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John Joseph Lydon (/ˈlaɪdən/; born 31 January 1956), also known by his stage name Johnny Rotten, is an English singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer of the late-1970s British punk band the Sex Pistols, which lasted from 1975 until 1978, and again for various revivals during the 1990s and 2000s. He is also the lead singer of post-punk band Public Image Ltd (PiL), which he founded and fronted from 1978 until 1993, and again since 2009.

Lydon's outspoken personality, rebellious image and fashion style led to his being asked to become the singer of the Sex Pistols by their manager, Malcolm McLaren. With the Sex Pistols, he penned singles including "Anarchy in the U.K.", "God Save the Queen" and "Holidays in the Sun", the content of which precipitated what one commentator described as the 'last and greatest outbreak of pop-based moral pandemonium' in Britain.[1] The band scandalised much of the media, and Lydon was seen as a figurehead of the burgeoning punk movement.[2][3] Because of their controversial lyrics and disrepute at the time, they are regarded as one of the most influential acts in the history of popular music.[4][5]

After the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978, Lydon founded his own band, Public Image Ltd, which was far more experimental in nature and described in a 2005 review by NME as 'arguably the first post-rock group'.[6] The band produced eight albums and a string of singles, including "Public Image", "Death Disco", and "Rise", before they went on hiatus in 1993, reforming in 2009. In subsequent years, Lydon has hosted television series in the UK, US, and Belgium, 2004 appeared on I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! in the UK, appeared in advertisements on UK television promoting Country Life, a brand of British butter, written two autobiographies, and produced solo musical work, such as the album Psycho's Path (1997). In 2005, he released a compilation album, The Best of British £1 Notes.[citation needed]

In 2015, there was a revival of a 1980s movement to have Lydon knighted for his achievements with the Sex Pistols, although he has declined efforts to award him an MBE for his services to music.[7] Q magazine remarked that 'somehow he's assumed the status of national treasure'.[8] In 2002, he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.

John Joseph Lydon was born in London on 31 January 1956.[11] His parents, Eileen Lydia,[12] and John Christopher Lydon (died 2008),[13] were working-class emigrants from Ireland who moved into a two-room Victorian flat in Benwell Road, in the Holloway area of north London.[14][15] The flat is adjacent to the Highbury Stadium, the former home of Premier League football club Arsenal F.C. of whom Lydon has been an avid fan since the age of four.[14][15] At the time, the area was largely impoverished, with a high crime rate[citation needed] and a population consisting predominantly of working-class Irish and Jamaican people. Lydon spent summer holidays in his mother's native County Cork, where he suffered name-calling for having an English accent, a prejudice he claims he still receives today even though he travels under an Irish passport.

In his autobiography, Rotten – No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, Lydon wrote of being from an Irish background in London in the 1960s: "Londoners had no choice but to accept the Irish because there were so many of us, and we do blend in better than the Jamaicans. When I was very young and going to school, I remember bricks thrown at me by English parents... We were the Irish scum. But it's fun being scum, too."

Lydon, the eldest of four brothers, had to look after his siblings due to his mother's regular illnesses.[18] As a child, he lived on the edge of an industrial estate and would often play with friends in the factories when they were closed. He belonged to a local gang of neighbourhood children and would often end up in fights with other groups, something he would later look back on with fond memories: "Hilarious fiascoes, not at all like the knives and guns of today. The meanness wasn't there. It was more like yelling, shouting, throwing stones, and running away giggling. Maybe the reality was coloured by my youth."[19] Describing himself as a "very shy" and "very retiring" kid who was "nervous as hell", he hated going to school, where he would get caned as punishment and where he "had several embarrassing incidents ... I would shit my pants and be too scared to ask the teacher to leave the class. I'd sit there in a pants load of poo all day long."

At the age of seven, Lydon contracted spinal meningitis and spent a year in St Ann's Hospital in Haringey, London. Throughout the entire experience, he suffered from hallucinations, nausea, headaches, periods of coma, and a severe memory loss that lasted for four years,[21] whilst the treatments administered by the nurses involved drawing fluid out of his spine with a surgical needle, leaving him with a permanent spinal curvature. The meningitis was responsible for giving him what he would later describe as the "Lydon stare"; this experience was "the first step that put me on the road to Rotten".

