A Rotten Breakfast

Mmes. Singh & Garraway trying to look interested and amused 

as John Lydon performs his signature routine and promotes some product 

on Good Morning Britain (ITV, 15 October 2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Yesterday, 70-year-old former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten was wheeled on to the set of Good Morning Britain - ITV's "lively BAFTA-nominated breakfast show that serves up an enticing blend of news and entertainment to start your day" [1] - in order to promote his new book [2].   

 

Watching such a spectacle live and first thing in the morning is, if I'm being honest, a bit more than I can take. 

 

However, I have now seen the interview with Kate Garraway and Ranvir Singh (the latter of whom wasn't even born when 'Anarchy in the U.K.' was released - and I very much doubt that nine-year-old Kate was pogoing round her bedroom at the time).    

  

Rotten performs in his now familiar role as national treasure and a man more sinned against than sinning; surely someone from the RSC should sign him up to play Lear - perhaps with Cook and Jones dragged up as Goneril and Regan, and Matlock in the role of Edmund. 

 

Anyway, I thought it might be instructive to critically examine a transcript of the interview. Note that italicised words and phrases in the text that follows are from the interview linked to above, as are the longer lines quoted.   

 

 

II.  

 

The segment begins with Ms Singh reminding the GMB audience - which numbers on average around 700,000 and mostly consists of viewers in their mid-50s - how the fabulous Sex Pistols exploded on to the music scene, scandalised the nation, and helped change popular culture forever. 

 

There is no mention of the role that an earlier ITV show played in this: these days, everyone has to pretend that punk was great and that the Sex Pistols were just four lovable spiky tops; these days no one wants to be seen to side with poor old Bill Grundy.      

 

Similarly, these days we are also asked to believe that "the man once known as Johnny Rotten is still tearing up the rule book". Really? Even the lovely presenter had to lean forward slightly at this point as if to check she was reading the autocue correctly.    

 

Lydon finally gets his chance to speak and - yawn - he begins with an attack on his former band mates for having the cheek to tour without him (Frank Carter having replaced him as the Sex Pistols frontman in 2024 and now singing the songs for which he, Lydon, had once provided lyrics). 

 

Not unreasonably, Ms Singh suggests he should have put his grievances behind him and joined them on the road, to which Lydon responds: "No, ma'am. I worked enough with them in the first place. They're deceitful, lying hyenas, and I never want another thing to do with them."

 

That being the case, then why complain or express disappointment when they draft in a new lead vocalist? I can't imagine Steve, Paul and Glen would make a fuss should PiL decide to perform a Sex Pistols track (as earlier variations of the band have done in the past), even though they - not Lydon - wrote the music. 

 

I'm really not sure why Rotten feels he has some kind of moral claim over songs that were credited to all four band members. He clearly has no legal right to prevent their performance or use, as the ruling in the Pistol case made clear [3].     

 

 

III.  

 

In an attempt to move the conversation on, Lydon claims that the Sex Pistols are now nothing other than a karaoke band. Which is true. 

 

But this is a bit rich coming from a man who on a spoken word tour in 2024 would lead the audience in a singalong-a-Johnny whilst a backing track of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' played [4]. Lydon has been offering us an imitation of Johnny Rotten for forty years or more.

 

Also, there's an irony in his choice of the word karaoke: for it is one that Malcolm McLaren increasingly used in his later years. But rather than acknowledge that he is still drawing inspiration from the latter, Lydon can't resist taking another cheap shot, describing his former manager as "just a bloke that run a clothes shop" who had no advice to offer and nothing of any importance to contribute to the band. 

 

This kind of casual dismissiveness - of everyone not just McLaren - is typical of Lydon, who remains convinced that he was the central figure in the Sex Pistols story, when, actually, he was a late-comer and a collaborator [5].    

 

 

IV. 

Ageing is a subject of significant and growing interest amongst members of the Punk Scholars Network - particularly those who are now over the hill themselves. And it's interesting to see how individuals who once subscribed to an ethos of living fast and dying young now deal with the physical realities of growing old. 

 

Lydon tried to laugh and joke his way off the topic when it was put to him - "I hit 69 and I thought that sounds like an interesting number" - although, interestingly, he confesses, he was more concerned about turning 21 than 70 (I'm somewhat sceptical about the truth of this, however).   

Dear old Kate Garraway - 59 - flattered her guest by expressing her astonishment that he had reached three score years and ten: "I mean, talk about energetic, youthful energy!" Clearly, she hasn't seen his most recent performances with PiL: unfortunately, thanks to YouTube, I have. 

