John Lydon aka ‘Johnny Rotten’ chats The Sex Pistols, PiL, music, life and his Derry connection

Derry Journal

Transcript

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.

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