about this. I call it ‘stupid rock deaths’ – how famous people can be so isolated. It's wicked, and they're up on the chopping block as professional victims.”
Lydon, like MacGowan, is the son of Irish immigrant parents. He grew up in north London, close to Arsenal football club. As a teenager, he ran with Arsenal’s hooligan firm. His dad, Jimmy, came from Tuam, Co Galway; his mother, Eileen Barry, was from Carrigrohane, outside Cork city. Growing up, Lydon spent summers holidaying in Ireland, mostly around Garryvoe in east Cork.
“I know Garryvoe, Inch and Ballycotton and all those places well. What a beautiful, crazy shoreline, untamed and ferocious. My granddad was a fisherman. He took me out to catch mackerel in a rowboat. It was thrilling. That's how I developed my taste for mackerel, my favourite fish in the world – that fried up, it's so good.
“I've only once seen a whale, which was in that bay. ‘One day as I went down to Youghal by the sea … O never O never O never again/If I live to a hundred or a hundred and ten,” he says, breaking into Cork classic . "That's what I love about Ireland – every town has a song. It’s a magnificent place but tough for a kid with a London street gang accent to fit in with the locals.”
Lydon’s Irish roots enable him to travel with an Irish passport. He also has American citizenship. He voted for Donald Trump in the last election. “I’m fed up with that left-wing extremism,” he says. “We all didn't get indoctrinated in universities. Wokery are fine idiotic theories to discuss at the students’ union, but they don't play out in real life.
“I come from that period – when Pistols started, we’d just had Dave Bowie being an exotic transvestite. No problems with it. So what the hell are they moaning about? We'd already joined up with each other. Trump is the world's most awful person. I met him. He's horrible but he’s a businessman and the business of government is broken. Get a businessman in to fix it.”
Lydon has spent half his life predominantly living in the United States at this stage. His post-punk life in London, at the mercy of persistent police raids on his home, had become intolerable. He thought of moving to Ireland, but was arrested “within 45 minutes” in the country, following a fight with two off-duty Gardaí in a Dublin pub in 1980. He was locked up in Mountjoy for four days, but avoided a prison sentence on appeal.
“I took my band PiL to America because we couldn't get any gigs in the UK. We were being banned everywhere, for ferociously idiotic reasons like a Fire Marshal saying we were ‘a threat to society’. The Lord Provost of Scotland at the time released a statement saying”, and for this he puts on a Scottish brogue, ‘Scotland has enough hooligans without importing them from south of the border.’ ”
- John Lydon’s PiL (Public Image Ltd.) will perform at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre (June 12) and Cork City Hall (August 15). John Lydon’s spoken word tour includes a date at the Cork Opera House (September 17). See: www.johnlydon.com
In June 1978, the month he founded his new band PiL, John Lydon travelled from London to the annual Macroom Mountain Dew Festival, Ireland’s first outdoor rock’n’roll music festival. After the headline act Rory Gallagher performed on the Saturday, Lydon, along with Bob Geldof, was invited along to the inaugural Hot Press Music Awards, which took place in Coolcower House Hotel, outside Macroom.
Lydon was staying in Montenotte in Cork city in the Arbutus Lodge Hotel, which, at the time, had a Michelin-star restaurant, although Lydon wasn’t too fussed about food. He came over from the UK for the awards ceremony on condition he be given a generous quota of liquor for his efforts. His decision to dress as a priest, this a year before Pope John Paul II’s iconic visit to Ireland, caused some commotion on the flight over to Ireland.
“I dressed as a priest because I thought I wouldn't get searched,” he says. “Even at an early age, I was a saucy bugger. I do things because it’s a giggle. You mustn't take life too seriously. You gotta open yourself up for laughter. Through comedy and humour you resolve most of the world's problems. Intellectuals just get us into deeper holes.”
Controversial ‘punk-rocker’ Johnny Rotten, ex-lead singer of the 'Sex Pistols, who was not on the official programme but who attended the concert and spoke to pressmen, described the proceedings as a "Rory Gallagher memorial concert".
Members of the festival committee were annoyed to hear that a presentation was to be made to the singer and at the festival. One of the committee members, Michael Lynch, said that as stage organiser, he was not going to allow Rotten onto the stage. "No way would we have Johnny Rotten on stage. We don't want punk rock. We are rock."
"As you can see from the crowd gathered here today, they are all very well behaved. You could take them anywhere, they are a good crowd. I am sure that parents would not want their children at a punk rock festival."
The camera-shy Johnny Rotten, wearing a long black coat, blue suede shoes and who had brown elastic bands in his hair, said that he did not want to go on stage anyway.
Asked was he really as rotten as people said he was, Rotten replied, "It's not for me to say.” One lady she thought he was rotten and he replied, "Big deal... I don't really care".
Later while Rory Gallagher was on stage, a rumour went around that a bucket of water was to be thrown on stage. Extra security men were brought in.
There was a minor disturbance and as a result, Johnny Rotten was asked to leave. His parting words were "You don't want me here", and he left.