 

Fans insist that although his physical movement is now restricted - and he can no longer really sing - his stage presence and vocal intensity are greater than ever. In other words, he's fat and he bellows and wails. Rotten always promised us he was no Mick Jagger - and I can absolutely confirm that when it comes to delivering a high-energy stage performance and still looking the part, he's no Mick Jagger. 

 

 

V.  

 

Of course, Lydon was always going to bring the conversation around to his lovely wife and having to care for her in the years before her death, aged 80, in 2023, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer's five years previously.

 

I find it increasingly irritating that he publicly plays the Nora card so often. I might be mistaken, but I do feel he emotionally milks her death whenever he wants not to solicit sympathy, so much as virtue signal and humanise himself in the eyes of viewers. 

 

Again, Lydon's fans view his openness as a rare and authentic display of vulnerability and suggest that talking about things is a way for him to overcome his grief. 

 

But critics argue that he turns personal tragedy into a slick media segment; an emotional narrative that is perfectly suited to the requirements of daytime TV. It may be that it was Kate Garraway who steered the conversation on to Nora - "I'd love you to to talk to us a little bit about her" - but Lydon was only too happy to give her what she wanted: "The more iller she got, the closer we got."

 

Ultimately, it's not cynicism on my part to notice that discussing his role as a loving husband and carer instantly humanises him, deflecting harsher political or personal critiques from hosts and viewers alike. 

 

 

VI.

 

I have to admit, I did smile when Lydon was shown - apparently for the first time - a photo taken by British photographer Lou Boileau to mark his 70th birthday and which is apparently going to be housed in the National Portrait Gallery. 

 

He said: "I don't like it. It's horrible!" and just for a moment I thought of Johnny Rotten and of all he once meant to me.   

 

VII. 

 

Finally, Lydon voices his opposition to AI and the fact that artists can have their voice and image appropriated: "It's horrible ... I don't want Mozart reinvented by a machine." [6]

 

Johnny Rotten, in other words, is a champion of the real deal and rejects falsehood and fakery in all its forms - including artificial intelligence. He even (jokingly?) promises a future album with the title Actual Intelligence.    

 

I suppose this shouldn't surprise us: punk was always obsessed with authenticity - a quality that, along with sincerity, risks transforming the human being into an overly earnest bore, like Lydon, forever banging on about the vital character of live performance, etc.    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from the official blurb for Good Morning Britain on ITV's digital streaming platform ITVX.

 

[2] Archive (2026) is a forthcoming photographic memoir which "brings together rare and previously unseen photographs spanning John's extraordinary life and career" and "captures five decades of music, controversy, creativity and cultural change". Alongside the pictures, Lydon "offers candid commentary and personal reflections on the experiences and people who shaped his life". 

      I'm quoting from the official Public Image Ltd website. Click on the link if interested and if you wish to pre-order a copy of either the luxury edition (£49.99) or the superluxe edition (£149.99).

 

[3] In 2021, Lydon lost a High Court battle with his former bandmates Paul Cook and Steve Jones. They wanted to license songs by the Sex Pistols for use in Danny Boyle's six-part miniseries, Pistol, but Lydon - aggrieved that he wasn't being consulted about the making of the show (and that it was based on Jones's autobiography, not his) - sought to exercise an imaginary right to veto. 

      The judge in the case was clear, however: the Band Member Agreement signed in 1998 stated that licensing decisions could be approved by a majority vote and, like it or not, Lydon was therefore required to sign the necessary licenses. 

 

[4] See the post 'Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero' (9 July 2024).

 

[5] Obviously, Lydon would reject this characterisation. In fact, later in the interview (5:55 on) he claims that he has not been absorbed and eventually corrupted by the music industry - even though, of course, he was swallowed by the Virgin shark in 1978. 

 

[6] That's a nice line. Unfortunately, however, Lydon spoils it thanks to his own tendency for malapropism: instead of declaring the reinvention of Mozart by a machine as an atrocious thing to do, he says it's an audacious thing to do. It seems fairly obvious that's not what he means.  

 

More Utopian Than Ethiopian: Thoughts on Michael Anthony's Interview with Johnny Rotten (May 2025)

Screenshot from The Michael Anthony Show with Johnny Rotten 

Episode 189 (27 May 2025): click here 

 

 

I. 

 

Hats off to Irish podcaster Michael Anthony for being able to tolerate being in the presence of the grotesque and abject figure of so-called punk legend Johnny Rotten for over an hour. 

 

For whilst some may still find the former Sex Pistol irreverently entertaining, his witless attempts at humour, cultural analysis and political commentary - combined with rambling reminiscences about his past - surely make him one of the most boorish and boring individuals on the planet.      

 

 

II. 

