I was a punk fan from the beginning. I may have been one of two people in Jamestown to have had a copy of the Sex PIstols first album. I don’t think my parents would have approved – but that was kinda the point, wasnt it?

I’ve been a fan of Pistols lead singer John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon – the Elvis Presley of punk rock as the leader of the Sex Pistols from 1975-1978 – since I was a teenager. And I’ve gotten to be more of a fan over the past 20-odd years, as he’s shown himself to be quite a political and social free thinker, breaking from the monolithic showbiz narrative on a *lot* of issues (albeit not all, but then, he’s John Lydon).

But…

…I was today years old when I learned that Lydon was married to the same woman for 44 years, withdrawing from much of public life for the past five years to take care of her while she was suffering from of Alzheimers before dying last month.

He also raised the children of his wife’s daughter (Ariane “Ari Up” Forster, also a punk icon) – the oldest two after Forster gave up trying to raise them (they’d essentially grown up wild, almost as art projects, and as teenagers couldn’t read, write or form complete sentences) and the youngest after Up died of cancer in 2010.

Now, if I could just run down the accuracy of that persistent rumor that Joe Strummer had become a bit of a Tory before he died, that’d be a perfect Christmas present.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, December 22nd, 2023 at 6:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.