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Book Review: “Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored”

• May 6, 2015
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Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored By John Lydon (Dey Street) Hardcover; 544 pages

If you were looking forward to an apologetic confessional from John Lydon/Johnny Rotten in his second book, then you clearly have never seen or read a Lydon interview. In Anger is an Energy , a companion piece of sorts to 1994’s Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs , his first memoir, Lydon is just as abrasive and self-congratulatory as he was as front man of The Sex Pistols. But deep into the 500-plus page memoir, toward the end, the mask is lowered just a bit as Lydon talks about the decades-long love of his life, Nora Foster (mother to the late Slits singer Ari Up). Every mention and description of Foster is treated with such unadulterated tenderness – completely out of character for the singer who seems to revel in spewing vitriol that you can’t help be reassess every notion you have about the man.

The book, far more thorough than Rotten , covers his childhood, time with the Sex Pistols and their legendary implosion, his founding of Public Image Ltd., the half-assed Pistols reunion and his much-talked about time as a reality TV cast member. There are few revelations here that haven’t been covered elsewhere including Lydon’s belief that longtime friend Sid Vicious’ girlfriend Nancy Spungen was killed by the mob over a drug debt, and not by the bass player. He takes plenty of jabs at his former bandmates, describing a heavier Steve Jones on the band’s 2002 reunion as “a mountain of butter wedged on two cowboy boots,” and despite claiming to like the members of The Clash before they got famous, spends most of the book criticizing Joe Strummer and his band’s faux Socialism. But Lydon’s harshest words are saved for former band manager Malcolm McLaren and McLaren’s one-time partner, designer Vivian Westwood. Lydon does however have surprisingly kind words for some of British rock’s old guard – the same groups many assumed bands like the Pistols were trying to tear down – in particular Robert Plant, Pete Townsend and Ginger Baker.

Anger is an energy and Lydon still has plenty of it coursing through his veins, but as he shows in small snatches throughout, he also carries around plenty of love for those closest to him.  (John B. Moore)

Purchase  Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored  on Amazon   here.

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Review: John Lydon recalls life as a punk (and beyond) in ‘Anger Is an Energy’

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Most lives do not have second acts, as F. Scott Fitzgerald incessantly reminds us from beyond the grave. John Lydon is lucky enough to have enjoyed two distinct and significant acts. The trouble is they fell just a couple of years apart.

As Johnny Rotten, he fronted the Sex Pistols and employed his keening circular saw of a voice to deliver some of the most apocalyptic lyrics in the annals of popular music: “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “God Save the Queen,” “Holidays in the Sun,” “Bodies.” That period lasted from 1975, when Lydon was just 19, until 1978, when the already-disintegrating band dissolved altogether during its sole American tour from that era. His fate appeared sealed — where could he possibly go after achieving the status of world’s most notorious pop star?

Months later, he had reverted to his birth name and assembled Public Image Ltd., or PiL, with two extraordinary musicians, guitarist Keith Levene and bass player Jah Wobble (actually John Wardle, enduringly garbled by Lydon’s former cohort Sid Vicious). The Pistols had power to spare but little grace or finesse. PiL, on the other hand, played adventurous, textured sounds with a dance-music spine, combining with Lydon’s incantatory vocal stylings and harrowing lyrics — “Poptones,” “Careering,” “Death Disco,” “No Birds” — to produce music of real depth as well as power.

Lydon had first made history, then he made art. But PiL (Version 1) was rife with problems — personalities, drugs — and Levene and Jah Wobble were gone after just two albums. Since then, there have been other PiLs, Sex Pistols revivals, sundry TV shows and two memoirs — “Anger Is an Energy: My Life Uncensored” is the second.

Although his lyrics show Lydon to be a dab hand at the word game, his memoir is as-told-to, with all the drawbacks of that form. It takes us from the cradle to his current, rather serene existence as an American citizen living in Los Angeles.

