thrilling the insight into how human beings work and how different we all are, yet similar in our needs and dislikes and likes. You have to bare your heart. And live performance is sometimes like “Death disco”, extremely hard to do because I will be in full tears. I can’t help it. I can’t hold back those emotions. They become very real for that moment on stage. And I see that very seriously in the audience’se eyes. I love to be able to see who’s in the crowd and I share eyeball to eyeball contact with them. It adds. It’s the audience as a fifth member of the band, sharing their tragedies and their joys with us. So, in this respect, yes, Public Image is a bit like a church without religion. You sing “Anger is an energy”, even called one of your books with that sentence. In the song “Public Image” is there a bit of anger against the way people see you? or just disgust? No,it’s just factual that,transitioning from the Pistols into Public Image, there was an awful lot of very negative journalism telling me that I had no right to be different or to advance myself, that I had to stay in this neat little pocket that they’d decided to put me into. And so, I expressed that in a song. And yeah, anger is an energy is a concept that comes back to when I was seven years old. I had meningitis and I was hospitalized for a year. I lost mymemory,etcetera,etcetera and the doctors advised my parents to keep me angry and said that that would give me the energy to bring back my memories. It worked. So, the concept “anger is an energy” has always been with me and the chance to use it in a song, years and years later,was wonderful.You must have patience as a songwriter.You can’t throw it all out at once. You have to wait for the right moment, the right tone, the right rhythm, the right beat where it fits its purpose most. Happiness. When would you say that John Lydon has been happier in life? You can’t come at me like that. I’m generally a happy, go lucky person. I’m not one to wallow in self-pity or misery or any of that nonsense. I have to get on with things. I have to endure the pain. And in an odd way, sometimes being able to do that, to conquer tragedy is happiness in itself. I’m happy to be alive, frankly, and the gift of life I love more than anything. I don’t know where life comes - 25 - from, but I’m eternally respectful for it. It’s a wonderful, amazing thing and often ignored.What a pity, silly people. Let’s talk about one ofmy favourite PIL’s albums.Do you think that Flowers ofRomance has been an influence for Goth music? with all these tribal drums and all the darkness? I don’t know. I’m sure there was Goth going on around us at that time. It’s not about those things at all. It’s actually about a school journey that I had to endure when I was young. We went on a geography expedition to Box Hill, which is near Guildford, a part of England, and we had to study map making. But I much rather went and found the local pub and drank ale rather than study where the Romans used to plant vines to grow for wine.That was the basis of that song. And then it shapeshifted into other things about dictatorship, Nero and how easy it could be to confuse myself and believe that just because I’m a singer in a rock band, I’m better than anybody else. So, it’s self-depreciating. It’s self-criticism of a song. Especially important that every now and again you check your ego. I’mblessed because I have family and friends that will not let me get away with anything. Do you think that your time in jail was an influence for that record? Being locked up and facing a sentence of years of prison was an influence, yes. As soon as I won that case, I immediately flew straight back to London from Ireland and went into the studio. It was exceedingly difficult because I couldn’t get my band to be involved. The drummer had to go on his own solo tour and everybody else had vanished.So, it’s practically a solo record.But that wasn’t a choice. But it was good for me to mess about with saxophones and violins and drum loops and just reinvent things.And of course,my favourite sound of all is discordancy: harmonics, sonorous rhythms and all of these things I thought I could achieve by simply putting metal ashtrays on piano strings. I’m chaotic at heart. And so, it’s in all those drones and tones where I really am.The actual notes you hear, they’re fine. But I’m up there. I know where heaven is. And it’s in those glorious unheard notes or mostly felt. ”FrancisMassacre”was inspired on that,right?Mountjoy was the name of the jail, if I am not wrong. There were a few prisoners there that considered themselves innocent, and they wanted me to somehow get the message out. And so, I used that song as the means. It’s basically a letter of “I’m here for life, please helpme”.And I thought the screaming and the volatility in it, the ridiculously fast-paced beat were perfect for the tension that I was feeling myself while into Mountjoy. © Andrés Poveda
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