Imagine, if you will, a figure who represents
the absolute pinnacle of chaos. Okay. I want
you to close your eyes and, you know, picture
the ultimate cultural bogeyman of the late 20th
century. We are talking about the poster child
for anarchy. A man whose face was, well, is practically
banned by the British establishment in the 1970s.
I have a very specific image in mind already.
I bet you do. A man whose rotting green teeth
became a symbol of a whole generation's rage.
You're picturing him, right? The sneer, the safety
pins, the absolute refusal to conform to anything.
Absolutely. It's grainy, black and white footage.
It's almost always accompanied by these screaming
tabloid headlines about the end of civilization
as we know it. He's the villain in the grand
narrative of recent British history. Right. The
villain. The monster. Now, I want you to take
that image, that snarling, spitting monster,
and try to reconcile it with this next one. Go
on. A devoted husband of 44 years. A nature enthusiast
who gets genuinely, almost giddily excited about
sharks and bugs. And this is where it gets really
interesting. A man who financed the reunion of
his avant -garde band by starring in a television
commercial selling British butter. That is quite
the juxtaposition. It just sounds like a glitch
in the simulation. You know, those two people
should not be able to occupy the same body. But
they do. And that is the mystery we are hoping
to solve today. We are unpacking the life of
John Lydon, famously known to the world, of course,
as Johnny Rotten, the front man of the Sex Pistols
and public image LTD. We'll PL. And I think the
mission of this deep dive is precisely that.
It's to dismantle that paradox. We really need
to move beyond the caricature, the safety pin,
the spitting, the headlines and try to get to
the intellectual, complex and frankly, deeply
contradictory human being underneath it all.
Because if you only know Johnny Rotten, you actually
don't know John Lydon at all. And for this, we
have a wealth of source material. We're pulling
from his autobiography, his discography, countless
interviews, and his political evolution right
up to 2026. Exactly. And for you listening, whether
you're a diehard punk fan or maybe someone who
just knows the name Johnny Rotten as a piece
of trivia, this matters. Yeah. It matters because
this is not just a rock biography. It's a study
in identity construction. It's about the massive
difference between the image the media sells
us and the reality of a person. It's about how
a working -class kid from London reshaped popular
culture, not by trying to fit in, but by, well,
by aggressively refusing to. It creates a fascinating
blueprint for how to survive in the public eye.
You become the monster they fear so you can protect
the person you actually are. It's almost a form
of camouflage, isn't it? If everyone is looking
at the safety pin, nobody is looking at your
soul. So let's go back. Let's go back to the
very beginning. To understand Rotten, we have
to understand the crucible that forged him. We're
going back to London, 1956. John Joseph Leighton
is born. And we need to be really clear about
the setting here. This isn't the swinging London
of, you know, Austin Powers or the Beatles in
tailored suits. Not at all. That's the exported
image of the 60s, the tourist version. Leighton
was born into a very specific, a very gritty
reality. He was born in Holloway, North London
to working class Irish immigrants. They lived
in a two room Victorian flat. And when we say
two -room flat, we're not talking about some
minimalist studio apartment that you'd see on
a design blog today. We are talking about genuine
grinding poverty. Exactly. We are talking about
an outside toilet. Just imagine that in a London
winter. We are talking about living right next
to the Arsenal football stadium so your entire
life is punctuated by the roar of crowds and
the chaos of match days. It was cramped, it was
loud, and it was tough. And then there's the
cultural isolation on top of all of that. Leiden
has spoken so much about this Irish Londoner
experience. It really sounds like he was trapped
between two worlds from the moment he was born.
He was. And this is so crucial to his entire
worldview. In London in the 1950s and 60s, anti
-Irish sentiment was visceral. It was everywhere.
You still saw signs in windows that literally
said no Irish, no blacks, no dogs. Wow. Leiden
was treated as Irish scum by his English neighbors.
