Mon. Oct. 15

  John Lydon launched himself upon the world as Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten in 1976 and was seen as the voice and face of English punk rock.
   But he has lived in California since the early 1980s. He surfs, skateboards, scuba-dives and skis.
    That doesn’t conform to the stereotype. And that’s just fine with Lydon.
   For all the anger and outrage of the Pistols, Lydon always thought life was meant to be enjoyed. You acknowledge the obstacles. Maybe you rail against them. But you try to have a measure of fun and do some good work.
    His hero? Gandhi.
    Lydon formed the punk-art band Public image, Ltd. in 1978 after the Pistols blew up on their American tour. PiL, though, has been on the shelf 20 years for a variety of reasons, and 39 players have passed through its portals.   The one constant? Lydon. This current edition includes longtime guitarist Lu Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith and semi-newcomer bassist/multi-instrumentalist Scott Firth. They play Royale Boston Monday Oct. 15.  Lydon is dead serious about certain things – his belief in music’s potential, his hatred of religion - vut he can laugh at his, well, public image. 
      Lydon, now 56, is as ever – loquacious, witty, and opinionated. He’s so frequently ridden the roller coaster of praise and scorn; it’s become a source of bemusement.  We talked on the phone last week from New York.

JSInk: So, you’re on a roll it would seem right now. First album in two decades, a strong one, a tour.  You’re pretty happy then?

Lydon: Eh, no, because it really is exhausting. It’s tiring, opening up our own record label and the day to day drudgery of that business is so wearing and complicated. And we do meet-and-greets and then perform live in the evening. It’s both ends burning; I haven’t slept properly in two weeks. It’s a bit tiring on the voice, too, but that kind of adds to the thrill. You have to work harder when you get on stage, and I like that challenge.

And your voice, when it gets more ragged, it can actually sound better.

I know, stop it, I know. (laughs) People have told me it’s best when it’s a little on the rusty edge.

You’ve always said your voice was like a bag of kittens being thrown down the stairs. Still like that description?

Yes. I think it’s as good as any. You mustn’t take it all too serious in life.

You do take the piss out of other people, but you're always happy to take it out of yourself too.

Oh, most certainly. I begin with me. I don’t believe in being sacrosanct about humanity. Without humor, that’s the road to ruin. That’s why I have been with Nora [Forster, his wife] for 35 years. She’s the only German I’ve ever known to have a sense of humor.

You were together and a great couple when I first met you on the first PiL tour in Boston in 1980.

Everything in life should be a proper full-on, well-thought out commitment.

As is PiL now. After the long gap, how did it feel to bet back to writing and recording?

Madly exciting and terrifying at the same time. With all the effort we put into raising the situation and creating it and work so relentlessly touring, we were exhausted when we got the studio time [in the English countryside]. We had no time really to rehearse and write new songs as a unit, so everything was made from conversations we were having on tour buses. But oddly enough that really paid off in dividends. Because as soon as things were picked up and microphones were placed properly, we just raged into it, almost instinctively. It’s a really, really happy environment, a PiL session. It’s the same creativity as the way the songs shape-shift [in concert]. It’s the accuracy. No word or note can be misplaced or done flippantly. It’s not just a shambolic, chaotic mess. I want the drama and potency of every word to mean something.

The way you start the record with the song “This is PiL,” essentially an pronouncement with the words in the title being sung and twisted in different ways to make a simple, declarative statement: We’re here we’re back.

No, we’re here. There’s no back in it. Well maybe a backbone

Yes, but from the public’s point of view, you were off the radar for a long time.

Yeah, well, it strikes me as odd that people didn’t know because I’ve been saying this for years: The record company, the deals I was involved in, they were strangling me and made it financially impossible for me to function. Basically, more or less, an accounting department kept me out of work. I managed to crawl my way back and that put money against outstanding debts. And one way or another, here we are.

You raised the money through touring in 2010 and the infamous TV ad you did for Country Life butter in England.

