Anger is an energy : my life uncensored

John Lydon is an icon--one of the most recognizable and influential cultural figures of the last forty years. As Johnny Rotten, he was the lead singer of the Sex Pistols-the world's most notorious band. The Pistols shot to fame in the mid-1970s with songs such as "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen." So incendiary was their impact at the time that in their native England, the Houses of Parliament questioned whether they violated the Traitors and Treasons Act, a crime that carries the death penalty to this day. The Pistols would inspire the formation of numerous other groundbreaking groups and Lydon would become the unlikely champion of a generation clamoring for change.

Following on the heels of the Pistols, Lydon formed Public Image Ltd (PiL), expressing an equally urgent impulse in his character: the constant need to reinvent himself, to keep moving. From their beginnings in 1978 PiL set the groundbreaking template for a band that continues to challenge and thrive to this day, while also recording one of the eighties most powerful anthems, "Rise." Lydon also found time for making innovative dance records with the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Leftfield. By the nineties he'd broadened his reach into other media while always maintaining his trademark invective and wit, most memorably hosting Rotten TV on VH1.

John Lydon remains a captivating and dynamic figure to this day--both as a musician, and, thanks to his outspoken, controversial, and from-the-hip opinions, as a cultural commentator. In Anger is an Energy, he looks back on a life full of incident, from his beginnings as a sickly child of immigrant Irish parents growing up in post-war London to his present status as a vibrant, alternative hero.

The book includes 70 black-and-white and color photos, many which are rare or never-before-seen.

Reviews (4)

