Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (62 page)

Normally, I might’ve sat back and considered her situation, because I’m very empathic with adopted children, and I know the pain it can bring to not know who or where you came from.
In our case, it’s not a matter of getting DNA testing: apparently if the adoption authorities declare this as a fact, then so it is. I’m not sure it’s wise to give adopted people
information about their real parentage once they’re adults, because it can create terrible pain to the blood relatives, and cast all kinds of doubts and aspersions in their mind. Ultimately
you just think, ‘What’s this woman really offering here?’ Is she saying my mum had played around before she met my dad? Is that it? Is that what you’re saying? This is an
Irish
Catholic family here. You’re asking us to accept that? It’s a very difficult thing to deal with.

Again, we go back to my mum and dad’s wedding photo, and there’s a baby being held by my auntie Agnes, and of course it must have been
me
. Unmarried mothers had to suffer the
whole Catholic guilt trip at that time – ‘Aurrgh, yurr’re filt-y, yurr goanna be ostracized from the community!’ Painful, painful stuff, and I personally don’t need
reminders. I’m sure you can now understand why I’m consistently involved with orphanages.

There’s very little you can do to defend yourself once someone attacks you from a press angle. For me, that’s like a full stop. You cease to exist. But of course, me being me, I
would like to find that she was better than that, and there’s every possibility that this may be the truth so, you know, time heals. Never say never, not when it comes down to things as
important as another human being desperately trying to find out what it is they came from. But you’re never gonna do that through
Richard and Judy
.

So, this woman pushed too many buttons at a particular point where it was very hurtful to us as a family. It’s a weakness in me, I suppose, but maybe as the years drift by I might find an
opening for her. But not just yet. It just came too pushy, too hard, and running to the press with it was really, really grotesque, and managed to offend all of us Lydon brothers.

I just have such a love and understanding of orphan kids. It’s terrible, it’s confusing, I’m well aware of that. She doesn’t know who the father is; she just believes
that my mother was her mother.

I was really worried that this would all be a terrible burden on my dad, at his stage in life. Through the 1990s and 2000s, I’d got really close to him. He was definitely trying to
research me in terms of, ‘Did you think we didn’t love you?’ It was a hard question to answer. If you think about it, that PiL song I mentioned in the first chapter, ‘Tie Me
To The Length Of That’, was probably through their eyes a rather cold estimation of their role in giving me life, with all its images of post-natal trauma. My dad always felt that I
held him responsible for the meningitis I suffered, but I always felt – and this is a conversation that we actually had – that he thought I was faking the
after-effects, like my memory loss. That drove me crazy for years and years.

Dad had very curly hair, sometimes done up into a quiff. My mum was convinced he had a bit of Spanish in him, from the Spanish Armada. That’s the Irish for you, going back that far! He was
a very smart dresser, and always very precise about the way he’d dress up on Sundays – a very stylish fella. Most excellent ties, good suits – hard, tough, laddish, and absolutely
impeccable detail – shoes polished to the point that you could see
through
them.

When he was young, whiskey was his drink of choice. One night, he almost hit my mother. I don’t think I was older than five, but I flew at him, and he changed everything. He told us,
‘I’m your dad, I love you, and I’ll never drink whiskey again.’ And, you know, he never, ever did. How beautiful is that?

Imagine how painful it is to go through meningitis and losing your brain, and when your memory of
that
comes back, just like a bolt in the head . . . You’re sitting in the pub with
your dad and you remember that, and you know it’s not a lie, because you ask him and he tells you it was so. I looked at it this way: I almost could’ve lost my dad all the way back
then; he could’ve been a dreadful, stereotypical Irish drinker.

All the times that I thought my dad was trying to ruin my weekend by having me out working underneath his cars, he was really actually trying to relate to me – not through words, because
that wasn’t really his way, but through situations. He was trying to bond. I wasn’t capable of understanding that at the time. You can talk about Catholic guilt, but there’s far
more serious guilt trips, about parenthood and childhood and what the relationship between them really means. I look back not in anger but in sadness, and I regret totally that I wasn’t as
smart then as I am now.

