John Lydon:
Musician magazine, USA, June 1986
Transcribed (and additional info) by Karsten Roekens
© 1986 Musician / CHARLES M. YOUNG
THIS IS THE REAL STORY OF JOHNNY ROTTEN
Sorting out the Lydons, by CHARLES M. YOUNG
"What is your business in Britain?" the customs officer wanted to know.
"I'm going to interview Johnny Rotten," I said.
"Oh," he smiled. "That will be fun."
"No," I said. "It won't."
"Really?" he said. "I always thought it was an act he put on rather than a character defect."
"That's not an either/or proposition," I should have said. As it was I opted for character defect.
"Well," he said, "I saw him come through here once on his way to America. He was travelling with his mother. I thought it was rather sweet."
According to the most recent surveys, 38.6 percent of the people who read this magazine are hosebags who write letters to the editor that say shit like "Why don't you guys live up to the name of your magazine and use that space for a real musician, like Phil Lesh / Rick Wakeman / Al Di Meola?" Under normal circumstances I pay no attention to hosebags, don't even open their letters because I can smell hosebag attitude right through the envelope.
But this article is not normal circumstances. This article is Johnny Rotten. And this one time I gotta sympathise with you 38.6 percent hosebags - I also get unglued when I'm reminded that this Rotten dude exists on the same planet. So go ahead and send your drooling, stupid letters and know that I ache for you as I ache for King Canute commanding the tide to roll back.
Cos, see, the difference between you hosebags and myself is that you hosebags think Rotten shouldn't be in the magazine cos has no talent. I say he shouldn't be in the magazine because when I see his name in print I am reminded that on five of the seven occasions when I met him since 1977, he came within a hair of giving me a nervous breakdown.
Yeah, yeah, I know - tough job I have, flying around the world interviewing rich and famous people. But the next two years are gonna be tough on me and all of you hosebags. The Sex Pistols are coming back.
A docudrama (apparently) centered on Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen is due out. It's directed by Alex Cox, who did 'Repo Man', the best fictional treatment of punk on film ever. 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle', the Sex Pistols' own sort of autobiographical movie, is finally going to get released in the States. And there are a number of books in the works, not the least of which I'm hoping will be my own 'Blowin' Chunks - Punk Passage And Beyond' (Doubleday/Dolphin), a skewed social history of punk in which the Pistols figure heavily. [1]
And then thee is the matter of Rotten's new album, 'Album' ('Cassette' in cassette, 'Single' in single), which to universal surprise is listenable and interesting and, if his reputation with radio programmers doesn't sink him again, somewhat commercial.
Let us furthermore recall why the guy is important aesthetically and historically - he changed singing. No one sounded like him before him, and thousands have tried to sound like him since him. No band has ever declared itself to the world with such force and rage as when Johnny Rotten announced he was the Antichrist on the Sex Pistols' first single 'Anarchy In The U.K.'. No band did more to spawn the still flourishing punk subculture than the Sex Pistols. Although it never broke the Billboard Hot 100 and radio programmers still loathe it, 'Never Mind The Bollocks' remains one of the most influential albums of the '70s, maybe the most influential if you count punk influence in other art forms.
And let me recall last summer, when I met Rotten in a Los Angeles saloon to get some information for my book. In two hours the guy drinks ten screwdrivers, several of which are doubles, and having asked every question I can think of I figure I better get him home before he pulls his usual Jekyll and Hyde. He, however, wants sushi.
"I answered all your questions!" he snarls.
Maybe food will sober him up, I'm figuring, as I drive to Sushi On Sunset where he eats about two grams of fish and pours down six or seven 21oz. Sapporos, growing ever more belligerent over a question I'd asked hours before.
See, certain types of punks are homophobic, and like all Americans they love to believe their heroes are homosexuals. I asked Rotten about certain rumours concerning him which he denied (he's had a girlfriend for years), saying what difference did it make anyway?