He talks about having bricks thrown at him just
for being who he was. He was the outsider, the
invader in the city he was born in. But then,
and this is the really cruel twist, every summer
he'd go back to County Cork in Ireland to visit
family. You'd think that would be a sanctuary,
a relief. You would think, but it wasn't. In
Cork, he was mocked for his English accent. To
the Irish kids, he was a plastic patty. He was
a Brit. So you have a child who learns very,
very early on that he doesn't belong. anywhere.
He just couldn't win. He's too Irish for the
English and he's too English for the Irish. Precisely.
And that creates a very specific psychological
profile. He later said, I view myself as British
first and foremost. I'm proper London working
class. But that experience of being rejected
by both sides of his own heritage, that has to
be the seed of his anti -establishment stance.
It makes perfect sense. I mean, if you don't
belong to any tribe. You stop trying to please
the tribe. You just become a tribe of one. Even
as that quote about it, something like, we were
the Irish scum, but it's fun being scum too.
Yeah. That's just such a light on perspective,
isn't it? Taking the insult, the slur, and wearing
it like a badge of honor, like armor. Oh, you
think I'm scum? Fine. I'll be the best scum you've
ever seen. It's a classic defense mechanism.
But there was something else that happened in
his childhood, something much more physical that
I think really created the persona that we know.
We have to stop here and really dig into this
meningitis episode because I think just saying
illness is too soft a word for what actually
happened. We're talking about eight, seven. This
isn't just a fever or a bad flu season. This
is a life altering event. No, it's a biological
catastrophe. He contracted spinal meningitis.
He went into a coma and the consequences were
just. He spent a full year in the hospital. A
full year. But the most terrifying part, the
part that sounds like something out of a horror
film, is what happened when he woke up. Memory
loss. Total erasure. The hard drive was completely
wiped clean. He woke up and had no idea who he
was. He didn't know his name. He didn't know
what a mom or a dad even was. And that profound
memory loss lasted for four years. Four years.
Can you even imagine that? Being seven years
old, essentially an orphan inside your own life.
He talks about his parents visiting him in the
hospital, this working class Irish couple, probably
terrified out of their minds. And he looks at
them and feels. Nothing. Worse than nothing.
He felt suspicious of them. He described this
profound sense of guilt because he saw these
adults crying over him. And he knew on some level
he was supposed to know them, but they were complete
strangers. He actually thought they were part
of some conspiracy to hurt him. Because of the
treatment, right? I mean, the medical procedures
in the early 60s weren't exactly gentle. They
were brutal. To treat meningitis back then, they
had to draw fluid from the spine. Lumbar punctures.
With these huge needles. Often with little to
no... sedation for a child. Oh, God. The nurses
would have to hold him down. So in his seven
-year -old mind, the hospital wasn't a place
of healing. It was a torture chamber. And he
thought these two strangers, his parents, were
the ones allowing it to happen to him. So you
have a child who learns at age seven that the
world is fundamentally a place of pain, that
adults are not to be trusted, and that you are
completely and utterly alone inside your own
head. And that right there is the birth of the
light on stare. You know, it's intense, it's
unblinking, it's slightly manic. I always just
assumed that was a performance choice. Like,
he was trying to look psychotic for the cameras
to build the Johnny Rotten brand. Not initially,
no. It was a direct medical result of the meningitis.
His eyesight was severely damaged. In order for
him to focus on anything, he had to lock his
eyes and physically tilt his head back just to
see straight. That's incredible. It's so ironic,
isn't it? That hateful stare that terrified the
British establishment in 1977 was actually just
a little boy trying to focus his eyes. But he
weaponized it. And this is the key insight, I
think, for anyone listening. Layjohn realized
that this, quote unquote, defect scared people.
It made them deeply uncomfortable. And instead
of trying to hide it or look normal, he leaned
into it. He realized, if I look at you like this,
you back down. It was his first real lesson in
the power of intimidation. It's Survival 101.