The first 200-odd pages of the 544-page tome are naturally of greater interest. Lydon is at his best when writing about his family — his parents were working-class Irish immigrants — and on the subject of his doomed friend Vicious, born John Ritchie. Vicious was a dishrag who soaked up every ambient misery; if there were a disease in the neighborhood, he’d catch it. “Poor old Sid, he couldn’t have sex with anything. He was rubbish. But I loved him because he was rubbish!” Lydon is quite moving in his account of Vicious, who was abused by his vile mother — she seems to have introduced him to heroin, among other things — and who never got a thing right but nevertheless carried within him some ghost of intelligence and humor.

On the other hand, Malcolm McLaren, who recruited and managed the Sex Pistols, is exhumed from his coffin every dozen pages for a round of slaps. “I don’t think Malcolm ever liked music at all.” He and his crowd were “hippie art-wankers,” Lydon writes, who treated the band as a conceptual-art project and routinely made grotesque managerial decisions based on aesthetic whims, regardless of their merit, practicability or physical hazard. He was constantly telling reporters whatever popped into his head — he may have proposed that the Pistols’ second album be produced by Charles Manson. Of course, Lydon’s account is necessarily partial. McLaren, whatever his failings, was crazy enough to devise the Sex Pistols and to pull off a multi-year publicity campaign fueled by outrage, which was not quite a thing then.

Lydon distances himself from some of the more boneheaded ideas that have attached themselves to punk, a concept that will adhere to him for as long as his name is remembered. “Disco sucks? You never heard that from me.” (He attests to his affection for the Fatback Band and Kool and the Gang.) He sneers at “poor old Joe Strummer” and his political stance, which like many good intentions in popular music curdled quickly into meaningless cliché, less with the Clash than with the band’s lesser epigones — “Studded leather jackets for everyone is not a creed I can endorse.”

He is good at evoking the shambolic conditions that somehow resulted in the production of PiL’s masterwork, “Metal Box” (1979), although evasive about the band’s fragmentation. He is, however, exhaustively detailed on a great many other matters — his later tours, his security arrangements, his reality-TV antics — of interest only to the most devoted of Lydon’s fans.

Like many celebrity autobiographies, “Anger Is an Energy” is less a book than it is a rant, arranged more or less chronologically. Lydon can turn a fine phrase even in dictation, but these are vastly outnumbered by sentences that could begin “I’m the kind of guy who…”

He is touchy and defensive, keeps grudges alive for decades, does not display much engagement with the wider world. But who am I to judge? He had drained the cup of fame by a tender age, and in his heyday’s long aftermath, what was once spontaneous has calcified into shtick, for survival’s sake. His self-absorption is at worst a venial sin, and his book’s failings should be charged to its editor.

Sante’s books include “Low Life” and “The Other Paris,” which will be published this fall.

Anger Is an Energy My Life Uncensored

John Lydon Dey Street: 544 pp., $28.99

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John Lydon – Anger Is An Energy: My Life Uncensored

Rampant ego and dodgy grammar can't spoil the punk icon's lively second memoir

“The king is gone but he’s not forgotten,” Neil Young once sang, “This is the story of a Johnny Rotten…” Well, here are 500 pages in Johnny’s own words. John Joseph Lydon’s new autobiography isn’t just about his incarnation as Johnny Rotten, but his upbringing, youth and, later, Public Image Limited and further intrigues. It’s not the first time the 58-year-old has looked back in anger – in 1993 his first memoir Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs hit shelves (it was later called “a nihilistic, gross-out masterpiece” by this magazine). A cynic might argue that Lydon hasn’t exactly gilded his reputation in the intervening two decades – there was his 2004 appearance on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here , and then those cringe-worthy Country Life adverts – but there are still plenty of fresh incidents and anecdotes here that make this new volume worth tracking down.

