The Waterboys star Mike Scott has revealed he’s not a fan of former Sex Pistols rocker John Lydon.
Lydon, known in his Sex Pistols days as Johnny Rotten, is hoping to represent Ireland at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
And while Scott admires Lydon for taking care of wife, Nora, who has Alzheimers, and raising awareness about the horrific disease, he still isn’t a fan of his music or politics.
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He said: “I’m afraid I don’t really like his music.
“I liked what he did in 1977 but I don’t like his music and I don’t like his politics,” he bluntly told RTE Radio One.
John Lydon has said he is competing to represent Ireland at this year’s Eurovision song contest primarily in order to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease.
He will appear with his band, Public Image Ltd, on the Late Late Show on February 3, performing Hawaii, a love letter to his wife of 44 years, Nora Forster, who is living with the illness.
“I’m doing it to highlight the sheer torture of what Alzheimer’s is,” said the singer, who holds an Irish passport as well as US citizenship. “It gets swept under the carpet, but in highlighting it, hopefully we get a stage nearer to a cure.”
Lydon insisted that spreading this message was much more important than competing to win, so he isn’t listening to the five other entrants.
He said: “I don’t want all that stuff to clutter me up, although if there’s a gold cup in it, I’ll have it.”
Lydon met his future wife in Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex in 1975, marrying four years later.
He remembered: “Her absolute independence stuck out to me like no other. She was straight out of a film, just totally individual and oblivious to the fashions of the moment. Of course she was told not to come near me. ‘He’s horrible’. Which piqued her interest.”
Since Forster’s diagnosis in 2018 he has become her primary carer: shopping for groceries online and cooking meals that Forster finds “fun enough” to eat.
“Forty-eight years together isn’t enough,” Lydon said. “But even in illness we’re still finding out new and great things about each other. With Alzheimer’s, they can’t always formulate the words but the real person is still in there. The saddest thing you can do is cut them off.”
Ireland has a record seven Eurovision wins, but Lydon admitted to nervousness at the prospect of competing to represent the country live on television.
He said: “I’m going to be absolutely terrified and stage-frightened and all those things. The realisation of how big an audience this is is mind-numbing.” The singer said he has also been dreaming about his late Irish parents, hearing their voices in his head.
“They’d have been over the moon at the idea of me representing Ireland. But my dad would be going, ‘Don’t mess it up’. The other day I was picking out a suit to wear for it and I could hear his voice saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t you wear that suit’.”
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