If you look like a monster, people think twice
about trying to hurt you. And he had to reconstruct
his entire personality from scratch. He said
he spent those four years of memory loss just
watching people, observing. He became a voyeur
of human behavior because he didn't have a personality
of his own. He was just mimicking what he thought
a person was supposed to be. Which would explain
why he was such a good or at least such a compelling
front man later. He was a performance artist
from age seven because he literally had to be.
But once he recovered. or at least once he relearned
who he was, he had to go back into the real world.
He went to St. William of York Roman Catholic
School. And if you know anything about working
class Catholic schools in 1960s London, you know
it wasn't exactly a Montessori. By his own account,
it was a brutal, brutal environment. He was bullied
by the other students. He was caned by the teachers.
It was all about conformity. But then... At around
14 or 15, something just snapped. He decided
he wasn't going to take it anymore. He saw the
teachers as trying to force everyone into the
same mold, and he just broke the mold. The rebellion
started with his appearance. And this is a classic
teenage moment. But Ledon, as he always does,
took it to the absolute extreme. His father,
who was a traditional tough working class man,
hated Ledon's long hair. He told him to get it
cut. Get a proper haircut, right? Yeah. The classic
dad line. Exactly. So Ledon obeyed the letter
of the law, but absolutely not the spirit. He
cut it, but then he went and dyed what was left
of it bright green. That is the ultimate passive
aggressive compliance of a teenager. But just
turned up to 11. And it had real -world consequences,
didn't it? He got a job at a children's play
center teaching woodwork. Which, frankly, sounds
dangerous enough given his general disposition.
Right. But he was fired. And he wasn't fired
for being bad at woodwork. He was fired because
the parents complained about the weird guy with
the green hair. It just reinforces that lesson
he was already learning his whole life. Society
judges you on the surface. If you look different,
you are immediately treated as a threat. And
eventually that lack of care for social norms,
for what people thought, extended to his personal
hygiene, which brings us to the name, the name
that defined a decade, Johnny Rotten. It wasn't
some marketing brainstorming session. No, it
was entirely literal, which is almost funnier.
In the mid -70s, his oral hygiene was so poor
that his teeth had actually started to turn green.
Green hair, green teeth, a very monochromatic
look. Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist,
saw him one day and just said, you're rotten,
you are. And the name just stuck. It wasn't a
character he created. It was a description of
his physical state at that moment. So you have
this green -toothed, green -haired, spinal -curved,
intense -staring survivor walking around London.
It's 1975. He's hanging around Malcolm McLaren
and Vivian Westwood's infamous shop, Sex. And
this is where history pivots on a dime. The audition
process for the Sex Pistols is one of the great
myths of rock and roll, but the reality is just
as good as the legend. Maybe even better. Malcolm
McLaren had just come back from managing the
New York Dolls. He was looking for a look, an
attitude. He was not looking for a trained vocalist.
No. He wanted a sculpture, something he could
put on a stage to upset people. And Lyne walks
in, and he's wearing a pink Floyd t -shirt. But
we have to explain the significance of that shirt.
Why Pink Floyd specifically? To us today, Pink
Floyd is just classic rock. Everyone's dad has
a copy of Dark Side of the Moon. But in 1975,
they were the absolute monarchs of the music
industry. They represented everything that punk
was about to rebel against. Like what? What did
they symbolize? Technical perfection, huge budgets,
20 minute guitar solos, massive stadium spectacles
with flying pigs. They were the establishment.
They were corporate rock. So Leiden takes this
shirt, the symbol of corporate rock, and he modifies
it. He scratches out the eyes of the band members
on the shirt and then writes. I hate in felt
-tip pen right above the logo. That t -shirt
is a manifesto in and of itself. It wasn't just,
I don't like this band. It was, I hate the entire
idea of this band. He was rejecting the notion
that music had to be professional or polished
or expensive. It was a declaration of war on
competence itself. So McLaren sees this walking
manifesto and asks him to audition. And what
does Leiden do? He sings along to the jukebox.
He sings along to Alice Cooper's I Am 18. But
he doesn't sing it like a singer. He writhes.
