With Public Image Ltd the subject of recent film The Public Image Is Rotten and a new box set on sale, John Lydon is enjoying a busy summer. Here, the former Sex Pistols leader dishes out his life lessons, gleaned from four decades of hell-raising and never taking no for an answer…
I had to fight record labels because…
“I’m trying to represent life accurately, not falsely. They’d say ‘Could you adjust your taste levels or, just, write a hit single?’. Which is just nonsense, it doesn’t make sense to people like me. If you don’t want PIL let us go. How many years, decades, did I have to fight the labels and just say, ‘Let me go, let my people go’? It’s very challenging and the only way out of it was to raise money independently to rise against the alleged debt that they’d run up against me. Wow, that’s a hard thing to endure. And you’ve got a media that aren’t really supporting you and many people out there imitating the ideologies you’re trying to pursue and push forward. I had to learn to have more ‘patience’ than a hospital. It drained me but at the same time enthused me.”
The best piece of advice I’ve ever had was…
“‘Stand up for yourself and never, ever show weakness.’ That was my dad’s best advice. No weakness! To genuinely believe in what you’re doing. To be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. You must not allow self-pity to get in there, or else you’ll end up in the silly saddle of drug indulgence and feeling sorry for yourself. And that’s never going to happen with a person like me – I always knew life would be tough, and why not?”
How many years did I have to fight the record labels and say, ‘Let me go, let my people go?’
John Lydon
Ego in music can be damaging because…
“To start listening to the, ‘You are wonderful’ brigade is mistake number one. Mistake number two is to actually defeat yourself with self-love – you must never allow that to happen. You must always be aware that you are very, very, very far from perfect, and work as hard as you can to make sure that you are somewhere near perfect. Self-analysis is very important, I’ll let you know if I’m any good at it in about 50 years!”
Honesty is all-important because…
“The books and records I love, everything I love about life has always been about honesty. I’m always amazed at people who tell the truth so blatantly and how brave they are; I want to be a member of that clique. My songs tell you everything about me, they have to be the most truth I can ever commit to the human race. I’m desperately trying to tell the truth about what it is to be a human being. I don’t know if I’m getting there but I’m working on it.”
The printed NME was great because…
“Oh, they were quite bizarre to me in the early days. An editor there – I met him through a friend, I can’t remember his name right now – but I remember him having the audacity to go, ‘I know for a fact you went to Oxford.’ [Laughs] What do you do with someone who talks to you that way? So funny, so pompous. Absolutely denying you to have any say in your life at all. That is what the music papers used to do, they’d totally take you over. But the old axiom of ‘Even bad press is good press’ is actually true, it really is.”
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