Lydon has made a career out of steadfastly refusing to do what’s expected of him, and it turns out this even applies to English grammar. The book opens with a Publisher’s Note pointing out the various liberties that Lydon takes with spelling and grammar, adding that it’s simply “Lydon’s lingo”. (As he puts it: “Don’t let tiffles cause fraction.”) Largely, his inventive prose and wildly unpredictable tangents and digressions – he compares Malcolm McLaren’s management style to that of Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger – are a delight, but occasionally his ego becomes a bulldozer. His claim to be “so much” on the side of Pussy Riot is rather undermined when he refers to the Russian group as “Pussy Farts”. When he spends several pages justifying the infamous butter commercials – perhaps to himself more than anyone – and calls them “the most anarchistic thing I’ve ever been presented with”, your eyeballs will roll.

Still, you don’t pick up a John Lydon book expecting safe, careful prose. This punk rock icon possesses a vast, self-justifying ego – but you wouldn’t want him any other way. His passion and his intellect remain an inspiration. Neil Young also sang: “It’s better to burn out/Than to fade away”. Lydon’s still burning.

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John Lydon - Rotten: No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs book review

Sex pistols’ old testament.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

It’s hard not to notice that this reprint of 1994’s Rotten comes in the wake of Lydon’s more recent and, one might suppose, more complete Anger Is An Energy: My Life Uncensored . So what’s the point in reading it? You might well ask.

Rotten and Anger are two very different propositions linked by a single crucial similarity. While Anger prides itself on being a prolonged ‘pub rant’ that insists, with metaphorical finger in your chest, that Lydon’s truth and Lydon’s truth alone will out, No Irish examines Rotten the Sex Pistol and the surprisingly squalid Finsbury Park upbringing that created Rotten the Sex Pistol.

With the assistance of other voices – Chrissie Hynde, Billy Idol, Paul Cook and Steve Jones – it presents a 360-degree pen-portrait of a man who was (across ’77’s anarchic UK, at least) punk incarnate. The unifying factor that deems both memoirs essential is Lydon’s extraordinary voice, as powerful, engaging, snippy and fascinating in print as it is in person.

Like it or not, Lydon’s a national treasure, a glorious irritant, a compulsively honest voice you can trust, if not always agree with. So read his rotten book. Read them both, in fact.

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records. 

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Anger Is an Energy: My Life Uncensored Paperback – January 1, 2015

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• Print length 536 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date January 1, 2015
• Dimensions 7.76 x 1.42 x 5.2 inches
• ISBN-10 147113721X
• ISBN-13 978-1471137211
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; UK ed. edition (January 1, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 536 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 147113721X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1471137211
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• #17,067 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

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NO IRISH, NO BLACKS, NO DOGS

by John Lydon & Keith Zimmerman & Kent Zimmerman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 1994

An insightful look at punk rock's—and his own—beginnings by former Sex Pistols' lead singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), with some help from enemies and friends. Lydon has a harrowing story, and he tells it with all the rage and disdain that marked his early music. A youthful sufferer of spinal meningitis, he returned home from a long hospitalization at age seven with no memory; his mother spent her evenings for two years outfitting him with a life, telling him all she knew about the world. A poor, hunchbacked adolescent, Lydon suffered shyness and explosive anger; his intensity overpowered all who approached him. His book is a loose series of reminiscences that spares no one—least of all his friends—its honesty and occasional contradictions. He tells how he named Pistols' bassist Sid Vicious for his hamster; how he tried to kill Sid's girlfriend Nancy; how lead guitarist Steve Jones stole equipment for the Pistols; of having his father sleep with his fans; and of being stabbed by royalists enraged by the group's hit ``God Save the Queen.'' Lydon offers plenty of insight into the punk subculture itself, including punk fashion, which flourished and died in just two years in the late '70s and had colorful (not all black-clad) beginnings; the class barriers punk straddled; the opportunities it afforded women, historically marginal to British pop; and the enormous degree to which the music industry—which quickly co-opted punk's energy and narrowed its meaning—influences English life. Included is testimony from Lydon's father and rockers Chrissie Hynde, Billy Idol, and others; a track-by-track analysis of Pistols recordings; and a reading of affidavits in Lydon's suit against former manager Malcolm McLaren for back pay. Though disorganized, occasionally repetitive, its pages afroth with revolting, delightful anecdotes, this book is an informative document and great fun to read.