He spasms. He screams. He wasn't trying to hit
the notes. He was like exercising demons right
there in the shot. And the other guys in the
band? The other guys in the band, Steve Jones,
Paul Cook, they were actually horrified. They
were rock and roll guys at heart. They wanted
to be the next Rolling Stones. They looked at
light and just thought, this guy is a complete
lunatic. But that tension is the magic, isn't
it? The friction between a band wanting to be
a traditional rock band and the singer wanting
to be a living piece of performance art. Precisely.
That friction is what made the pistol sound the
way they did. The band is playing these chugging,
almost Chuck Berry style riffs, and Leiden is
just wailing over the top of it, sounding like
a bag of cats being thrown down a flight of stairs.
It shouldn't work at all. But it did. It did,
because it sounded exactly like London felt in
1976. We have to paint that picture of London.
The winter of discontent was looming on the horizon.
It was grim. It was really grim. High unemployment,
especially for young people. Trash was piling
up on the streets because of constant strikes.
There was the three -day week where electricity
was rationed to save coal. The entire country
felt like it was dying. And here comes this band
screaming, no future. Yeah. It wasn't just nihilism
for the sake of it. It was like they were reporting
the news from the streets. It was social realism
set to three chords. So they release Anarchy
in the UK and then God Save the Queen. And the
reaction wasn't just bad reviews in the music
papers. It was, as one commentator perfectly
described it, pop -based moral pandemonium. It
is so hard for us to understand now in an age
where everything is shocking and therefore nothing
is shocking. Just how visceral the reaction was
in 1977. This is the year of the Queen's Silver
Jubilee. Right. The country was desperately trying
to wrap itself in the flag and celebrate the
monarchy to feel good about itself again. And
here comes this band screaming, God save the
queen. She ain't no human being. It was seen
as treasonous. Yeah. Genuinely. And it wasn't
just newspapers writing angry op -eds. It was
physical violence. Lied. and his producers were
attacked with razors outside a pub in Highbury.
They were targeted. That's such a key point.
This wasn't a marketing stunt for Lydon. It was
physically dangerous to be him. He had that great
line, turn the other cheek too often and you
get a razor through it. He became public enemy
number one overnight. But inside the band, it
wasn't exactly a brotherhood of revolutionaries
fighting the system together. There was serious
tension from the start. Oh, massive tension.
Lydon had a huge conflict with the original bassist,
Glenn Matlock. Lydon felt Matlock was too middle
class and, ironically, considering the Pink Floyd
t -shirt, too obsessed with the Beatles. Matlock
could write a tune. Matlock was a musician. Lydon
was a force of nature. They were coming from
completely different places. So Matlock leaves.
or is pushed out, depending on who you ask. And
in comes Lydon's old school friend, Simon John
Ritchie. But we know him better as Sid Vicious.
A name that, surprisingly and hilariously, came
from Lydon's parents' pet hamster. Wait, you're
kidding me. The most dangerous man in punk, the
symbol of heroine chic and nihilistic destruction,
was named after a hamster. Indeed. The hamster,
named Sid, apparently bit Leiden's father, who
exclaimed, Sid is really vicious, and the name
was born. That's amazing. But bringing Sid into
the band was the beginning of the end. Leiden
essentially mentored Sid in the beginning. He
gave him his first punk haircut, which involved
literally hacking chunks out of his hair with
no shape or logic. He taught him the attitude.
But while Leiden was, you know, playing a role,
he was intelligent, he was reading. He knew when
to turn the Roulton persona on and off. Sid didn't
have that switch. That is the absolute tragedy
of it all. Sid started to live the caricature.
He believed the headlines. Leighton watched his
friend just completely decline into heroin addiction
and that chaotic, doomed relationship with Nancy
Spungen. Right. Leighton wasn't celebrating that
chaos. He was actually the one trying to hold
it all together, which is so contrary to the
public image. He was the moral compass, as strange
as that sounds. He was constantly trying to get
Sid off the drugs. He tried to manage the madness.
