ROTTEN LUCK : Punk’s John Lydon Survived the Sex Pistols, But He Hasn’t Yet Managed to Save the World

Before he became Johnny Rotten, John Lydon used to help his father dig out London cesspools. The lad’s specialty was dispatching sewer rats that got in the way. One wonders whether this experience set the pattern for Lydon’s subsequent career in rock.

First with the Sex Pistols, who lit punk rock’s fuse with their 1977 album “Never Mind the Bollocks,” and in 10 albums with his ongoing band, Public Image Ltd., Lydon’s primary method has been to spot a rat and come out hacking.

The targets are bigger nowadays than they were back in the sewers: censors, junkies, manipulative religious leaders and rock stars with messianic pretensions are among the game Lydon stalks on P.I.L.’s new album, “That What Is Not.” As is his custom, he pursues them with declamatory zeal and sarcastic disgust, railing away with one of rock’s most theatrical voices.

Lydon is a natural contrarian, a master of invective who thrives in opposition. In a recent phone interview from Tampa, Fla., where he was waiting to open a tour sponsored by MTV’s “120 Minutes,” he began with a cheery greeting but quickly assumed the imperious tone and the antagonist’s stance that is his most comfortable public persona. For Lydon, an interview is one more opportunity to hack away at the figurative rats he stalks in his songs.

As he spoke, Lydon smoked a cigarette, setting off a hotel room smoke alarm. “Crap hotels,” he said with a mixture of mirth and bile, after opening a window to silence the high-pitched beeping. The other extraneous noises during the chat came from two unfettered belches with which Lydon punctuated his discourse. He didn’t say “crap hotel food,” and he didn’t say “excuse me.” The lapse of etiquette was comforting, in a way. It would have been terribly disillusioning to have heard the former Johnny Rotten beg anybody’s pardon.

While Lydon’s basic vituperative method remains in effect on “That What Is Not,” the album does contain a few surprises. One is the brief return of the Sex Pistols.

At the end of the opening track, “Acid Drops,” in which Lydon imagines his words burning “like acid drops” into the flesh of would-be censors, we hear the famous “no future” refrain from the Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” in a sound bite taken from the original recording. Could Lydon be feeling nostalgia for the good old days of punk?

“You mustn’t place too much emphasis on me sampling myself,” he said. “That was done almost flippantly by Dave Jerden,” the album’s producer. “He snuck it in one night” after Lydon had left the studio. “I hated it when I first heard it. But I later thought, ‘OK,’ because it does fit with the sentiment of the song. Censorship is a problem I first ran into with the Sex Pistols.”

The recasting of that “no future” refrain does say something about the difference between Lydon in his Sex Pistol teens, and his outlook now that he is in his mid-30s. On “God Save the Queen,” “no future” had a gleeful ring to it. Lydon and his band mates were triumphant at having found a voice of their own, a voice they could use to disparage the established social order. In howling “no future,” they could imagine themselves overthrowing what they despised.

In “Acid Drops,” the borrowed “no future” refrain is electronically treated to sound ghostly, aged, and chilling. For the older Lydon, “no future” is no longer a triumphant prospect, but simply a fearful one.

If censors prevail, he said, “you will have no future. These vested interest groups are the most serious threat I can see to humanity at the moment. I cannot see why people are not bitterly angry about it. They say that (confrontational art works at the center of the National Endowment for the Arts controversy) are irreligious and anti-Christian. Isn’t that the same mentality (Iran) had against Salman Rushdie? They will very fast turn this country into (Iran). No sexually frustrated old biddy and horrible, impotent old judge is going to tell me how to lead my life.”

Lydon decided to use the cover of “That What Is Not” as exhibition space for some provocative artwork. The image is black, bushy, triangular. “It’s pubic hair to those who want to believe so,” Lydon said. “It isn’t to me. I know what it is, and that’s my business. I wouldn’t inflict my opinion on somebody else.

“My original design was what I call ‘The Meat Tower,’ ” Lydon added, describing it as a phallic construction made of “buttocks and breasts of well-endowed women. The record company said, ‘No way, Johnny boy.’ That was a form of censorship.”

Lydon’s sociopolitical broadsides are just that: broad. Rather than pinpointing a specific example to illustrate one of his themes (for example, addressing the consequences of religious censorship by writing about Rushdie’s plight), he’s content to be general. Lydon says he doesn’t want to miss the forest for the trees, to snip the tail off the rat when he has a chance to crush every bone in the critter’s body.

“That’s just sloganeering,” Lydon said of the notion of writing about specific incidents. “That would just be what the Clash do, and I don’t think they are very valid. You have to deal in broader themes, across the board. If you deal in trivial instances, then you don’t see the longer view. You don’t see the future.”

Slagging the Clash, which succeeded the Pistols as the leading light of British punk, seems rather unpolitic, even for Lydon. After all, one of the three bands barnstorming with P.I.L. in the “120 Minutes” tour is Big Audio Dynamite II, fronted by Mick Jones, a Clash mainstay.

“Oh no, Mick’s a friend,” Lydon said when asked whether there figures to be friction on the tour. “What I feel about his music is neither here nor there. Real people don’t take things like that personally. Not all of us out here in the wonderful world of music are precious prima donnas. I’ve known Mick (since before) the Clash. He tried to join (the Sex Pistols) but he needed serious guitar lessons at the time. It was also much easier without a fifth member. Money was so bloody tight.”

