This book is a two-level, highly programmed rollercoaster; as you feel deep sympathy and empathy for Lydon, it's as though he yanks that away from you, as a person who's afraid of getting hurt and hence pulls away from you first; from sympathy and empathy to acting a narcissist. What plagued his first autobiography - "Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" - was Lydon's inclination to constantly point out that he was first on a number of details; this is still the case, but not as irritating; it's even ludicrous in a few instances.
By the way, if you have read his first autobiography, this is not an add-on; this book basically contains the first book and then adds what differs from that publication date and this one's.
Having said that, the good bits over-weighs the bad, so to speak; Lydon's way of writing of overcoming, being a quite warm person, love and hate, being in a band and persistently trying to better himself - while taking the piss out of himself, is good.
From the introduction, as an example of Lydon's style:
INTRODUCTION MAY THE ROAD RISE WITH YOU Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’ So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better. When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.
There's a tinge of old-man's-anger in-between everywhere; this anger is clearly different than that of his older ways, especially when in Sex Pistols:
There have been conversations here in the United States about why every ex-President opens a library when politicians do not read the books. Hello, America! Kind of explains your politics. For me, reading saved me, it brought me back.
His meningitis and how it affected him is taken up:
Trying to blend back in was very difficult. That was a friendless first year, very friendless, and kind of lonely, because of the kids’ attitude – ‘Oh he’s sick, keep away from him!’ I hated school breaks and lunch because it meant I had nothing to do. No one would talk to me; the rumour ran around the school that I was a bit ‘out there’, and so that’s exactly where I found myself, cast out on the outside. I know what that loneliness is, it’s very, very fucking damaging. The only people that talked to me at break time were the dinner ladies. They were very kind Irish women – ‘We heard you were ill – how are you?’ I didn’t even really remember being ill, just – ‘Why am I here?’
On other music:
The Beatles – yeah, a couple of good records there, but my mum and dad had driven me crazy with their early stuff, so by the time they’d turned into Gungadin and his Bongos, there wasn’t much there for me. The people surrounding them were pretentious, with flowers painted on their faces and rose-tinted oversized sunglasses. The whole thing was too silly for words. I remember watching them on Top of the Pops doing ‘All You Need Is Love’, all that ‘la la la la-laaaa’ – oh, fuck off! No, I need a hell of a lot of other things as well. Don’t make me feel selfish for acknowledging a truth at a very early age.
And on taking the piss out of himself:
I can from time to time be a creature of excessive stupidity. I’m well aware of the warning signs and yet I’ll dive in and just go with it, but overdo it. I tend to lack subtlety. Maybe in later years I’ll catch onto that one, the idea of being subtle.
More "piss":
Football’s the kind of game where, if your team’s doing really badly, it gets you into the mode of having a laugh at losing. You can actually enjoy looking forward to the next tragic defeat. And there’s nothing else that gives me that ability. It serves an absolutely brilliant, beautiful purpose. It’s the theatre of emotions, not dreams. The biggest joy of being a football fan is that there is ultimately no joy in it at all. It can always get worse. Years and years ago, when West Ham got kicked down to the second division, I remember their fans singing this glorious chant: ‘Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, we’re going to Bu-uuurnley, que sera sera.’ The humour was fantastic.
On Vivienne Westwood and Chrissie Hynde:
Chrissie Hynde tried to help me on the music side. She used to hang around the shop a year before I did, maybe even a couple of years before. She and Vivienne used to be close but they fell apart. One of the most delicious lines she said to Chrissie one day was: ‘The thing I don’t like about you, Chrissie, is you go with the flow – well, the flow goes that-a-way,’ pointing to the door. Chrissie would be in fits of laughter. The delivery was so funny, that she had to go, ‘Fine’. Vivienne can definitely deliver a good one-liner – no doubts about that mouth.
And yes, there is a lot of hate directed towards Malcolm McLaren here.
On the DYI essence of punk:
By now, the girls that would come to the gigs had their own creative genius just in the way they’d be dressing. There was a whole mob of girls that started wearing bin-liner bags, long before the press caught on. Because of the strikes, the garbage on the streets, it was the natural thing to evolve into. The authorities had run out of black bin-bags, so they started to make bright green and bright pink. Astounding colours, and perfect if you couldn’t afford topnotch alleged punk – you’d wrap one of them on, a few belts on it, and studs, and bingo, ready to go! ‘Right, where’s the boys?’
