Interview: John Lydon

Controversial, hilarious and often unpredictable: John Lydon is an alternative British hero. He might have defined punk with The Sex Pistols, but he’s never been a man to take for granted. This month he’s hitting Bristol to celebrate forty years of Public Image LTD. As I somewhat anxiously call his home number in LA, he puts any nerves straight to rest. “Hello Bristol how’s it going?” He explains he’s making a tea as the whistle whirs away in the background. “I’ve got a phone in my hand and a kettle boiling, these are the things we have to go through and endure in life.” After a slight conversation about the perfect cuppa we get things underway.

Forty years of Public Image Ltd, what an incredible milestone…

This is the second one I’ve had the ‘forty years in’ to endure. It is an endurance because people expect you to be celebrating all year long for what took forty years to get to. No can I please just relax and take a deep breath. I don’t do that, I go out touring. I tour to earn enough money for us to get back into the studio and record new material. That’s how we are, we’re independent of what we call the shit-stym, so our lifestyle is really live performance and then whatever we can make on that contributes towards the studio. Then we release and we can rely on those sales figures and that makes the wheel keep spinning. It’s simple enough, you could call that old-school but really, there’s no reason to complicate any issues with large record labels hindering me.

I guess you must get pushed into some of these things?

Well you’re dictated to, that’s what you find. You’re dictated to once you’ve taken the money. It’s like ouch, you’ve made your deal with the devil. Then you spend a huge chunk of your life trying to get away from that. Every new band is going to go through it, it’s part of the process of how you can survive and have any sense of longevity. It’s the difference between sink or swim. I like what I do and no matter how long the waiting period that they enforce on me, I never surrender. I’m always waiting for that day when I can say I’m free.

It’s amazing that you’re not counting your medals…

Oh God, I haven’t got enough time and life’s too short for that. I haven’t anywhere near finished. I’ve yet to achieve the final record that I’m really really hoping to achieve. Everything is a step up the ladder towards that really. It’s all approaching the most blatantly honest you can be about yourself to other people. That’s the very essence really of a good album or a good book or film, something that teaches you something about yourself and thereby hopefully has an influence on others in a positive well.

I guess being propelled by forward movement keeps you fresh…

Yes otherwise you’ve just been absorbed into the system and that’s a terrible way to meet your maker. Death meets us all in the end and I say yippee because I want to go uncontaminated. I’m very happy that I’ve fought the system and I’ve not been sucked up into it, for me that’s the greatest success. All the money in the world isn’t worth that.

You haven’t got it too bad living out in LA though have you?

Yes I have! I want more thank you. I’m not a fool, if it comes my way then I’ll have it but it’s always on my own terms you see. This is again why record labels propagated the myth that I was hard to work with, it just meant basically that I wouldn’t be told what to write, what to do and how to dress. Those are all completely in my own domain.

It’s incredible that you’re so far into your career and remain so independently minded…

I still get insults for something I did in 1977 and they’re not even right about that. In fact history is picked out and used in a negative way. It’s like, hang on, you’re wrong, you’re presentation is inaccurate. Journalism is very much responsible for inaccuracies. Trump may yack on about fake news but he’s lucky he’s getting any news at all. My God, I deliberately made Public Image as far away from the shit-stym as it could possibly be. It still held a basis of thought amongst some small-minded individuals that it was a sell out because it didn’t sound like The Sex Pistols. Well for fuck sake man, you can’t win and why should you. It’s a game I’m not prepared to play. In PIL I can explore fully and freely mine and everybody else’s emotions. In-fact that’s what we all do. We’re all from very different backgrounds with very different ideas but that’s what makes it. It’s the combination of those elements that you’ll find in the end are not in direct opposition. When done properly you’ll find they’re all saying the same thing just in slightly different ways.

Does it frustrate you that people still dredge up your musical past?

Well it’s sometimes just a slag off. ‘Oh is he doing this for a joke?’, well if I was I’d be the best comedian in the world and I’m sure you don’t want to give me that award. The thing is that I do use humour, I do. It’s a great form of freeing up your intellect. I think it’s more directly honest than any other form of study. Philosophy is all well and fine but it’s a quagmire because it doesn’t deal with humour which is the essence of questioning everything.

Do you see music as entertainment or something more than that?

It’s cultural and it’s entertainment most definitely. It’s also a word to the wise though. It carries great potent messaging which can be used wrongly and rightly. It brings happiness, joy and it also brings self-analysis.

You have to take it seriously though sometimes?