That brings us. to the final collapse the winterland
concert in san francisco january 1978 the band
is falling apart at the seams sit is a mess and
ladon closes the show with that immortal final
line ever get the feeling you've been cheated
It was a question directed at the audience, of
course, but you have to feel it was also directed
at himself. He realized the Sex Pistols had become
exactly what they set out to destroy. A circus,
a product, a joke. They were just another rock
band being sold to the masses. And here is the
ultimate proof that Laudan had a moral line he
would not cross. After the band broke up, the
rest of them, McLaren's idea, was to go to Brazil
to record with Ronnie Biggs. And for those who
don't know, Ronnie Biggs was a famous British
train robber who was on the run. a fugitive living
in Brazil, the other Sex Pistols and McLaren
saw him as this cool outlaw figure, a rebel.
You'd think an anarchist would love a train robber.
It fits the brand. But Lydon refused to go. He
saw Biggs as a common criminal who had stolen
working class money from a mail train and, crucially,
had violently hurt a train driver during the
robbery. Lydon refused to glorify him. He said
something like, I don't dip my toe in the slurry
of criminality. That is a fascinating distinction
to make. He's happy to insult the queen, the
head of state, but he won't cozy up to a guy
who hurt a working class train driver. It violates
his sense of class solidarity. Exactly. It shows
a consistent internal logic that the media completely
missed. They just saw chaos. Leiden saw a kind
of integrity. So the pistols implode. Leiden
is done with rock and roll. He's broke, by the
way. He didn't walk away a millionaire. Management
took most of the money. He could have just faded
away. But instead, he pivots. And he pickets
hard. He forms public image LTD, or PL. And this
is where he really earns his stripes as a true
artist, I think. If the pistols were about destroying
the past, PL is about building a strained and
unnerving future. He moved completely away from
the three -chord thrash of punk. Can you describe
the sound? Because it must have been shocking
to the fans who just wanted anarchy in the UK
part two. Oh, it was a total rejection of that.
It was dub. It was heavily influenced by Jamaican
reggae. It was... Bass heavy, slow, deep. It
was music that vibrated your chest. The guitar
wasn't playing riffs. It was making these metallic
sheets of noise. It was open. It was spacious.
And it was terrifying in a completely different,
more psychological way. The tracks are darker,
the more complex. The song Death Disco is about
watching his mother die of cancer. That's a heavy,
heavy topic for a pop song. And he sings it with
such raw anguish. Public Image, their debut single,
is a direct takedown of his own media persona.
He's singing, you never listened to a word that
I said. You only saw me for the clothes that
I wore. He's critiquing his own audience for
only caring about the image. He's deconstructing
his own myth from day one. But there is one collaboration
from this era that just blows my mind. 1984,
World Destruction. Yes, a collaboration with
the one and only Afrika Bambaataa. This is years,
years before Run DMC and Aerosmith did Walk This
Way. Leighton and Bambaataa basically invented
rap rock on the spot. And they recorded it in
four and a half hours. It just shows Layton's
incredible musical curiosity. He was never a
punk purist. He was a sound explorer. He loved
reggae. He loved dub. And he respected what was
happening in the early days of hip hop. He saw
the connection between the punk rebellion in
London and the hip hop rebellion in the Bronx.
So PLL has this long, critically acclaimed run,
then a hiatus in 1993. But then in 2009, Lydon
decides to reform the band. But there's a pretty
big problem. A financial one? No record label,
no funding. So how does the godfather of punk,
the anti -establishment icon, pay for his band's
reunion? This is the moment that broke the brains
of music critics everywhere. He stars in a series
of British TV commercials for Country Life Butter.
Okay, we have to talk about the elephant in the
room. Or rather... The cow in the room. I have
seen this ad. He's dressed in tweed, running
around a field with cows, being very cheeky and
saying, it's not about Great Britain, it's about
grape butter. It is absolutely surreal. The backlash
was nuclear. It was immediate. You had old punks
claiming they were burning their records. The
Guardian wrote endless think pieces about the
death of integrity. Johnny Rotten is a shill
for big dairy. He's gone soft. But was he? Or
was this actually the most punk rock thing he
could have possibly done in 2009? That's the
provocative question, isn't it? Let's just look
at the financials for a second. Payal had been
dead for 17 years. Leighton wanted to tour. He
wanted to record new music. But the record labels
wouldn't touch him. He was seen as too difficult,
too old, too commercially risky. So he was being
creatively silenced by the industry. Exactly.
