Rotten

"I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die...." - John Lydon Punk has been romanticized and embalmed in various media. An English class revolt that became a worldwide fashion statement, punk's idols were the Sex Pistols, and its sneering hero was Johnny Rotten. Seventeen years later, John Lydon looks back at himself, the Sex Pistols, and the "no future" disaffection of the time. Much more than just a music book, Rotten is an oral history of punk: angry, witty, honest, poignant, crackling with energy. Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Idol, London and England in the late 1970s, the Pistols' creation and collapse....all are here, in perhaps the best book ever written about music and youth culture, by one of its most notorious figures.

John Lydon now records and performs both as a solo artist and with PiL (Public Image Limited). He lives in California.

Keith and Kent Zimmerman are writers for Gavin Report. The live in Oakland, California.

"Invaluable...sheds welcome light on that short period of great music and spasmodic cultural change." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Alive at the core...Lydon's quite the humorist...(Full of) cut marks of wit and ego." --The New Yorker

"A wrathful Irish poet...Lydon proves to have a keen wit and rare insight." --The Washington Post Book World

"A pavement philosopher whose Dickensian roots of blossom with Joycean color." --Rolling Stone