There are sentences I never expected to write, and “we took my mother to see Johnny Rotten” is one of them. John Lydon brought his show to the Island in March, and our party neatly spanned the entire possible audience. My mother, for whom this was her era, was properly excited. My girlfriend had never heard of him and came anyway, excited on principle, which I regard as the correct attitude to live music and possibly to life. And I sat between them: born in 1989, a decade and more too late for any of it, and yet a punk obsessive since childhood. Some of us inherit the family silver; I inherited smash-the-system records, and I have never stopped loving them.
We did the thing properly, with the VIP tickets, and queued to meet the man himself beforehand. The queue produced the finest moment of the evening: before you reached Lydon, a chap with bleached hair was selling books and posters for signing, and my girlfriend, surveying the hair and the crowd’s excitement, concluded that this must be him. I then had the delicate task of explaining, in a queue full of lifelong fans, that she was preparing to be starstruck by the merchandise seller. She took it well. He would have taken it better. We came away with signed books and signed artwork, all of which will no doubt be framed and hung, together with a photograph of the two of us with the actual John Lydon that I will treasure.
In person and on stage he was exactly as complicated as you would hope and slightly sadder than you would expect. The evening dwelt heavily on the hard road: the desperately ill child in a poor corner of North London, the hardship, the fights. And it was, almost start to finish, a PiL evening; the Pistols were hardly mentioned by name, Sid barely at all, and when the band’s business dealings surfaced, the bitterness was real and undisguised. He spat a great deal. Then there was the outfit. It was punk, technically, but not the punk I grew up worshipping. Punk used to have real fashion: sharp, deliberate, put together with intent. What he wore was just a bit odd, and truthfully so was he, which I suspect is exactly how he likes it.
Yet I loved every minute of it, which is rather the point. Punk was never supposed to give you a tidy evening of the hits with a costume to match. It was supposed to give you an awkward, contrary, wounded, funny man telling you exactly what he thinks, comfort be damned, and that is precisely what we got. My mother got her era back for a night. My girlfriend got a very entertaining introduction to a man she had never heard of. And I got to shake hands with a piece of the reason I turned out the way I did, which is not something every Thursday offers.
Never mind the wardrobe. The anger was authentic, and that was always the product.
Charlton Krentz 