A very sweet paragraph on meeting the love of his life, Nora:
I first saw Nora at Malcolm’s shop in 1975. She came in with Chris Spedding, who was playing guitar with the likes of John Cale and Bryan Ferry at that time. He was very shy, and Nora wasn’t. He was worried about his flamenco shirts not quite fitting. Nora was fussing around, and somehow the screen in the fitting room fell, and there was Chris Spedding with his belly bursting out of a far-too-tight shirt. That was very typical of Vivienne’s clothing. She would never make them to fit, so you’d always have to order them a couple of inches bigger. Nora already had a daughter, Ariane, who’d been born and brought up initially in Germany, where Nora originally came from. Nora used to promote gigs in Germany, people like Wishbone Ash, Jimi Hendrix, and Yes. Then she ran away from the confines of German society, which was far too restricting and nosy. Everybody’s in your business. During punk, Ariane became Ari Up, the singer in the Slits. Her father was Frank Forster, a very popular singer in Deutschland, in a Frank Sinatra way. Germany after the War was very influenced by the American air bases, and that dictated a lot of the music that was popular. Over here, Nora brought up Ari really well, and got her to learn all sorts of musical instruments, which were always lying around. Ari was only about thirteen or fourteen when I first saw her bouncing around. Nora, I soon discovered, is a guiding light, and a creature of utter chaos. She was a very odd and different soul. Not at all like one of the average old hippie birds, who weren’t quite sure what punk was about. There were loads of them. That, or working-class girls out of the estate, full of ‘fack you’s. None of them seemed like options to me. But Nora – God, she shone in a room. From way across the other side, she shone, she glowed. Nora loathed me at first sight. At least, that’s what I thought. It was because of what everyone was saying to her. ‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to him, he’s awful’, propagating a myth around me. She was short, sharp, brutal, and very intelligent with her remarks, and a lot of that was based on what people had told her about me. But Nora being Nora, she was inquisitive. If people are telling her not to talk to anyone, she’ll talk to them, and I’m exactly the same way. I was told she was stuck-up, and so I found her deeply fascinating. Once we started talking, all of that nonsense came to light and we realized we had both been lied to. Everybody told lies, then. Shocking. I always loved the way Nora understands how to dress. She has a completely individual, incredible style, and that style is reflective of her personality. That drew me in. To the point that I never smoked cigarettes until I met Nora. She used to smoke Marlboro, so I started smoking Marlboro, too. So the afterglow ruined me for life. But then Nora gave up smoking completely, and here I am, still to this day! It was a topsy-turvy situation, for sure. We didn’t waltz straight off into the stars of romanticism. There were all kinds of heated arguments, but in those heated moments we discovered each other as human beings. I’ve got to be honest, before we met both of us played the field, but we found the field to be full of moos. And those moos turned out to be nothing more than muses, and that’s nothing to base a solid lifestyle on. It’s too vacuous. I don’t personally get the rewards of one-night stands at all. Just don’t get it, never did. I always left those situations feeling empty inside, and rolling over and going, ‘Oh my God, do you really look like that?’, and knowing that’s exactly what they felt too. I’d gone through the one-nighters period, but there was a point where it became a futile, boring, repetitive procedure. I didn’t know it at the time but what I was really looking for was a proper relationship, and that was slowly forming with Nora. There were girls leading up into that, longer than a week, shall we say, but something really good happened and clicked with Nor’, very seriously. We learned to really know each other, and that’s the best that any human being can ever look for, I think – the right person who truly accepts you for what you are, warts and all, and doesn’t make you feel ashamed of yourself for any reason at all. So self-doubt is gone, and that’s what the right partner teaches you.
More on Nora:
Once I make that commitment, it’s forever. That’s how me and Nora are and were. It’s quite brilliant how it worked out. I can’t imagine living without her, not at all, and it doesn’t matter what people tell her about me either; here we are, and here we will be.