He was being censored by capitalism. So he decides
to exploit the system to defeat the system. He
takes the butter money. And it was a massive
check. And he doesn't go buy a mansion in Malibu.
He doesn't buy a fleet of Ferraris. He buys a
tour bus. He reforms the band. He hires the musicians
he wants on his own terms. He books the studios.
He records and releases the album. This is Payal
on his own independent label, funded entirely
by himself. So the Butter Company essentially
became his patron. It's like the Midich's funding
Michelangelo, except it's salted dairy funding
post -punk noise. And he was completely transparent
about it. He went on TV and said, I want to make
music. They offered me the money. I'm spending
it on the music. There's a strange purity to
that transaction that I find fascinating. He
called it an anarcho -capitalist move. He found
a loophole. It really challenges our simplistic
definition of selling out. Is it selling out
if you use the corporation's money to make exactly
the art you want to make without any compromise
whatsoever? I would argue that not doing the
ad and staying silent would have been the bigger
sellout. He would have sold out his creativity
for the sake of preserving his cool image from
1977. Instead, he sacrificed the image to save
the art. And it really launched this whole second
phase of his career where he became this ubiquitous
media personality. And not just the butter ads.
He started appearing on reality TV. Oh, the lifts
is amazing. It starts with Judge Judy in 1997.
Wait, the anarchist was on Judge Judy. How did
that happen? He appeared as a defendant. His
former drummer from a post -pill project was
suing him. And he won the case. He was articulate.
He was sharp. And he completely dominated the
courtroom. He treated the court with respect,
but he absolutely refused to be bullied by the
process. It's an incredible watch. And then there's
I'm a celebrity. Get me out of here. In 2004.
This is a show where celebrities live in the
Australian jungle and eat bugs for public amusement.
And true to form, on the very first night, he
called the audience fucking cunts on live television
for voting for him to do a challenge. Classic
Leiden. The establishment must have had a meltdown.
But here's the funny thing. The complaints were
surprisingly low. Only 91 complaints to the regulator.
People loved him on the show. He was charming.
He was surprisingly helpful around the camp.
He eventually walked off the show, but he proved
he could still shock while being weirdly likable.
Then he pivoted to nature shows. Yes. Megabugs,
ghost ape, shark attack. Why nature shows? That
seems so wholesome. So out of character. He's
an enthusiast. He described himself not as an
expert, but as someone who just loves learning.
And you can see it. It humanized him. You see
him getting genuinely excited about a spider,
and you forget he's supposed to be this terrifying
anarchist figure. It goes all the way back to
his childhood curiosity, I think, the kid who
had to relearn the world by observing it. And
then the ultimate surreal moment, the masked
singer. He did it in the U .S. in 2021 as Jester
and then in the U .K. in 2026 as Yak. A yak.
A yak. Why? Just why? I think partially for the
money, which he's always open about, partially
to keep his name out there so P .L. can tour.
But also I think he genuinely enjoys the sheer
absurdity of it. It's performance art. You want
to put Johnny Rotten in a giant yak costume and
have him sing Help Yourself? Fine. I'll be the
best damn yak you've ever seen. It's a mockery
of celebrity culture by participating in its
most ridiculous form. It certainly keeps people
guessing. But let's shift gears now to something
a bit heavier, his politics. Because if you think
you know John Lydon's politics, I guarantee you
probably don't. And this is where people get
really frustrated with him. This is where the
paradox gets really sharp and uncomfortable for
a lot of people. Everyone assumes, because of
anarchy in the UK, that he is some kind of hard
left anarchist. But he explicitly rejects that
label. Repeatedly and for decades. He calls anarchy
mind games for the middle class. He says if you
remove the police and all structure, the weak
just get eaten by the strong. It's not a utopia.