I don’t understand why that would be “infamous” though. The public at large completely understands what my position was. There is this element in the press that seems to be preaching some socialist nonsense. Look, I live in the west, we need financing to do what we do, and I don’t know any other way. It’s not like I could go down to the Politburo and go, “Hello, can I have 100,000 pounds please?”

It also happens to be a very funny advert.

Well, they gave me a free hand. It was, from start to finish, one of the best business relationships I’ve ever endured. Totally open, very friendly, and un-corporate. I’ve only really known record company structure and it was like a breath of fresh air. They trusted me. They gave me the opportunity to bring wit to it. It’s not deadpan dreary.

Leading to thoughts of other business relationships, like yours with the record industry. That industry has more or less collapsed since you were last part of it. Is your take, “Fine, good riddance”?

I enjoy it. And then I step back and take a deep breath and go “Well, I think that’s a very bad thing.” The money these large record companies could flirt with was very useful to new young bands, and now that’s been removed. It’s an enormous negative, so I’m very sad about that. We do need rich godfathers or sugar daddies from time to time, whatever you want to call them, all of us. And that side of it’s gone and that’s unfortunate. It’s a shame these corporations were run by headless chickens who didn’t really consider the future at all. They never saw the internet as a threat or incorporated it into a business plan so what you’ve got now is chaos. And I don’t think it’s very helpful. You don’t know where to get a record anymore. Music stores, vinyl and CDs and cassettes – this is my culture and it’s been stolen from me. I’ve been pushed out of the business I love, which is making music, for nearly two decades.

Your new song, “Human,” has you missing England. You’re singing “England’s died” … about “a class system has pushed you all aside … doomed to slip, doomed to slide.” Most of all above the screaming and the poses here/I miss the roses, those English roses.” Now you’ve lived in California for decades. Why this sudden nostalgia for what’s missing in England?

It really came about the way we were writing in the studio. We were writing and recording simultaneously. The subject matter automatically drifted in. I think as a point of reference it was back to very early childhood, remembering when times were young and maybe through rose-colored glasses or whatever, but the point is, it’s still in me. There’s a bigger picture to unfold here, to explain to people. They’re poignant vignettes in my life, things that I miss.

It’s rather like a Ray Davies’ Kinks song, not in sound, but lyrically.

Oh, Ray Davies is one of my favorite writers. Blessings be upon you, that’s a real compliment to me. The way you craft a song should be a story, beginning, middle and end.

Sometimes though, you’re pretty oblique.

Well, you can come at it from different angles, but if you close your eyes and you listen to the way the words fall and the way the sounds and the textures evolve, it’s trying to tell you something.

“Four Enclosed Walls” is another anti-religion song, a subject you began tackling on the first album, “Public Image: First Issue.” One in a continuing series of those songs, right?

Somewhat, yes. I’ve never believed in religious crusades. There’s always a different angle to come back at it about. I don’t like religious doctrine in any walk in life. I come across it and I have to have a say about it. I don’t think any group of people have the right to preach morals to me. They can show me by example what they value, but they cannot dictate to me.

Do you consider yourself atheistic or agnostic?

Completely atheist. I have a serious acknowledgement and love of nature and science. I understand it that way. “Hark, the Herald angels sing!” is never going to work for me.

You were raised Catholic.

Yes. That’s a very hard decision to make, too [to leave], because of the rigors of Catholicism thrown at you and the guilt. It’s all about the guilt.

Some of the harsher critics of today’s PiL have said it’s the John Lydon Show with a backup band.

Of course it isn’t. Here’s the point: What would be wrong with that anyway? My god, haven’t I warranted that position in life? What is the resentment for me getting any kind of accolade or acknowledgement? There will always be this element out there who are just bitterly twisted and jealous, because I’m just a happy- go-lucky, creative kind of bloke. I find it disturbing that people could resent the Johnny Rotten Show but they don’t resent, say, the Morrissey show. Apart from that, I’ve been very clear that this is a sharing universe to me, and it’s ludicrous to see it any other way. Plus, the people I’m working with, they’re not allowed an opinion here? Someone’s making assumptions on their part and I’ll tell you these are my very close friends and they’re upset when they read things like that.

