It did not look promising in rehearsals, when he set light to his hair while trying to start a fire, crouching down, blowing at the embers, as instructed, then getting caught in the blowback. He was, he says, the only contestant who refused the offer of a fake tan the night before the show (though surely Diane Modahl didn't want it either, as a black woman). He went in as a spotty f***ing Fatty Muldoon, he says, and came out as the white tornado, all trophies. The others didn't want to wash, for fear of rubbing off their tan, and that suited him too because he hates washing, never really learnt to look after himself and was not taught how to by his parents. When John went on tour with the Pistols or PiL, his wash bag always came back unopened, his soap, his toothbrush — especially his toothbrush — unused.
He did his best to incite insurrection among the other contestants before his abrupt early departure. He suggested they could plunge the show into chaos if the evicted celebrity refused to leave. But he couldn't get them to play along. So he amused himself looking for the speakers that played the piped jungle noises, and the back ways out where the security guards were hidden. Ex-SAS? Snort. Salvation Army Socialists. In the end he was bored, bored, bored. There was no challenge and he was annoyed too that they wouldn't tell him if Nora had arrived safely in Australia. When he finally got out she wasn't okay: she had got sand in her eye while swimming and had an infection.
John's only legacy was some insect bites that wouldn't heal, probably because he kept scratching them, causing bleeding, which he seemed to find fascinating, staring at his red-coated fingertips. He loved a good squeeze of his spots, he said. The leeches in the jungle reminded him of his penis. He had to be careful not to get the two confused, especially when he was "pulling the pudding", as you do under the blankets on 24-hour TV — which in itself was not easy, he said, when all you could think about was the hideous liposuction scars on Jordan's thighs.
As he had feared, after the show he was getting lots of ludicrous offers of work. There was the TV show that wanted him to dispense with his domestic staff for a week and do all his own cleaning and washing-up. Who did they think he was? He didn't clean and he didn't have cleaners either. He lived in a dustbowl. Anyway, he said, the jungle was just the appetiser for the main event: he wanted to get on and do some serious shark-hunting, with the great white sharks. That was his next project, with or without television cameras. He would go down in a cage, but he would get the f*** out of the cage and swim with the sharks, because he had studied sharks when he first came to America, and took courses in marine biology. He was fascinated by the sea and had always been a good swimmer, though he lacked stamina. He and Nora had a second-hand boat, a 17-footer, which they loved to take out for fun. Bearing in mind his origins on the council estates of north London, I said it was hard to picture him as a yachtie, but he said his maternal grandfather in Ireland had been a fisherman, and had taken him out once in a rowboat, which had been scary but made a great impression on him.
Over the years, John Lydon has played cat and mouse with the tabloid press, creating or not bothering to correct the many fictions written about him. Consequently, it was difficult to know what was true. At the same time, it was hard to tell whether he was untroubled or extremely vexed by the tabloid versions of his life. Sometimes he seemed both at once. He told me that he and Nora had never been married, though their wedding has been reported in most of the articles ever written about him. He scoffed at stories of the millions Nora was supposed to have inherited as a "German publishing heiress". But there was a publication, a newspaper, that apparently provided Nora with some inheritance, albeit more modest than had been suggested. The paper was Der Tagesspiegel, one of several Berlin dailies. Most importantly, Nora's money, such as it was, had never been exploited by John. "You know, like, ÔHe only married her for her money.' Well, we never married, we didn't need to. We married like that [he tapped the side of his head], in the head; in the heart, right. A place that other people seem to have forgotten about."
He met Nora in London in 1976 or 1977, he couldn't remember which, during his time as lead singer of the Sex Pistols. It had not been love at first sight but something far better: pure intrigue. She was fantastic, dressed like Lauren Bacall. Cor blimey! Outrageous. Everyone else was in hippie gear, but she wouldn't be seen dead in it, and he loved her for that. Nora is 15 years older than John, who turned 48 in January. When they met she already had a teenage daughter, Ariane, who was performing as Ari-Up in a band called the Slits.
Like many punks, Ariane embraced reggae and Caribbean culture. She went on to have mixed-race twin sons, Pablo and Pedro. John shows me a photograph on the wall of his living room of the boys. They had long dreadlocks, which, he says, was because of their mother's religion, meaning she had become a Rastafarian. "She thinks she's Jamaican," he said, not quite disguising a sneer. Shortly after the picture was taken, the boys came to live with Nora and John in Marina del Rey. The first thing the boys did, he says, was shave their heads, fed up with being taunted and having their hair pulled at school in London. They were brought up from then on by John and Nora, for many "weird" reasons: Ariane was still performing and travelling and later had another child. It was about getting the twins proper schooling, he says, giving them a base here in LA. Nora and John had lost a baby to miscarriage back in the 1970s and, he says, could not have children of their own afterwards, so there had been a gap in their lives. With hindsight he thinks that being grounded by a baby would have been a problem. It could have been a tragedy never leaving London, brain-wise. He needed to get away from what was killing him and, at the time, it was his London life.
Instead he had become grandad to the twins. Grandad. He had not liked that term at all at first. He had thought, f***ing hell, he wasn't going to be able to handle it. But parenting the twins had been wonderful. He had gone to meetings of their school PTA; he had given the bleedin' teachers a lesson in how the English language was properly used. But, with the whippersnappers around, time had really flown by. They were 21 now and living independently. And they were not interested in music. They hated the whole thing — not least the tabloid attention, as when Nora had been followed on a recent visit to Pablo and had been accused by a reporter of meeting her young, dark lover. The boy had been in tears, said John. How nasty and spiteful could you get?
There was no routine in his and Nora's life, he said. On a whim she would get up and fly across the world. They had their own separate interests, which kept them sane, and at the moment Nora was creating this amazing music. She thought John was jealous, and he was, because she was the fastest rapper he'd heard in his life, and with her German accent it was f***ing frightening. She had been recording in their studio — between the living room and the kitchen — and John's brother Martin, who lived nearby, would come over to work with her. He was the engineer. It was bloody powerful stuff and John was really, really proud of her. He loved her to bits too. Nora had yet to perform or release any of this music in public. She was like him, he said, in that way. It was great to make the music, but did you really want to release it? Sod all that. You should do it for yourself.
He had just gone back to his own solo album and was pleased with where it was. He had some offers for it from record companies, but he would wait now until it was finished, until he was happy that it was perfect, because otherwise people would start interfering, fools who had no idea how things worked. If they wanted Britney Spears out of him, they were looking in the wrong place.
PiL, Public Image Ltd, the band he had formed after leaving the Sex Pistols, had been very much like that, about doing it for himself. Even though PiL had been dormant for over 10 years now, the band clearly meant more to him as a personal achievement than the Pistols. Perhaps it was no coincidence that he had remained in the US, where PiL continued to be more appreciated than they ever had in the UK.
John seemed reluctant to take any pleasure in the achievements of the Pistols. He would not be drawn on his liking for any of the songs he had written, and said many of them had, in many ways, been made up as they went along. Such as standing on stage repeating the chorus of Pretty Vacant to a violently hostile audience at a West Ham (enemy territory) social club in 1976.
