It’s been the toughest time for JOHN LYDON – dealing with the illness and death of his wife, Nora. As ever, PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED is the channel for his pain, his anger and, on occasion, his joy. Cue: contempt for the other Pistols and love for Status Quo, on a menu of fear, mischief, laughter and hope. “I have no control over my emotions at all,” he tells TOM DOYLE.

MAIN PORTRAIT TOM SHEEHAN

His own creation: John Lydon, in his London flat, March 1981.

A world apart: Public Image Limited in 2023 Scott Firth, Lu Edmonds, John Lydon, Bruce Smith.

Tom Sheehan, Andres Poveda

IT IS MID-MAY, SIX WEEKS SINCE JOHN Lydon’s wife of more than four decades, Nora Forster, passed away, following a five-year period in which she suffered from Alzheimer’s and Lydon acted as her carer. Yet the ex-Sex Pistol and eternal PiL singer is already back at work. Sat on a sofa at his home near Oxnard, California, surrounded by punky-coloured pink and orange sheepskin cushions, wearing red glasses and a peach and blue checked shirt, his hair shaved at the sides and swept back into a neat quiff, he’s clearly relieved to be returning to action. Still, in his first interview since Forster’s death, he remains fundamentally deep in grief, and his raw emotions immediately break to the surface. “I’m very nervous,” he admits, as his eyes brim. “It’s very hard.”

Nonetheless, the singer acknowledges that throwing himself back into PiL is essential to his well-being. “Yes,” he nods. “It would be a disappointment to those that really matter in my life not to…”

But Lydon is nothing if not resilient, and his composure returns – after a sip of ginger beer and a few puffs on a fag – as talk turns to PiL’s multi-faceted new album, End Of World. Moving back and forth between the dark (brooding groovers Down On The Clown and Strange) and the light (the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band-inspired jazz of Dirty Murky Delight; daft glammy tongue-twister The Do That), it was recorded in English residential studios pre- and post-pandemic, and introduced to the public with Hawaii, the atypically tender ballad written by Lydon about memories of happier times with Forster.

The singer says his wife loved End Of World – another factor helping to drive him on. “It made her laugh, and the louder I’d play it, the more she enjoyed it,” he beams. “Actually, the least favourite track for her was Hawaii. It might have been a bit too sentimental for her. But, ooh, I’m sure she likes it now (laughs).”

That said, it was a wrench to leave Forster behind in California while he was recording.

“This was a very, very difficult album to make for me,” he offers. “I was playing the album the other night, and I hadn’t played it in a while. I couldn’t. I just wasn’t right for it. It’s the deepest I think I’ve ever had to write.”

One track in particular, the metallic North West Passage, which employs the mythical Atlantic/Pacific sea lane as a metaphor for the journey towards death, finds him ominously ruminating on “barely a future” and wondering, “Could it be the end of my life?” It seems mortality has been on his mind for a while.

“I look back at that song and I’m wondering, Oh, was I subconsciously thinking about that?” he says. “I do my best to, like, not be that way. But I have to question it. And I have to deal with it. I have to face it fully, as a man would and should.