Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  And then up came a TV screen, a pre-recorded video with my dad on it asking me why I left. I thought ‘Bloody hell, Dad, do you really need to know?’ Bloody obvious. I spoke to him much later and found out the reason he’d been so upset: ‘Whoi did yer leave, Johnny? Oi had money bettin’ on yer!’

  Of course, Rambo was disappointed that I’d walked, and Nora too, although she knew I’d be heartbroken not knowing she was safe. It turned out to be a great thing to have done, because I learned a lot about myself. I’m a survivor.

  Whatever waist size I went in at, I came out a damn sight thinner. Did the pounds shed off me! It really thinned me down, in such a short time. I’d reached that thin-enough waist to wear designer clothing, and I hadn’t had that since I was eighteen. I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve got to stay this size forever!’ Of course, I didn’t. The first thing you do when you get out is stuff your face.

  I’m a Celebrity itself was positive, it was just the surrounding media nonsense I had a problem with. One of those British papers had followed Nora around before she left LA for Australia. We’d moved the twins into an apartment of their own at that time, and one time when Nora went over to see them some journalist had followed her there and wrote an article saying she was meeting her young black lover. ‘Hey, that’s my grandson!’ So that was the nonsense I had to deal with when I emerged.

  I know that going into TV World, you’re somewhat asking for it, and let’s get real – Johnny Rotten is going to get it, dans le chuff, seven ways to Sunday, from these rags. They will always be looking for the nasty in me and that’s just the way it’s always going to be. But when it gets into my family and my friends and my personal life, that’s then a wicked line that I think they have no right to cross. I don’t view myself as innocent as far as a target for the press goes, because I’ve more than asked for it, haven’t I? I don’t mind my own head on the chopping block, just don’t execute my family. Can you imagine what Pedro and Nora made of that, when they had to read that shit.

  I don’t think the public take too much of it too seriously, really. But there is the one so-called friend who’ll ring up and go, ‘Oh that’s terrible, Nora’s got a black lover,’ stirring it up. The problem is you don’t have any real comeback or revenge (there’s a word!) on these journalists. Ultimately, their driving force is jealousy – very evil. That whole thing of spying on people – that to me is unforgivable. To just try and trivialize and squander away another human being’s life because you resent their popularity – it’s very suspect. The lesson you learn is, if you keep away and you’re shy and you don’t get involved in that world, and you don’t invite it by doing Hello! magazine covers, the badness of it wears off.

  I don’t read my own press, and I haven’t been able to look at any of the footage from I’m a Celebrity either. When I got back to the hotel they had a showreel waiting for me. ‘No, John, you did good, you must look at this.’ ‘No! I don’t look at myself, I am myself, and quite frankly I’ve had enough of me. I’ve got a whole lot more of a life to live, and I’m not going to get bogged down in admiring myself on camera.’

  I can’t see any positives in keeping abreast of that stuff. It’ll make you conceited and contrived, for one thing. Or it can really upset you and bring you down. There’s enough going on in the real world to contend with, without that vacuous condition occupying a large part of your resources.

  In the light of what’s been revealed in the Leveson Inquiry into press misbehaviour in Britain, I know damn well that my phone was tapped during this period. Everybody was tapped. If you are going to tap my phone all day long, you aren’t going to get any dirt. I don’t even use it as a chat line. I don’t like the phone. I like one-on-ones. We don’t do dirty dealings; there’s no subterfuge in how we operate. So, fine – come one, come all! I should publicly broadcast our business line. You’ll be bored by the purity of it all. The best they could hope for is a discussion on the room allocation for our Eastern European tour. Imagine them sniffling into that.

  One thing I learned long ago about touring arrangements is to always have Rambo with me, and in hotels for us to have interconnecting rooms. We’d learned about all that sex-scandal nonsense in hotel rooms. As a result, I never answer the door, because that’s how they catch you, and try and pin something on you. As a byproduct, I can’t order room service because John’ll be aware of it, so that keeps me thin. Everything is for a point and a purpose.

