Background

John Joseph Lydon was born in Finsbury Park, London, England, on January 31, 1956, into a poor, working-class family of Irish descent. His parents were John Christopher and Eileen Lydon. At age seven, Lydon contracted spinal meningitis and spent half a year slipping in and out of comas; when he finally recovered, most of his memory had been erased, and he was left with minor damage that eventually popped up in elements of his stage persona.

Lydon, tutored by his mother, had to learn everything again from scratch. Despite this, Lydon had to grow up fast, there was no time to be mollycoddled. As the eldest child, he had responsibilities. His father was a working man, and unfortunately, his mother became even more ill than John himself.

Education

Labeled a "dummy" at school by teachers John soon became disillusioned and detached, but never a loner. He was painfully shy but realized it was getting him nowhere. Lydon had friends, but he chose them carefully.

By the time he got to Secondary school, he had already begun to form his own strong ideas and beliefs about life and his school work.

John was educated at St William of York Roman Catholic School. Although a bright and attentive student it wasn't long before his 'opinions' singled him out for special attention, and by the age of 15 he had been "asked to leave."

John demanded an education, not just a stack of rules. He knew that there was no point in rebelling just for the sake of it. John knew that education was the way out of poverty. Not in the monetary sense, but as a way of improving yourself. To this day he is still a firm believer in the 'right' of education.

Lydon attended Hackney College, a college for 'tearaway's and no-hopers' a college; but there he flew through his O Level exams, before moving on Kingsway Princeton College to start his A-Levels.

Career

Johnny Lydon was hired as the frontman of the Sex Pistols in 1975 by Malcolm McLaren, who was impressed by his personally crafted image and unique fashion sense. With the Pistols, Lydon went on to write some of the most influential bodies of work in punk rock’s history, including "Anarchy in the U.K.," "God Save the Queen" and "Holidays in the Sun."

The band attracted press criticism due to their anarchic lyrics, eccentric antics, and swearing on live television. Due to the controversial appearance of the Sex Pistols in the media, Lydon acquired the reputation of the outré figurehead of the punk movement in the public image.

Lydon left the Pistols in 1978 and formed Public Image Ltd, his own band which became known for its experimental music sound. It is now regarded as the earliest post-rock group. Despite the limited commercial success of Public Image Ltd, the band released eight studio albums and a series of hit singles, such as "Public Image," "Death Disco," and "Rise." Public Image Ltd went on hiatus in 1993 and reunited in 2009.

In the next few years, Lydon went on to host several television shows in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Belgium. In 1994, he released his autobiography, 'Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs,' and released his only solo album 'Psycho’s Path' in 1997.

John made a surprise move appearing on ITV's "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" in 2004.

December 2009 saw the long-awaited return of Public Image Limited (PiL) for 7 monumental live dates in the UK. Their first shows in 17 years. The band has toured worldwide ever since. 2012 saw them release the critically acclaimed studio album 'This Is PiL.' The album was self-funded and released on its own PiL Official Ltd label.

'This is PiL' was followed in 2015 by the 10th PiL studio album 'What The World Needs Now…,' again released via their own PiL Official label. The album peaked at number 29 in the official United Kingdom album charts and picked up fantastic acclaim from both press and public. (The album also peaked at number 3 in the official United Kingdom indie charts and number 4 in the official United Kingdom vinyl charts).

'Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored' was published in 2014 and was John's first complete autobiography covering his life from childhood through to the present day taking in Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd, along with his TV and media work.

Achievements

• 

  Known for his no-nonsense way of talking, rebellious image and fashion style, John Lydon was seen as a figurehead of the burgeoning punk movement in the 1970s, and, having been a prominent figure in British popular culture for over four decades, in 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a United Kingdom-wide vote.
  
  John Lydon has won numerous awards and accolades in his career, including several NME Awards, and the BMI Icon Award. In 2006, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Sex Pistols, but he refused to accept the invitation or even acknowledge the induction.
  
  As a writer, Lydon has written two best-selling volumes of memoir: the excoriating 'Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs' and the ridiculously entertaining and uncompromising 'Anger Is An Energy: My Life Uncensored.'

Works

More photos

• book

  • Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

    (Seventeen years later, John Lydon looks back at himself, ...)

    1993
  • Anger Is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

    (John Lydon is an icon - one of the most recognizable and ...)

    2014
  • Mr. Rotten's Scrapbook 2015

• music

  • Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols 1977
  • The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle Import 1979
  • Flogging a Dead Horse 1980
  • Kiss This 1992
  • Filthy Lucre 1996
  • Filth and the Fury Ost 2000
  • Jubilee 2002
  • The Sex Pistols Box 2002
  • First Issue 1978
  • The Flowers Of Romance 1981
  • This Is What You Want This Is What You Get 1984
  • Album 1986
  • Happy? 1987
  • 9 1989
  • That What Is Not 1999
  • This is PiL 2012
  • What The World Needs Now... 2015
  • Paris Au Printemps 1980
  • Psycho's Path 1997

Religion

Lydon's parents raised him and his brothers in the Roman Catholic faith, but he "never had any godlike epiphanies or thought that God had anything to do with this dismal occurrence called life."