Recent developments in music and politics can be taken as a validation of the punk outlook that Lydon first championed with the Sex Pistols.

In rock, anger and rebelliousness are now the rage, as bands such as Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, and a raft of rappers find large audiences. And in world events, an entire established order--the Communist bloc--has crumbled. Punk preached the overthrow of established orders; the fall of the Soviet Union would seem to confirm that it wasn’t a pipe dream, after all.

Lydon, who snarled in one well-known P.I.L. refrain that “anger is an energy,” isn’t energized by Axl Rose’s venting of anger.

“I’m not sure what Guns N’ Roses are going on about, apart from self-idolatry and the rock ‘n’ roll cliches,” Lydon said. “They don’t understand what they’re doing very well. It’s a little bit selfish, because we’re all angry. There are bigger things out there (than a GNR-style unleashing of personal fury), and you can get at those more acutely. Public Enemy I have much greater empathy with, although they’re becoming more tired of late. That doesn’t mean their message is any less valid. I don’t think Guns N’ Roses has a message at all.”

In world affairs, the singer who yowled “I wanna be anarchy” on the Sex Pistols hit, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” cringes at the prospect of anarchy in the U.S.S.R.

“In fact, it terrifies me, and it should terrify the whole world,” Lydon said. “The feudalism creeping in there now, and the petty hatreds going back 400 years--all these people have nuclear warheads.”

“At the time (that ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ appeared) I declared in no uncertain terms that anarchy would never work unless you had something to back up your antagonism with. I don’t want to wreck things. I don’t want to live in a world of ‘Mad Max.’ You have to replace it with something sensible. You have to have something lined up. Otherwise, it’s mindless stupid vindictiveness and death, and we all get dragged in.”

Amid all the fear and loathing that is the basic premise of the new P.I.L. album (and of virtually all his past work), Lydon tosses in a sentiment that, given his track record, sounds downright suspicious.

“Love . . . has to be treated with respect and taken seriously. . . . I want to belong,” he sings in “Love Hope.”

Has the old rat killer turned teddy bear? Or is this just another salvo of Lydon irony that we should be leery of taking literally? Are these warm sentiments to be taken at face value?

“Why not? I meant them,” Lydon said. “I am a human being--I think people don’t understand that. I have these feelings like anybody else, and I chose to include them.”

Lydon, who lives in London with his wife, Nora (they have no children, and he says they probably won’t have any for reasons he doesn’t care to discuss), acknowledges that there is some vulnerability involved in “Love Hope.”

“Absolutely,” he said, chuckling at the admission, as if struck by the seeming absurdity of a vulnerable John Lydon.

“I feel more confidence in myself, and I feel I can say these things,” he said. Before, “I was too wound up with fears and self-depreciation and phobias. I’ve managed to chase these out of my life. I don’t know what brought that about. I hit 30 and sat down, and thought about myself seriously.”

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, Lydon quickly promises he’s not about to turn into a sensitive troubadour. He invokes Barry Manilow as a convenient straw man exemplifying unacceptable sentimentality.

“That kind of manipulation doesn’t appeal to me, because it is unreal,” Lydon said. “It’s as unreal as silly women filling their houses up with pink ribbons and teddy bears.”

Despite its turn toward romantic yearning, “Love Hope” isn’t exactly pink ribbons and frills. For one thing, it is one of the heaviest blasters on an album that continues the exploration of fairly straightforward rock that dates back to P.I.L.’s 1986 release, “Album.”

Before that, Lydon had pursued an experimental bent, best exemplified by the dark and baleful 1979 release, “Second Edition.” Besides Lydon, P.I.L.’s current lineup includes guitarist John McGeoch, bassist Allan Dias and drummer Mike Joyce, formerly of the Smiths. Appearing as guests on the new album are some decidedly pre-punk, tradition-minded stylists, including Los Angeles harmonica man Jimmie Wood, ‘70s soul shouter Bonnie Sheridan (formerly Bonnie Bramlett) and the Tower of Power horns.

At the end of “Love Hope,” as Lydon bays “I want to belong,” his anguished tone leaves it very much in doubt whether he really can belong.

What does Lydon want to belong to, anyway?

Characteristically, his answer reveals nothing personal. For public consumption, at least, he thinks in global terms.

“All this nonsense that divides us as a species--we’re all the same,” Lydon said. “I want to belong to something that (can uphold) that. Is that Utopian of me? Possibly so, but that’s where I want to belong.”

Who: John Lydon, with Public Image Ltd., performing as part of the MTV “120 Minutes” Tour with Big Audio Dynamite II, Live and Blind Melon.

When: Thursday, March 26, at 8 p.m.

Where: Crawford Hall, off Bridge Road on the UCI campus.

Whereabouts: Corona Del Mar (73) Freeway south to University Drive exit. Go East to Campus Drive. Turn right, then right at Bridge Road. Proceed into UC Irvine Campus, turn left on Mesa Road into parking lots. Or, take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Campus Drive exit, turn left, then right onto University, left at Campus, right on Bridge.

Wherewithal: The show is SOLD OUT.

Where to call: (714) 856-5000.