CityLife

Interview: John Lydon

John Lydon

A BROAD, hammy Lancashire accent on the end of the phone answers: “Hello. Fatty’s Poodle Parlour. Can I ‘elp you?”. Oh good. John Lydon is in playful mood. He’s just been up a ladder, he explains, trying to fix a leaky roof at his California home.

“I’m no repairman. A right mess I’ve just made,” he says with a strange air of satisfaction.

This rare audience with one of the most unknowable men of the rock ‘n’ roll age comes about because Lydon is reconvening Public Image Limited, the post-Sex Pistols project which spanned 14 years, saw 37 musicians pass through its ranks and was, he says “my finest crowning achievement”

“I’m not one to open up the trophy room and gloat,” he says, before proceeding to do just that. “PiL is a damn fine band, probably none better…none that I have heard, although many have copied us or given a nod and a wink in our direction. Which is fine, because I’ve definitely helped improve the alleged music scene over the years.”

PiL’s resurrection has been hastened by a momentous event in Lydon’s life.

“My father died last year, and my brother had cancer of the throat,” he says. “Luckily his cancer is curing up. But my dad’s death brought back a song called Death Disco which I wrote when my mum died. In fact I wrote it for my mum. She asked me to write it.”

That song is a slice of raw emotion that, says Lydon, “you can’t fake”

“That feeling of loss never ever goes away,” he adds. “You can’t do a shallow, sugary performance around such a thing.”

'Full experience'

PiL will be performing for the first time in 17 years, Lydon joined by a couple of late-1980s members, guitarist Lu Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith, plus multi-intsrumentalist Scott Firth. Some of those PiL songs are now 30 years old. Do they still hold the same truth for their creator?

“Yes they make me feel like Fred Astaire,” he says, crooning a line of Stepping Out With My Baby then cackling. “They are about the full experience of being a human being: songs that deal with birth, near-death, suicidal tendencies and the sheer joy of living.”

And does he still believe the vehement message of a song like Religion?

“Now more than ever,” says Lydon. “We hope they get smarter, but you still see the damage religion does with the fundamental belief in a Bible or Koran. It all leads to death. It doesn’t lead to joy and life and sharing. It leads to death, because it’s judgmental.”

Death seems to loom large in our otherwise jovial conversation. Asked whether he has any regrets, Lydon cites only the deaths of certain people. But surely you can’t regret something entirely beyond your control?

“Of course I can,” he spits. “Of course it’s beyond control and of course I can regret it. I just don’t understand it. Is life a gift? Buggeration, how many people I know who haven’t used their lives properly. I don’t intend to be like that.”

Strange decisions

I ask Lydon about his part in some important Manchester rock history - the Sex Pistols appearances at the Free Trade Hall in 1976, which helped inspire the formation of Joy Division, the Smiths and The Fall, and energised Tony Wilson, who would found Factory Records. Wilson, says Lydon, “was a friend of mine”. He always regarded Joy Division as fellow travellers in the post-punk world.

“The fact is that Manchester’s a great place,” he says. “It’s always had that zing to it. There’s possibilities can come out of that town. People seem to be more prepared to listen. Every time I play in Manchester I feel wanted. 

“The New Order chappies, I always hum the Coronation Street anthem to them, and it drives them crazy. but it’s done in love.”

A creature of his own invention, Lydon, 53, refuses to be pinned down and defined. He was a surprise inclusion – alongside Katie Price and Peter Andre – in the 2004 series of I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!. He withdrew from the jungle, annoyed at the programme-makers’ refusal to notify him of his wife’s arrival in Australia. But the strangest decision of all was when Lydon became the face of Country Life butter – so successfully that the brand has overtaken its rival Anchor for the first time.

“It’s a very fine product, mate,” he says. “Secondly, that’s the money that’s funding this (PiL’s reunion tour). I’ve got no financial backers at all. So the butter came up. It seemed insane. But then I thought: ‘Who’s writing my rule book?’ I actually like the product, and after they supplied me with a year’s load of it, I love it. Butter! You rub it all over, it’s grrrrreat!”

So would he be tickled or appalled to be considered a national treasure?

“Oh he’s a treasure,” he trills sarcastically. “That’s like something Ena Sharples would come up with …NOT! I’m not looking for any such thing. A title like that would drag you down. You’re not expected to be a person any more. You become an icon.

PiL play Manchester University on Saturday December 19, 2009.