Some of those folks like to harken back to “Public Image” and “Metal Box” with Wobble and Levene and say “Those were the days.”

Oh, that trendy movement to isolate you into that narrow little slot. You know, hello! When the Sex Pistols first put out “Never Mind the Bollocks” there was that narrow clique that hated us and resented it then and then there was the first two PiL albums and the same narrow clique who hated that stuff at the time are now harking back to it. It seems to be they’re consistently ten years behind and sometimes twenty

You’ve talked about PiL’s songs in terms of landscape and texture. Good words. The first time around with the new album I caught words, the second time those other elements. How do you see them working together?

I love reading but the written word is never good enough. There’s something missing and that would be music. Same when you listen to music without a human voice. I find it somehow inferior. It’s that combination of the two that’s unsurpassable. The human voice, for me, is the main instrument in all of nature. Instruments are imitations of voices, and the two together can reach places where words cannot. There are certain emotions that can only be grasped as sound. It’s that intricate weaving of the two that I’m very fascinated with.

You don’t print lyrics on the album sleeve. Why not?

They’re too overwhelmingly dominant. It’s like the way I shape-shift the songs live, according to the atmosphere. The words are ambient. One night the poignancy can be in a completely different place. It depends on the atmosphere of the audience and that give and take that gives it life. I don’t want it to be a museum piece.

Speaking of museums and artifacts, I remember you ripping up Sex Pistols memorabilia on MTV some years ago, to rant against collectible “museum piece” attitudes. So, I should ask: You’ve done a few Sex Pistols reunion tours in the ‘90s and ‘00s, digging up that old dirt. Is there another one ahead?

Never. I had a very great conversation with [Sex Pistols drummer] Paul Cook over the phone before I came to the States and we’re in a happy place, me and him about calling it quits. That’s it, let it rest.

But the Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” was re-released earlier this year for the Queens diamond Jubilee. And the band was asked to play at the opening Olympic ceremony.

We didn’t want to reform. Some of us did, some of us didn’t, but not me and I was pleased Paul didn’t. I hold Paul in high regard. If I’d have turned up in person, it would have been all rather silly… Although there were some good points about that [ceremony]. I went to meet Danny Boyle, who put together the ceremony and I was very impressed with the way he staged it. It was completely from the working class point of view. That angle has never been approached before; it’s always been about celebrating the landed gentry. This was quite different, this was celebrating national health. So that’s why I gave them permission to use a PiL song, “Under the House,” and two Sex Pistols’ songs, “God Save the Queen” - as the camera traveled down the river Thames and the Tower Bridge - and they played a minute and 30 seconds of “Pretty Vacant,” while the entire royal family, Queen and all, were staring at Johnny Rotten on the screen. And that was poignant.

We didn’t see that here in the US.

America decided you needed massive advertising. The rest of the world noted it. In a weird way, that’s how brilliant the English are, you have these juxtapositions of events that are obviously clashing and colliding but at the same time mean something. There’s a sense of unity there.

I wonder what the Queen thought.

That’s intriguing me still. Let’s put it this way: It was a button worth pushing.

You have amazing resiliency and stamina.

You can’t beat me down. It’s not possible. I’ve never been an ageist and I don’t believe in that “Hope I die before I get old.” I use a refrain in the song, “One Drop,” “We are the ageless/We are teenagers.” You’re as young as you feel or as old as you want to be. For me, one of the things I value most about my childhood was the sponge-like way I would absorb information and I’ve remained a child. Adults tend to switch off and just accept. That’s never going to happen here. Middle age? No such thing. When’s that happening? Someone never sent me the rule book.

And if they had, you’d have torn it up.

Of course I would.

(This is an expanded version of an interview that ran in the Cape Cod Times Saturday Oct. 13., www.capecodonline.com. )

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