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JOHNNY ROTTEN/ 2009
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 2 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0111 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest." - Johnny Rotten
-thinkexist.com/quotes/johnny_rotten/
John Lydon -
John Joseph Lydon (born 31 January 1956 in London, England), also known as Johnny Rotten, is a British rock musician and lyricist, best known as the lead vocalist of the punk rock group Sex Pistols during the 1970s and 2000s, and also as the vocalist of post punk group Public Image Ltd in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lydon became notorious in the media during the 1970s as a figurehead of the punk movement, and for his stance against the music establishment, class system and the British monarchy. He has since become a television personality, appearing on television shows in both the UK and elsewhere.
Biography:
Early life
John Lydon was born in London to Irish Catholic immigrants, his father from Tuam, County Galway, and his mother from Shanagarry,County Cork.[citation needed] He grew up on a council estate in Finsbury Park, North London with three younger brothers. At the age of seven, he contracted spinal meningitis, putting him in and out of comas for half a year and erasing most of his memory. The disease left him with a permanent curve in his spine. It also damaged his eyesight, resulting in his characteristic stare. He attended St. William of York School in Islington, North London, where his friends included David Crowe, Tony Purcell and John Gray. David Crowe went on to become involved with Public Image. John Gray became a school teacher and Tony Purcell went on to become a pioneer of the Internet industry in Scotland.[1]
Sex Pistols
In 1975, Lydon was among a group of youths who regularly hung around Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's fetish clothing shop SEX. McLaren had returned from a brief stint travelling with American proto-punk band the New York Dolls, and he was working on promoting a new band formed by Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook called Sex Pistols. McLaren was impressed with Lydon's ragged look and unique sense of style, particularly his orange hair and modified Pink Floyd T-shirt (with the band members' eyes scratched out and the words I Hate scrawled in felt-tip pen above the band's logo). After tunelessly singing Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" to the accompaniment of the shop's jukebox, Lydon was chosen as the band's frontman.
The origin of the stage name Johnny Rotten has had varying explanations. One, given in a Daily Telegraph feature interview with Lydon in 2007, was that "he was given the name in the mid '70s, when his neglect of oral hygiene saw his teeth turning green".[2] Another story says the name was allegedly given to him by Steve Jones, after Jones saw his teeth and exclaimed "You're rotten, you are!"
In 1977, the band released "God Save the Queen" during the week of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. The song was a hit, but caused so much controversy that Lydon was attacked in the streets by an angry mob. They stabbed him in his left hand, his leg, and nearly gouged out his eye with a beer bottle. Since then, he has not been able to properly make a fist with his left hand.
Lydon was also interested in dub music. McLaren was said to have been upset when Lydon revealed during a radio interview that his influences included progressive experimentalists like Magma, Can, Captain Beefheart and Van der Graaf Generator.[3]
Tensions between Lydon and bassist Glen Matlock arose. The reasons for this are disputed, but Lydon claimed in his autobiography that he believed Matlock to be too white-collar and middle-class and that Matlock was "always going on about nice things like the Beatles". Matlock stated in his own autobiography that most of the tension in the band, and between himself and Lydon, was orchestrated by McLaren. Matlock quit and as a replacement, Lydon recommended his school friend John Simon Ritchie. Although Ritchie was an incompetent musician, McLaren agreed that he had the look the band wanted: pale, emaciated, spike-haired, with ripped clothes and a perpetual sneer. Rotten dubbed him "Sid Vicious" as a joke, taking the name from his pet hamster, a finger-biting creature named Sid the Vicious.
Vicious' chaotic relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and his worsening heroin addiction, caused a great deal of friction among the band members, particularly with Lydon, whose sarcastic remarks often exacerbated the situation. Lydon closed the final Sid Vicious-era Sex Pistols concert in San Francisco's Winterland in January 1978 with a rhetorical question to the audience: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Shortly thereafter, McLaren, Jones, and Cook went to Brazil to meet and record with former train robber Ronnie Biggs. Lydon declined to go, deriding the concept as a whole and feeling that they were attempting to make a hero out of a criminal who attacked a train driver and stole "working-class money". Lydon was abandoned in San Francisco virtually penniless.