 

Anthony seems to have graduated from the give 'em enough rope school of interviewers; he knows that if you offer an ignorant and opinionated big mouth like Rotten the opportunity to relax and speak at length they will invariably say something revealing and potentially compromising (particularly if plied with beer and cigarettes throughout the conversation). 

 

Thus, for example, as well as reaffirming his admiration for Donald Trump as an agent of chaos and his contempt for the Palestinians, Lydon concedes that he is primarily driven by anger and the sense that whilst he doesn't have all the answers, he is in the right on most things.  

 

Lydon is also, it turns out, skilled in the dark art of victim blaming (i.e., shifting responsibility for abusive behaviour from the perpetrator to the one who is harmed in some manner). 

 

Thus, he suggests that misogyny only exists because a sufficient number of women are complicit (go to 38:29 in the above interview) and that children of his generation who fell prey to sexual abuse by paedophile priests were either too stupid for their own good, or willing participants (1:04:16). Smart kids, says Lydon, like him and his frends, knew what was what and kept out of trouble.    

 

Whether Anthony should have challenged Lydon on these views more than he did is debatable. As mentioned earlier, his style of interviewing tends toward neutrality (i.e., its non-confrontational and non-judgemental). But this open and empathetic technique often produces the most telling results; interviewees are made to feel so comfortable that they sometimes say things they might otherwise keep to themselves.      

 

 

III.

 

Finally, just as Nietzsche was bitterly disappointed by his one-time idol Richard Wagner when the latter threw himself at the foot of the Cross and embraced Christian themes in his late work, so too am I shocked (though not particularly surprised) to hear Johnny 'I am an antichrist' Rotten declare that, for him, when all is said and done, the person he thinks is the greatest star of all (if only for the longevity of his fame) is ... Jesus Christ!    

 

 

Notes

 

For a pair of posts published in July of 2024 in which I discuss Rotten as an abject antihero, click here and/or here. 

 

For a much earlier post, from January 2013, that anticipates how my love for Rotten would increasingly turn to hate, please click here.  

 

And for those, like me, who now need a reminder of just how charismatic Rotten was back in the day, here's a clip from an interview with Janet Street-Porter for The London Weekend Show (LWT, 28 Nov. 1976): click here.

 

 

Memories

Public Image Ltd: Memories 

(Virgin Records, 1979)

  

"Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of pain."

 

 

I. 

 

Looking back, one of the admirable things about 22-year-old John Lydon, after he left the Sex Pistols in 1978, is he had no time for rosy retrospection. 

 

Indeed, if anything, he viewed his own punk past and Rotten persona negatively - as something to be abandoned or overcome, rather than desperately clung to or fondly remembered:

 

I'm not the same as when I began  ... This person's had enough of useless memories ... [1]

 

 

II.

 

However we attempt to configure it, the nature of one's relationship to one's own past remains an interesting question ...

 

Is it best, for example, to simplify one's own history and, in the process of simplifying it, also give it a positive gloss; are good memories (and reshaped lies) vital in maintaining self-esteem and happiness? 

 

Or is it best (if possible) to never look back; to regard nostalgia as a dangerous disease; to tie innocence and becoming to forgetfulness and/or an active denial of the past? 

 

It was, after all, because of Lydon's refusal to rest on his laurels or bullshit about his experience as a Sex Pistol, that he was able - in collaboration with Keith Levene and Jah Wobble - to deliver unto the world his Metal Box [2]. 

 

Arguably, with this album Lydon proved himself to be a genuinely creative artist (or a true star as he once signed himself to me) and not merely a derivative talent or copycat; i.e., one who uses memory to mimic ability and as a resource to plunder. 

 

As Nietzsche says, original artists and great poets seek to counter the deadening effects of an all-too-faithful memory (i.e., a mere recording capability that is of no value creatively speaking).

 

Sadly, however, Lydon never quite succeeded in getting rid of the albatross and he became a monster of passive memory, increasingly consumed by ressentiment. 

 

Now, his entire being revolves around having the last word, settling old scores, slagging off everyone he's ever known or worked with; a grotesque (and bloated) parody of his former self, it should be clear by now that he's the one who makes us feel ashamed ...

 

We let him stay too long.  

 

And he's old.    

 

Notes

 

[1] Lines from the singles 'Public Image' (Virgin Records, 1978) and 'Memories' (Virgin Records, 1979), by Public Image Limited. 

      Cf. Lydon's attitude to the past (and the importance of memory) in the single 'Hawaii' - taken from the album End of World (PiL Official, 2023) - in which he remembers all the good times shared with his wife, Nora Forster. For a discussion of this song, click here.    

 

[2] Metal Box, was PiL's second studio album released by Virgin Records in November 1979. The album is a million miles away from Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) and, indeed, a significant departure from PiL's debut album released eleven months earlier; the band moving in an increasingly avant-garde direction. Metal Box is widely regarded as a landmark of post-punk. An alternative mix of 'Memories' appears on the album - click here to play the 2009 remastered version.  

