He’s become one of music’s most divisive figures, but there’s no keeping John Lydon down.
The former Sex Pistols frontman has come through the toughest period of his life after spending recent years as a full-time carer to his wife Nora Forster following her Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2018.
Nora, who was 80, died in April, but not before she’d seen Lydon and his band Public Image Limited enter Ireland’s national Eurovision competition with a touching song he wrote about their relationship.
Simply agreeing to take part in the notoriously middle-of-the-road event massively split opinion.
Eurovision song ‘helped so many people’
Many of the erstwhile Johnny Rotten’s critics insisted that it served to confirm a long-term nosedive in his credibility, while supporters saw the move as evidence of a challenging artist who, against all the odds, has retained a sense of playfulness almost half a century into his career.
The man himself insists that Hawaii, his Eurovision love letter to Nora, which features on Public Image Limited’s new album End Of World, is one of his most important musical statements.
“That song broke the mould in that people understood finally just how deep a person I am and that there is good in me,” says Lydon, who brings Public Image Limited to the Beach Ballroom in Aberdeen on Tuesday.
“It helped so many people, yet started out really as a song based on Blue Hawaii by Elvis Presley, the movie, which we foolishly watched the night before in the studio way back when during Nora’s illness.
‘We zoomed through ideas’
“We turned what started out as a kind of self-effacing mockery into something so deeply moving. It’s all manner of people this song has affected.
“Nora’s postage stamp on the letter of her love is big-time important here.”
The 67-year-old took time off his caring responsibilities to record the album in the Cotswolds with Public Image Limited colleagues Bruce Smith, Lu Edmonds and Scott Firth.
“The atmosphere we created amongst each other was just one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever had,” he explains.
“We zoomed through ideas – there were some 19 ideas there on the table but we tried to knock it down to 13 because, you know, there is such a thing as too much. And you need to work on individual tracks a little bit more, rather than say 19 to 20 pieces that were not thought out properly.”
‘We hold our own purse strings’
As was the case with 2012’s comeback This Is PIL and What The World Needs Now (2015), End Of World has been released on the band’s own label.
PIL has previously tended towards a revolving door policy, but Lydon says going their own way has helped foster an amiable vibe among the four-piece.
“We’re friends and I think that’s obvious when you hear the music, but more importantly, because we’re now our own independent label, we don’t have to go through corporate record company nonsense,” he declares.
“That’s what created an awful lot of issues in my earlier past, and my later past. Now we’re outside of what we call ‘the s***stem’ and it means we can spend more time really getting to know each other rather than having to listen in to the Chinese whispers that corporate record company thinking can bring.
“It means we hold our own purse strings and there’s no tightening, and there’s no blackmail. There’s no ‘all you have to do is write a hit single or we won’t pay you’.”
Featuring dub bass maestro Jah Wobble and acclaimed guitar maverick Keith Levene, PIL’s initial marker was their 1978 debut album First Issue.
Including the band’s anthemic hit Public Image, it’s still seen as one of the pivotal moments in post-punk’s development and paved the way for the experimental classics Metal Box and The Flowers Of Romance.
Despite masterminding such lauded offerings, Lydon reckons his often confrontational public persona masks deep insecurities. “I’ve never been confident in my musical abilities, not ever,” he laughs.
‘Every time I go on stage I’m terrified’
“I’m a bag of nerves, thinking I’m somehow underwhelming or not achieving the heights I should be. No, I’m a self-inflicted pain and misery kind of character with a smiley face.
“Every time I go on stage I’m terrified – but the fears and phobias are the very things that power me to do what it is that I do, to take those risks and chances.”
Lydon penned his barbed new song LFCF (Liars, Fakes, Cheats and Frauds) in the wake of losing a court bid in 2021 to block Sex Pistols’ music being used in a Danny Boyle-directed miniseries.
Public Image Limited coming to Aberdeen
He says there’s now zero chance of the iconic band ever reuniting. “I don’t give a damn what they think any more,” he adds.
“After allowing that debacle of a mockumentary to be released, it’s like a ‘shame on you’. How can you not want to include the lead singer and songwriter?
“It’s a shame – what they’ve done is burn their own history and I don’t feel any pity for them. I don’t feel any rage or hatred, I just don’t feel anything for them.”
Public Image Limited play the Beach Ballroom in Aberdeen on September 19 – bookings can be made at seetickets.com