Foo Fighters front-man Dave Grohl has written a book called “The Storyteller”. I received it for Christmas a year or so back. It was liberally dotted with swearing from the very first page. Now I’m not against swearing in writing or in speech if it is used very sparingly, but this was too much. I gave the book away. John Lydon starts his book with rock’n’roll star swearing from the very first page, but there’s a difference. I guess he has something that Dave Grohl lacks: charm (unlikely enough, given the photo below). John Lydon captured my attention immediately.

I’ve always liked the idea of John Lydon, though I confess I never listened to the Sex Pistols at the time, and not a lot since. His second band Public Image Limited (apart from “Rise”) passed me by completely. But he always always struck me as someone who would say and do anything. Someone who had something to say.

This was entertaining and readable from the get-go. You turn each page and expect something dreadful to happen on the next page…and it does. Lydon’s use of vernacular grammar in writing – the “back in them days it were different ” kind of thing, I found made him more accessible. I did not find such affectation at all pretentious. Others possibly may not agree.

All that said, it only took me about 150 pages before I realised that the author is full of s**t from start to finish, and as big a bullsh*t merchant as the next rock star, or the next person. He’s as hypocritical and as self-important as any pompous High Court judge, bien-pensant BBC news presenter, MP or any other Establishment figure. The story remains engaging – to that extent it is a nuanced story. It is a story I enjoyed reading, for I am a hypocrite myself.

Lydon is an un-English, southern Irish kind of hypocrite; for all his bombast about speaking the truth and calling things out as they were, he knew when to speak up, and he knew when to keep quiet – when under arrest, that is.

I like his politics; he is scathing of the middle-class public-school educated Marxism of Joe Strummer of The Clash. I’ll listen to the politics of almost anyone who is scathing about the malevolent silliness of Marxism. Almost anyone.

For all that I found this account more interesting and better as it unwound through Lydon’s life, I found him to be just another rock star saying “we wanna be different”. Some might argue that he was the first such; others might say there were many before him right back to Mick Jagger and even before that.

My response to this work was nuanced; I didn’t need to read much of it to discern that (paraphrasing Francis Rossi of Status Quo talking about the entire music industry): “95% of this is bullshit….and you know what, the other 5% is bullshit as well”. This book was about the life and work of someone who I found personally inspiring, and if not actually likeable, then admirable.