IN his bondage trousers, see through mohair jumper and spiked up hair, he was staring straight into the camera and spitting out the words "I am the Anti Christ". This looks promising we thought, so we went out and bought his records and did our little bit to put his band at the top of the charts.
Then we heard he was being condemned - in print and from the pulpit - so we adopted him as our John and gave him our full respect and attention. It was the simple logic of our enemy's enemy being our friend and through his actions he seemed to be reciprocating our affection. If we had lives back in those desperately dull days of Ireland in the 1970s, he would have changed them.
"It's pretty bloody ironic really," says the man who they used to call the most truly terrifying singer in the history of rock'n'roll, these days known simply as John Lydon and an unbelievable 40 years of age. "I really, really despise the whole quasi religious thing that grew up around the Sex Pistols," he says in that familiar sing songy sarcastic voice that has a habit of over emphasising one word in most every sentence. "A lot of people missed out on the whole point of punk rock, it was about destroying your idols and doing it for yourself. The deification of the Sex Pistols is a contradiction of everything we stood for. I mean, I used to have these upper class English twits writing books about me, saying how I was a modern day Shakespearian character and all of that. There was never, as has been alleged by many an egg head writer, an intellectual conspiracy fuelling the Pistols. For God's sake, I was only 18 when I joined the band."
Though they were only with us for less than three years, the Sex Pistols made music respectable again. In a time when rock dinosaurs like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull roamed the land, music had become about as radical as your average hunt ball. Hippy horrors like Mike Oldfield and Rick Wakeman ruled the airwaves and it was as John Lydon so succinctly puts it: "all so bloody boring". The Pistols, with their short, sharp and shocking three minute, turbo charged anthems of anger, spite and sedition, provoked hordes of sanctimonious and hypocritical "Disgusted Of Tonbridge Wells" types to denounce them for their anti royalist stance (a stance now echoed in papers like the Daily Telegraph), their yobbish behaviour (not a patch on what Oasis now get away with) and their "foul" language (if John Major can refer to some of his backbenchers as bastards, what was the big deal about Johnny Rotten using the same term to describe Ted Heath, even if it was on live television?).
The Pistols, like all the best bands, imploded early on due to the familiar litany of managerial/ego/drug problems. Their legacy as one of the most exciting and one of the most significant bands ever to lurch their way onto a stage would have remained gloriously intact were it not for the heart breaking announcement earlier this year that they were going to do what they implicitly swore they would never do and re form for a filthy lucre generating series of shows. The Pistols would be messing with our collective folk memories, committing an act of gross musical necrophilia and demeaning themselves to the cheap, tacky and vulgar status of other 20 years on reunion acts like the Eagles. Say it ain't so Johnny.
"I know it's not what was expected of us, and many would say it's particularly contradictory coming from me, but I just thought Why The Hell Not?" he says. "The Sex Pistols were an excellent band and for once in our lives we're going to be paid for something. If people don't like the idea of us re forming then they should stay away and shut up. We were the most hated band in the world in the 1970s, and also the most condemned and we were condemned wrongly. Forget about the whole mythology surrounding us and forget, in particular about the whole mythology surrounding Sid (Sid Vicious, the Pistol's bass player who died in 1979). Sid was just a clothes hanger. We're back because we want to finish what we first started. All these PC people are going on and on about us "cashing in" which is just people interfering in things that don't concern them. We're back together, we're doing the gigs. Sorry for not suiting the plans other people had for me."
HE claims that the main reason, apart from the loot, behind the re formation was the confused bundle of feelings he had about the band that re surfaced when he was writing his autobiography (Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, 1993). "The book helped purge me," he says. "Once I had dealt with all the bad memories, I felt better about that whole time and now I can say I was proud to be a Sex Pistol. It's funny but the first gig on this tour is going to be in Finland because that's where we were supposed to be playing after that night in San Francisco in 1978 when the band fell apart. It's going to be a case of `sorry for the delay'."
In his book, he says that the whole point of punk rock, apart from dismissing traditional sexual and racial role playing, is individuality and that it is a tragedy of modern life that individuality is perceived as, at best, an art form and at least, an outcast. Fashion should follow individuality he thinks, and not, as too often the case, the other way round. "The thing about all these new punk rock bands is that they think imitation is a form of flattery. It's not; it is a sign of personal inadequacy. They are imitating something they don't understand. They should try something original and they shouldn't be calling themselves punks," he says. Further ruminations on Princess Diana ("she's a true Sex Pistol, she's carrying on with the Royal Family where we left off") and vegetarians ("Meat isn't murder; it's bloody nice") lead him on to wondering aloud about what sort of reception the Pistols will get when they play in Dublin next month.
"The last time I was in Dublin I got arrested for attacking a policeman's fist with my face and then they threw me in Mountjoy for the night. We don't want a repeat of that, do we? I'm actually an Irish citizen and I carry an Irish passport because my parents are Irish." Informed that he's going to be featuring in a new book by Jon Savage (author of the definitive punk text, England's Dreaming) which looks at the massive contribution that musicians of an Irish heritage like Morrissey, Oasis and Shane McGowan have made to British culture, he wearily remarks: "Oh great, yet another book by Jon Savage on something that he knows absolutely nothing about. I'm so sick of these English twits who presume to know everything. They're jealous, and they're jealous of something which they don't have, which is a sense of culture and sense of wit. That's why I like going back to Ireland and when I do I head straight over to my grandparents' place in Galway. Despite it all, I'm still a bit of a culchie."
