Public Image Ltd: 'I didn’t want the album to be one long, gothic morbidity'

Completed shortly before the death of his wife Nora Forster from Alzheimer’s disease, it is inevitably a record freighted with sadness, but Lydon, now 67, tells The Yorkshire Post, he was determined that it should not be all-consuming study of grief.

“(Nora) was ill and all of that, but she never lost her love of music or comedy and fun, and so we shared that right up to the last, and that was wonderful,” he says. “I didn’t want the album to be one long, gothic morbidity because that’s not how I feel about my lovely, so we condensed it into one song.

“Because we’re all human beings and we’re all contributing we went off on all the other emotions that human beings have to endure.”

Forster’s blessing drove Lydon on to complete the record and release it this year. “It’s been like that since I first met her, that never changed,” he says. “Of course there have been records she loathed and despised until I arm wrestled her into submission.”

The emotional frankness that has characterised Lydon’'s work with PiL from their very first single, which summed up his feelings of being exploited by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, is again a notable feature here. “I’ve always written very deeply from the heart,” he says. “If it’s a situation I can’t directly relate to, I’m not going to have it in a song because it’s just some silly fantasy. There’s enough people out there to fill that hole; I’m not one of them.

“For me, it’s like writing a book, it has to be accurate, and an emotional insight, so there’s me explained away.”

The stability provided by the present line-up of PiL – Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and Scott Firth – has been much appreciated by Lydon. “It’s fantastic,” he says. “We all go off and do our different things and then come back and chuck it all at each other. It’s great fun.”

Not being on a major label has also “helped that camaraderie no end”, he adds. “It was bitter times always under major labels,” he remembers. “They get in between you and spread Chinese whispers and promote egotism and things. I call a large record label death by committee because they make decisions on what your next product – that’s the word they use – should be without really paying any due respect to you, the person that’s got to put this together.”

The first single released from the album was Hawaii, a gentle sentimental ballad, dedicated to Nora, which is unlike any other PiL song. The band even pitched it as a possible Irish entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Lydon says he is looking forward to performing it live on the band’s UK tour next month because the only previous time they have performed it in public was on Irish television while Nora was gravely ill. “It was really difficult on The Late Late Show in Ireland to do it live because I didn’t know if she would die while I was doing it,” he says. “To rush back to Ireland and play it for her was absolutely the greatest reward that those people could give me. It was amazing because she picked out the pink checked suit I wore. She was so happy. I bought it secretly – that’s what we used to do, go on the iPad and go to shopping networks and laugh at some of the stuff.”

He was unconcerned that PiL didn’t get the chance to compete at the Eurovision final in Liverpool in May. “I don’t think anybody expected that,” he says. “I’ve got many, many friends in Ireland...I appreciated that as a heart-warming gesture, and at the same time they thought (adopts an Irish accent) ‘We'll give this competition a bit of a kick up the a***’, and so momentarily I became a balladeer.”

Recent single Car Chase was written “thinking of someone we knew who was institutionalised because of old age”. “He was sent to an old folk’s home and it might as well be the nuthouse or prison for all the joy he got out of that. He was a perpetual smoker and suddenly he’s censored and his life is imprisonment, so he would escape at night. I love friends like that!” he laughs. “He’d get up to all manner of shenanigans, stealing cars, robbing supermarkets and he’d be back there in the morning going ‘huh-huh-huh, it wasn’t me’. A Man after my own heart. How could you not write a joyous song about that kind of attitude?”

PiL embark on a tour of the UK and Europe in September. Live shows are where Lydon believes the band really thrive. “There’s a communion that goes on there between audience and band, it’s just so emotional and it takes not only them in the audience but me to places far, far deeper into the songs than I even knew when I wrote them because I insist on eye contact with people in a gig.

“I don’t like a blackened hall, I like to be able to see people’s faces and their eyes, and that contact transforms the songs. They hook straight into me. All manner of new ideas float into them. A shared sadness can be a great joy.”

End of World is out now. PiL play at The Leadmill, Sheffield on September 8, The Old Woollen, Leeds on September 9, and Holmfirth Picturedrome on September 23.