Pub Date: April 7, 1994

ISBN: 0-312-09903-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994

GENERAL NONFICTION

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by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

Episodes from the life of lady mendl (elsie de wolfe).

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

by Ludwig Bemelmans

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Quick Book Review: “I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right” by John Lydon

I’ve been a Sex Pistols and a Public Image LTD fan from day one.  I read Lydon’s first two books.  This book is a limited edition (only 10,000 copies printed), autographed, individually numbered, in a clamshell box.  The paper quality and graphic design are great.  The content… that’s another story.  The book is a random collection of Lydon’s thoughts and musings.  The wit and wisdom of Mr. Rotten himself.  There’s a fair amount of wit, but some of his bombastic proclamations hardly qualify as wisdom.  His thoughts are often so rambling and disjointed that they border on incoherent.  Thankfully, his political views weren’t discussed very often, because when they were, they were generally ignorant and idiotic.  Many of the great life lessons he tries to impart are very basic and very obvious. No brilliant revelations here.  The best sections of the book are those that reveal more about his actual life, rather than his silly philosophical rantings.  In these sections, you get to see the softer side of the guy. John has been married to his wife, Nora, for over 40 years.  He’s 65 now. She is 78 and is suffering from severe Alzheimer’s disease, and John is taking care of her in the most loving, attentive, caring way.  He is completely devoted to her, refusing to leave her side for more than a few minutes, lest she become upset or disoriented.  He’s also an animal lover and there are several sections in the book that talk about the squirrels that he’s befriended. He is really into these squirrels.  When his stepdaughter (Ari Up, the lead singer of The Slits) was too screwed up to take care of her twin sons, John stepped in and raised them in his own home, with Nora.  These are the things that have made me a fan and admirer for all these years (and of course, the music and songwriting, duh.)  His other memoirs have more structure to them and are better reads.  This one is for true fans only.  Purchase HERE

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‘I won’t let the bastards grind me down’: John Lydon on grief, feuds and being an unlikely optimist

Covid, court, bereavement: although the PiL man’s new album could not have been made against a worse backdrop, his glass of non-alcoholic cider remains half full

T here’s a term for people that live in Malibu – they’re called Malubians,” claims a cackling John Lydon. “It sounds like something that has to be cut off at an early age.” The artist formerly known, in his Sex Pistols days, as Johnny Rotten is speaking from his California home and seems ecstatic that we can hear and see each other on our Zoom call. “I am so fucked up with technology,” he laughs. “I’m as blind as a bat.”

Lydon, 67, is looking well, though, decked out in green specs and matching pullover, with his signature vertiginous hair teased into a quiff. The well-worn jumper was a gift from a fan “in either Bradford, Barnsley or Bolton; one of them”, who asked for it to be passed on to his late wife, Nora Forster. “It was very sweet. She can’t wear it now, so I wear it. It’s not about the monetary value, it’s the thought – that’s priceless.” His love for his fanbase feels completely genuine. On the wall behind him are a Samurai sword and an Afghan dagger given to him by diehards when his band Public Image Ltd (PiL) played behind the iron curtain decades ago.

Next month, PiL will release End of World, their first album in eight years. The promotion for it, along with preparation for an accompanying tour this autumn, has come in the midst of profound grief for Lydon after the death in April of Forster, his wife of 44 years. “It hurts so deeply,” he says. “It’s hard to get to grips with but I don’t want to let her down. That’s not healthy for me, or her, or her memories. So, I am gonna try and throw myself into working – as far as I could throw myself, considering my weight,” he adds with a laugh.“It’s an uphill climb, but I’ve got to get there. I’ve got to find myself again, because in all of this you can’t end up losing yourself.”

Sadly, some online trolls, described by Lydon as “savage kittens”, have mocked his suffering. He cites one particular comment along the lines of, “Well, that’s what you get for marrying an older woman.” But this low form of viciousness just seems to bounce off him. “Funnily enough, whatever they meant by that, I found it heartwarming. That’s my nature, to make the best of a thing, not the worst.”

