There's always that element in the media where they want to twist a thing too far poisonous. I would describe it as an insanely incompetent yet deeply funny fiasco! Nobody got hurt, damaged, murdered or killed. It was just a lot of confused people turning their confusion into some sense of fun. Of course, the newspapers would call it a 'riot.' But it wasn't. If you could call that a riot! The softest silliness I ever seen. The film gives a good sense of what really happened at PiL's infamous 1981 New York City show, when the crowd began to riot. That came as quite a surprise to me, when his face zinged up on the screen. I never knew he was going to be in this documentary. In the documentary, Flea reveals that he auditioned to be in PiL. Anything negative to say about me would be an act of incredible unkind selfishness. Quite frankly, I've given them all wonderful opportunities, and spent a lot of my own personal money on them to be in those positions. There's no point in people moaning about me. And people who have poisoned the store-well, there's not much you can do for them except laugh. No! Listen, if there's bad blood there, it's not of my making. Were you worried the new documentary would dredge up bad blood between you and your former bandmates? There was some drama within PIL. This interview with Lydon has been lightly edited and condensed. Asked if the documentary tells the truth, Lydon tells Newsweek, 'It's as good as anything else I've ever seen or heard.'

Lydon's improbably long career with PiL is chronicled in the new documentary The Public Image Is Rotten (out September 14) in which everyone from Flea to Thurston Moore materializes to laud the band's long-tailed influence. But he's made far more interesting-and brashly anti-commercial-music as the leader of the pioneering post-punk group Public Image Ltd (PiL), which went from 1979's abrasive and inscrutable Metal Box to an unlikely hit with 1986's apartheid-inspired 'Rise.' 'You should never allow yourself to be categorized or bracketed or contained or neatly packaged in somebody else's phraseology.'Īs Johnny Rotten, the sneering frontman for the Sex Pistols, he mocked the queen, swore on live TV and incited concert mayhem.

'I don't see music in categories like that,' the 62-year-old insists. John Lydon deserves as much credit for the punk explosion as any other living human.

Public image ltd johnny rotten