Unfortunately, the game was not quite finished when we arrived at his home, and I knew immediately this was a mistake. Hello again, I said cheerily. Ssssh, said John Lydon without moving from the sofa or looking up. So we shushed for a moment or two, while he finished watching his team, Arsenal, draw with Chelsea in the Champions League. Thank God, I thought, Arsenal aren't losing.
Yesterday afternoon we had been round the corner at the Mercedes Bar & Grill, where Lydon and his newly promoted "super-manager", his old friend Rambo, had drunk close to their own body weight in vodka cocktails: there had been 16 sea breezes on the bill and I had drunk two or three at most — at most! — so the rest was down to them. Full of love and vodka, John had insisted, against Rambo's better judgment ("John, John, listen to me, you're not thinking straight..."), that we watch the game together, either at his home or at a sports bar nearby, where there was some Glaswegian bastard he might get into a fight with. Not that he was really into fighting any more. I think he just likes mixing it: talking the talk.
In spite of his bonhomie, he had refused to be photographed. Perhaps it was because the elastic had gone on his underpants, as he had shown us on returning from the restroom. Perhaps, as he said, he just didn't look so good today. Anyway, we had agreed to take pictures tomorrow instead. This was cutting it fine: Perou had already been here two weeks ago, and the photographs he had been able to take were somewhat limited in scope.
Next morning, the morning of the match, Rambo had phoned early. Listen, me and John'd like to watch the game on our own, if that's okay with you, so why don't you come round when it finishes at half one? Alas, at half one, the game was still in injury time. The sofa John now occupied was the same sofa he had refused to leave two weeks earlier, for the photographer. This article was supposed to be about John's life in California, but sitting on a sofa indoors, of course, he could have been anywhere. The game finished and John challenged Perou to explain what pictures he wanted. Perou showed him a Polaroid of a possible setting in a flower-shrouded walkway nearby. John rejected this because it was too close to his home.
Then, finally, we were outside and he was relaxing and playing up to the camera, clowning and mugging and suggesting a picture in that nearby walkway — "It's all right if it's my idea" — and generally being helpful and agreeable and funny, grabbing the folds of his stomach with both hands, shouting: "Charles Fatlas!"
He kept up a constant barrage of talk in his theatrical, singsong voice. You could not quite call it a conversation, any more than you could call our hours of interview quite an interview, in the regular Q&A sense of the form. He did not always listen or respond to what was said. He just talked, zigzagging through topics at breakneck pace, a monologist on speed, cackling like Norman Wisdom, hawhawing like Kenneth Williams.
His language was rich and ribald, and scatological too. There was a lot of talk about bodily functions. The fried oysters he had eaten reminded him of snot in batter, he said. There was a lot of swearing. When he was talking about teasing the tabloids it was: "Go on, c***s, munch on my old rug, keep munching, ya f***ers." Swearing was just words to him. As far as he was concerned, he spoke genuinely. He liked people who were real. He liked Elton John when he met him, because he was real. And who'd have thought it? But back to the swearing: "You take away our words and what the f*** have we got? Right. Nothing. Nothing. You'll be telling me next what I can think, right? Those words are evocative of certain emotions and sometimes there are f***ing c***s in this world and there's no expression that sums them up better. It's just bang on the money."
He smoked red Marlboros incessantly, because it made him mellow: "I'm a bag of nerves." He only had two gears, he said: flat out or FLAT OUT.
Today he was wearing his $20 Samsonite trousers with zips all over the place, plus his Dr Martens with the yellow stitching, which he had cut away to expose the metallic blue toecaps. Rambo had done John's hair, with four tramlines running from front to back, leaving a series of cropped hedgerows dyed red and blue. They spent a lot of time playing with hairstyles, John and Rambo, which they believed influenced the likes of Beckham and other young footballers.
As we walked past his house, John pointed to the stuccoed exterior wall that, he said, had been made by Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was first in Hollywood as a jobbing builder. John had been at home nursing a hangover one Sunday afternoon in about 1996 when the doorbell rang and there was Schwarzenegger on his bicycle: "The Terminator and that bitch of a wife of his, Maria Shriver. They wanted to come in and see the house. F*** that. I wouldn't let them in. This was my Sunday." Looking back, he supposed he was too embarrassed. Now, he said, Schwarzenegger owned half the property in the area.
John and his girlfriend, Nora Forster, bought the house cheaply 17 years ago. It was built in 1910, he says, as a beach house for the actress Mae West, in the heart of Marina del Rey, one of the quietest and most residential of the Los Angeles beach suburbs. John thinks of himself as a pioneer in the area, having been there long before the hip restaurants and shops came. Now tourists were coming in growing numbers and he seemed to fear the idyll would be spoilt and wanted to take an active role in preserving the way of life he had enjoyed. His way of life had come under fresh scrutiny during and after his appearance in the ITV reality-television series I'm a Celebrity... Get Me out of Here.
While audiences were being unexpectedly engaged by his presence in the Australian jungle, tabloid reporters had descended on Marina del Rey, quizzing neighbours, shop assistants and restaurant staff about him. They had found no dirt, he says, because there was none. He was not a love rat. He was not even, as he himself had wickedly told The Sun, a property developer. That had given him a laugh. His fear now was being thought of as nice. Nice was the kiss of death. Johnny Rotten is dead. Long live Johnny of the Charities. Johnny Showbiz.
He had been invited onto I'm a Celebrity a year earlier and refused, because it was too short notice. Then, late last year, he was getting bogged down with his solo album, and Granada, the production company, called again and this time the timing was right. He was worried he might "f*** up", get so angry, or even happy, in front of the cameras that he would just lose control, go nuts. Then he thought, so what? He had to be able to take on anything and face the consequences. He was upset at not being billeted in the same hotel as all the other participants — they told him it was full — and thought he was being singled out, treated like an old has-been to wind him up, which, if that was the plan, had worked a treat.
