He hasn't gone away you know. Any fear/hope that Johnny Rotten (ne Lydon) would just have taken the cash from the successful Sex Pistols reunion tour three years back and retreat to his house in Los Angeles to do whatever ex-punk rock icons are supposed to do are unfounded.
He still means it (man) and just in case we'd forgotten the legacy and the leer, he'll be in our face again over the next few weeks, thanks to the release of a four-CD retrospective box set of his post-Pistol's group PIL, a possible film version of his very well written autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, and the screening soon on Channel 4 of his own version of the life and times of the Sex Pistols.
The timing is almost as impeccable as when the spiky-haired urchin first ponced his way through the door of Malcom McLaren's shop, Sex, on the King's Road, Chelsea in 1976, thus ensuring that musical and cultural history would never be the same again. Now, in 1999, Mike Oldfield and Rick Wakeman both have new albums in the shops, assorted corporate fodder clutters up the charts, and music is about as radical as your average hunt ball. You'd almost get nostalgic for the likes of Sham 69.
It is always welcome when the Irish passport-carrying Lydon - as irreverent and single-mindedly bolshie as ever - emerges from his American hideaway to pontificate, pronounce on and generally piss off all those who have it coming to them. Sample quote: "Oasis? I loathe them."
So what's with the Pistols documentary then? "It's not a nostalgia exercise," insists the man who was once described as the most truly terrifying singer in the history of rock 'n' roll. "There's nothing wrong with looking back if you do it honestly. The only reason I agreed to do the documentary was because Channel 4 gave me the freedom to tell the Sex Pistols's story as it was really was - the real history of the group. So much rubbish has been written about punk in the past 20 years, mostly by people who weren't even there. This programme is not about nostalgia, it's about history. We don't praise ourselves or wax lyrical about our influence on music; we just tell the truth.
"The truth about punk will get out. It was not an intellectual movement orchestrated by Malcom McLaren. We didn't set out to be seen as some great, culturally significant force. If we had an aim, it was to force our own working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of at the time."
The programme will barely touch on the Pistols reunion - the "cash from chaos" tour three years ago, but Lydon remains distinctly unrepentant abut the reunion. "If people don't like the idea that we reformed and toured then they should just shut up. We were the most hated band in the world in the 1970s and also the most condemned, and we were condemned wrongly. We got back together just to finish off what we first started but as it turned out, it wasn't a comeback tour at all, it was a `f**k off for ever' tour. Until then, the Sex Pistols had never ended properly. It simply fizzled out into a load of nonsense. We now feel that's it over for good."
What's not over for good though is the band PIL (Public Image Limited), who were named after a Muriel Spark novel (The Public Image) and who endured, with a variety of different personnel, from 1978 to 1992. More musically expansive and experimental than the Pistols were allowed to be, PIL featured Lydon alongside collaborationists like bassist Jah Wobble, ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker and the first real hip-hop artist, Afrika Bambaataa, along with other guests like axe guitar hero Steve Vai and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Hit songs like This Is Not A Love Song and Rise were rarities in comparison with the bulk of the band's "artier" work. From this distance though, PIL's early stuff can be listened to as a blueprint for techno-edged dance music.
"The idea behind PIL was exactly the same as it was with the Sex Pistols - only much more focused," says Lydon, "I was determined to limit our public persona and concentrate not just on the music but the attitude and the drama within the group. I wanted less pop. The Pistols was a crash course in what can go brilliantly right and horribly wrong with a band. It was an incredibly volatile two years. You can come out of that a shattered human being or damn wise to the ways of the world."
Other television work coming up includes a chat show later this year for the satellite channel VH1 (a sort of MTV for the baby-boomer generation). "Well when I say it's a chat show, it's just me doing the talking," he says, "it's based on the new millennium and I get rid of all the objects I think we won't need in the future. One of the first things we filmed was a bonfire I built on the beach by my house.
I can't tell you how much pleasure I got from tossing A&M copies of God Save The Queen on to the fire. I'd like to destroy rare items of Sex Pistols memorabilia every week. Yes, I could sell them and give all the money to charity, but it's more fun to burn them." Readers should note that the ultra-rare A&M pressing of God Save The Queen can fetch up to £2,500 at Sotheby's. He's been married now for 20 years to Nora, 56, who is the mother of Ari-Up of the female punk band, The Slits, and he says the only thing that will drag him back into music is if PIL reform. "I still occasionally put out techno singles under different names," he says. "I have always been into disco - PIL was basically a dance band - but people don't want to hear me make that type of music."
He'll forever be a teenage Sex Pistol, though, and his main motivating force behind the Channel 4 programme was to deconstruct the deconstruction (if you will) of one of the most famous bands ever: "I don't recognise half of what punk apparently became. You need a dictionary to understand most of what's been written about it. What does that have to do with growing up in grotty council flat like I did."
Plastic Box by PIL is out now on the Virgin label. John Lydon's documentary about the Sex Pistols will be shown on Channel 4 next month