| NEVER
MIND THE TARANTULAS Lydon gets into his stride in Arizona as a wildlife
TV presenter
Are you interested in frilly knickers at all?" asks John Lydon, rolling
his eyes with a maniacal leer. "No? That's a shame. Because there's
a lace worm we could discuss. . ."
There's nothing Lydon likes better these days than a good old chinwag
about the insect kingdom. And few, to do him justice, can wag a chin to
greater effect than Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, progenitor of punk, professional
gadfly, and - most lately - wildlife presenter. We are in the sweltering
summer heat of Gainesville, Florida, filming a sequence for a new Discovery
series, John Lydon's Mega Bugs. Lydon has dressed for the occasion in
a Graham Greene-meets-the-Fimbles ensemble of cream linen suit (with ironic,
post-- punk safety-pin detail), hectically striped shirt and turquoise
pork--pie hat. Chugging black coffee in the manner of a man downing cyanide,
Lydon enters a sealed tank of the world's most aggressive mosquitoes and
drops his trousers. "Not the willy!" he shouts, as the cream
suit turns black with insects anxious for breakfast. "Leave the jewels
alone!"
Reeling, blotched, bitten and buggered (his own phrase) from the tank,
Lydon explains his original approach to wildlife presenting. "It's
not he-man, show-off, macho stuff, I just like to get up close to the
subject." His interest in entomology was sparked by his stretch in
the Australian jungle, before he walked from the set of I'm a Celebrity.
. . Get Me Out of Here! "There were some really nasty, poisonous
things there," he says. "And then there were the insects. .
. "
Snakes and scorpions proved a welcome distraction from his co-celebrities,
but Lydon refused to share his sleeping bag with rats. "They cut
out my rat-killing bits," he reveals with his trademark sod -the-lot-of-you
snicker." They said the RSPCA would kick up a furore. But excuse
me, I'm not going to sit around the campfire with rats nibbling away.
I don't believe in killing for entertainment value, but I'm from the slums,
I know about rats, and these ones were huge -like bloody rabbits."
It's been a while - 28 years, to be brutally precise - since Lydon was
the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who spat in the face of society
and screeched, "I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist" (the
opening lines of the Sex Pistols' notorious debut single Anarchy in the
UK). These days the former Sex Pistol lives in Malibu and owns a Volvo.
"In England I'm known for the Sex Pistol thing, and nothing since,"
he says. "I'm bleedin' 47, and I'm still 'that foul-mouthed yob'.
Over here, Public Image Ltd [the band he formed after he quit the Pistols]
and Rotten TV [his short-lived show on VH-l, swiping at "fakery in
all its forms"] have huge followings, but in England, for a long,
long time after the Sex Pistols - until I'm a Celebrity - I wasn't given
anything at all. In fact, I'd say I was outright denied it. Which is why
being given this chance to go rummaging around sewers looking for cockroaches
is just astoundingly good fun for me."
System smashing, says Lydon, is in his blood, and certainly Mega Bugs
breaks the mould of natural history programmes. (It is hard to imagine
Attenborough waving a fag at the camera to disperse a cloud of midges.)
"I will never, ever learn the Latin name for any species on earth,"
vows Lydon. "I'm far more interested in learning than lecturing.
I'm a curious person, I always have been. I like to know how things work,
or why they're not working. And whether that be government institutions
or the life cycle of the tiger beetle, it's all the same to me. I just
want to know."
The method may be unconventional, but Lydon is passionate about "the
correct communication of knowledge". His own education at a Catholic
comprehensive school in Finsbury Park, north London, was more conventional,
but not without its problems. A constitutional misfit, he was bullied
on account of his slight squint and curvature of the spine - the result
of a serious bout of childhood meningitis. "I learnt hate and resentment
at school," he says. "And I learnt to despise tradition and
the sham we call culture."
He is even less impressed, however, by today's hi-tech teaching methods.
"I'm dead against the MTV generation that has reduced children to
morons and force-feeds them blatant tokenisms and commerciality. The internet
to me is a very destructive thing. It's not the information highway. It's
the disinformation highway. You can say what you like, create any fantasy
you like, be completely inaccurate, and there's no government body to
control it. I don't believe in mind control, but I do," says Lydon,
measuring his tones to politician pitch, "believe in standards and
values."
THIS JOB IS PANTS! Lydon drops his trousers in a cage full of hungry mosquitoes
while filming his Mega Bugs TV series
The artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten is possibly the last person
you expect to hear holding forth on standards and values. But then, people
move on. Lydon is now a happily married step-grandfather (he met his wife
Nora, a German publishing heiress, back in his punk days) and anarchy
was never an old man's game.
"It never was a game for young men, dear," he flashes, showing
his new American teeth in an expensive version of the Sex Pistol snarl,
"It isn't a game at all I don't understand what anarchy has evolved
into.
For me, it was about playing with the minds of the middle classes. I used
the term 'anarchy' flippantly, in the British music-hall tradition of
having a laugh. It was all, you know, 'I'm Finsbury Park, I'm 'avin' a
lark.' I got up there with the Sex Pistols and sang Pretty Vacant, but
I'm not pretty and I certainly ain't vacant. It was just about getting
a thought going, seeing things on a bigger level."
Organised politics remains anathema to Lydon. "Politicians are liars.
They're what makes the world wrong." He makes an exception for Margaret
Thatcher -"not for her politics, but because she bloody well got
up and did something" - but reserves his best one-liner for Tony
Blair: "Another fine war he's got us into - just shows what can happen
when you fiddle with the wrong Bush."
His greatest contempt, however, is reserved for pop stars who jump on
political bandwagons. "It's all very well bounding up and down on
a stage for world peace or whatever -knowing you're being watched by 40
million people. You're not exactly sacrificing a lot, are you? "Pop
stars should dig into their own pockets. Like what I do. Except,"
he says, primly, "I'm not going to tell you about that. Because I
don't brag."
Lydon was a little hurt, however, not to be included in the Queen's Golden
Jubilee concert. He concedes that his artistic contribution to the Silver
Jubilee in 1977 ("God save the Queen, the fascist regime") might
not put him in the front-running for a gig at the palace, but he's willing
to forgive and forget. have nothing against the royals now," he says.
"They're a spent force. Because all those years ago, I drew their
sting."
It all comes down to insects in the end. "I spent this morning poking
at a wasp's nest. The structures they build are bloody marvelous, but
they're temporary, they're all in a constant state of evolution. Like,"
says Lydon, with a little chrysalis-busting shrug "what! am." |