Fascinating Interview With Johnny Rotten
May 30th, 2008 by joe
I remember the first time I heard the Sex Pistols was on the old WHFS radio station, 102.3 FM “Home Grown Radio” in the 1970s. (Probably one of the best radio stations of all time, and not just in the DC area). My uncle bought me Never Mind The Bollocks for Christmas in 1977 - a well-worn LP I still own. Publicly, I hated the Pistols. I even won a National Council of Teachers of English writing award for an essay I wrote condemning the Sex Pistols as the dirty underside of the punk movement of which I held the Talking Heads up as the “intellectual” and respectable representatives. But like most everything I said as a teenager, that was total BS, because I played the record over and over, through high school and college. The sound was so tinny and unfiltered and unique, it was compelling.
In the 1980s Pistols lead singer Johnny “Rotten” Lydon formed Public Image Limited, a band with a completely different, suave, jazzy sound, and in my book one of the 10 or 15 best rock groups ever formed. The Sex Pistols were an angry teenagers’ band; PIL was a musicians’ band. By that time of course I had graduated to cassettes and PIL was on every party tape I made.
Well, I haven’t really done music per se for a decade or so, so I could not tell you what has been going on in the interim since my party-tape days ended. But I must say this interview with Lydon is one of the more intriguing historical pieces I’ve read in recent years.
Lydon and his wife, he tells me, were due to fly to New York on Pan Am flight 103 on 21 December, 1988. They missed the flight by minutes because Nora had packed late. Hours after take-off the plane exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all those on board. ‘It was just chance. Sheer chance that we weren’t on board. Sheer chance that we weren’t both blown to bits. That, I can tell you, was one very sobering experience. I mean, that has an effect on you.
Read it all. If you are an old, wistful, new wave codger like me, you will definitely appreciate it. He has quite a story to tell.
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May 31st, 2008 at 9:24 am
What is sad is that he attributes to chance what is clearly providence at work. His life was spared, and rather than gratitude he should have, he shows contempt. sigh.
May 31st, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I remember reading your review of Never Mind the Bollocks very well. I must say, you had me fooled. There weren’t many people at our high school who had even listened to the record or knew anything about punk. I had a relative who brought me a bunch of records from England: the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello (I remember you saying you like him), the Clash. That music changed my life. I was really looking forward to reading what you said and was sorely disappointed when your piece turned out to be a scathing attack on punk, which was the most important music of the time. I think you ended the review by saying something about throwing it on the turntable and vomiting on it. How could you so completely miss the point, I thought at the time. Looking back, I always thought it made more sense, that it was the first sign of your burgeoning conservatism, a sign of things to come. Now you claim that it was all a lie. Hmm. Interesting.
A few years later I saw PIL live. He spent most of the concert with his back to the audience smoking a cigarette. After the concert I got a chance to go backstage and meet John Lydon. He was very funny and pretty intimidating. At one point when I complimented him on something, he got in my face until our noses were almost touching and said mockingly, “You’ve made it all worthwhile.”
You’re right about WHFS being one the best radio stations of all time, though I hear WGTB, which was a bit before our time, was even better. Did you ever listen to Steve Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” show? He was the anti-DJ. There would always be long stretches of silence where you could only hear his chair squeeking as he tried to figure out what button to push or what public service announcement to read. Then he would throw something like Linton Kwesi Johnson or Serpent Power on the turntable.
Thnaks for this blast from the past, revisionist though it may be.
May 31st, 2008 at 5:16 pm
You, my friend, are high.
First of all there is nothing “revisionist” about what I just wrote. Please put a little more effort into your word choice when commenting here.
Second of all you never read my essay. Third of all it was not a “scathing” attack on punk, it was a scathing attack on the Sex Pistols as a bad strand within the punk movement.
It was written in bad faith, I admit. I was 17 and needed a story for the school newspaper, and it popped into my head that writing a high-brow critique of Never Mind the Bollocks vis a vis other bands would be pretty easy, and it just rolled off my pen. At the time I had no moral qualms about the fact I played the record alot in the least because it was basically homework I needed to get done.
“All a lie” ? It was a single article in the Edison “Current” newspaper. Don’t be such a drama queen.
While I can’t say any music “changed my life” if you had been there in the mid 1970s you would have known that my music collection was much broader and more eclectic than most. My “burgeoning conservatism” did not appear until years later when I first decided it was a travesty that abortion was legal and marijuana was not.
May 31st, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Well it was only two short years later (or less) that you were toting around the Bible and saying that it was the only great religious text because no other religious text was written by such a variety of people and that the only way to read it was literally, so I would hardly say that you became a conservative “years later.”
I’m not sure why you are always cutting down the person you once were but I think it’s funny that you think it speaks well of you now to claim you had no moral qualms about writing something in bad faith then, something that you even went so far as to submit for an award.
May 31st, 2008 at 10:39 pm
And Brian, I just can’t resist. So you think it was God who gave the Sex Pistols a record contract?
June 1st, 2008 at 8:05 am
zimzo,
“So you think it was God who gave the Sex Pistols a record contract?”
Actually Calvin’s, and other theologians would argue ‘Yes!’ to the above question.
June 1st, 2008 at 11:57 am
I don’t think I’ve ever written anything I think “speaks well” of me. Where did you ever get that idea? Most often I think we are confirming the evidence that I’m an idiot who is occasionally right about some things.
It was an English teacher picked the essay to submit. I was 17, remember.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:36 am
“Don’t be such a drama queen.”
Joe, you hit the nail on the head. I got a good laugh out of that!
“My “burgeoning conservatism” did not appear until years later when I first decided it was a travesty that abortion was legal and marijuana was not.”
I never corollated it like that before. For an idiot you have brain matter 4 times that of zimzo. Does that make zimzo….mud?