He views himself as a pacifist by nature and
has even said he admires Gandhi. Which is not
what you expect. And came the American citizenship
in 2013. Yes, he became a U .S. citizen. And
the reason he gave was that he believed in Barack
Obama. Specifically, he believed in Obamacare.
He saw the potential for a health care system
that cared for the working class and the sick.
You have to remember his own childhood experience
with the NHS. He wanted that for America. OK,
so he's an Obama supporter. Case closed. He's
a liberal. But wait. Then comes 2016. And the
shift to Donald Trump. This confused and enraged
a lot of people. Leighton started wearing a Make
America Great Again shirt in interviews. How
do you possibly reconcile Obama and Trump? They
are polar opposites on almost every issue. To
Leighton, they aren't that different in one very
specific way. Disruption. He saw Trump as the
sex pistol of politics. He called him a cat amongst
the pigeons. He felt the political establishment
on both the left and the right was stagnant and
needed shaking up. He didn't necessarily align
with every single policy, but he loved the disruption.
He loved the chaos Trump caused in the system.
It's the break through the window again, just
on a geopolitical scale. Exactly. And he claimed
that the left wing media had become the new establishment
and didn't understand the working class anymore.
And we saw the exact same pattern with Brexit
in the UK. All right. The famous flip flop on
that. Initially, he supported Remain. In interviews
before the vote, he called leaving the EU insane
and suicidal. But then after the vote, he switched.
He started supporting Brexit and even praising
figures like Nigel Farage. Why the change? Because
he felt the working class had spoken and that
the elites in London were trying to ignore the
result or shame the voters. As a self -identified
working class Londoner, he felt he had to stand
with the voters, even if he had initially disagreed
with the idea itself. So it seems his loyalty
isn't to a consistent ideology, but to a class
identity. Whatever the working class is doing,
I'm with them, even if it completely contradicts
what he said five minutes ago. And he's impartial
in his controversial stances. It's not just about
left or right. Take Israel. He played Tel Aviv
with Powell despite huge pressure from the boycott,
divestment, sanctions movement from artists like
Elvis Costello. His argument there was interesting,
though. He said he won't boycott a country unless
he can see an Arab or Muslim country nearby with
a functioning democracy. He claims he plays for
the people, not for the government. Which is
a consistent stance for him. You have to give
him that. He hates institutions, but he seems
to connect with individuals. But the most significant
political moment of his career, in my opinion,
wasn't about voting or borders at all. It was
about Jimmy Savile. This is such a chilling story
for our international listeners. Jimmy Savile
was a beloved British TV personality for decades,
a knight of the realm, a national treasure who
raised millions for charity. But in 1978, decades
before the truth finally came out after his death,
Leiden went on BBC Radio and said something truly
shocking. What does he say? He was being interviewed
and he just went completely off script. He said,
I'd like to kill Jimmy Savile. I think he's a
hypocrite. I bet he's into all kinds of seediness.
I know some rumors. Fine. He basically tried
to out him as a child abuser on national radio.
In 1978. And what did the BBC, his employer,
do? They cut him off immediately. They edited
it out of the broadcast replay. And according
to Leiden, they effectively blacklisted him for
years after that. He was right. He tried to warn
the public about the monster in their midst,
and he was the one who was silenced for it. That
one incident. really cements his role as the
uncomfortable truth teller, doesn't it? He was
the rotten one, the foul -mouthed yob. Yet he
was the only one willing to point out the actual
rot hidden deep inside the establishment. It
forces you to reevaluate his entire career. Was
he just being difficult and contrary for the
sake of it? Or was he seeing things that other
people refused to acknowledge? He has a moral
compass. It just doesn't point north like everyone
else's. That brings us to the final and maybe
most important piece of the puzzle. The man behind
the stare. The personal life. We've talked about
the anger, the politics, the butter. But at home,
John Lydon was a deeply devoted partner. This
is the most touching part of his story, I think,
and the part that really shatters the Johnny
Rotten myth for good. He met Nora Forster in
the mid -70s. She was a German publishing heiress,
and she was 14 years older than him. An older
woman. Wealthy. The tabloids must have had a
field day. People probably thought he was a gold
digger. I'm sure they did, but they were together
for 44 years until her death. In the world of
rock and roll, that is an eternity. And it wasn't
just some marriage of convenience. They took
in Noor's grandchildren, the twin sons of Ari,
up from the punk band The Slits, because Ari
couldn't cope at the time. So Leighton, the man
who sang about abortion and anarchy, became a
grandfather figure raising teenage boys. He said,
they gave us hell, but I loved having kids around.
