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.
