John Lydon: “I tried to save Sid Vicious”

John Lydon gave an interview to the Mirror and, as always, expressed his point of view on various topics very frankly. In the conversation with the British newspaper, in addition to having defined Donald Trump the Sex Pistols of politics he also spoke about his time as a singer of Sex Pistolswhen he was called Johnny Rotten.

Going back to 1977 and the band’s success with the song “God Save the Queen”, which was banned from radio in Great Britain at the time, Lydon says he’s still quite amazed today: “When we recorded ‘God Save the Queen’ we didn’t know we were going to have a huge hit. We were just having a laugh. I thought ‘no one will listen to us, who cares? There’s no hope’. The Royal Family in those days were sacrosanct. You weren’t even allowed to have an opinion about them!”.

The now 69-year-old English musician becomes much more somber when talking about
Sid Vicious
the bassist called by the Pistols manager
Malcolm McLaren
in 1977 to replace
Glen Matlock
despite not knowing how to play even an instrument. Vicious, whose real name was
Simon John Ritchie
died just a couple of years later of a heroin overdose at just 21 years old in a friend’s apartment in New York.

Speaking about Vicious’ heroin addiction, Lydon says: “I’ve tried to get him to stop. I’ve tried to get several people to stop. But it’s a thankless job. They fall back into it. Thinking about Sid, he was very interested in the needle itself.” And he goes on to describe the act of injecting heroin as “a Japanese tea ceremony kind of thing. It’s just a spiel, but heroin addicts love it. They see it as their purpose.”

The former frontman of
Sex Pistols
considers some heroin addicts completely beyond redemption: “It’s a form of slavery that people willingly fall into. They’ve made that decision and you’re wrong to try to thwart and stop them. I’ve learned that. The hatred they feel for you afterwards is incredible and they never forgive you for trying to help them get off a drug they think will do them good. I tried heroin once. I hated it.”

Lydon himself had some problems with an addiction that he later managed to free himself from: methamphetamine. And he explains seriously: “I created a problem with methamphetamine 20 or 30 years ago. I had to get out of it on my own. But I did it. I didn’t like the shape that lifestyle was taking. Really very quickly I lost weight, my teeth fell out and everything. It’s a notch on the belt, ‘I’ve been there before. No thanks’.”