Guardian Review

The 'only truly terrifying singer rock'n'roll has ever known' keeps it honest and defies his own stereotype In Lipstick Traces, the brilliant "secret history of the 20th century" in which Greil Marcus placed punk rock at the end of a long tradition of subversion and sedition, the Sex Pistols were hailed as immeasurably more than just a four-piece rock group. "It doesn't seem like a mistake to confuse their moment with a major event in history," Marcus wrote, and he identified one quality in particular that allowed them to acquire such significance. There was, he said, a "black hole" at the heart of their music, "a wilful lust for the destruction of values that no one could be comfortable with, and that was why, from the start, Johnny Rotten was perhaps the only truly terrifying singer rock'n'roll has ever known". A quarter-century after those words were written, they seem rather quaint. In recent(ish) years, Rotten -- who has long since reverted to calling himself John Lydon -- has appeared in that ironically titled celebration of faded fame I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, starred in an ad for Country Life butter, and hosted such examples of TV anarchy as John Lydon's Megabugs and John Lydon's Shark Attack. The Sex Pistols were last seen playing Las Vegas, and lending their name to a brand of unisex perfume ("fighting conformity and disregarding aromatic conventions, it leaves a fresh, restless bite of lemon, sharpened and intensified by a defiant black pepper"). And now comes Lydon's second memoir, following 1994's Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs : a slightly straighter example of the great seasonal genre-cum-publishing ritual that is celebrity autobiography, which this year sees Lydon pitched against John Cleese, Stephen Fry and Westlife 's Shane Filan. On the face of it, Anger Is an Energy is true to the form: light on reflection and context, and told with barely a pause for breath. As with other celeb memoirs, it sometimes achieves a tone of self-importance that takes it into the realm of the Pooteresque. But it is a relief to report that it is also fascinating, and stands as a corrective to the idea that Lydon is merely a former pantomime villain. It also amounts to a 500-page yell of insistence that he should be entitled to do what he damn well likes, for two reasons: first, the superlative nature of so much of the music that he has created; and second, the life through which he struggled before music offered him an escape route. In an age in which a caste of privately educated musicians threaten to dominate what remains of British rock while singing about nothing much at all, this is what gives the book its fundamental spark: the sense of raw working-class art, and someone driven to create by the furies to which the title allude. Lydon's co-author, the music writer Andrew Perry, took the sensible decision to stay true to Lydon's singular mode of expression and thereby convey his personality; a matter, sometimes, of brazen malapropisms, but also of language that can somehow be both elegant and blunt. "I come from the dustbin," Lydon says on page three, and he is not wrong. The child of Irish immigrants who settled in Finsbury Park, his early years suggest that the postwar welfare state had distinct limits. "In the bedroom was Mum, Dad, me, and then my younger brothers, as they arrived ... Then it was six: four kids, two parents ... you imagine: two double beds and a cot in a tiny room with an oil heater." His mother, he says, suffered several miscarriages: "It's quite a thing to carry a bucket of miscarriage -- and you can see the little fingers and things in it -- and have to flush it all down the outdoor toilet." (Shades here of "Bodies", the Sex Pistols' pitch-black evocation of abortion: "Die little baby screaming / Body! Screaming fucking bloody mess"). The most moving passages in the book describe how, at seven, he contracted meningitis (from rats), endured a long coma, and lost most of his memory. "I hadn't forgotten how to read, yet I couldn't talk -- language was gone," he says. When his parents came to take him home from hospital, nurses and doctors "told me that they were my mum and dad, and I had to believe them". Lydon himself cannot quite find the words to convey the profundity of all this, but it surely sits at the core of a lot of what still defines him -- not least, a furious urge to express himself. This is what Marcus's "black hole" theory perhaps overlooked. There undoubtedly was an amoral, nihilistic impulse behind the Sex Pistols, but it was largely the work of their manager and Lydon's bete noire, the late Malcolm McLaren (a mere "suburbanite", Lydon says), whose attempts to prolong the life of the Sex Pistols beyond Lydon's exit took the whole enterprise into schlock. Lydon, by contrast, was always, he says, driven to live as "a completely honest human being". Give or take his own tendency to self-mythologisation, this is manifested here in a loathing of other people's cant, pretension and anything else that might trivialise the obvious fact that life is very, very serious. These impulses drove what he achieved with the Pistols (witness, say, the rapier-like declarations of national decline in "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen", or a key line from "Pretty Vacant": "I don't believe illusions / 'Cos too much is real"). They also fired the project Lydon founded after the Pistols' demise: Public Image Limited, AKA PiL, "a consortium of like-minded loonies prepared to jump into the next universe without any tools". The drive to honesty, as well as envelope-pushing musical imagination, defines their 1979 masterpiece Metal Box as well as the cream of their other music-- something best illustrated by a quick visit to YouTube and archive footage of them performing "Death Disco" on Top of the Pops. The song fearlessly deals with Lydon's loss of his mother: I can well remember watching it as a 10-year-old, and just about understanding that here was something much nobler than the froth that surrounded it. Reading Anger Is an Energy brings to mind something the rock writer Nick Kent said of Keith Richard s -- that he achieved a "strange purity amidst filth". In Lydon's case, though, what burns through is not Richards's brand of piratical nobility, but old-fashioned self-respect and exacting standards (again, working-class values, rather than those of bourgeois bohemia). The punk milieu was full of deadbeats and smackheads, and lifestyle options that quickly killed Lydon's close friend Sid Vicious. But Lydon kept his head: he claims to have tried heroin only once. A recruit to the latest lineup of PiL, he says, was hired when Lydon found that "he loves his wife, loves his kids, he's got that area of life sorted ... Fantastic, I'm listening to a stable-minded human being." Lydon has been with his German-born wife Nora since the distant days of punk: two chapters are devoted, in every sense of the word, to their relationship. Towards the book's end, the couple adopt the twin sons of her daughter, the late Ari Up of the Slits, who came to live with the Lydons having experienced the many downsides of a bohemian upbringing. Lydon found them, at the age of 14, "basically illiterate, really way behind". Resolving to pull them away from being "antisocial" and "unemployable", he set about teaching them "a respect for others", and had their dreadlocks cut off. Once again, his account of all this conveys the fact that the only truly terrifying singer rock'n'roll has ever known proudly defies his own stereotype. "What they needed," says the man formerly known as Johnny Rotten, "was boundaries, as do all kids." * To order Anger Is an Energy [pound]16, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - John Harris.

