It's not wise to try to pin John Lydon down as something. And if you do pin him down, wait five minutes - he’ll have proved you wrong.
Lydon - for the millionth time - is back in the headlines. He has entered a song in Ireland’s Eurosong contest, in the hopes of representing the country in the Eurovision in Liverpool in May.
It'll have come as a surprise to some. But seasoned fans of Lydon - and there are many - will know this is classic him. When punk became a uniform, he stopped being a punk...
He knows that what punk was meant to embody - in the fleeting few months it genuinely was a thing - is doing the exactly what people don't expect you to do.
And how Irish is Lydon? The answer, like Lydon himself, is both complex and simple.
It’s easy to fall into a trap of thinking of the former Sex Pistols frontman as an Irish rebel - one of our own, raging against the machine.
It took guts and bravery to do what The Sex Pistols did - release a scathing alternative to the British National Anthem during Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977.
Even today, football fans are criticised for booing the British National Anthem before a match - in 1977, Lydon and his band performed their version on a boat on the Thames. The boat’s name was Queen Elizabeth.
At face value, anyone could look at Lydon - and look at his parents, and put it all down to his Irishness. But they’d be wrong - with Lydon, nothing is that simple.
He has always spoken openly about his Irishness - but it doesn’t fit into the pigeonhole so often occupied by other celebrities craving kudos that Irishness might provide.
The basic facts are simple enough. His mother Eileen Barry was from Carrigrohane in Co Cork. His father was a Galway man, John Lydon from Tuam.
Both followed the path of many working class immigrants that ended in North London. Lydon recalled: “Poverty drove my parents out of Ireland. They moved to England thinking it was the best thing to do.”
And that’s where it all began for John Lydon - hated by the English because of his Irishness, and looked down on by the Irish because of his English accent.
He always seemed to be on the outside, looking in - something that may have helped forge his rapier-like, searing honesty.
And what he saw was never simple or straightforward. He recalled: “My dad was from Galway and my mum from Cork so I know all about warring factions.
“Oh my God, they’d argue over which was the true Gaelic and yet neither would teach me a word. I was brought up by utter confusionists!”
Lydon’s brilliant 1994 autobiography ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ doesn’t sugarcoat anything about his upbringing.
His dad worked on building sites and oil rigs, while - as the eldest of four brothers - he helped his mother raise their family.
He said: “Londoners had no choice but to accept the Irish because there were so many of us, and we do blend in better than the Jamaicans.
“When I was very young and going to school, I remember bricks thrown at me by English parents... We were the Irish scum. But it’s fun being scum, too.”
He saw it all over again during childhood holidays in Cork - again an underdog, again an outsider.
“We stayed there every year in the summer, it was a run-down farmhouse with a lovely view of a lighthouse.
“It all sounds very romantic but we had all kinds of multi-legged naughty things crawling around, even the chickens would run through the house.
“There was no running water, my grandad built the house over a stream instead of having taps, it all felt very medieval.”
And it certainly wasn’t home. Lydon once said: “I never felt Irish. I always felt I’m English, this is where I come from and that’s that.
“Because you’d be reminded of that when you went to Ireland. Ye’re not Oirish, the locals would say. So it was like, bloody hell, shot by both sides here.”
Recalling the Irish back in London, he said: “They were always trying to enforce a pecking order.
“The Irish can be incredible snobs, much more so than anything in Britain,
even with the class structure. It’s always lurking there.”
In adulthood, trips to Ireland became much less frequent. On one infamous weekend, after an incident at a Dublin pub in October 1980, was as far from a Holiday in the Sun as it’s possible to get.
Lydon later recalled; “I was arrested for attacking a policeman’s fist with my face and thrown in Mountjoy for the night. Some homecoming. The police and the screws made a big deal out of me, they tried to shatter my morale – well, good luck on that one.
“I was acquitted but not before I was asked to make a £100 donation to the ‘poor box’. That’s Irish justice for you.”
Lydon’s Irish dad - indirectly - had a massive part to play in what became Punk - and what’s now set for a revival.
Lydon’s dad hated long hair - so Lydon agreed to get it cut - but in an act of rebellion dyed it bright green... The rest is music and cultural history.
But don’t try to pin Lydon down in music or culture either - this, after all, is a man who almost represented Ireland in the Eurovision song contest.
It got as far as a song being selected - and Lydon said: “I am fully qualified as an American-English Irishman, well-travelled, up and at it and ready.”
It wasn’t to be. But it was another of many examples of Lydon taking a sharp right turn when everyone expected him to go left.
He travels on an Irish passport - but he travels as John Lydon - not as an Irishman. May the road rise to him.
ENDS
