John Lydon is King of the Outsiders. Squadron leader of the awkward squad. A punk ploughman with a taste for lonesome furrows.
“From birth onwards” he has felt that way: a shy boy too nervous to speak much, growing up in north London poverty — and now, a legend self-exiled to Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Nora, still very much a man apart. The artist formerly (and, when the mood takes him, currently) known as Johnny Rotten claims to be hungover and not long awake, but when asked about his own favorite outsiders and alternative thinkers, he is considerate and articulate.
His own feeling of removal from the world, he explains, was exacerbated by his contracting spinal meningitis at age 7 and spending a year in the hospital. On recovery, he found himself with the curved spine and manic stare that, as leader of the Sex Pistols, would jolt the nation. His memory was affected, too — he found it difficult at first to recognize even his own mother and father, and he was held back a year in school.
This was him “on the road to Rotten,” he says — becoming the crooked, alienated character who would later achieve such infamy — but as a child, it simply made him feel his otherness more intensely.
“A complete feeling of isolation” is how he remembers it. “When I woke up from my coma, I had no memories at all. I quite literally didn’t feel like I belonged to anybody or had any connection with anything human.”
He found solace in the British public library system, and it was here, around the age of 11, that he encountered the first of his outsider heroes.
“Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed, came up with the fabulous statement, ‘That wallpaper is hideous, and one of us has to go.’ That was the bravest thing I ever heard,” Lydon recalls. “Humor on your deathbed is an incredible inspiration. Oh, his irony and sarcasm about British society was damn well excellent, and he managed to turn it into something enduring in those plays and books.
“His ideas about being an outsider but viewing society from the inside was delicious. He was a bit of a joker, and he mocked formality and conformity, and that was my attraction to it.”
Who else did the young Lydon admire?
“Most definitely Gandhi.” At the local fleapit cinema on Saturday mornings, old newsreels were shown. “There was one I’ve never forgotten. It was Gandhi visiting England in the 1930s, and he went to the East End of London in his sheet and his circular spectacles. People loved him because he was so unassuming and there was no ego there at all. It was performance but a very good one, so I read up on the fella, and I really liked what he was saying.
“The idea of passive resistance is worthy of trying because war doesn’t solve anything. My mind’s been invaded all my life by people with ideas of what I should and shouldn’t be, and I passively resist that. To avoid conquest, you just don’t give up yourself. I stand up and defend my own corner.”
Lydon’s choices all say something about how he sees himself and his lifelong struggle for self-expression. He mentions the burlesque icon Bettie Page.
“She was well brave. She endured an awful lot of antagonisms, not only from the institutions and moral majority but from the Mafia that were running the nightclubs. There were all these different restrictions being imposed on her, but she still managed to endure.
“Mae West is definitely there for me, too. I wallow in her films. They’re fantastic. It’s her humor. She just absolutely couldn’t give a damn for formality. Bettie Page is the same. I just revel in them. When we first moved to L.A., Nora and me, we bought a tiny house built by Mae West.
“The idea of her ghost coming back and standing at the top of the staircase, saying, ‘Come up and see me sometime,’ is an amazing, rewarding thought for me. It’s a spooky place and things go bump in the night sometimes, but that puts a smile on my face because I imagine it’s her having a giggle.”
What about outsider musicians? None of his punk peers make the cut for Lydon. Forget the 1970s; he’s all about the 1790s. He loves Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the brattishness of his personality but also one piece of work in particular.
“Mozart’s Requiem is this unfinished death dirge in homage to his father. It’s the most excellent piece of music I’ve ever heard. So sad and riveting and at the same time loud and clashing. I own a good 20 versions, and they all sound amazingly different.
“I wanted to play it at my own dad’s funeral, but the family thought that was a definite no-no, so we played lots of Irish things that he loved. But I’m going to have the Requiem played at my funeral, and it’ll be in homage not to me but to my own father, a way of saying, ‘Thank you for giving me life.’ I might have made a bugger of it, but life is life.”
John Lydon still talks at times like the snotty enfant terrible of yore. But he has, too, a hard-won wisdom.
“Listen, the longer I live, the more I realize that everybody feels left out.”
That’s a feeling to cherish, he says, because it leads to originality.
“As a completely separate individual from the rest of your species, you are alone in your own thoughts; no one can interfere or take them away from you, and that’s your absolute protection of character.”
He has been fortunate, of course, in being able to take those feelings of isolation and use them in art, through which he has made a profound connection with many other people who feel the same — misfit heart speaking to misfit heart. “Do you think so?” he says. “I’m only 60 years young. I haven’t had long enough to work it all out.”
He laughs, thinking back to Wilde and that wallpaper. “Maybe on my deathbed, I’ll be able to give you some proper answers.”
Courtesy of INSP News Service www.INSP.ngo / The Big Issue UK