Rich childhood memories of summer holidays back in Ireland. I remembered all these insects crawling around the floor and chickens that wandered in through the door. “I clearly remembered this old farmhouse in Co Cork, it was like something out of the 15th century. When the Sex Pistols gave me that initial kick, and when those gates were opened – I came out running and screaming.” The curve in my back, the stare, the need for the truth at all times – that put me on the road to Rotten. My whole being – every single thing about me – was shaped by almost dying as a child and losing my memory. If people lied to me, I would never recover from my illness. And it was vital that people didn’t lie to me. I felt like my brain was going to literally explode because I had to learn everything again. I developed, out of necessity, a sponge-like demand for information. It was rough for my parents – there was no real British national health system then, so my mother had to sit me down and teach me how to read and write again because I had lost all memory. “Because of the lumbar puncture I was left with permanent spinal curvature, and the meningitis also left me with a stare because what’s really going on there is I’m trying to focus. The lengthy recuperation, he says, turned the precociously clever at school, council estate son of two Irish parents into Johnny Rotten, punk icon and scourge of establishment Britain. To be told ‘I’m your mother’ by a complete stranger is a very, very strange thing,” he says. I didn’t know who my parents were when they came to visit me. I had to have a lumbar puncture to draw fluid out of my spine. When they thought I was dying from it, they gave me injections every six hours to keep me alive. I had meningitis and was in hospital for a year. It was an eerily familiar feeling for Lydon. “I just looked at my wife and we both almost collapsed.”

One hour later he heard that Flight 103 had been blown up over Lockerbie killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew. Lydon was livid to find that they had just missed the final call for Pan Am Flight 103. Between his wife’s packing and the row that ensued, the couple had to dash to Heathrow to make their flight. Baleful thoughts were going through John Lydon’s mind in London on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 21st, 1988 as he watched his wife, Nora, pack for a trip to New York. YOU EVER seen a woman pack for a long-haul trip? Outfits for every conceivable occasion – including, it seems, the possibility of alien abduction. To be told ‘I’m your mother’ by a complete stranger was a very, very strange thing, says John Lydon of the meningitis that cost him his memory and shaped ‘every single thing about me’

Johnny rotten image