That's lovely, I think, but this is an example of Lydon at his worst:
Back then, I suppose I was the prime target of the moment – and still am, in many ways, that’s never gone away and I have to be aware of that. It’s jealousy, ultimately. Jealous of what? God, if only they knew! Being Johnny Rotten was never easy. To maintain the integrity that I think I have is a daily grind.
On being open and not being anti-feministic:
Being open-minded to all kinds of music was Lesson One in punk, but that didn’t seem to be understood by many of the alleged punk bands that followed on after, who seemed to be waving this idea of a punk manifesto. I’m sorry, but I never did this for the narrow-minded. I was horrified by the cliché that punk was turning itself into. I didn’t – and still don’t – have too many punk records in my collection, because I never really liked them. Buzzcocks, Magazine, X-Ray Spex, the Adverts, the Raincoats – those, I liked. They were skirmishing on the outside of it rather than the typical slam-dunk bands that drove me nuts, because they all sounded the same, all chasing the same carthorse. I’m not impressed by macho bullshit bravado. It doesn’t have any content and it’s not actually aimed at anything other than trying to show off your masculinity. Failed! You had all these males-only bands trying to out-threaten each other. To me that’s the lowest common denominator. There were so many of them all doing the exact same thing, all of them completely stupid, not understanding Rule Number One: there are no rules. And yet this lot rigidly adhered to rules and regulations. They became the new Boo Nazis.
On the great PiL track called "Death Disco":
Mum had always been loving in a very quiet way. There wasn’t much said, but that’s all you need from your parents, the right kind of attention. Before she went, she asked me to write her a song, which became ‘Death Disco’. I only got to play her a very rough version. She knew what I was up to. I had to curtail it a bit, because what I wrote is very directly about death, so I wanted her to feel it was more about the challenge of an illness.
On singing competitions and The Cure:
As an aside, this idea of what a singer’s voice should be or shouldn’t be, is revolting to me. American Idol, X Factor – they all expect singers to do all the trills and all the runs, that singing instructors require – the gospel background. What a load of bollocks, man. Why can’t you just sing the way you FEEL? It doesn’t actually have to be what you would call musical, just how you feel in the moment, communicating something. The concept of tune, or tuneless, to me is bizarre. I know when I hear someone, it doesn’t have to be a G Flat Minor, perfect, but it has to be accurate. The emphasis of the words, and the tonality, and the pain in the sound that they’re procuring, and the message. If those things come across, tuneless doesn’t exist. Where being in tune counts very much, of course, is on boat cruises. That’s what American Idol is really trying to procure! Boat cruise singers! My God, hahaha! I always enjoyed this story about the Cure, because the singer, Robert Smith – he can’t bear aeroplanes. So the band took the QE2 to New York and the rumour – I don’t know what truth is in it – was that they played on there. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I love the idea!
A bit on Boy George, whose first autobiography, "Take It Like A Man", is one of my personal favourite autobiographies:
It struck me as deeply strange just how little music there was in the charts with any kind of relevance or political meaning. To me, someone like Boy George was the rare exception. All the people I like in music are the ones that have done something completely original, with a touch of genius, and I put Boy George in that bracket. He came up with something really great and challenging. At a time when punk had got staid and boring, out comes Culture Club. Fantastic. George would wear Indian menswear in a feminine way. The boy can sing, and he comes from the same background as me – the same hardcore rubbish. He’s someone that stood up for himself, no matter what he got into, and he’s intelligent, and therefore I like him. More respect, more power. He was the kind of guy there wasn’t really enough of to make the ’80s bearable.
On John Wayne Gacy:
The song ‘Psychopath’ is based on John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer – the famous one, the clown. How many hundreds he must’ve murdered. In my darker moments I’ve thought, ‘But for some kind of inner sensibility, I could quite easily be that way. I could go and kill people, aimlessly and pointlessly, and take some kind of gratification.’ I’m analyzing myself here and seeing that it is possible to be a serial killer, as indeed it is possible for any human being to be exactly the very thing that you think you hate and despise in someone else. What you’re really doing when you’re over-judgemental about those things, is you’re taking it out on yourself because you know your inner possibilities. We all are capable of the most ultimate evil. And because we are also capable of analyzing that, that is exactly why we’re better.
All in all, this book is entertaining, funny, irritating and good.