Politics

Lydon became a political mascot for the 1970's punk takeover in the United Kingdom, a job that he continuously admitted to resenting in his autobiography Rotten. He rebuked the idea that The Sex Pistols were ever truly political stating that, "[Their] interest in politics at the time was zero…[He] just knew they were all corrupt - like the people who would run off with money and fake their own deaths" (Rotten Lydon 104) however his lack of knowledge about the specificity of politics at the time the Sex Pistols were performing in both the United Kingdom and around the world did not stop him from continuously spewing lines like, "Cause I want to be anarchy/ Its the only way to be" to the young and impressionable population. Lydon admittedly became more political later on in his career and in the creation of PiL but his legacy as the forefather of British punk rock lives on.

In 2017 John Lydon defended United States President Donald Trump against the "left-wing media" during a Monday interview in London. He said on ITV's "Good Morning Britain" that Trump is "a complicated fellow" but doesn’t deserve being labeled a racist by his liberal opponents. "What I dislike is the left-wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as a racist, and that's completely not true," John said. "There's many, many problems with him as a human being, but he’s not that, and there just might be a chance something good will come out of that situation because he terrifies politicians."

Views

In 2005, Lyndon was interviewed by the BBC's Sunday morning religious show, where he said, "I don't like the idea of one-parent families. It's very tough on the kids. They grow up missing something. I find the same with same-sex marriages; there is something missing. There is a point to male and female - and for a child to develop, it needs both those aspects."

Quotations: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night!"

"I'm not here for your amusement. You're here for mine."

"Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative."

"It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest."

"There's nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it."

"Love is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises."

"It's no good being nice and young and naive. There's no good in that at all. You've got to do it all yourself, and you've gotta learn quickly. And you can't look for sympathy either."

"When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution."

"Music can describe emotions far more accurately than words ever can. As soon as I realized that, I knew music was where I wanted to be."

Personality

The whole "Johnny Rotten" persona was indicated as a stage act in "The Filth & the Fury," the considerably more flattering of two documentaries on the Sex Pistols. Johnny Lydon was said to be a sickly, quiet, bookish type before he joined the group and the documentary showed that many aspects of his stage persona were inspired directly by Laurence Olivier's performance in the film "Richard III": the hunched back, the half-sneer/half-grin, the loud clothes, the tendency to shout insults at any "passersby."

He was supposed to be on Pan American World Airways Flight 103 from London's Heathrow International Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on December 21, 1988, but missed the flight because his wife Nora, hadn't packed in time. The plane crashed over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland when a terrorist bomb exploded in the forward cargo hold, killing all 259 passengers and crew.

Lydon considers himself a Californian rather than a Brit. "I do consider myself a Californian," Lydon said. "And I hope that annoys a lot of Californians! But really, home is where the heart is, and I find this to be a very generous state. It had to be because I was basically run out of Britain."

Physical Characteristics: At age seven, while living in the tough north London Finsbury Park area, Lydon contracts meningitis. He spends a year in hospital, often slipping in and out of a coma. Part of Lydon's treatment involves drawing fluid from his spine on a regular basis, which leaves him with a noticeably hunched back. The disease also permanently affects his eyesight, leading to what is later called "the Lydon stare."

Lydon was knifed by offended Royalists after the Sex Pistols' classic anti-monarchy song "God Save The Queen" was released, resulting in the permanent loss of feeling in the middle two fingers of his left hand. He has played the guitar right-handed ever since.

Quotes from others about the person

• I was talking to Bill Laswell saying I need somebody who's really crazy, man, and he thought of John Lydon. I knew he was perfect because I'd seen this movie that he'd made [Corrupt, a.k.a. Copkiller and The Order of Death], I knew about all the Sex Pistols and Public Image stuff, so we got together and we did a smashing crazy version and a version where he cussed the Queen something terrible, which was never released. John Lydon: We went in, put a drum beat down on the machine and did the whole thing in about four-and-a-half hours. It was very, very quick." - Afrika Bambaataa

Interests

• Video games, record collecting

• Politicians

  Mahatma Gandhi, Donald Trump

• Writers

  Oscar Wilde, Macbeth by William Shakespeare

• Sport & Clubs

  Football, Arsenal F.C.

• Music & Bands

  Punk rock, post-punk, experimental rock, noise rock, alternative rock, Hawkwind, Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, the Stooges

Connections

In 1982, Lydon married Nora Forster, a German media heiress 14 years his senior. The couple currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Father:

John Christopher Lydon

Mother:

Eileen Barry Lydon

Wife:

Nora Forster

stepdaughter:

Arianna Forster

Brother:

Bobby Lydon

Brother:

Jimmy Lydon

manager:

Malcolm McLaren

Friend:

Sid Vicious

Sid Vicious was a bassist of the Sex Pistols.

colleague:

Steve Jones

Steve was a guitarist and the founder of the Sex Pistols.

colleague:

Glen Matlock

Glen was a bassist and the founder of the Sex Pistols.

colleague:

Paul Cook

Paul was a drummer and the founder of the Sex Pistols.

colleague:

Jah Wobble

Jan was a bassist and the founder of the PiL.

colleague:

Keith Levene

Keith was a guitarist and the founder of the PiL.

References

• John Lydon - Official Site
• John Lydon - Instagram
• John Lydon Official - Facebook
• John Lydon - Twitter