With some of the songs you have to because the subject matter is so deeply personal. In songs like Death Disco you have to be serious There’s nothing funny about the death of you mother. So you approach it in a very clear way. Although it seems chaotic to outsiders, that’s a man screaming in agony. That’s very important that I understand and analyse that emotion as much as I can, but I don’t let it pervade every other area of my life. That’s me studying that emotion. It’s very important to me that I keep them all apart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWZepWteDM

It’s not one-dimensional then, it explores the spectrum of emotion…

No you’ve got to go in all areas to free up your mind and then make your decisions. Then you’re making healthy choices, if you want to be a miserable sod for the rest of your life, at least you know you’re doing it deliberately. You’re cutting off other options and that’s up to you but you have given yourself the choice. That’s the thing, you give yourself the choice, others don’t give you it. That’s why religion and politics are so important for the foolish. You see people fighting on the streets over different political points of view, that’s the most ludicrous thing I think you could hope to witness.

Is it easy to get into the mindset of each song in the live environment?

Well they’re all in different spaces. That’s what PIL has always done no-matter who is in the band. We do it automatically and instinctively because it’s such a free zone. We explore things with a great sense of study really.

I guess you paved the way for that post-punk era in a sense?

You can’t emulate it, that’s the thing. It’s not a skill-set that you can quickly learn at a university course. To me it’s called common sense, which is something my class background apparently doesn’t have very much of but I’d beg to differ. So there it is. Judgement is the great enemy of us all, the way we so quickly and easily judge out of spite and jealousy. That’s the real problem. The seven deadly sins are such a minefield of self-deception or acute anxiety and pain you can inflict on yourself mentally for realising where you’ve gone so wrong on others. Here it is, the guilt trip, but if you don’t open pandora’s box you’ll never know what’s in it. Somewhere there are some goodies as well.

So are you excited to come back over to the UK then?

Well I’m excited to tour and of course panicked and nervy. There’s always a constant fear of letting people down. You leave your ego in the dressing room, when you’re onstage there’s no place for arrogance or any of that. You can’t have it because the audience will know you’re being deceptive. It’s like standing there absolutely naked mentally and that’s a dangerous thing to do to yourself. It’s fantastic when it works proper though. It teaches all of us something about ourselves.

I guess that exposure is part of the thrill?

Oh without the fear and stage fright I don’t suppose any of this would be worth anything at all. It’s taking that big risk. I never knew how to swim until I jumped into the deep end in the local baths on Waterloo Road, that was it, sink or swim time and I bloody learnt to swim thank you.

Have you always had that fear in the back of your mind?

Yes always but I’ve found it a very useful companion. It’s like another part of my personality that gives me advise sometimes. I’ve got characters in there that weigh-up the options. I don’t do anything haphazardly or with no thought. I’m not that calculated either. It’s six of one half a dozen of the other depending on the situation at hand. Just organising this tour, the finances and trying to structure it, it’s mind-numbingly tedious but necessary. I come from a background where libraries were very important to me. Study is not a problem for me, I love it and I wish more people understood that.

On this tour you’re playing some often overlooked towns, is that important to you?

It’s a bit more folky but that means it suits us more almost. It’s the presumption of the inner-city snobbery, ‘oh we’ve seen it all before’, but indeed they haven’t, their minds are closed by glossy magazines and what a shame. In many respects I’m a bit of a country bumpkin and I hope to stay that way. I find the wisdom of a farmer far more enduring than a snotty nosed intellectual currently unemployed sitting in a coffee bar with his laptop. I like the cider farms as well, concrete boxes filled with professional drunks.

Do you still feel a need to learn from your own past?

I don’t look back. If anything it’s like a really good reminder that there must be another forty years to follow. I don’t feel I’ve lived my life until I’ve fully achieved all I want to. I try to be as open and honest and direct that I possibly can be. I don’t know if I’ve reached that yet. I like my sins and I like fiddling around with them though. I don’t look for perfection in human beings, we’re imperfect by nature and I think that’s our saving grace actually. We should acknowledge the sins in others that we also have within ourselves. As I said before judgement is the great enemy. I’m incredibly self-critical though. I carry my demons of self-analysis and they’re extremely wicked and they prepare me very well.

And beyond this you’re excited to get back into the studio?

Yes we make the tours very long but they’re not arduous because of the way we are with each other. We started PIL as real friends and very quickly the record labels managed to manipulate situations in there and created all manner of personal jealousies. Of course none of us were innocent of them. PIL now in it’s modern way is well aware of all that because we’ve all been through it. We know how to avoid it. There’s no greed going on here, there’s no animosity and there’s no jealousy. It’s an incredibly enlightening way for me to be able to work. I always presumed you were supposed to hate your band and thrive in the face of adversity. But now I can thrive in the face of character.

Public Image LTD play O2 Academy Bristol on May 30.