THE PUBLIC IMAGE IS ROTTEN: Punk Legend John Lydon Puts The Record Straight

“This sod is going to be around for centuries… I’m one of the few people in pop history that will just not go away,” John Lydon tells us early on in this clunkily-titled but absorbing documentary sprint through the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd legend’s chequered history, both musical and personal.

The thing is, just lately, this lifelong Lydon fan has rather wished he would go away, or at least concentrate on making new music and touring, instead of chatting errant nonsense about Trump, Brexit and the evils of the “left-wing media”. Lydon’s rampant contrarianism has always been part of his appeal, but he’s started sounding like a Morrissey tribute act and that is, quite frankly, beneath him.

Bizarre And Frightening

My antipathy to Lydon’s recent outpourings meant I was initially reluctant to watch Tabbert Fiiller’s film, The Public Image Is Rotten, but within five minutes and the first blasts of ‘Public Image’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’, all was pretty much forgiven. Say what you like about the former Johnny Rotten’s 2018 persona but, back then, as an artist and frontman, he was peerless. Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols (1977) and PiL’s Metal Box (1979) sound every bit as extraordinary now as they did then, albeit for very different reasons. One was a blistering “up yours” to the British establishment, the other a transmission from a bizarre and frightening new musical dimension.

His purple patch didn’t dry up anytime soon either with further records from PiL, including The Flowers Of Romance (1981), Album (1986), and That What Is Not (1992), as well as inspired collaborations – ‘World Destruction’ (with Afrika Bambaataa) and ‘Open Up’ (with Leftfield) – ensuring Lydon’s musical output remained relevant and exhilarating into the 1990s. The band’s return, after a 17-year hiatus in 2009, with a tour and eventual album (2012’s This Is PiL), was warmly received and deservedly so.

Still haunted

The Pistols are dealt with here in the first 10 minutes – Julien Temple’s documentary The Filth And The Fury (2000) remains the place to go for the band’s definitive story. It’s PiL that Fiiller and Lydon – whose manager-cum-minder John ‘Rambo’ Stevens executive produces here – are mainly interested in. We get some well-trodden biographical detail early on, too, covering Lydon’s early days in Finsbury Park, north London and how, at the age of seven, meningitis put him in a coma for three months, robbing him of most of his memories when he eventually awoke.

He couldn’t even recognise his mum and dad, and it’s a subject he returns to several times over this film’s 105-minute running time. That early trauma clearly still haunts Lydon, even as a 62-year-old, and to see him with tears in his eyes as he recalls it is genuinely moving. It isn’t the last time we see him get a serious attack of the feels, either.

As well as new interviews with the punk legend, recorded at his home in Los Angeles, which link the whole film together, cinematographer-turned-documentarian Fiiller manages to speak to a great many of his PiL band-mates, both past and present. The best stories invariably involve Jah Wobble who, as well as being a bassist of sublime ability, had a penchant for violence (“I kicked him in the face and it turned out to be the head of security”) and untrustworthy behaviour, that Lydon – who refers to his old friend as a “used-car salesman” – clearly still finds exasperating nearly 40 years on.

Crowd riot

There’s a Spinal Tap air to some of the stuff here, including 1981’s bizarre New York gig in which PiL provoked a crowd riot after attempting to play the whole show from behind a screen and, in an MTV interview, Lydon’s insistence that the band “didn’t do tours, we just do gigs occasionally… like once every two or three days”. David St. Hubbins would be proud.

The Public Image Is Rotten isn’t quite a warts-and-all affair and perhaps that’s a shortcoming. It dances around certain subjects when it would have surely been better to address them directly. No one can quite bring themselves to properly tackle guitarist Keith Levene’s deleterious heroin habit and arguments various band members had with Lydon over money – including original drummer Jim Walker – are mentioned but left hanging.

Life with PiL was clearly no bowl of cherries for certain members. The late guitarist John McGeoch took a bottle in the face during one gig and required 40 stitches, guitarist Lu Edmonds had to quit with tinnitus so extreme it gave him “suicidal tendencies”, while drugs, booze and hard living eventually forced the likes of bassist Allan Dias out of the band for their own sanity. As Wobble’s replacement, Pete Jones, puts it, being in PiL could be “a drip, drip, drip of shit” which tells you, despite a reluctance to delve deep elsewhere, this is no airbrushed history of the band.

Public Enemy No.1

The Public Image Is Rotten is as interesting for what it omits as much as for what it includes. There’s no mention of the numerous, money-for-old-rope Pistols reunions between 1996 and 2008, nor Lydon’s 11-day stint, in 2004, on obnoxious British reality TV show, I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, in which he lived in the Australian jungle with glamour models, C-list pop stars, and – irony alert – a BBC Royal correspondent.

Clearly, there are some things Britain’s former “Public Enemy No.1” would happily scrub from his résumé and you can’t really blame him. I was delighted a bit about his amusing TV ads for British butter brand Country Life made the final edit though. The old devil still knows how to laugh at himself.

The Public Image Is Rotten: Final Thoughts

The only surprise is that no one has made a documentary about Lydon’s post-Pistols career before, especially when his list of admirers includes the revered likes of Don Letts, Thurston Moore, Big Youth, Moby, Adam Horovitz and Flea, all of whom pop up here to pay fulsome homage (“Metal Box changed my life,” reveals the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist at one point). Mexican-born Fiiller has a lot of material to juggle but does so admirably. It’s breathless at times, but never less than engaging. Better yet, Lydon’s increasingly baffling politics are kept well out of it.

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The Public Image Is Rotten will be released in the US on September 14, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.