Lydon’s rebel roots

John Lydon was born to be a Sex Pistol, says Sylvie Simmons in Mojo. Growing up in working-class north London, crammed with his parents and four brothers into public housing, the future Johnny Rotten was raised on a daily diet of rage and humiliation that would later define his public persona. At age 7, an attack of meningitis left him in a coma for four months and led to serious memory loss. “I had a lot of mental problems,” he says. “Kids kept calling me Dummy Dumdum. I forgot who I was for three or four years.” As he got older, he came to deeply resent the prevailing snobbish attitude toward his background: “‘Oh, the working class, they’re scum.’ Says who?” Soon, he was getting into trouble with the authorities. “I was in and out of the courts for possession, breaking and entering, a lot of bad things went on. I was a problem kid. People were noticing definitely something suspect about me from an early age.” But in the 1970s, his defiant, anti-establishment pose made the 19-year-old Lydon a perfect match for a certain anarchic punk-rock band that was then looking for a lead singer—no experience necessary. The Sex Pistols, he says, proved to be his salvation. “They set me on such a clear course,” says the 52-year-old Lydon, who now scratches out a living in various bands and TV appearances. “I mean, it ain’t a wonderful life I have, but it’s the best I could have hoped for. Look at the benefits I got from all that ridicule. God works in mysterious ways, he does.”

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