Johnny Rotten

John Joseph Lydon (born 31 January 1956), also known as Johnny Rotten, is an English rock musician. He is the lead vocalist for the punk rock group Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. With his sarcastic and provocative public personality, he participated in laying down a new template for rebellious youth and band frontmen. His musical innovations have also been influential.



He is married to Nora Forster. They have no children together, but Lydon is stepfather of Forster's daughter, Ari Up, who herself had been the lead singer in the influential postpunk, dub reggae band, The Slits. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Born in London, his parents were both Irish Catholic immigrants, his father from Tuam, County Galway, and his mother from County Cork. 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. John 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 some year later became a pioneer of the Internet industry in Scotland.



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 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 words I Hate scrawled in felt-tip pen above the band's logo). After tunelessly singing Alice Cooper's "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". Another story says the name was allegedly given to him by Steve Jones, after Jones saw his teeth and eed "You're fucking rotten, you are!"

Johnny Rotten c. 1977, photographed by Dennis Morris.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's interest in dub music and his post-Sex Pistols work with Public Image Ltd. (also known as PiL) and artists such as Afrika Bambaataa and Leftfield showed him to be more musically sophisticated than his work with the Sex Pistols had suggested. McLaren was said to have been upset when Lydon revealed during a radio interview that his influences included experimentalists like Can, Captain Beefheart and Van der Graaf Generator.



Tensions between Lydon and bassist Glen Matlock arose because Lydon believed Matlock to be too white-collar and middle-class and because Lydon said Matlock was "always going on about nice things like the Beatles". As a replacement, Lydon recommended his school friend John Simon Ritchie. Although Ritchie was not a competent 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's chaotic relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and his worsening heroin addiction, caused a great deal of friction amongst 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 train robber Ronnie Biggs. Lydon declined to go, feeling that they were attempting to make a hero out of a violent thug who brutally 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 live footage and as an animation. 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 vulnerable Lydon choking up and becoming tearful 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".

Although Lydon spent years furiously denying that the Sex Pistols would ever perform together again, the band re-united (with Glen 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.

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.

Evo vam novi post kad ga toliko hoćete.Ko što se vidi,o mojim najdražim Sex Pistolsima je.Tj.o Johnnyju,al bit će još.
Eto,vježbajte engleski čitajući.
I sretan Uskrs svima sa zakašnjenjem.

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