He was still young when they had me – he didn’t have all the answers, poor fella. I’m not one to moralize or preach but I think
young couples having
kids at eighteen and nineteen aren’t fully capable of understanding the problems that will come in the future, because they haven’t fully realized themselves. But try telling the young
Johnny Rotten in the Pistols anything at all! That fucker wasn’t going to listen, was he?

For all the farce that
I’m a Celebrity
turned into, something else good did come out of it: I was on the radar, TV-wise. When I went in, I joked that I might get a
nature programme out of it, and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what bloody happened. Some peoples out there watched it and obviously thought I might have something going for me there, and
indeed I did. The programmes I presented through 2004 and 2005 are my absolute pride and joy, work-wise, outside of music.

The first offer came in from Channel Five in Britain, to film two one-off nature specials in Africa, called
John Lydon’s Shark Attack
and
John Lydon Goes Ape
. Swimming with
sharks was an adventure I was really looking forward to. I’d been studying them all my life, ever since – I have to be honest! – I watched
Jaws
as a kid. Well, as a big kid
– it was 1975 and, at nineteen, I was not fully developed, haha. As I’ve said many times before, if you’re paid to do what you love to do the most, you’re onto a winner, and
I’m glad to say that’s really happened quite a few times in my life.

Our five-week filming schedule for these two shows began in Cape Town in South Africa, where Rambo and I were to have a crash course learning to dive. We had to earn our open water PADI
(Professional Association of Divers) certificates before they would let us cage dive with Great White sharks. Which, of course, was the whole premise of the show. I have to admit, the pressure was
on us: what would have happened if we’d failed our tests? It would have been a very quick show! It was a lot to take in, but we got through it, and I can truly say it was one of the proudest
moments of our lives when we passed and were given the opportunity to see these fantastic creatures in the flesh.

We had diving suits measured for us, because they had to be of a certain thickness and fit perfectly, because the water is frigid. One thing just led to another: instead
of the usual black garb and looking like a sea lion, me and John spotted these colours in the next room, which are usually used as trimmings. I ended up as a yellow and black bumble bee, and Rambo
got Arsenal away colours – yellow and blue stripes, both with a codpiece. The South African ex-Marine who was teaching us to dive was great. I really liked him, but I’m not sure if he
wanted to be near us in this gear – we did look a sight for sore eyes! Science has since caught up with us: people are now selling shark repellent wetsuits, and clashing stripes are actually
regarded as an effective shark repellent.

I quickly acquired a love and affinity for being in the ocean. I’d always loved being
on top of it
, but now I loved being
under it
.

In training, we were taught about depth narcosis, also known as ‘the bends’. On one of our ocean dives we travelled to False Bay, around an hour south of Cape Town. We were in about
80 foot of water, slouching around on the seabed, having fun, and I definitely went off on one – the closest thing would’ve been an acid trip. The colours suddenly became so vivid, and
I just wanted to drift off into the depths and swim forever. Then came time to rise and you’re supposed to rise slowly, to decompress as you go up, but I couldn’t understand the ballast
system, so I went up like a rocket. But for Rambo grabbing my flipper, I could have been in a serious problem when I hit the surface. While all this was going on, and I’m wondering why he was
trying to grab my flipper – I thought he was just trying to annoy me – we were apparently being scouted by an enormous Great White shark. How do you miss 15 foot of teeth and
muscle?

I wanted Rambo on camera with me, I should add. That was just the way it was going to be, period. I don’t want things stagey-stagey, but as things naturally are. Why pretend otherwise for
the cameras? But that said, I will fully admit when the camera was on me I made sure I was swimming at my best! The Channel Five
crew, I have to say, were well on board with
my ideas, and had a very chirpy buzz about them. Any idea of a script was completely abandoned, and it was really a kind of a free-for-all – a series of misadventures, one fiasco following
another – with the luxurious backdrop scenario of deadly dangerous huge sharks.

On the way to one of our first dives, someone had bought a newspaper, and right there on the front page was a story about a couple of poachers who had been attacked by a Great White while
swimming. One was dead, the other survived. Jesus, that was an eye-opener for us.