  There was one hotel, probably in Hungary, where we drove up and the driver said, ‘Uh-oh, that’s the press waiting to catch someone.’ Outside, there was a girl in a mac, and it was obvious, even looking out through dark windows, that she had nothing on underneath. There was a cameraman next to her, so she was going to run over, and it would be a sex scandal shot. That’s the kind of stuff that you can’t have happening. So much of it is fake. There are certain hotels in London where you know damn well that’s the kind of thing that may happen. We used to book in this one place all the time. It must’ve driven them mad. No joy from us.

  Whatever you do in life, you know somebody is paying attention. So pay attention, because you’re being paid attention to. A lot of them alleged celebrities involved in the scandal-mongering were probably quite thrilled. They’re really looking to profiteer from that angle, because it guarantees a media profile.

  Sometime after I came out of the jungle I had a meeting in London, where the producers of I’m a Celebrity said, ‘Everybody’s got a TV show from it – what can we do for you, John?’ My reply was, ‘Oh no . . . please, nothing!’ Their suggestion was along the lines of that I do one of those question-and-answer sessions, where a big celebrity stands up there and you discuss your life, and a celebrity audience fires questions at you. They wanted me to do An Audience With Johnny Rotten. So what did they think the content would be? ‘Well, if you can focus it on I’m a Celebrity . . .’ ‘Goodbye!’ It was the most disjointed evening dinner I think I’ve ever attended. I brought Nora and Rambo, and we just sat there and listened to this uncaring, unsympathetic, pointless vision of what they think I do. I don’t run with the rest of that crowd, and I don’t want to be perceived as needing celebrity more than reality, because, indeed, I don’t.

  Doing the show also gave me the opportunity to raise money for charity, and what a mad one we picked. Me and Rambo had both watched this nature documentary about a chimp sanctuary in Sierra Leone. In the show they followed this little albino chimp that had been rescued from the wild – it’s tough for albinos out there, apparently – but at the end of the show the poor thing died. It broke our hearts so we signed up for money to go to the sanctuary to make sure the other chimps were looked after.

  There was no great trading of phone numbers between us contestants. I’ve thought about it over the years, maybe I should try and ring up for a laugh – ‘Oh, wasn’t that a giggle!’ – but then I’m thinking, ‘No, it really wasn’t!’ Beyond two minutes, you’ve got another half hour on the phone going, ‘Pfff, you know, you’re not really important!’ And I mean that from both sides, we’re not important to each other, so why try and make it something it isn’t?

  A few months after my appearance on this ratings-topping TV programme, an alleged half-sister of mine crept out of the woodwork. Was the timing a coincidence? I think not – it was glaringly obvious. Her story was that my mother had had her out of wedlock and sent her off for adoption, before my mum and dad got married.

  From the off, she was too pushy. She approached my dad first, which I found odd, then she barged into my Uncle Jim’s funeral in Ireland. I couldn’t attend that one myself because I was on tour, but apparently she got involved with my Auntie Pauline there. So she’d approached Dad and Auntie Pauline, but neither of them chose to pass the info on to me. I only got wind of it when it hit the newspapers – she went to the media with her ‘story’ before I’d even had a chance to talk to her, which really didn’t feel right to me at all.

  When you try to do this stuff through TV networks and the p
ress, really, how can it be anything else but a money hunt? You know, at the very least, ‘Why don’t you just hang back, and stop trying to push your way into our family?’

  Around that period, The Richard and Judy Show approached us. I had been on the show a few months previous promoting something or other – I actually appeared on that show a couple of times – me and Rambo always got on really well with Richard and Judy, and the producers had been very friendly with us too, but this time they said, ‘We hate to say this to you, but we talked to this woman yesterday, blah, blah, blah . . .’ So they wanted me to respond to this on TV, a situation I thought she should never have gone to TV about, because if I wasn’t Johnny Bloody Rotten, it wouldn’t be in the TV framework – so obviously your angle is a little crooked here, babby. And she’d made no approach to my other three brothers, by the way. She don’t want to know about them, because they ain’t got cash in the bank. I felt like, ‘Is this someone else claiming an inheritance from me if I kick the bucket? Sorry, love, I didn’t grow up with you, I don’t know you, I don’t care. My family is my family, and my money stays with us.’

