The one moment that provoked John Lydon’s bad behaviour
It takes a lot to be considered the most outspoken man in punk, but John Lydon was seemingly the man for the job. Best known by his onstage moniker Johnny Rotten, the musician has skewered everything from the “astoundingly popular and enormously hollow” Green Day to death itself, given that he famously quipped: “There’s nothing glorious in dying; anyone can do it”.
Of course, there’s a reason for his unruly behaviour and general loudmouth activity, and it’s as strange a story as you’d expect from the former Sex Pistol.
Lydon previously said he patently refused to go on holiday with his parents as a teenager because of a long-standing fear that his father would take his clothes off and run around naked. “He’d do it for a laugh,” he explained in an interview with The Talks, “But it used to really, really annoy and upset me.”
Lydon has always been frank about the effect his childhood had on him. A proud advocate for the working class, he grew up in north London at a time when the area was impoverished and suffered from high crime rates. In his autobiography Rotten – No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, he said Londoners had to begrudgingly accept his Irish background, although he remembered bricks being thrown at him by English parents on his way to school.
“We were the Irish scum,” he wrote, with a usual hint of Johnny Rotten bite: “But it’s fun being scum, too.”
Again, it’s Lydon’s childhood that he credits for creating his ‘Rotten’ persona. At only seven years old, Lydon contracted spinal meningitis and spent a year being nursed back to health at St Ann’s Hospital. The experience had a lasting effect on his outlook, causing memory loss that plagued him for four years – as well as gruelling headaches, months-long periods spent in a coma, and vivid hallucinations.
In the same interview, Lydon joked about his father’s naked antics, he said: “I didn’t know my parents, didn’t know my own name, and I never want to wake up and feel that pain ever again.” In a rare moment of sincerity, the musician admitted it was a constant problem for him, saying the fear it might happen again never quite left him.
It was the meningitis that was responsible for giving him what he later called the ‘Lydon stare’, his signature dead-eyed glare that put Stanley Kubrick to shame.
A childhood spent poor, ill, and evidently in fear of his old man’s naked body was the perfect cocktail for creating one of punk’s finest frontmen. His quick wit and anger were well applied to anti-authority anthems like ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, and his later work with Public Image Ltd addressed some of his own health anxiety, as well as dedicating his work to his late wife, Nora’s battle with Alzheimer’s.