     

 

For an earlier post in which I discuss Johnny Rotten as an artist in decline, click here.

 

 

Sweet Sixteen (In Memory of Sid Vicious and My Own Punk Youth)

John Beverley, aged 16, in his pre-punk days 

prior to becoming Sid Vicious, Sex Pistol.

Me, aged 16, in my post-punk days, but still sporting 

a Sid Vicious badge on the left lapel of my jacket.

 

 

I recently came across a rather touching photo of a young John Beverley on his way to a David Bowie concert at Earl's Court, in 1973 ... 

 

This was the infamous opening show of Bowie's Aladdin Sane UK tour on May 12th, two days after Beverley turned sixteen. Whether the latter took part in - or, indeed, incited - the violence that ensued amongst the 18,000 strong audience, I don't know. But it's possible this is where he first developed a taste for rock 'n' roll mayhem. 

 

Around this same time, Beverley was kicked out of his home by his heroin-addicted mother, so quit school and began squatting along with his friend John Lydon, the soon-to-be Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, who gave him the punk-sounding nickname of Sid Vicious by which he is best remembered today.

 

The two friends - like many other youngsters at the time interested in music and fashion - started to cruise up and down the Kings Road and eventually found themselves hanging out at the small and unusual boutique owned and managed by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, called SEX. 

 

When, in late-summer 1975, Rotten joined the Sex Pistols, Sid became their No. 1 fan and acted as an agent provocateur ensuring that every gig ended in an unpredictable bloody mess. He can be seen in photos taken at the Nashville Rooms in April 1976 on the night that the band physically attacked their audience.

 

Vicious is also credited with inventing the pogo, an aggressive form of anti-dance. In February '77, he replaced bass guitarist Glen Matlock in the Sex Pistols, even though he had no experience of playing the instrument. He would later (rather cruelly) be stylised by McLaren in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle as 'The Gimmick'. 

 

Tragically, post-Pistols, things did not turn out well for Sid - or his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen; he died, from a drug overdose, on 2 February, 1979, aged 21, whilst on bail and awaiting trial for the murder of the latter, who died from a single stab wound to her abdomen, aged 20, on October 12th of the previous year.  

 

II.  

 

I vividly recall the time when Sid died. For one thing, it was less than a fortnight away from my own sixteenth birthday, on February 13th ...

 

I remember, for example, going out on a cold, foggy night and stealing that day's headline poster for the Evening Standard outside my local newsagent's which read: Sid Vicious Dead (I still have it today somewhere). 

I remember also the next morning, at school, being met with snide remarks from those who knew I was a fan of the Sex Pistols: Your hero's dead - that kind of thing, nothing very imaginative. 

 

Actually, Sid was never really my hero: I was more devoted to Rotten, as the Public Image Ltd. t-shirt worn in the above photo taken in 1979 indicates. However, I do retain a certain affection for him which, sadly, is no longer the case when it comes to the latter, who recently turned sixty-six, but died many, many years ago ...     

And No Birds Sing

This could be heaven ...

Having moved back to my childhood home, it's forgivable to be feeling a little nostalgic for a time and a place - and even a people - now vanished. For although Harold Hill remains Harold Hill, it's not the Harold Hill I remember with such fondness. It's changed. And not for the better.

To be honest, it was never a pretty place. A large, post-War estate on the far fringes of Greater London, Harold Hill was developed on 850 acres of formerly private land to house ex-servicemen like my father and those cockneys (as my mother always called them rather disparagingly) looking to leave behind the bombed-out ruins of the East End and start a new suburban life in leafy Essex. 

Construction of over seven-and-a-half thousand new homes began in 1948 and was completed ten years later. The development, however, was fairly low density; mostly two or three bedroom houses built of brick with lots of open spaces, including woodland, parks, greens and, perhaps most crucially, gardens at both front and back that the original residents not only delighted in but prided themselves upon.  

Needless to say, most of the playing fields and wild areas have now been built on. But it's the loss of the front gardens which has, I think, dealt a mortal blow to any sense of community and reduced the estate to stony silence.

It's not simply a case of no birds singing - a prospect which has long troubled poets from John Keats to John Lydon - but also of no insects buzzing, no flowers blooming, no frogs spawning, no hedgehogs hiding, no lawnmowers gently humming, no neighbours chatting, and no children laughing ...

The idyllic world above has been buried alive under concrete and gravel in order that the nation's 35 million vehicles can have space to park.

Beneath the crazy-paving stones lies the past. And future hope lies with the weeds that defiantly grow between the cracks ...