  Normally, I might’ve sat back and considered her situation, because I’m very empathic with adopted children, and I know the pain it can bring to not know who or where you came from. In our case, it’s not a matter of getting DNA testing: apparently if the adoption authorities declare this as a fact, then so it is. I’m not sure it’s wise to give adopted people information about their real parentage once they’re adults, because it can create terrible pain to the blood relatives, and cast all kinds of doubts and aspersions in their mind. Ultimately you just think, ‘What’s this woman really offering here?’ Is she saying my mum had played around before she met my dad? Is that it? Is that what you’re saying? This is an Irish Catholic family here. You’re asking us to accept that? It’s a very difficult thing to deal with.

  Again, we go back to my mum and dad’s wedding photo, and there’s a baby being held by my auntie Agnes, and of course it must have been me. Unmarried mothers had to suffer the whole Catholic guilt trip at that time – ‘Aurrgh, yurr’re filt-y, yurr goanna be ostracized from the community!’ Painful, painful stuff, and I personally don’t need reminders. I’m sure you can now understand why I’m consistently involved with orphanages.

  There’s very little you can do to defend yourself once someone attacks you from a press angle. For me, that’s like a full stop. You cease to exist. But of course, me being me, I would like to find that she was better than that, and there’s every possibility that this may be the truth so, you know, time heals. Never say never, not when it comes down to things as important as another human being desperately trying to find out what it is they came from. But you’re never gonna do that through Richard and Judy.

  So, this woman pushed too many buttons at a particular point where it was very hurtful to us as a family. It’s a weakness in me, I suppose, but maybe as the years drift by I might find an opening for her. But not just yet. It just came too pushy, too hard, and running to the press with it was really, really grotesque, and managed to offend all of us Lydon brothers.

  I just have such a love and understanding of orphan kids. It’s terrible, it’s confusing, I’m well aware of that. She doesn’t know who the father is; she just believes that my mother was her mother.

  I was really worried that this would all be a terrible burden on my dad, at his stage in life. Through the 1990s and 2000s, I’d got really close to him. He was definitely trying to research me in terms of, ‘Did you think we didn’t love you?’ It was a hard question to answer. If you think about it, that PiL song I mentioned in the first chapter, ‘Tie Me To The Length Of That’, was probably through their eyes a rather cold estimation of their role in giving me life, with all its images of post-natal trauma. My dad always felt that I held him responsible for the meningitis I suffered, but I always felt – and this is a conversation that we actually had – that he thought I was faking the after-effects, like my memory loss. That drove me crazy for years and years.

  Dad had very curly hair, sometimes done up into a quiff. My mum was convinced he had a bit of Spanish in him, from the Spanish Armada. That’s the Irish for you, going back that far! He was a very smart dresser, and always very precise about the way he’d dress up on Sundays – a very stylish fella. Most excellent ties, good suits – hard, tough, laddish, and absolutely impeccable detail – shoes polished to the point that you could see through them.

  When he was young, whiskey was his drink of choice. One night, he almost hit my mother. I don’t think I was older than five, but I flew at him, and he changed everything. He told us, ‘I’m your dad, I love you, and I’ll never drink whiskey again.’ And, you know, he never, ever did. How beautiful is that?

  Imagine how painful it is to go through meningitis and losing your brain, and when your memory of that comes back, just like a bolt in the head . . . You’re sitting in the pub with your dad and you remember that, and you know it’s not a lie, because you ask him and he tells you it was so. I looked at it this way: I almost could’ve lost my dad all the way back then; he could’ve been a dreadful, stereotypical Irish drinker.

  All the times that I thought my dad was trying to ruin my weekend by having me out working underneath his cars, he was really actually trying to relate to me – not through words, because that wasn’t really his way, but through situations. He was trying to bond. I wasn’t capable of understanding that at the time. You can talk about Catholic guilt, but there’s far more serious guilt trips, about parenthood and childhood and what the relationship between them really means. I look back not in anger but in sadness, and I regret totally that I wasn’t as smart then as I am now.