That domesticity is so profoundly unexpected.
But the real test of their bond came in the later
years. Nora developed Alzheimer's. And Leiden
became her full -time carer. He refused to put
her in a care home. He said, I made a commitment.
He spoke about it in interviews with Such Tenderness
and Love. He said, the real person is still there.
A bit of love goes a long way. He dedicated his
entire life in those final years to making her
comfortable, to keeping her memories alive as
best he could. This all culminated in 2023, with
Peele's attempt to enter the Eurovision Song
Contest for Ireland. Yes, they submitted a song
called Hawaii. And it wasn't a punk anthem. It
wasn't angry or political. It was a gentle, beautiful,
heartbreaking love song dedicated to Nora. It
was about a happy memory they shared on holiday
in Hawaii. And it was his attempt to capture
that one perfect memory for her before it faded
away completely. It didn't win the selection
process, but I don't think that was ever the
point. It was this incredibly public declaration
of love from a man who spent his life sneering
at sentimentality. It showed a vulnerability
that we had never, ever seen from him before.
Nora passed away in April 2023, and he was, by
all accounts, completely devastated. It showed
that underneath all that armor he built in that
hospital ward at age seven, there was a massive
and ultimately very human heart. And we should
also mention his best friend, his closest confidant,
John Rambo Stevens. Rambo, his childhood friend
from Finsbury Park. He was Lydon's manager, his
minder, his head of security for over 50 years.
That loyalty to his wife for over four decades,
to his childhood friend for over five sets, it
stands in such stark contrast to the betrayal
and chaos narrative of the Sex Pistols. He keeps
his circle very tight and he protects them fiercely.
So let's try to synthesize all of this. We started
with the paradox. The anarchist butter salesman.
The punk who loves the queen. The Trump supporter
who became a citizen for Obama. But after unpacking
it all, does it start to make a strange kind
of sense? I think it does. Ledon's entire career
is defined by uncomfortable truths. He called
out Jimmy Savile when it was professionally dangerous
to do so. He criticized the punk movement while
he was leading it because he saw it becoming
just another uniform. He supported political
figures that alienated his original fan base
because he values shaking things up over any
kind of ideological purity. He is a contrarian,
but a principled one. His one principle seems
to be that he refuses to be owned. by a record
label, by a political party, or even by his own
fans' expectations of who Johnny Rotten should
be. Exactly. He realized early on, probably back
in that hospital bed at age seven, that the world
is chaotic and often unfair. So you might as
well construct your own reality, defend the few
people you love with everything you have, and
never, ever let them tell you who you are supposed
to be. Light on once famously said, it's fun
being scum. But looking at his life, the whistleblowing,
the caregiving, the artistic integrity, the fierce
loyalty, I have to wonder, was the scum label
just a mirror he held up to society to show them
their own prejudices? That is the ultimate question,
isn't it? If he is rotten, then what does that
make the society that created him and then condemned
him for telling the truth? On that provocative
thought, we're going to wrap up. If you want
to understand the man yourself. Don't just look
at the pictures in the history books. Listen
to Metalbox. Read his book, No Irish, No Blacks,
No Dogs. Decide for yourself. Just don't expect
him to care what you decide. Very true. Thanks
for diving in with us. We'll see you on the next
one.