“Hot Press? You gave me an award, didn’t you? It fucking broke, you cheapskates!”

Those were the first – and last! – words exchanged between yours truly and John Lydon in 1996. The occasion was the London 100 Club press conference or, more accurately, mêlée to announce that after eighteen years of routinely slagging each other off, the Sex Pistols were getting back together for a supposedly one-shot reunion gig in Finsbury Park.
A lot’s happened since then, not least the death in April this year of former Pistols manager and all-round mischief-maker Malcolm McLaren.
The pre-interview deal with Lydon’s PR minder is that we concentrate on PiL and their upcoming visit to the Electric Picnic – no great hardship given their own raging against the rock ‘n’ roll machine, but John can’t wait to share a juicy bit of gossip with us.
“Bob Geldof told me some hilarious stories about poor old Malcolm’s funeral when he turned up at a PiL show recently,” he cackles in that pantomime villain voice of his. “How awful that went off. It just turned into a catfight between Vivienne Westwood and (former Clash manager) Bernie Rhodes. You know, absurd stuff like yelling at each other over the coffin. I would have gone for all the right reasons, but I knew egotism would be a part and parcel of it. It was great Bob telling me how it transpired in that inimitable Irish way of his!”
Are John and Sir Bob good mates?
“Sir Bob? How comes he got the knighthood? I demand a recount! Nah, it’s always a great laugh with him. I like the man. I mean, we row but we row properly. If there’s something to be said we’ll say it to each other’s face rather than through the media, which is where most rows seem to take place these days.”
Something that’s always intrigued me is whether or not Lydon was invited to sing on ‘Feed The World’?
“No. I forget exactly what happened but PiL’s name was sort of linked to Band Aid without any mention of it being made to us. It was all very confusing and wrong. You don’t need to grab our name and attach it to your cause in quite that way. A phone call would have helped.
“Would I have done it if asked? I’m not sure. I don’t understand fully the shenanigans of those kinds of events anyway. And to be quite frank, you listen to the songs that come out of them – they’re really poor. ‘We ain’t gonna play Sun City…’”
Which brings us rather neatly to the shitstorm that’s been kicked up by PiL’s headlining appearance on August 31 at the Heineken Music Conference Festival in Tel Aviv.
“John Lydon is being used as a propaganda tool by an apartheid state,” charged classical composer Raymond Deane at the recent launch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s cultural boycott against Israel. So incensed were Palestinian pressure groups in the UK that they picketed PiL’s dates there this month. Lydon, though, is not for turning.
“You’ve got to be able to play anywhere in the world,” he insists. “Music is the only thing we have that’s free and uncontaminated. And music carries a far bigger political clout to change situations than any demonstrator. I’ve had to face this ridiculous fiasco of these left-wing 18-year-old students called Jeremy following us around saying, ‘Please John, don’t play Israel. I’ll burn my records if you do because you’re supporting apartheid.’ I’m fully prepared to play in any Arab territory – Gaza and the West Bank included – yet I’ve never been invited. I have been invited by a promoter to play to the Israeli people. I’m not playing to the Israeli government. They’re an object of contempt, which I shall be letting them know on their own soil. I can do far more good that way than I can by outright not going to Israel.
“What these students don’t seem to grasp – or conveniently ignore – is that a lot of Israeli citizens are Arabs and that there are many Jewish people vehemently opposed to what’s being done in their name to Palestinians. This was my problem with Bob and the whole Band Aid thing – which army are you feeding? Are you aware that there’s a civil war going on in Ethiopia? I remember the nonsense of the food trucks arriving on the border and two armies waiting there to rob ‘em. You’re not getting anything to the people.
“If I’m going to learn anything about the Israeli situation, I need to be right smack in the middle of it. Anyone who accuses me of supporting an apartheid system is talking shit. I want to implant it firmly in my head so I can write about this in a song. That’s how I solve all my internal problems. It’s no use me reading The Times because then I’m down to the contemptible wafflings of a journalist. I learned 30 years ago that these sods all lie.”
Something tells me that him and Bob Geldof will be rowing again the next time they meet. While Lydon has been a regular visitor to Ireland through the years – see hotpress.com for the stranger-than-fiction tale of him attending our 1978 ‘Kiss Me Quick’ Awards in Cork with his septuagenarian uncle – the Sex Pistols’ headlining turn at the Electric Picnic two summers ago was the first time he’d ever played here. How comes?
“It’s the same story again – no fucker ever invited us. I can kind of understand it with the Pistols ‘cause of all the ‘They’ll eat your children’ headlines, but cuddly old PiL? That sort of thing can make a man feel very unloved.”
Did he enjoy his first trip to Stradbally with the Pistols?
“I did, thank you for asking,” he says switching into faux posh mode. “The party afterwards wasn’t half bad either.”
Any famous faces there?
“The only one I can think of is Shane MacGowan… poor sod! I was furious with his companions – he was very, very wasted and should never have been ed to the hotel by the nose like that. All these fuckers pretending to be his nurse and his friends and his carers – it was so not right. It hurt me deep down inside that they were enjoying humiliating him that way. I tried to explain to Shane, ‘Go home, you can’t allow these people to make you look foolish in public.’ I just hope he understood that later.