The other squatters hated us ... because of the way we looked—short cropped hair and old suits. That's when Sid [Vicious] started to come around to my way of fashion. I gave him his first decent haircut, which was the punk style as it soon became. You'd literally cut chunks of hair out of your head. The idea was to not have any shape to your hairdo—just have it fucked up. This was the beginning of it all.

—John Lydon (1993)[23]

With his father often away, employed variously on building sites or oil rigs, Lydon got his first job aged ten as a minicab despatcher, something he kept up for a year while the family was in financial difficulty.[24] He disliked his secondary school, the St. William of York Roman Catholic School in Islington, where initially, he was bullied, but at fourteen or fifteen he "broke out of the mould" and began to fight back at what he saw as the oppressive nature of the school teachers, who he felt instigated and encouraged the children to all be the same and be "anti-anyone-who-doesn't-quite-fit-the-mould."[25] Following the completion of his O-levels at school, he got into a row with his father, who disliked Lydon's long hair, and so, agreeing to get it cut, the teenager not only had it cut, but in an act of rebellion, he dyed it bright green.[26] As a teenager, he listened to rock bands like Hawkwind, Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, and the Stooges – bands his mother also used to like, which somewhat embarrassed him – as well as more mainstream acts such as David Bowie, T. Rex and Gary Glitter.

Lydon was kicked out of school at age fifteen after a run-in with a teacher, and went on to attend Hackney College, where he befriended John Simon Ritchie, before attending Kingsway College. Lydon gave Ritchie the nickname "Sid Vicious", after his parents' pet hamster.[28] Lydon and Vicious began squatting in a house in the Hampstead area with a group of ageing hippies and stopped bothering to go to college, which was often far away from where they were living.[29] Meanwhile, he began working on building sites during the summer, assisted by his father. Friends recommended him for a job at a children's play centre in Finsbury Park, teaching woodwork to some of the older children, but he was sacked when parents complained that somebody "weird" with bright-green hair was teaching their children.[30] Lydon and his friends, including Vicious, John Gray, Jah Wobble, Dave Crowe and Tony Purcell, began going to many of the London clubs, such as the Lacy Lady in Seven Kings, and frequented both reggae and gay clubs, enjoying the latter because "you could be yourself, nobody bothered you" there.

Lydon during this stage of his life was described by Vicious as "the vilest geezer I ever met – all misshapen, no 'air, 'unchback, flat feet.

Personal life

Lydon is married to Nora Forster, a publishing heiress from Germany.[n 1] He was the stepfather of Forster's daughter Ari Up. In 2000, Lydon and Nora became legal guardians of Ari's twin teenaged boys; as Lydon explained "[Ari] let them run free. They couldn't read, write or form proper sentences. One day Ari said she couldn't cope with them any more. I suggested they came to us because I wasn't having them abandoned. They gave us hell, but I loved having kids around."[13] In 2010, Ari died of breast cancer at the age of 48 and they became guardians of her third child.[65][66] Lydon and Forster primarily live in Venice, California where they have resided since the early 1980s, but keep a residence in London.

In 2018, Lydon revealed that Forster was in the mid-stages of Alzheimer's disease.[68] In June 2020, Lydon said that he had become full-time carer for his wife as her condition has been deteriorating. "Nora has Alzheimer's... I am her full-time carer and I won't let anyone mess up with her. For me, the real person is still there. That person I love is still there every minute of every day and that is my life. It's unfortunate that she forgets things, well, don't we all? I suppose her condition is one of like a permanent hangover for her. It gets worse and worse, bits of the brain store less and less memory and then suddenly some bits completely vanish.” Lydon said experts were impressed with how she remembers him saying "a bit of love goes a long way" and that he has no intentions to put her in a care home despite the strain her illness has on both their lives.

Lydon has been a fan of Oscar Wilde since he studied his works at school, when he came to the conclusion that "his stuff was fucking brilliant. What an attitude to life!...he turned out to be the biggest poof on earth at a time when that was completely unacceptable. What a genius."

Lydon is a visual artist. His drawings, paintings and other related works have featured prominently in the works of PiL and his solo career throughout the years, the most recent example being the cover to This is PiL.

In 2014 he admitted to spending £10,000 on iPad games.

Courtesy – Wikipedia
- John Lydon

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