He arrived on the pop culture landscape of the 1970s with the subtlety of a mushroom cloud, serving as the globally recognized face of punk rock, as well as its id.
John Lydon — then known as Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the British band the Sex Pistols — did not just espouse anarchy, he personified it, gyrating onstage like a broken marionette as he screeched against the pillars of polite society, while a hailstorm of spit rained in from the audience.
At their apogee, the Sex Pistols inspired pundits on the evening news to ponder, in all seriousness, whether the decline of Western civilization had finally arrived.
Mr. Lydon has apparently mellowed with age, at least by his standards.
On a recent rainy Wednesday, one of rock history’s most polarizing figures was standing in the Issey Miyake flagship store in TriBeCa, a hushed, gallery-like space that exhibits avant-garde clothing by its namesake Japanese designer.
“It goes beyond clothes,” Mr. Lydon said, admiring a pleated yellow jumpsuit with undulating curves that seemed borrowed from Frank Gehry. “It really is architecture.”
Turns out, the man who once called for “Anarchy in the U.K.” is something of a fashion plate.
As Johnny Rotten, the young Mr. Lydon had a knack for design. He would turn heads in London by wearing a T-shirt he made that read, “I Hate Pink Floyd.” Later, it was Johnny Rotten who took the scissors to his friend Sid Vicious’s Bowie-ish mullet, transforming it into a crown of black spikes.
And although credit for the Sex Pistols’ look often went to the band’s flamboyant manager, Malcolm McLaren, and his fashion muse Vivienne Westwood, it was Johnny Rotten who dreamed up his own rag-doll-in-bondage ensembles. Or so Mr. Lydon now says, as he tried on a deconstructed blue beret in front of a full-length mirror.
“This is the first lesson I learned in music,” he said. “Don’t trust adults. They’ll steal everything off you.”
A torrential rain pelted the store’s glassy facade. Mr. Lydon was wearing a playful ensemble that seemed a fitting counterpoint to Mr. Miyake’s sculptural confections: Valentino sneakers, an oversize yellow Burberry shirt that he had sliced into a poncho, and an old pair of gray Miyake trousers, whose generous pleats provided both style and comfort.
With his return to the public stage, Mr. Lydon’s girth has become a subject of tabloid reports. “John Lydon, 62, looks barely recognizable,” read a recent headline in The Daily Express in London. The Daily Mail said he “looks worlds away from his hell-raising rail-thin punk heyday.”
Mr. Lydon, for his part, isn’t about to start caring what people think. “Sometimes I bloat because I’ve got a thyroid problem,” he said. “It’s really nice when your pants expand, and you can wear them after, when you thin back down.”
This is not to suggest that Mr. Lydon, at 62, has gone soft. With a sprig of strawberry blond hair poking up from his shaved head that made him look like Tintin after a 10-year prison hitch, Mr. Lydon bellowed to a clerk, “Show me some basics, in the biggest size a fatty boy can get.”
Turning his attention once again to the billowy jumpsuit, he said: “What would I look like in that, a pregnant woman?” When the clerk assured him that the piece was unisex, he added, “Ain’t nothing wrong with some uni-sex. I went to a uni-versity, I know all about it.”
After shopping for about half an hour, Mr. Lydon was ready for a drink and a smoke. Along with his gravelly voiced manager, John Rambo Stevens, he climbed into a black S.U.V. and headed off to Hudson Bar and Books, a clubby, dark-paneled cigar bar in the West Village that still allows smoking.
“We’ll sneak a cigarette,” Mr. Lydon said mischievously as the car pulled up. “We’re the low-rent brigade.”
Settling into a corner stool, Mr. Lydon slapped a pack of Marlboro reds on the bar and ordered two draft Stellas: one for each hand, he joked. The few Wall Street types lingering over whiskeys at 5 p.m. seemed unaware that there was a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in their midst (never mind that Mr. Lydon refused to attend the Pistols’ 2006 induction).
Conversation turned to “The Public Image Is Rotten,” a new documentary on his lauded post-Pistols band, Public Image Ltd, or PiL, that opened in theaters this month. The band is also embarking on a 19-city tour of North America on Oct. 9
Despite 40 years of live performances, Mr. Lydon said he still suffers bouts of “terror” before each gig. “The idea of making a fool of myself and letting people down is appalling,” he said. “It’s self-torture I put myself through.”
While he is still best known for the Sex Pistols, that band cut just one studio album and lasted just over two years. PiL, on the other hand, has survived (in various incarnations) long enough to record 10 studio albums, and has influenced a generation of rock stars including Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, who give glowing testimonials in the film.
The band has produced anthems in its own right, including “Rise” and “This Is Not a Love Song.”
Even so, it has never been easy to live down the legacy of the Sex Pistols. In the early days of PiL, fans and critics resisted Mr. Lydon’s new, more musically adventurous, direction.
At concerts, “Row 1 to 30 would be Johnny Rotten imitators,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is going horribly wrong.’ I wasn’t doing this to create a new uniform that wasn’t any way near as good as what the Nazis had.”
Aware this conservation was being recorded, he quickly added with a wink: “‘John said with the utmost possible humor.’”
“That’s where punk and me separated,” he continued. “Punk wanted to maintain the cliché and the uniformity that it didn’t deserve. And I wanted to do new and different things, which is, to my mind, what punk is all about: Do it yourself, which means be true to yourself.”
Indeed, 40 years after Pistols imploded following a chaotic United States club tour, Mr. Lydon finds it amazing that modern bands are still out there wearing spiky haircuts, trying to keep 1978 alive.
“It is embarrassing, really,” he said. “How many bands are out there like Green Day now? I look at them, and I just have to laugh. They’re coat hangers, you know. A turgid version of something that doesn’t actually belong to them.”
As he drained another Stella and spewed a stream of invective, Mr. Lydon seemed anything but retiring. Yet, as a man in his 60s, he also sounded pensive and reflective as he discussed the limits of revolution, in music and other arenas.
Punk, he said, became a “caricature,” rap a “perfect backdrop to sell a pair of sneakers.” And then, of course, there is politics.
In recent years, Mr. Lydon has ruffled feathers by suggesting that Donald Trump’s presidency is the Sex Pistols of politics. But as a United States citizen (he lives in Los Angeles), Mr. Lydon said he voted for the candidate “whose name rhymes with ‘Hilarity,’” despite his palpable lack of enthusiasm for her “loser trip” candidacy.
“What America did was it voted in a businessman to replace politicians,” he said from within a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Is business the alternative? I’ve openly said I don’t think so. That’s the ultimate corruption, but that’s how desperate America has become.”
The man who once sang “God save the queen, the fascist regime” does such a convincing job impersonating an adult these days that some in his native country have suggested knighthood for him, just like his fellow British rock luminaries Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Elton John.
When I mentioned this, his eyes bulged in horror. “Do you think,” he said, “I’d ever let the Queen hold a sword over my head?”
