John Lydon: 'I’m not one to take grief in a sad sack kind of way'

Talking to The Yorkshire Post via video from his home in the US, the 68-year-old says: “I suppose now it really is down to I love talking with people. I ain’t got much to sell other than my very own existence – and that seems to be filling halls.”

If he can get something out of this, he adds, it would be “a willingness to continue to work”, having lost both his wife Nora and best friend and manager John ‘Rambo’ Stevens within the last 12 months. “Both were sledgehammers,” he admits that had left him “reeling”.

“I feel very alone at the moment – and I am literally alone,” he says, glancing around his sunlit home. “I don’t know how to get out of that doldrum other than to go and talk to my other friends, who will be the audience. So it will be a clearing house in many ways – all the debris and flotsam and jetsam that’s been clogging up my arteries will get a good flushing.”

The events themselves have evolved as time has gone on, he feels. “They’ve created an entire genre all upon their own. It’s a marvellous response I get in these environments, it’s very old British music hall, really. We go for those small theatres anyway because naturally I’m inclined to that way of communicating with people, up close and personal. But just because of the camaraderie between the audience and myself, it’s become a very special event almost. I don’t know why I haven’t been doing it annually – well, I can tell you why, it’s stamina and you have to have enough things to be able to talk about in order to do it otherwise you’re just pontificating.”

He acknowledges that on this tour “there’s grief to be dealt with” but he believes that the audiences know this. “I’m not one to take grief in a sad sack kind of way, I’m looking for the bright side of death – I’ve got one up on the Montys for that,” he says, punningly referring to the Monty Python song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. “I’m coming round to this way of thinking now, I’m beginning to remember both my friend and my lovely wife Nora, the excellent side of them, their humour and the joy they brought to me as a human being and if I can share that with an audience that will be great because I’m sure the both of them, just as characters alone, have been amusing people.”

Lydon jokingly blames “that bloody Rambo again” for “torturing” him with such a hectic schedule – with more dates to follow in North America in the autumn. But, he says, “there’s enough Irish in me to have the gift of the gab, and then there’s enough sardonic sarcasm from the English bit of me to more than come across like a sweet cherry on that cake.” When recently asked to describe what the evenings are like, he suggested “Norman Wisdom does philosophy”.

There will inevitably be Rambo stories each night. The pair had been friends since their teenage years in Finsbury Park and in Anger is an Energy Lydon described him as a “diamond”. “He was a jeweller – me and my sly innuendos,” he says. “But he was also a boxer and a paratrooper, the man led an enormously varied lifestyle and was hyperactive throughout it. How he ever put up with a good-for-nothing lazy, fat slob like myself, I’ll never know. It was one thing he and Nora had in common, which wasn’t much because they hated each other on sight – if they ever go to heaven I expect those two to be rowing, I’ll have to break it up, what kind of an afterlife is that?

“But to go back to Johnny, he made so many friends over the years, he was much more socially amenable than myself because I’ve got shy issues, it’s very difficult for me to stand on a stage at all let alone do it completely alone like now, but in at the deep end, sink or swim.

“He was a wonderful bloke and took to managing (Lydon’s band) Public Image (Ltd) like a duck to water. He had problems, he was dyslexic, but he overcame all of them and he never moaned and he never grumbled, but him and Nora had a common there, to both annoy me and to get me to think clearer. From both ends – Nora in one ear and John in another, (adopts Nora’s German accent) ‘get up you lazy b*****d’, I’m going to remember that for ever and ever. There was no excuse to dawdle from either of them, so I can honestly say that both of them instilled a work ethic in me that left to my own devices I’m not sure I would’ve had. At the very least I would’ve had to have worked on a work ethic.”

No matter how difficult he might have found the past year difficult, Lydon says: “It’s always in the back of my mind – hang on, there’s much worse going on in the world for other people. Oddly enough, that a comforter, that’s my security blanket, my comfort pillow. Others go through far worse in life. I pity the human race that I survived meningitis (when he was seven years old).”

Getting back into the touring routine with his PiL bandmates Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and Scott Firth last year helped Lydon too. “Those gigs were set up way in advance and the Covid situation knocked us all back and so obligations had to be met, but they were very good because as a band we became very close again and that’s very important. Lu and Scotty are very good friends, and so is Bruce, but Bruce is going through his own emotional turmoil at the moment, so I don’t know where we stand with that. But hopefully I’ll be able to raise a bit of money on this (spoken word) tour in order to get Public Image back into a rehearsal situation.

“That’s how the wheels of industry work for us. Being independent you have to perform live to earn the money to get into the recording studio to release the album to be able to work live again, it just goes round and round like that. It’s very exciting but none of it’s easy and we all took a serious knock with Covid. Many bands I know are slowly falling off a cliff.”

Since PiL’s most recent album, End of World, came out last year, Lydon says he has found the inclination to write again. “I was going through my records the other day after doing a couple of interviews and I found The Method, an old drum & bass CD that I’ve had for years,” he says. “I remember at the time finding the whole thing very confusing because the hard edge of it gave me a heart attack, but I suppose I had a calmer way of approaching and I found I was writing again just automatically and instinctively, and oddly enough, I had Neil Young in my mind while doing it listening to drum & bass.