As much as he may be a glass-half-full type, Lydon has never been afraid of being candid about his shortcomings. Take his account of his recent struggles with alcohol. “I went through a rough time and gained some weight,” he says while nursing an alcohol-free cider. “Don’t look for clarification in claret. There isn’t any.”

Last November, Lydon also lost his former bandmate and PiL co-founder Keith Levene, also an original member of the Clash. Lydon had not seen Levene in “eons” and his memory of him is littered with the challenges that Levene had as an addict. “People will take this wrong, but the endurance you had to have to tolerate his drug habits was kind of overwhelming, and I can’t really separate that,” he says. “There were great moments when we were friends, but he really got into [drugs] just too much. It was a great pity because he never had much time to reflect outside of the haze he was in.”

End of World has been in the works since 2019. During that period, Lydon has not only had to deal with Forster’s worsening condition, but also a high-profile court case involving his former Sex Pistols bandmates Paul Cook and Steve Jones (Lydon was successfully sued by the drummer and guitarist after he had attempted to prevent the band’s music appearing in Danny Boyle’s Disney-backed TV series, Pistol ). “It was pressure, on pressure, on pressure,” he says. “You never really get a chance to sort yourself out before some new inflammation turns up, like a boil on the bum! But with my irrepressible nature, I won’t let the bastards grind me down.”

After PiL initially swapped ideas over the internet, the End of World project really kicked into gear when the band – former Damned guitarist Lu Edmonds, ex-Slits drummer Bruce Smith (who both initially joined in 1986, left after a few years and rejoined in 2009), plus multi-instrumentalist Scott Firth, on board since 2009 – got together in a studio in the Cotswolds during the lockdown-free periods of 2020 and 2021. Lydon refers to the band as “a gaggle of mates … When we get together, our ideas just flow from that. I needed to be away [from Malibu] in order to write these songs properly. You have to make the space. As human beings, we all need those logical avoidances of daily problems.”

I ask about one new track, Car Chase. On a literal level the song tells the true story of a friend of his who has been confined to a psychiatric hospital for “his own good” and has tried to escape on numerous occasions. But the core of the song, he says, is “about excessive self-importance and the oblivion of that. Mainly through technology, people are beginning to think of themselves as the centre of the universe.”

This leads Lydon to bemoan a society where individuality is being strangled – a familiar critique of his. “It’s a rulebook that doesn’t accept questions,” he says. “It kills free speech and all creativity. The concept of equality has become the equally mundane. Don’t strive, don’t step out of your box.” On the spot, he comes out with a line that he says he may use as a future lyric: “If we create, we will irritate the state / And the state will eradicate all ideas that differentiate”.

As with its lyrics, sonically the album is typical PiL, its songs’ relentless rhythms interlaced with jagged guitar. There is one striking exception, and that is the tender Hawaii. The song came from Lydon hearing Edmonds fooling around in the corner of the studio. “[He] was playing Hawaiian guitar for a laugh,” Lydon says. “I thought: that’s so excellent.” The song would eventually be dedicated to Forster. In early February, just two months before his wife’s death, Lydon unexpectedly premiered Hawaii during Ireland’s contest to decide its Eurovision entry (Lydon has Irish heritage). Unfortunately, it finished fourth out of sixth. It was a difficult experience for Lydon. “Playing it for the first time was so hard for me,” he says. “I shed more tears for her before she died than after. It was that build up to her death, and that’s what that song is absolutely full of.”

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As well as his California home, Lydon maintains a place in the UK. He still loves British culture and retains movie and TV DVD collections in both locations. He reels off some of his favourites: Steptoe & Son; The Lion in Winter with Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn; the I, Claudius TV series with Derek Jacobi. It is fitting that Lydon has such a love for these classics of the 1960s and 70s, seemingly simpler times when art and culture were not at the mercy of rapidly evolving technology.

