Formerly Rotten, Sex Pistols vocalist, punk catalyst and all-round iconoclast John Lydon is busy. Knuckling down to write a forthcoming (twelfth) album with Public Image Ltd while touring the UK prior to embarking on another spoken-word tour in September, he’s in good shape and on fine form, despite significant setbacks. Lydon’s wife Nora died in 2023 following a five-year battle with Alzheimer’s, and later that year he lost his manager and oldest friend John Rambo Stevens. He recently found himself in the path of the California wildfires (again). And in February his favourite uncle passed.
Meanwhile, there’s Frank Carter’s ‘Sex Pistols’.
It’s weird. A dumbing down of all the integrity, intensity, genuine honesty and heartfelt emotions I put into that band. Of course, it’s karaoke, but it’s like… Come on, Mr Carter, you’re not Johnny Rotten, I am. Right? Stop it. Though I actually think he took it on in the right spirit. The same spirit Billy Idol did before [Idol toured with Steve Jones and Paul Cook as Generation Sex in ’23]. Poor Billy, he ran out of wind. He can’t sing them songs.
The internet claims you were once offered an MBE for services to music?
I think that was a journalistic invention to try to get my rag. No, I’m not up for accepting anything like that. It’s too pomp-y, too social climb-y, and I don’t know that it’s particularly relevant. I said when I first heard that I wouldn’t want to put a sword in the Queen’s hand with me at her feet, because “Off with his head” would’ve come to mind. I’d rather go for the Irish OBE: the Old Bloody Eejit.
You have more spoken-word shows on the horizon.
There’s nothing quite like standing up on a stage completely alone, the shit fear of it. I’ve no script, nothing… And I fucking love it. But the reception’s not always favourable. There are some real haters who travel miles, buy tickets, just to come in and say yah boo sucks. At one gig somebody stood up while I was talking about my childhood, and said: “Isn’t it true you’re trying to profiteer off the death of your wife?” That’s evil, beyond any concept I can relate to.
Losing Nora and then Rambo in such a short space of time must have been devastating.
And then recently my favourite uncle. When will the nails in my coffin stop banging? Uncle John [Barry] bought me my first Parker pen when I was six, because he knew I could read and write. My mum taught me and he encouraged me. So I’ve had a love of Parker pens ever since. I learned to write in italics with that pen from a great teacher at my school, the only one who wasn’t a nun. Her name was Miss Kitty. She was dying of cancer and smelled of Heinz Condensed Vegetable Soup, but she was great
This Is Not The Last Tour will be your first without Rambo.
He was a manager and a best friend, who absolutely kept me honest. You couldn’t get a thing past that one.
All this bereavement is an awful lot to deal with.
It is. When you go to bed at night you wonder: “Should I just be thinking of Nora?” I can’t leave John out, he meant so much to me too. And my uncle now. And of course I went through it all before with my mum and dad, and all that comes back. So sleep’s quite hard to get through. The juxtaposition of tragedies, how can I handle them all? I just have to let it flood over me. And it does. Every single night.
And it’s not just grief, is it?
It’s not grief. I can hear every one of them, every now and again shouting inside my head: “Oh, Johnsies, that song is awful” from Nora… You have whole conversations, and you’re not faking them, the dialogue just pops up automatically. On this PiL tour you’ll have a new drummer.
What can you tell us about Mark Roberts?
He looks like film director David Lynch and has worked with [guitarist] Lu [Edmonds] on all kinds of weirdnesses, with Middle and Far Eastern influences, and to my ears he plays like Ginger fucking Baker: full on and hard-core. We’re going to miss Bruce [Smith] very much, but we’re gonna rely less on technology and get back into proper fucking bangers.
Always nice to have a bit more Middle Eastern flavour in the pot.
It just seems to happen instinctively with us. It doesn’t work if you try to force it, but this is who we are. I was brought up in a very mixed area, Arsenal land: Jamaican, Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, German, Italian, Irish and English, a properly good musical upbringing.
Aren’t you worried that Mark might prove to have some unacceptable tour-bus foibles?
Listen, the voice of experience here. For sheer smelly, stinky audacity, nothing beats Lu Edmonds’s underpants hanging on a hanger. No one can beat that, so he’ll be as safe as houses.
So what’s it like to be resident in the US right now?
Well, the fires weren’t anything to laugh at. In the mid-nineties they came up to my front gate, but these [recent ones] stopped a mile away. It was terrifying, because I knew what it’s like, I knew the heat. Everything melts. And long before the flames engulf you, acrid black smoke steals the air out of your lungs. Waiting was a nightmare, because they cut the damn electricity and cell phone towers off, so no one could get any information on what was happening.
Will Hawaii feature in the PiL tour’s set-list?
We’re going to try and do it. I don’t know if the emotions are going to be too heavy for me. Even that’s wrapped up in good memories of Rambo because he put the video together. I love the empty swing between the palm trees at the end. For a paratrooper, boxer, football hooligan maniac, he could be surprisingly sensitive.
Public Image Limited are currently on tour. For dates and tickets, visit the PiL website.
