Without the Pistols, there wouldn’t have been Sham 69, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Undertones etc. But you can’t want to start a revolution of inspiring kids to be in a band and speak their own truth and at the same time hate the scene that you’ve helped to create, ‘cos that’s an oxy(they made you a )moron. John’s therefore rather dismissive of such great bands as The Clash. It was about doing your own thing, not following the crowd or following Lydon. Lydon’s full of contradictions: he wanted to inspire anyone to pick up a guitar and join a band, as a backlash to broken Britain and the Rick Wakeman type music and post-Beatles fandom of the time, but he never wanted to create a scene. And even though much of the information was covering old territory that every punk fan knows, it was all delivered in a raw way that brought to life that exciting time in the mid-seventies when, led by Lydon, kids started “doing it for themselves”.

It’s supposed to be an autobiography, after all.Īll that aside, if you want to read about the Sex Pistols story, you probably won’t get better than this book. But, for me, it just broke up the prose too much – especially when there are whole chapters written by these guys. The idea of breaking up John’s prose with segments from these people who were there at the time works in its intention: it helps to give a different side of the same story. The book also has a hell of a lot of other contributors, including Paul Cook, Chrissie Hynde, Julian Temple, Steve Severin and Johnny’s dad.

It’s co-authored with two writers, and much of the time it felt like they had just transcribed what Lydon had said on tape, rather than it being written by the man himself. A lot of the time though, it didn’t feel like this was Johnny’s book. I wanted to get to know Johnny better and I felt like I didn’t learn a huge amount more about him than I already knew, but that’s not to say there’s not a lot of insightful stuff along the way.

But I still wanted a lot more of the man, more than the Pistol. This book is called ‘Rotten’, so obviously it’s about Johnny’s time as a Sex Pistol, rather than about Lydon himself and his other ventures although there is a lot of information about his upbringing and so on, as you’d expect. It maybe ended with Lydon, before punk even became a scene, too.įirst off, let’s get what I didn’t like about this autobiography out of the way. Punk didn’t even begin with the Sex Pistols. You can argue that punk began in America, but you’d be wrong.

Pil johnny rotten