Song of the Day 1/28: Public Image Ltd, “Hawaii”
Turns out Johnny isn’t so Rotten after all. Not all the time, anyway.
John Lydon, better known in public (and Neil Young’s lyrics) as Johnny Rotten, has released a new, surprisingly mellow song with his longtime band Public Image Ltd. On the surface, his effort to represent Ireland in the Eurovision contest sounds like his reaction to laid-back atmosphere of the 50th state, but it’s actually a love letter to his wife of 43 years, Nora Forster, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2018. Since 2020 Lydon has been her full-time caretaker.
He explained in an interview earlier this month on Good Morning Britain,
“We spent a magnificent holiday in Hawaii after a tour once and it was just the greatest week of our lives. Now her memories are fading, I wanted to bring something like that back to her. I get broke up even thinking about it.
Oddly enough, as bad as Alzheimer’s is, there are great moments of tenderness between us. I try to capture that in the song. It’s not all waiting for the Grim Reaper. I can see the personality in her eyes that lets me know.”
Forster, who at 80 is almost 14 years older than her husband, is a German publishing heiress who moved to London and became a music promoter in the ’60s. Her home was a crash pad for people like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and later punk bands like the Clash and Lydon’s Sex Pistols. Her daughter, Ari Up, who died in 2010, fronted a band called the Slits.
