JOHN THE REVELATOR John Lydon interview with Andrew Graham-Dixon on BBC4
I don’t read or watch TV interviews with performers normally. They need to burnish their public persona and that gets in the way of anything interesting. Not so with this John Lydon interview. Perhaps its the advancing years or the vapidity of the current music scene but he seemed determined to share his sense of what has shaped his whole artistic career, rather like some of Bob Dylan’s recent interviews, and probably for the same reasons. Lydon took us from his childhood roots, and explained how a period of his early years in the Norfolk countryside had given him an accent that enabled his reading of Shakespeare’s verse, and showed us a clip Laurence Olivier in Richard III (which sent me straight to video rental) by way of explanation. He extolled the beauty of Mozart particularly his Requiem,and talked about his feelings around his mother’s and father’s deaths and his subsequent PIL recording of Death Disco.
passion, honesty and the commitment to expression that I’d encountered at the 100 Club.Its on BBC i-player!