The play that turned John Lydon into Johnny Rotten
John Lydon and Johnny Rotten are much like a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde situation of one body, two very different beings, where the nice enough kid from Finsbury Park splits and splinters into a wild beast on stage.
Opinions aside about the music Lydon makes or some of his more controversial comments, the man is fascinating. Growing up in an impoverished area to two Irish immigrants, raised more as a parent than a kid, as his mother’s illness meant he played a major role in raising his siblings. The boy was perhaps the least likely candidate to become a star, and an even less likely one to be a star with a deep love for literature, but he is and does.
Under all of the punk icon’s swearing and rebellion is genuine intellect, and it’s part of what made him such a threat as the establishment hated tunes like ‘Anarchy in the UK’ or ‘God Save The Queen’. Part of it was the basic fact that these were trouble-making tracks, but some of the panic around them came from the fact that an intelligent man was singing about fascism, the corruption of the royal family, the exploitation of workers, the manipulation of the tourist industry and so on, troubling the dogs at the top for this beast on a chain knew what he was on about.
A great example of that point is the very origin of Johnny Rotten. Rotten is the Hyde, he’s the beast that comes out when Lydon hits the stage and starts screaming, throwing himself around and jostling with his own crowd. He’s the beast that comes out when the band was sat down on TV shows and barely lasted a moment before causing controversy or offence. Rotten is the rage, but really, Rotten was always a beast of Lydon’s intellectual design.
“I loved [Laurence] Olivier’s Richard III, I thought it was the most splendidly vile thing I’d ever seen,” Lydon said once. Did you ever think you’d hear a famous punk talk about a Shakespeare adaption done by one of Britain’s best-known names of the stage? It feels like an oxymoron to put punk and a historical play together, but here we are.
Released in 1955, Olivier’s take on Richard III was a technicolour masterpiece that truly captured the grit of the original play, focusing on the evil amongst it all as Richard plots to take his own brother down and grasp the throne, and Lyndon was a fan.
For the young kid watching, this depiction of Richard III and his outright evil was ugly and nasty, and it gripped him. “I couldn’t present myself as a nice little pop star because I knew ultimately I was pig-dog ugly, and I had to find a way around that. That was my conclusion,” he said as he decided the version of himself that stepped onto stage had to be shocking if it couldn’t be alluring.
However, part of it all comes down to protection. Even in that comment, as he’s cruel about his own appearance, Lydon’s shyness and insecurity shine through. “I didn’t conceive of Rotten as a character, that’s just the way I decided to present myself,” he said, seeing his Sex Pistols persona, not so much as a character but almost as a shield.