  He was still young when they had me – he didn’t have all the answers, poor fella. I’m not one to moralize or preach but I think young couples having kids at eighteen and nineteen aren’t fully capable of understanding the problems that will come in the future, because they haven’t fully realized themselves. But try telling the young Johnny Rotten in the Pistols anything at all! That fucker wasn’t going to listen, was he?

  For all the farce that I’m a Celebrity turned into, something else good did come out of it: I was on the radar, TV-wise. When I went in, I joked that I might get a nature programme out of it, and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what bloody happened. Some peoples out there watched it and obviously thought I might have something going for me there, and indeed I did. The programmes I presented through 2004 and 2005 are my absolute pride and joy, work-wise, outside of music.

  The first offer came in from Channel Five in Britain, to film two one-off nature specials in Africa, called John Lydon’s Shark Attack and John Lydon Goes Ape. Swimming with sharks was an adventure I was really looking forward to. I’d been studying them all my life, ever since – I have to be honest! – I watched Jaws as a kid. Well, as a big kid – it was 1975 and, at nineteen, I was not fully developed, haha. As I’ve said many times before, if you’re paid to do what you love to do the most, you’re onto a winner, and I’m glad to say that’s really happened quite a few times in my life.

  Our five-week filming schedule for these two shows began in Cape Town in South Africa, where Rambo and I were to have a crash course learning to dive. We had to earn our open water PADI (Professional Association of Divers) certificates before they would let us cage dive with Great White sharks. Which, of course, was the whole premise of the show. I have to admit, the pressure was on us: what would have happened if we’d failed our tests? It would have been a very quick show! It was a lot to take in, but we got through it, and I can truly say it was one of the proudest moments of our lives when we passed and were given the opportunity to see these fantastic creatures in the flesh.

  We had diving suits measured for us, because they had to be of a certain thickness and fit perfectly, because the water is frigid. One thing just led to another: instead of the usual black garb and looking like a sea lion, me and John spotted these colours in the next room, whi
ch are usually used as trimmings. I ended up as a yellow and black bumble bee, and Rambo got Arsenal away colours – yellow and blue stripes, both with a codpiece. The South African ex-Marine who was teaching us to dive was great. I really liked him, but I’m not sure if he wanted to be near us in this gear – we did look a sight for sore eyes! Science has since caught up with us: people are now selling shark repellent wetsuits, and clashing stripes are actually regarded as an effective shark repellent.

  I quickly acquired a love and affinity for being in the ocean. I’d always loved being on top of it, but now I loved being under it.

  In training, we were taught about depth narcosis, also known as ‘the bends’. On one of our ocean dives we travelled to False Bay, around an hour south of Cape Town. We were in about 80 foot of water, slouching around on the seabed, having fun, and I definitely went off on one – the closest thing would’ve been an acid trip. The colours suddenly became so vivid, and I just wanted to drift off into the depths and swim forever. Then came time to rise and you’re supposed to rise slowly, to decompress as you go up, but I couldn’t understand the ballast system, so I went up like a rocket. But for Rambo grabbing my flipper, I could have been in a serious problem when I hit the surface. While all this was going on, and I’m wondering why he was trying to grab my flipper – I thought he was just trying to annoy me – we were apparently being scouted by an enormous Great White shark. How do you miss 15 foot of teeth and muscle?

  I wanted Rambo on camera with me, I should add. That was just the way it was going to be, period. I don’t want things stagey-stagey, but as things naturally are. Why pretend otherwise for the cameras? But that said, I will fully admit when the camera was on me I made sure I was swimming at my best! The Channel Five crew, I have to say, were well on board with my ideas, and had a very chirpy buzz about them. Any idea of a script was completely abandoned, and it was really a kind of a free-for-all – a series of misadventures, one fiasco following another – with the luxurious backdrop scenario of deadly dangerous huge sharks.