“Then I looked at the words and it was about surfing and all that splish and splash on the surface, and then in the second verse it was underneath is something deeper, and so I’m in that frame (of mind) with it. That’s as far as I got before the bottles of wine hit home. I’m rather partial to a Sauvignon Blanc or two these days. I’ve been advised to cut out the beer but the fool of a doctor forgot to add the rest of it.”

To coincide with Record Store Day tomorrow, PiL are releasing their three most recent albums on cassette. Sorting the artwork for them was Stevens’s last job before he died. “Rambo put in a great deal of effort there and so did Scotty Murphy, who also works with us,” Lydon says. “It’s teamwork, I have the original concept and then we do variations from that. I’m constinuously drawing, I can’t help it. I send in these snip bits and we put them on a file and research them when the time’s right. Probably the most active part of PiL is the artsy fartsy side.”

As an avid record collector throughout his life, Lydon is a keen advocate for Record Store Day, which supports independent record shops. “I don’t think you’re ever going to beat the sound of vinyl, it’s luxuriously different,” he says. “CDs and digitialisation it’s all well and nice but certain information’s missing, there’s a finality between each sound that’s not there on a CD, it seems to eliminate that as non-informative, but that’s the stuff I love.

“An example of that would be my reggae 45s, they’re all hiss and pop and an early English sensibility would’ve been one of urgh, that’s ruining the music, but my first time in Jamaica I found the most wonderful thing was the hiss and pop of the records because it matched the jungle, it sounded like the insect life. It was an important part and feature of the production of that entire sound, so that’s how I view it.

“Going back to cassettes, I’ve still got reggae from the early 70s on cassette and I play them regularly. I’ve still got an old Pioneer cassette deck and it’s fantastic.”

The first record he says he bought was Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town by Kenny Rodgers and the First Edition. “Probably because I liked the cover – it’s West Ham’s colours,” he says. “Arsenal’s my team but I’ve always loved claret and blue as a colour scheme, it excites me for some reason. I used to buy a lot of records just because I liked the artwork or the colours involved, it gave me inspiration as to what was behind all that.

“That’s why I love making album covers and paintings for projects because you’ve got all the sound carpetry, which is wonderful, but you need a visual aspect to focus on, I think. Particularly the last three albums, I love my ‘Freedom Buffalo’ and the third one well, that really is all the possibilities there, all the different shades of blues is to my mind to represent silicon chips inside a computer. There’s a Viking longship very subtly buried and there’s a modernised battleship because I love warships.

“These are things that matter to me. There’s a resemblance to the White House in the top right hand corner. There’s many things going on there. There’s this Johnny Depp kind of character from a spinning world. I love Johnny Depp in that film (The Lone Ranger) where he’s playing a Kemo Sabe character with a dead crow on his head, I found it thrilling.”

Lately Lydon has found his artwork in ​​​​​​​demand, with ​​​​​​​orders coming in via his website for giclee prints. “There’s people out there wanting this stuff and we’re starting to pay attention to the endless emails that come in​​​​​​​ – ‘why don’t you do this? why don’t you do that?’, and indeed why not?”

He shows The Yorkshire Post a couple of the prints, saying: “I liked it more than the original painting – this kind of stuff, which is in between many other kinds of art.” Pointing out another painting, Lydon says: “That’s something Nora’s husband did, her previous husband to me, a guy called Frank (Forster), who was a Frank Sinatra imitator.”

Moving across the room, he comes to a painting of himself and Nora in the sea. “It’s unfinished,” he says, “and oddly enough I like it for that because I think our business is unfinished.” He finds another, “that a friend and a fan did”. “It’s homely stuff, nice folk art. It might not be body-wise perfect but then again, look at my stuff. I’m all wiry hands and limbs, anatomical connections. That’s fine, you’ve got cameras for that.”

In his teens, Lydon had studied A-level art at Kingsway College in central London – or at least, he says, “I tried to but they gave me a hard time”.

“I wouldn’t take the course on art history, which to my mind was just nonsense, being told ‘this is art because blah blah did it’. It was all about company investments​​​​​​​, really, making decisions on what was or was not good art​​​​​​​. It’s art if you like it and it’s fart if you don’t​​​​​​​, it’s as simple as that.”

Lydon’s artwork has adorned many a PiL record sleeve over the years. He says the appeal of painting is “that it doesn’t carry carry a rules and regulations pamphlet with it, whereas I try to be extremely open in music, I’m aware that there are limitations – Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica proved that – that’s an album I took great fun playing last night, it’s an excellent piece of humour.

“But painting you don’t have to be told anything at all, it’s the colours you like, you paint where you like, you don’t have to start in the centre and work out. I’m not there to attract the viewer’s eye, they can look where they like without a rule book or a manual. It should be all over the place and all happening at once and at least for me have a sense of excitement.”

He’s less keen to exhibit his work, though. “The concept of art galleries really appals me,” he says. “I think it’s nice the way we’re going, we make posters available if you want them and leave it there. I do books, if you like them buy them, if you don’t, don’t. There’s no obligation at all.”

John Lydon: I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right is at Huddersfield Town Hall on May 29 and Leeds City Varieties on June 1. https://www.johnlydon.com/tour-dates/