Fair enough, but as he gets drunker he wants to deny it some more, getting increasingly irritated with me for asking in the first place, and flirting with all these woman at the sushi bar to show how heterosexual he is. And he's getting louder and louder, really stinking out the joint for anyone interested in eating, and he's ordering numerous Sapporos for all the woman he's trying to flirt with on my tab. I'm tellin' ya, I was hoping for botulism in my tuna roll, or maybe in his tuna roll. Course, the bastard wouldn't have eaten it anyway.
So, finally he stands on the bar and announces, nay, screams to the entire restaurant:
"No one ever stuck their willie up my bum!!!"
Then he todders off to take a leak. This woman he's been putting the moves on, she's got dyed black spikey hair and is wearing a Rodeo Drive designer punk outfit in black and dayglo pink and has a skeleton earring, leans over and asks:
"Who is that guy?"
"John Lydon," I say.
"Who's that?" she asks.
"Johnny Rotten."
"Who's that?"
"He sang for the Sex Pistols ... you never heard of the Sex Pistols?"
"No."
Young people today, they got no respect for tradition. They don't deserve to know who this John Lydon/Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols/Public Image Ltd. is. Fuck 'em! On the other hand, I want lots of young people to give me their money when my book comes out, so I'll lay out a portion of my stuff.
First of all, Johnny Rotten is one of the least informative interviews this side of politics. Interviewers tend not to notice they are getting nothing, because he is such a dificult personality that they are overly grateful or overly resentful of any small tidbit he tosses their way. I plead guilty on both counts.
His first impulse is not to reveal, but to calculate how much to reveal and/or provoke. He almost never volunteers information if you bring up a general subject in hopes that he'll ramble for a while and drop a few factoids on you. He rarely tells anecdotes, mostly just throws thunderbolts of judgement.
One of the tricks of interviewing is to shut up for a moment and let the interviewee rush to fill up the silence. Try it sometime. Conversation abhors a vacuum and people will say anything to fill up those uncomfortable pauses.
Rotten is the only person I ever interviewed (excluding a couple of lawyers) who is smart and sadistic enough not to fill up those silences. He loves to look haughty as I squirm and stutter to formulate the next question out of the absolute minimum of information he has revealed.
There is also the problem of what to do with one's eyes when talking to Rotten. To return his glare is to be blasted with two laser beams of contempt. It is to know you are in the presence of someone who is quite sure you are ridiculous. If you look elsewhere in his face you are confronted with massive, deep, red, poisonous zits, the sort you could squeeze until you cry and still never pop the root infection. His scalp is piled with hairballs so vile they would get any stray dog euthanised immediately as a public health hazard. And his body, these days, is bloated.
The biggest problem however is figuring out when he is telling the truth. The first insight I had into the guy's character came in 1977, when I was interviewing Sid Vicious for a cover story on the Pistols. [2] Vicious had attended Kingsway College [3] (a college of further education, that is the equivalent of American high school) and recalled that John had once skipped school and returned with the excuse that he had piles so long they were hanging out his pants, and he had to cut them of with a razor. The teachers had believed him, even sent him flowers. Rotten confirmed the story in 1977 (describing himself as an "atrocious liar") and again in 1986. Like any good politician, he learned early that the most outrageously absurd lie, if propounded with enough emotional force, will be believed. At the same time, his life has been so strange that you cannot dismiss anything out of hand.
One of the early stories about Rotten was that he once had a job as a rat killer in a cesspool. To the extent this story has been repeated, it has been assumed to be part of the Sex Pistols hype, a lie calculated to build their legend. But he really was a rat killer in a cesspool.
"He used to work with me in the crane when he was young," says John Lydon, Sr. "He used to spend his holidays as my banksman. We were digging out cesspits and they were full of rats. When I would chuck out the dragline, the rats used to grab the rope and climb it back towards me. We had an agent there sometimes and he used to shoot them. But John would chuck them off with an axe."
