Early Life

According to his birth certificate, written two years after his birth, John Lydon was born in London — something that he later admitted he had his doubts about — on 31 January 1956. His parents, John Christopher Lydon and Eileen Lydon (nee Barry), were working class immigrants from Ireland, and moved into a two-room Victorian flat with an outdoor toilet in Benwell Road, Finsbury Park, an area in the north of the city. At the time, Finsbury Park was largely impoverished, with a high crime rate and the population composed largely of working class migrants from both Ireland and Jamaica who suffered racist abuse and name-calling from nearby native English communities. John Lydon would be the first of four brothers, with the others being named James, Robert and Martin. Even as a child, being the eldest, John had to look after his brothers because his mother was often ill, several times due to miscarriages.[7] As a child, he lived on the edge of an industrial estate, and would often play with friends in the factories when they were closed. He belonged to a local gang of neighbourhood kids, and would often end up in fights with other groups, something he would later look back on with fond memories: "Hilarious fiascoes, not at all like the knives and guns of today. The meanness wasn't there. It was more like yelling, shouting, throwing stones, and running away giggling. Maybe the reality was coloured by my youth."[8] Describing himself as a "very shy" and "very retiring" kid who was "nervous as hell", he hated going to school, where he would get caned as punishment and where he "had several embarrassing incidents… I would shit my pants and be too scared to ask the teacher to leave the class. I'd sit there in a pants load of poo all day long."[9]
When he was seven years old he contracted spinal meningitis and was hospitalised for a whole year in St. Anne's Hospital in Highgate. Throughout the entire experience he suffered from hallucinations, including seeing a green dragon, and also experienced nausea and headaches. The treatments administered by the nurses involved drawing fluid out of his spine with a surgical needle, something that left him with a permanent spinal curvature, and the meningitis was also responsible for giving him what he would later describe as the "Lydon stare." For him, this experience was "the first step that put me on the road to Rotten."[10]
With his father often away on work, employed variously on building sites or oil rigs, Lydon got his first job aged 10 as a minicab dispatcher, something he kept up for a year whilst the family was in financial difficulty.[11] He disliked his secondary school, the Sir William of York Catholic School in Islington, where initially he was bullied, but aged around 14 or 15 he "broke out of the mold" and began to fight back at what he saw as the oppressive nature of the school teachers, whom he felt instigated and encouraged the kids to all be the same and be "anti-anyone-who-doesn't-quite-fit-the-mold."[12] Following the completion of his O-levels at school, he got into a row with his father, who disliked Lydon's long hair, and so, agreeing to get it cut, the teenager not only had it cut, but in an act of rebellion dyed it bright green.[13] Growing up as a teenager, he listened mostly to rock bands like Hawkwind, Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper and Iggy and the Stooges — bands his mother also used to like, a fact which somewhat embarrassed him — as well as more mainstream groups like T. Rex and Gary Glitter.[14]
"The other squatters hated us… because of the way we looked - short cropped hair and old suits. That’s when Sid [Vicious] started to come around to my way of fashion. I gave him his first decent haircut, which was the punk style as it soon became. You'd literally cut chunks of hair out of your head. The idea was to not have any shape to your hairdo - just have it fucked up. This was the beginning of it all."
John Lydon (1993)
Aged 15, he was kicked out of the school after a run in with a teacher, and subsequently went to a state school, Hackney and Kingsway Princeton College, where he befriended John Simon Ritchie, who in later years would become better known as Sid Vicious. It was Lydon who gave him his nickname of "Sid Vicious", naming him after his parents' pet hamster.[16] Lydon and Vicious began squatting in a house in the wealthy Hampstead area with a group of ageing hippies and stopped bothering to go to college, which was often far away from where they were living.[17] Meanwhile, he began working on building sites during the summer, employment that his father was able to help him with. He also got a job at a children's play centre in Finsbury Park after friends had recommended him for the job. It was here that he taught woodwork to some of the older children, but he was eventually fired after parents complained that somebody "weird" with bright green hair was teaching their children.
Lydon and his friends, including Vicious, John Gray, Jah Wobble, Dave Crowe and Tony Purcell began going to many of the London clubs, such as the Lacey Lady in Ilford, as well as reggae clubs which primarily catered to the black community, and to gay clubs, which were places where, according to Lydon, "you could be yourself, nobody bothered you" and "they always had the best records.