We managed to arrange an interview with the survivor and went to see him in a shanty town in Gansbaai. When we arrived he was sitting outside one of the huts playing dominoes with his friends.
It didn’t look a particularly safe place, so we got the crew – with the exception of an interpreter and a cameraman – to stay in the van while me and Rambo went and spoke to the
fella. But they were all very friendly to us and welcomed us in. The poacher told us how he and his friend had been out swimming for abalone fish. It was a six-hour round trip, but they were so
poor they had no choice but to do it. On the way back his friend was attacked by the shark. The chap that survived had seen it coming and had been shouting at his friend to drop the fish and swim
away, but it was too late, it took a chunk out of him, then came back and finished him off. He kept shouting and shouting at his mate to drop the fish, but he wouldn’t do it. The survivor
managed to get away but he then faced the daunting task of swimming back to the shore knowing his friend had been killed. Poor sods. It was a harrowing tale – I can’t imagine what that
must have been like. Horrible. He told us he’d never poach again. The whole thing certainly put us on alert, because it turned out the scene of the attack was not far from where we were set
to do our Great White dive.

Over the next few days we had more practice ocean dives and I was also given special permission to swim with Ragged Tooth sharks at an aquarium. I even got to try one of those old-fashioned
diver’s suits with the big helmet and boots. How they ever ocean dived in those I really don’t know.

For the cage dive with the Great Whites we went to ‘Shark Alley’ just off Gansbaai. Me and Rambo couldn’t wait; this was the whole point of being here, and it was the pinnacle
of my journey. Something that really appealed to me was the totally clear face mask with a microphone inside, so that they could hear me underwater. I didn’t know, of course, that the damn
thing wasn’t working, so I was chuffed to high hell when I started singing the Morris Albert song ‘Feelings’ to the Great Whites. Magnificent TV. I came up and asked, ‘Did
you catch it on film?’ ‘Oh yeah, mmmm.’ They wouldn’t tell us until we hit shore. I was furious! It would’ve been the greatest thing in my life’s work –
singing ‘Feelings’ to sharks on television. Yes, I am self-indulgent.

The boat captain really reminded us of the captain character from
Jaws
. He was friendly enough but he had a bit of an attitude with us and was full of himself – it was really hard
to stand there and listen to what was coming out of his mouth. And his boat! It was as if it was held together by plasters, the cage didn’t seem securely tethered, nothing really worked on
board properly. But it did the job admirably.

After we’d done the really serious stuff out at sea, we were invited back to a dinner with our entire crew, and the captain and his family and friends. The whole thing was being filmed and
the captain and his friends were beginning to show off for the cameras. During dinner, he stuck his fork on my plate, and Rambo had to grab his hand. There was almost a fork battle! He ended up
looking like a dribbled fool – his own daughter even got up and slapped him.

The trouble was that this was a fisherman’s hut where they all go to drink. They knew we were coming and so when we walked in, it felt like we were being set up. There was a good fifty
challenging fellas there and they’d all been drinking heavily, especially the captain, and so they were kind of trying to rough-house us, but it
didn’t wash with
us. As the evening went on, it became very unpleasant, but we dug our heels in. What made us leave? Not their nonsense. It was the first course. Can you imagine:
snails in cheese sauce
? Fuck
that, let’s go get something proper to eat.

South Africa had its challenges, but we loved every second of our trip there. One afternoon we had some time off from filming so we hired a helicopter to Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift,
scene of two major battles in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war made famous by the film
Zulu
and later
Zulu Dawn
. When we landed in Isandlwana it was all but deserted except for a couple of
tourists. The most impressive thing about the site was the silence. The deathly hush gets you into a trance-like state, as your imagination takes over.

There was a monument dedicated to the British and Colonial forces that had lost their lives in one of the worst defeats the British Empire had suffered. And there were piles of rocks where every
soldier had fallen. We climbed up to a cave where one of the last British soldiers had made his stand before he was killed. It was all very eerie.