The elder Lydon appears to be a robustly healthy man of 44, [5] his complexion ruddy and weathered by years of working the oil rigs in the North Sea. Margaret Byrne, Mr. Lydon's girlfriend and widow of his first cousin, divides her attention between the interview and the English version of 'The Dating Game' on the living room telly. I tell him the story of John's piles.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "I didn't know this, you see. Even if it was true, he wouldn't tell me because I would bring him back to school and sort it out. Course, if the master called him a liar in front of me, I'd smack him in the mouth!"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "You didn't actually smack the schoolmaster in the mouth, did you?"
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "But I would have, cos I've been in pubs with John and I've had me jacket off more than once. All the time. I used to sort out all the problems in the pub. Whenever there was a row I was the first one in it. Well, you know Irish people, they have a temper."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "You would fight over John in pubs?"
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "Regular it used to happen, in the pub across the street. [5] We used to go there and you'd have girls come in and a girl would say 'Hallo Johnny darling, can we have your autograph?' And then her boyfriend would call him a wanker, then the punch-up started. I've had all me knuckles broken fighting there, John will tell you that himself. I've had three fights in one night!"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Over John?"
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "Yeah. It's jealousy, isn't it? If anybody is famous at all, some girl wants to kiss him, especially in the pub. That's where it all starts. When he comes home we go to the pub. If there's a problem we sort it out between us. We just have a go, win or lose, what do you do? That's what life is all about, isn't it?"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Seems like it would make life difficult."
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "No, not really. I'm hot-tempered, you see? I drive a heavy goods lorry in the city, and when you drive a truck down a narrow street, everybody is going like this to each other ..."
Mr. Lydon makes what I always interpreted to be a V for Victory sign, but which means "Up yours!" in London.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "... and that's it then. I have sort-outs in the streets every day. Every day I have a punch-up. Well, not every day, most days I have a punch-up."
Mr. Lydon tells a long story about throttling another lorry driver who sneaked in front of him at a construction site and ended up bleeding in the gutter ("I don't see why I should let him slip me the mickey!") for his affront. Sheba, the family dog, a muscular cross of Labrador and Doberman, grows restless and Margaret shoos her from the room.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "The dog has one fault. If we take her out she'll be walking along the green, calm as can be, and for no reason, out of the blue, she'll chomp on someone. All of a sudden she's just got someone in her teeth, and she's got some teeth, like a tiger. We just have her to keep the blacks away. Something about them that dog don't like, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the colour of their skin."
The Lydons live in a two-storey flat [6] - the same in which Johnny grew up - in a housing estate in the Finsbury Park section of London, a working-class Irish neighbourhood that has in recent years become racially mixed. Of the four Lydon sons two have been seriously hurt in fights, according to their father, with blacks.
"Jimmy was almost as famous as Johnny," says Mr. Lydon of his second eldest, standing proudly next to his pretty young wife and baby in a snapshot. "He had his own band, the 4" Be 2", [7] you know, but he married a school teacher and she put a block on it. He's quite content now, painting and decorating."
One of Jimmy's first projects was his living room, which he redecorated like a pub in the green and gold colours of Ireland. Various aspects of his handiwork are displayed in the photographs, but it is hard to keep from looking at his face. His right eye socket is a grotesque mass of red scar tissue.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "He lost his eye about five years ago. He was at a stag party on a Friday night, he came out of the pub carrying a wedding present at half past three in the morning. When he got to the corner he met nine darkies. They said 'What have you got in the bag?' He said 'Aw, go away!' So they jumped him. Two of them picked up bottles and they both got him in the eye. Cut the eye clean out of his head. You've seen guys fight, but you've never seen anyone who could fight like Jimmy. Since he lost his eye he's terrific. He's got the method and he never loses, not now. If somebody cut your eye out, they'd never do it again to you, you'd make sure of that, wouldn't you?"
Bobby, the third-oldest (the youngest, Martin, works for John as a roadie), has a semi-circular, almost glowing red scar from just below his right earlobe to the corner of his mouth.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "It was August a year, a year last August. He was coming in at midnight and there was two coloured guys playing their radio down there. And he sleeps in the front room, over the front door, and he said 'Go away, it's a bit late to be shouting outside the door!' One went inside, and the other said 'What did you say, man?' Bobby said 'You heard me, piss off!' And as he turned around the coloured guy stuck a Stanley knife in his neck, just nipped the jugular. When he came in his head was hanging of him, you could see into his neck. We almost lost him, he lost so much blood. He's very lucky. Tough to control him afterwards because he wanted to get the guys. He couldn't get the bloke who did it, because he's inside, got three years. But Bobby got five of his mates. Caught them at the chip shop and gave them a good hiding."