“I knew Shane back in the day when he was running around with a Union Jack on his back and suddenly this Irish accent came from nowhere! He’s a lovely, lovely man who seems to be deeply unhappy and keeps bad company.”
How important is John’s own Irishness – his Mum and Dad hailed from Cork and Galway respectively – to him?
“Extremely, although like a lot of English-Irish it’s left me with an enduring identity crisis!”
Did he have a problem during the ‘70s working out where his loyalties lay in relation to Northern Ireland?
“No, I knew exactly where I stood politically, which was opposed in equal measures to the IRA and UDA because they both at the time believed in murder. If you need to murder any one human being in this world then you have no cause. No cause at all! I have family members on both sides of that great divide so I know what I’m talking about.”
Former Hot Press-er Declan Lynch has this theory that it’s not 800 years of tyranny but 30 years of Jimmy Hill, which has caused the Irish to hate the English.
“That’s Irish wit for you! There has down through the years been a terrible arrogance about the English that has understandably got up Irish noses.”
Something I’d never realised until RTÉ broadcast a documentary about it recently is that in 1969 the then-Taoiseach Jack Lynch considered sending the Irish Army into Derry to protect the beleaguered Catholic population from the B-Specials, saying “We cannot stand idly by” and then proceeding to stand idly by.
“They were going to invade?! That was obviously something dreamt up in the pub on a Friday night after a few pints of Guinness! But that’s the Irish for you – always willing to have a go even when the odds are insurmountable.”
While adamant that he needs “no fucker’s validation”, Lydon was dead chuffed recently when Ms. Stefani Germanotta bigged up the Pistols.
“I went to a Lady Gaga show and it was so much fun – totally over the top!” he enthuses. “If you’re going to wear a bra on stage, make sure it explodes. That’s the problem with Madonna – she has no sense of humour. I’ve no problem with her being a tough businesswoman and demanding excellence from everyone around her – I’ve been known to do the same myself – but lighten up, love! Madonna said in an interview that she’d never heard of the Sex Pistols, yet a few weeks later there she was wearing a Sex Pistols belt. That doesn’t compute or, like most of the things that have been done in the Pistols’ name, earn me any money. I don’t want to be all stamp collector-ish about it, but ladies, if you’re going to walk around in a Sex Pistols, MC5 or New York Dolls t-shirt at least be able to name one of our songs!”
A point made a few years ago in Hot Press by MC5 founder member Wayne Kramer.
“I’m both a realist and a romantic – I understand why everything the Pistols stood and still stand for has been commoditised, but I don’t have to like it. A bit more respect for the elderly please!”
The catalyst for Lydon reconvening PiL – “It’s not a reunion because we never broke up” – was the death in January 2008 of his Dad, John Sr.
“Even though we’ve not made a record in 18 years, PiL has always been in my head,” John Jr. proffers. “‘Death Disco’ was about my mother dying and when my Dad joined her it really resonated again. I don’t like using the word ‘therapy’, but it’s a great way of getting all the grief and anger out. I just thought, ‘I want to sing these songs again on stage.’ The question then was, ‘How the fuck do we bankroll it?’”
Lydon was still mulling that one over when he got the most unexpected of phone calls.
“Hurrah for Country Life butter! Those commercials are probably the most anarchistic thing I’ve ever done. They’ve not only paid for this tour, but given us the option of making a new album if we want to. We’ve no fucking record company to write cheques on our behalf, so that’s how it has to be done.”
John Lydon has a reputation for being a prickly customer, but today at least, he couldn’t be any more personable. He’s also good value for money, insisting that our chat last for a full hour.
“I’m not into this fucking ‘soundbite’ nonsense,” he explains. “If I’m going to engage with gentlemen of the press, I want to A) Teach you something useful and B) Work out if you’re a moron or not. In case you’re wondering, you’re doing all right at the moment.”
Please, my ego’s already big enough as it is! Given how confrontational he can be, is Lydon surprised that he sometimes gets a rough ride from journos?
“For 30 years I’ve always been treated with suspicion by the media. A lot of it is because I don’t come from the public school shit-stem, and therefore they don’t know much about my background or life story. I don’t suffer fools gladly and I do bite sometimes, but overall I think I’m a pretty fair-minded sort of a bloke.”
And quite a healthy-looking one, judging by the PiL live shots I’ve seen recently.
“I swim a bit and go skiing,” he divulges. “Well, when I say ‘skiing’, it’s more spending a pleasant afternoon falling off two lolly-sticks. Somebody said, ‘You should take lessons, John’ but I’m not really the lesson-taking sort. I have to find out how to do it for myself even if it means breaking my fucking neck!
“I’ve epilepsy – so no strobe-lights! – and the effects of meningitis, which I had as a kid, stay with you for life, but otherwise, yeah, I’m as fit now as ever I could be. Anyway, gotta go mate. May the road rise with you!”