Watch Trailer for John Lydon Movie ‘The Public Image Is Rotten’
Producers of the John Lydon documentary The Public Image Is Rotten released a trailer featuring Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and others.
The movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and will hit theaters in New York on Sept. 14 before rolling out to other other cities. You can watch the trailer below.
Lydon is seen discussing how it “wasn’t much fun” to be Johnny Rotten, frontman for the Sex Pistols, because of manager Malcolm McLaren’s obsession with shocking people at the cost of musical endeavor, and how he decided to create Public Image Ltd., which would “approach it without that media mockery.”
He notes that he had to “really, really fight for my survival” and admits he doubted whether anyone in the music industry held any respect for him.
“I wanted to get away from attacking institutions, which was basically the job I allotted for myself when I joined the Pistols, and I just wanted to experiment inside my own head,” Lydon told Rolling Stone in 2015. “You can't change the world if you don't change yourself first. So that was the ambition of it all. Very utopian in many ways, but that's basically how PiL works.”
Responding to the suggestion that no two PiL albums sound alike, Lydon says, “There's no need for them to. There's a great deal of conversation that goes into things, which gets everybody on the same page.”
“I didn't want to have a bunch of famous musicians telling how much they're influenced by PiL," first-time director Tabbert Fiiller said in a statement earlier this year. "That would've been a long list, so I narrowed it down to people that have been influenced by PiL but also have had a connection to PiL and had stories to tell. I also wanted a variety of musicians that would show how PiL's influence has carried over into many types of music.”
PiL are currently touring the U.K. to mark their 40th anniversary.