Born in Galway, Ireland, Mr. Lydon moved to Scotland on his own at the age of 14, supporting himself on the pipelines and eventually working his way down to London. He met his wife there, the former Eileen Barry of Cork, at an Irish dance club.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "She was so quiet. It was funny - my son has a wife and she's exactly the same as mine is, Jimmy's wife is. And all she lives for is the baby and him, nothing else in the world. And my wife was exactly the same. She idolised the children, never wanted to go anywhere, just the children all the time. Except church. She was a really good Catholic. If there was a church that said 'Mass twice a day', she'd make you go twice a day. She was a great Catholic. And as the lads grew up, they could never do anything wrong in her eyes, anything. She backed Johnny all the way."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "It was up to you to whack him when he got out of line?"
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "She'd never let you hit him, no way. You'd say 'I'm going to give you a smack on the ear!' and she wouldn't let you touch him, no way. She'd say 'Go away with your Irish temper and leave the lad alone!' They got on very well together, all the kids, but Johnny was more attached to her than anybody. It was always mum and John. She was so calm, she would sit down and talk to him for hours and hours. He wouldn't go nowhere without telling her, he wouldn't go outside that door without telling her where he was going. Maybe it was his meningitis that he got to depend on her so much. Johnny was eight years old when he had meningitis, you know, and he was in the hospital [8] for months. I'd say three months. It's water on the brain, meningitis, isn't it? He kept getting pain in the back of his head. He used to have these lumbar punctures, you know, big needles into the spine and they would draw the fluid. I used to have to hold him down on the bed when they gave him the lumbar punctures, he wouldn't let them give him the lumbar punctures unless I was there. And he forgot everything in the hospital that he had learned in school. Lost his memory completely, couldn't remember who he was. And she taught him everything again herself. She was a genius at math, you know. You could have a calculator, and she could do the problem in her head and she could beat you to the answer. I'll be damned if I know where she learned it, but she could beat accountants with A-levels in mathematics."
When Johnny returned home he lived mostly an indoors existence, reading books and listening to music alone in his room. There is a football pitch right outside their backdoor, but even when he could be coaxed onto the field he would refuse to kick the ball, just sort of waft his foot at it if it rolled directly to him. He was equally resistant to his formal education, getting expelled from Catholic school [9] at the age of 14.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "It was a silly old master there, kept dictating to him. Johnny had a bit of an accident, twisted his ankle one day. I took him up to casualty and they gave him a little card saying he'd been there. The master said he didn't want to hear any bloody excuses, didn't want to see it, it was all lies. They almost had a punch-up, you know what I mean, and he got expelled over it."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Johnny was standing there with a sprained ankle and a card from the hospital, and the master wouldn't believe him?"
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "More or less called Johnny a lyin' b, and he got expelled."
Despite Mrs. Lydon prevailing on the Bishop of London to pay a surprise visit one Sunday morning ("I felt bad about it because you can't let the bishop see you with a hangover, can you?") and promise the reinstate the lad, John transferred to Kingsway College, [10] and fellow student Sid Vicious [3] was soon a regular visitor to the Lydon home.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "My wife used to feed him here. She thought as much of Sid as she did of John, and Sid had never had nothing, really. I'd come home, and if I'd had a few drinks I'd say 'Who's that wanker?' And she'd say 'That's Johnny's friend, leave off!' And she'd be pushing me out the door. I used to be a bit wild, you know. Martin, I'd pick him up and sling him under me arm, but she wouldn't let you do that. Even a coloured person - if a coloured person passed the door and he was hungry, she'd bring him in and give him a meal. She was that type. Me, I'd shoot him. The difference in people, it's unbelievable, isn't it?"
