Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones … the Sex Pistols in San Francisco in 1978. “I was ill for most of it, then went from illness to work to the Pistols – no time for fun,” he says. Career avenues for the working-class son of Irish immigrants were limited, to say the least, and he was stifled by both shyness and a bout of meningitis, which wiped out his memory for several years. At Catholic school in north London he was forced to write with his weaker right hand, and despite his love of reading and writing, didn’t really envisage an outlet for it. Lydon has been misunderstood for most of his life. The media at the time viewed my stuff as foul-mouthed this, that and the other … no, no, no, no, it’s all from a point of empathy.” “You couldn’t write the songs I do without having some consideration for your fellow human beings. If these are not words you would expect to hear from the former snarling punk known as Johnny Rotten, then perhaps you weren’t paying close enough attention to his music. The whole thing is to never let her feel lonely.” My family is with her now we’ve got a nice little unity going. “She’s always been very gregarious so she couldn’t understand why nobody was coming around, and the few that did had to have face masks on. “Lockdown was soul-destroying for Nora,” says Lydon. Forster is the mother of Ari Up, the singer from the punk band the Slits who died in 2010 John and Nora became guardians of Up’s twin boys in 2000 after she struggled to bring them up, and later her third child, too.
He has been married to the German publishing heiress since 1979 and they have lived in Los Angeles for most of the time since. Lydon has been out of practice as a frontman, spending the pandemic not as a singer but as a carer for his wife, Nora Forster, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018. ‘Lockdown was soul-destroying for Nora’ … Nora Forster and John Lydon in 1986.
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