Quizzed on his views on the ever-increasing impact of AI on the arts – a much-discussed topic at a time when America’s actors have gone on strike in part over its use – Lydon becomes animated. “Who’s in charge and who’s feeding the information and giving the guidelines to these artifices?” he asks. “What or where is the moral code? It has infiltrated young people’s minds now to the point of total domination. What will this create?” His solution? “My advice is make small steps against this – and get that fucking Siri or whatever out of your house. It will ultimately make decisions for you, and that’s very dangerous.”

He nods to that very public fallout with the Pistols, saying that there is another brand of AI at play. “It’s misrepresentation and the rewriting of history done so casually. I’ve got to deal with real human beings doing that, let alone artificial intelligence taking over. That’s the other side of that coin.”

One new track, LFCF (standing for Liars, Fakes, Cheats and Frauds), is an unapologetic dig at his former bandmates. Lydon sings: “I was willing and I was waiting / You cannot do what I do, so I left you / Give yourself a story, empty of history, wrap it up in Mickey Mouse … I love it when you slate me / But you cannot fake me”.

“The only way to deal with this is to be direct and don’t be coy with the words,” Lydon says of the song. “But also, make it somewhat of a comedy. Let’s face it, when I went on to form PiL, the world really, really noticed. They [Cook and Jones] don’t have that capability, and they are still stuck in my mud tracks.”

For all the indignation at his former fellow Pistols, Lydon’s passion for music – and PiL – burns as brightly as ever. “We’ve never limited ourselves to this tiny little universe called revolutionary punk rock,” he says. “It’s the wonderful world of sound and noise. If I could have a volcano exploding as a fifth band member, I would, but it would be very volatile.”

For all the bluster, it is clear that Lydon has a vulnerable side. He constantly battles with stage fright, describing it as “the scariest thing in the world. I’ve been given the gift of being able to go and do this kind of stuff; well hello: here’s the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune. I would much rather have it than not, but the fear of letting people down is overwhelming. I don’t like to be misunderstood and there’s classic examples of me being misunderstood throughout my entire life, and judged harshly. Sometimes, with a tad too much jealousy and vindictiveness.”

Some would find it difficult to have much sympathy. It could be argued that Lydon often brings it on himself. Take his oft-cited support for Donald Trump, which many long-time fans cannot comprehend. Lydon remains highly critical of Joe Biden and the Democrats: his latest gripe is over Biden’s unwillingness to take part in a debate against other Democrat nominees. While this isn’t an uncommon move for sitting presidents, Lydon sees it as a concern. “This is very dangerous stuff because this is walking us completely into dictators, where you’re not allowed to question someone who wants to tell you how to live your life,” he says, before pivoting back to his AI bugbear. “An artificially intelligent Joe Biden would be quite an issue. I find life quite hilarious.”

After the PiL shows, Lydon will head out on a spoken-word tour across the UK next year. He says he thrives on this two-way interaction with audiences: “It’s kind of like going into a strange pub where everyone is inquisitive and really friendly, and at the same time prepared to tell you their stories. It’s a good trade-off and completely rewarding.”

And with that, by way of a signoff, Lydon gives me the V sign, and launches into an uncanny impersonation of Lance Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army: “Peace … and if you don’t like peace, you can peace off.”

End of World is out on 11 August. PiL’s UK and European tour starts on 8 September in Sheffield ; John Lydon’s Q&A tour starts 1 May in Brighton.

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I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right, 2020

John lydon: i could be wrong, i could be right, away with media, october 15th 2020, 10,000 copies only. strictly limited edition hardback.

Published worldwide on October 15th 2020 via the Away With Media website .

Hardback, 240 pages, 230mm x 193mm, cover artwork by John Lydon, in a clamshell box, individually numbered, hand signed, with screen printed ribbon.

I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right  features random thoughts about the way John sees life, along with anecdotes from his unique and extraordinary career.

Beautifully designed and limited to just  10,000 numbered copies , each book includes an  original signature  from John Lydon