“I thought it was the most anarchistic thing I’d everheard,” Lydon recalls. “Johnny Rotten selling butter! If you can’t see the funin that, then you’re dead.”
The commercial dressed the orange-haired singer in atweed suit and pit him against the British countryside, where he was chased bycows. Though punk idealists didn’t find much humor in one of the genre’s seminalfigures becoming a corporate spokesman, Lydon justified the commercial by usinghis paycheck to jump-start Public Image Ltd. (PiL).
“It was something I had been wanting to do for along, long time, but the money was never there,” Lydon says of reuniting PiL,which had remained dormant since Virgin Records dropped the group in 1992.“There was no money or interest from the record company, so I did otherprojects. They were all to get me the money so I could reform PiL. That buttercampaign finally gave me the money to do that. I am the kind of person whoreally does put his money where his mouth is.”
Lydon believes that record labels have a systematicbias against any music too far outside the norm. “When you present your newproduct to the record company and it doesn’t sound like anything they’ve everheard before, they balk at the prospect,” he says. “I’ve been criticizingrecord companies for 30 years. They were always 10 steps behind, and itshowed.”
In truth, though, PiL was never an easy sell forrecord companies. Their first albums, recorded after the Sex Pistols’ 1978breakup, were dense and atonal, building towers of noise over a shakyfoundation of thick dub reggae. Even as their sound grew cleaner and dancierthroughout the ’80s, in part because of constant lineup changes, Lydon’s edgy,animalistic wail kept their most accessible pop songs from climbing too high onthe charts.
“I view my voice as an instrument,” Lydon says of theodd delivery he honed with PiL. “Language is the greatest human achievement,but language is still very limited, I discovered. There are certain emotions,like grief, that language really can’t express. I realized that so much of whatwe do as human beings is imitating the sounds of birds and nature and insects.That’s why I host nature programs. I’m captivated by that form of expression.When I look at a chimpanzee, I know he wants to talk to me.”
Where Lydon’s songs for the Sex Pistols were writtenaround sweeping, often fiercely confrontational statements, his songs with PiLwere markedly more personal.
“I went as far as I could songwriting with thePistols,” Lydon says. “With the Pistols’ song ‘Pretty Vacant,’ I love the ironyof that, because I’m not pretty, and I’m not vacantI’m from small beginnings,and it’s extremely gratifying to come from that. But I’m much more interestedin true emotions. I love songs to be truthful and genuine and honest, and notjust manufactured. My songs are from the heart and soul. They’re about thedeaths of people I love, or their rise or their successes. They’re about whatimpresses me in other people, and what depresses me about other people. Butthey’re mostly analytical. That’s the constant string that runs through PublicImage Ltd.: This is a human being analyzing human beings.”
With that mentality, songs still come easily toLydon, who has stockpiled plenty since PiL’s hiatus. “I can never be short ofthings to write about,” he says. “Every single human being you meet for thefirst time is an inspiration.” His challenge, then, is finding the money torecord them, something he hopes to do through the band’s reunion tours.
“It will be better than all the others,” Lydonpromises of the next PiL album, whenever it should arrive. “I wouldn’t put outa record if I thought it was inferior. I believe in every song I write.”
PublicImage Ltd. plays the Pabst Theater on Friday, April 30, at 8 p.m.