Kirkus Review

Alternately musical bomb-thrower and contemplator Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, looks back on a long life of pot-stirring and piss-taking.This latest installment is of a piece with the author's earlier Rotten (1994), though some of the caustic anger has given way to a kind of studied resignation. Which is not to say that Lydon isn't irritated; hence the title and the subtitle, which owes to his suspicion that there's always someone who aims to enact some kind of censorship: "It's the kind of ordinance that comes down from people that don't like to think very hard and aren't prepared to analyze themselves, just judge others, and are scared of the future." Some of Lydon's well-aired hatreds have given way, too, even to a kind ofshuddertoleration: Malcolm McLaren, the entrepreneur behind the Sex Pistols, is no longer the Antichrist but instead just another schmo with an idea: "He really didn't want to move mountains at all, he wanted to rearrange piles of glitter." As for Sid Vicious, "dumb as a fucking brush," well, if there was a punk through and through, it might have been himthough he was a victim of fashion and drugs alike. Lydon delivers a few surprises, not just with his newfound ability to accept the flaws of lesser mortals, but also with his allowance of unexpected likes. Confessing a fondness for Status Quo, Arthur Brown and Can might have pegged one as (gasp!) a hippie. It is clear that, though fond of zingers (he once called Ozzy Osbourne a "senile delinquent") and political put-downs, Lydon is also a serious and thoughtful artist, bookish and unafraid of hard work, and thus serving as a model citizen in a more ideal republic than ours. Besides, he's a philosopher: We're capable of horrible evil, he writes, but "because we are also capable of analyzing that, that is exactly why we're better." A lucid, literate pleasure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Lydon is better known as Johnny Rotten, his Sex Pistols' infamous alter ego, but in this entertaining memoir he writes from the perspective of his own straightforward self. He recalls his days in the Sex Pistols and his follow-up band, Public Image Ltd. He writes about his impoverished London childhood as the son of Irish parents, his bout of meningitis, his friendship with the troubled Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols' tour of America, and his current activities. Written in a conversational style, Lydon comes across as a likable bloke who has no patience for pretense, hypocrisy, or phoniness, as well as someone with a genuine fondness for oddballs and misfits. Readers may be surprised to learn that he lives in Los Angeles and is now an American citizen; that he loves to read, especially history, but also Oscar Wilde and Dostoevsky; and that Gandhi is his ultimate hero. And Lydon takes writing seriously. Words count, he notes, . . . words are actually weapons. For anyone interested in the punk scene and the evolution of one of its finest.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2015 Booklist

Library Journal Review

Punk rock legend Lydon's previous memoir, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, focused on the rise and fall of 1970s British punk pioneers the Sex Pistols, but his new book is much broader in scope while emphasizing his years fronting current band Public Image Ltd (PiL). A candid, long-winded, and wickedly witty Lydon revisits the nasty 1978 break-up of the Sex Pistols but for the first time explains in fascinating detail why he dropped the Johnny Rotten moniker and formed a new and very different-sounding group. Other topics covered include Lydon's disillusionment with the early London punk scene, his friendship with former bandmate Sid Vicious, how PiL's lineup changes affected the group's musical direction, the Sex Pistols' admittedly cash-grabbing reunions, and his various recent television and film endeavors. The book is at its best when Lydon shares little-known and often hilarious stories about his two bands, but drags a bit whenever he drifts from discussing his music career. Derek Perkins's lively narration is a perfect fit for this provocative, vulgar, and very funny book. -VERDICT Recommended to all punk and post-punk rock fans and pop culture enthusiasts. ["A must-read for fans of punk rock and popular culture since the 1970s": LJ 4/1/15 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Introduction: May The Road Rise With You	p. 1
1 Born for a Purpose	p. 9
Roots and Culture	p. 38
2 First Indoor Toilet	p. 49
3 Johnny Wears What He Wants	p. 77
The Beautiful Shame	p. 100
4 Into the Inferno	p. 104
Hugs and Kisses, Baby! #1	p. 135
5 This Boy Don't Surrender	p. 141
"Who Censors the Censor? #1
Judge Hot Lest Ye Be Judged	p. 179
6 Getting Rid of the Albatross	p. 181
7 Opening Pandora's Box With a Hammer and Chisel	p. 211
Who Censors the Censor? #2
Swanny Times	p. 241
8 Just Because You're Paranoid, It Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get Ya	p. 249
Hugs and Kisses, Baby! #3	p. 276
9 There's Nowt as Good as Change	p. 280
Who Censors the Censor? #3
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood	p. 314
10 Happy Not Disappointed	p. 321
11 Johnny Cuckoo	p. 353
Who Censors the Censor? #4
Do You Want My Body?	p. 385
12 You Can Look to the Future When You're Confident	p. 394
Hugs and Kisses, Baby! #3
Nora, My "Hair-ess"	p. 426
13 Nature Discovers Me	p. 433
14 History and Grief... as a Gift	p. 459
Who Censors the Censor? #5
Passive Resistance	p. 474
15 Deeper Water	p. 484
The Final Note	p. 514
Acknowledgments	p. 516
Index	p. 521

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