John and Sid went on to make history, causing hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic with the Sex Pistols. John getting thrown out of the band for being an arsehole at the end of their brief American tour, Sid more or less murdering his girlfriend and committing suicide. The biggest blow to John, however, came in the fall of 1978, just after a trip to America with his mother to discuss plans for a solo career.
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "She thought she had a tummyache from all the parties and food and drink. They couldn't find anything at the hospital, but she got bad and they opened her up and they discovered she had malignant cancer. He took it really bad, because he was really attached to her, you know. He adored his mother, really. From the meningitis. He sat there all the time with her, day and night he sat in the chair. The way he felt at the time was, he thought it was all his problems that was causing this to her. His punk rock, you know what I mean. But it wasn't, cancer is a disease and there's nothing you can do. We talked to four experts and they all said not even a miracle could cure her. He wouldn't believe the doctors couldn't do anything. I don't think he's trusted them since."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Wasn't he also mad at the priest?"
JOHN LYDON, SR.: "He was alcoholic. Before she died she wanted to be annointed, and he was dead drunk at four o'clock in the afternoon. We'd been calling him all morning. Someone who goes to church every Sunday, and you can't get the priest to come when she's dying! She'd already been annointed four times because they expected her to die. They were giving her so many injections in trying to keep her alive that they were killing her. It seems like you could save people from sufering some of that agony and misery, but they won't let you."
Sheba the dog trots back into the living room for a little affection, and Mr. Lydon gives her a pat on the head.
Johnny Rotten's solo career, it seems to me, can be characterised as a lot of thrashing around, looking for someone to blame for his pain. It has often been musically adventurous but not very listenable, unless you are into narcissism, despair and scapegoating. Unlike his work with the Pistols, there is little funny about it.
In his personal life, he has left many of his friends behind, angry and embittered and full of accusations that he lies. He seems more comfortable holding on to his enemies, like Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, always the mongoose to John's cobra and recently John's victim in a court suit in which he and the surviving Pistols (and Sid Vicious' mom) won complete control of Glitterbest, McLaren's management company, and Matrixbest, McLaren's movie company.
After a disastrous first album for Elektra [11] in 1984 (a half-million dollar advance and 30,000 copies sold) and an equally disastrous tour, Rotten is again selling albums with 'Album' and is going to assemble yet another version of his ever shifting band Public Image Ltd. for a tour.
"I honestly didn't think this album would be commercial in any way, shape or form," he says, sitting behind the desk of some absent executive at Virgin Records in London. "I thought it would be perceived as absolutely preposterous for me to delve into that kind of music, particularly using those guitars. I thought it would drive people against me, but it's done the exact opposite."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "The first time I heard it I thought you'd brought in Eddie Van Halen for the solos."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "He couldn't play that good, he'd have beaten it to death, ha ha ha! I wanted to make a jolly good rock album, and that appeared to be the best way. I've worked with Bill Laswell before [12] and we're a good team."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "It's getting quite a bit of play in dance clubs, especially the single 'Rise'. When I heard the chorus ("May the road rise with you") my first thought was 'What's this guy doing in a good mood?'"
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Ha ha ha, I deserve to be , ha ha ha. What a thing to say to me - 'You have no right to be happy, it's against all my preconceptions!'"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "It is against all preconceptions. Preconceptions based on getting verbally eviscerated, physically threatened, thoroughly embarrassed in previous meetings, recently hearing that you hit a friend of mine over the head with a beer can and shot blanks from a submachine gun at bystanders on the set of the video for 'Rise', and ..." [13]
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Got any cigarettes?" (Rotten burps) "No? I'll get some."
Upon his return, I tell him I talked with his father.