The Sex Pistols' disintegration was documented in Julian Temple's satirical pseudo-biopic, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, in which Jones, Cook and Vicious each played a character. Matlock only appeared in previously-recorded live footage and as an animation and did not participate personally. Lydon refused to have anything to do with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, feeling that McLaren had far too much control over the project. Although Lydon was highly critical of the film, many years later he agreed to let Temple direct the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury. That film included new interviews with band members hidden in shadow, as if they were in a witness protection program. It featured an uncharacteristically emotional Lydon choking up as he discussed Vicious' decline and death. Lydon denounced previous journalistic works regarding the Sex Pistols in the introduction to his autobiography, Rotten - No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, which he described as "as close to the truth as one can get".[4]
Lydon with the Sex Pistols at Hammersmith Odeon in 2008
Although Lydon spent years furiously denying that the Sex Pistols would ever perform together again, the band re-united (with Matlock returning on bass) in the 1990s, and continues to perform occasionally. In 2004, Lydon publicly refused to allow the Rhino record label to include any Sex Pistols songs on its box set No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion. In 2006, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Sex Pistols, but the band refused to attend the ceremony or acknowledge the induction, complaining that they had been asked for large sums of money to attend[5] and stating that it went against everything the band stood for.
In June 2007, Lydon, Jones and Cook re-recorded "Pretty Vacant" in a Los Angeles studio for the video game Skate and, in a radio interview in the same month, Lydon announced that the Sex Pistols may perform again over the Christmas period. They also re-recorded "Anarchy in the UK" for the video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. In September 2007, Lydon announced that the Sex Pistols would play a concert for the 30th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks at the Brixton Academy on 8 November 2007. Due to popular demand, four additional concerts were added, as well as further shows in Manchester and Glasgow.
The Sex Pistols appeared at the Isle Of Wight Festival 2008 as the headlining act on Saturday night. They also appeared at the Peace and Love Festival in Sweden, Electric Picnic in Ireland, the Live at Loch Lomond Festival in Scotland, Heineken Open'er Festival in Gdynia (Poland), Paredes de Coura Festival in Portugal, Traffic Free Festival in Turin (Italy) and EXIT festival in Serbia the same summer.
Discography: All chart positions are UK.
Sex Pistols
Studio albums
* Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin, 1977) Platinum
Compilations and live albums
* The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin, 1979)
* Some Product: Carri On Sex Pistols (Virgin, 1979)
* Kiss This (Virgin, 1992)
* Never Mind the Bollocks / Spunk (aka This is Crap) (Virgin, 1996)
* Filthy Lucre Live (Virgin, 1996)
* The Filth and the Fury (Virgin, 2000)
* Jubilee (Virgin, 2002)
* Sex Pistols Box Set (Virgin, 2002)
Singles
* "Anarchy in the UK" - 1976 #38
* "God Save the Queen" - 1977 #1
* "Pretty Vacant" - 1977 #6
* "Holidays in the Sun" - 1977 #8
* "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone" - 1980 #21
* "Anarchy in the UK" (re-issue) - 1992 #33
* "Pretty Vacant" (live) - 1996 # 18
* "God Save the Queen" (re-issue) - 2002 # 15
Footnotes:
1. ^ p. 17, Rotten - No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Picador, 1995. ISBN 0-312-11883-X.
2. ^ a b "Daily Telegraph feature interview, 8 November 2007". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/11/08/bmlydon108.xml.
3. ^ Simon Reynolds (2005). Rip it Up and Start Again - Postpunk 1978-1984. faber and faber. ISBN 978-0-571-21570-6.
4. ^ Lydon, John. Rotten - No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.
5. ^ BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Sex Pistols snub US Hall of Fame
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lydon
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