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "What lies did he tell you? Did he get out the family snapshots?"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Some."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "My God. Was he currently in jail, or just getting out, or what?"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "No, but all his stories were about giving someone a good hiding. He seemed proud of it."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "I know."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "I got this vision of you as a small child in a house like that."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Ha ha ha!"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Obviously you know what I'm getting at."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Yes - no comment! Ha ha ha. I definitely decided that was not going to be my lifestyle."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Another thing he talked about was the blacks who live in the estates."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Oh, the race-hate nonsense, I can't stand that. Most of the working-class people here have that problem. It seems to be the only thing that unites them, their hatred for each other. It's outrageous. If it isn't against blacks, it's against people who live on the other side of the Thames, or Northerners and Southerners. It's just on and on and on. I am my own person, I wouldn't allow any of that nonsense to infiltrate my sensible brain, thank you!"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "A small child doesn't have a choice about that."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "It does, you know. I cannot be easily swayed, I've always felt what was right and what was wrong."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "From the beginning you felt your father was wrong about black people? Or was there a single incident that turned your mind around?"
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "I don't think violence is the answer to anything. Never have, never will."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Two of your brothers were carved up by blacks."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "More coincidence than anything else. They're such raving loonies, the lot of them. They don't mind going out and scrapping with anybody or anything. I'd rather not talk about it, it depresses me, as it happens."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "I found it kind of depressing, sitting there."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "I know ... wondering when someone is going to turn on you!"
I change the subject to meningitis he contracted at 8.
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "I blame it on the pork chops, I haven't eaten pork since. I was in a coma for a long time. I don't remember too much about it."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Your father held you down while you had your spinal shots?"
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Yeah, that was bad. Every fucking six hours. That was torture, you can't imagine that thing!"
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Every six hours for how many days?"
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "For months. For about six months."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Every six hours for six months you got a hypodermic needle up your spine?"
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "Yeah. I nearly died."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Your father said that you'd forgotten everything you'd learned in school."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "That's true. I had to start all over again."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Your mother taught you your schooling?"
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "No. I taught myself, I'm self-taught."
At this point Rotten whispers something to himself which I don't catch during the actual interview. Two weeks later, I play the tape back twelve times and Rotten is distinctly saying:
"Don't you listen, I'm bored! Don't you listen!"
For this I see three possible explanations:
1) He is possessed by Satan, who is not a fan of psychoanalysis,
2) He is commanding himself not to listen, because questions about his mom are painful, and
3) He thinks I don't listen and finds the entire interview a snore.
In any case, his manager, perhaps by extrasensory perception, seems to pick up on explanation number 3) and interrupts with a suggestion that we finish, which I do by asking if he's seen his family lately.
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "They're doing alright. They're still fighting."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "It's a hell of a way to get through life."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "You can't change them, they won't have it. They're self-righteous about it."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "What I'm trying to figure out is why you're different."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "I can fight if I'm pushed into it. I've had very good training."
CHARLES M. YOUNG: "Yeah, but your face is not a mass of scar tissue."
JOHNNY ROTTEN: "And it won't be!"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Young's book remained unreleased.
[2] 'Rolling Stone' magazine (20 October 1977)
[3] Sid Vicious met Lydon at Hackney College in 1973. Lydon enrolled at Kingsway College in 1974, Vicious didn't.
[4] Lydon's father was actually 52 years old in 1986.
[5] Sir George Robey (220 Seven Sisters Road, London N4), now derelict.
[6] 1 Honeyfield at Six Acres Estate, London N4.
[7] 4" Be 2" released three singles between 1979 and 1981 and disbanded in spring 1981.
[8] Whittington Hospital (London N19)
[9] St William of York R.C. Secondary School (London N1). Lydon got expelled in December 1971 and did not return, but passed his O-level examinations in 1972 anyway.
[10] John Lydon first went to Hackney College from 1972 to 1974, where he met fellow student Sid Vicious. Then, in 1974, Lydon went to Kingsway College but hardly ever bothered to show up. He finally dropped out in late 1975 after he had joined the Sex Pistols.
[11] 'This Is What You Want This Is What You Get' (released 9 July 1984)
[12] 'World Destruction' by Time Zone, recorded in 1984.
[13] Actually John Lydon's guest appearance in Big Audio Dynamite's 'The Medicine Show' video, shot in late April 1986 in Battersea.
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