Johnny Rotten’s eye-opening 1978 trip to Jamaica
Credit: Far Out / John Lydon / Public Image Ltd
After spearheading the rebellion of the late 1970s as the snarling face of anti‑establishment fury, John Lydon‘s punk exterior gradually began to soften.
You could say it softened all the way to room temp butter, which is precisely what he ended up advertising in 2008, grinning through a Country Life campaign that made punk purists choke on their tea. Throw in a stint on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and a handful of other resolutely mainstream appearances, and the once‑putrid Johnny Rotten suddenly looked suspiciously spreadable.
His political allegiances have drifted over time too; for years, Lydon has dismayed some Sex Pistols fans with his enthusiasm for the 45th and 47th president of the United States, even donning a red MAGA (Make America Great Again) cap during interviews.
In 2017, he told NPR he thought Trump was “magnificent” and “a cat amongst the pigeons”, praising the disruption he brought to politics, yet by 2025, he’d swung the other way, telling NME that Trump was “one of the most horrible little runts I’ve ever seen,” before adding, in quite literally the same breath, “I’ll never like him. I’ll vote for him, but that’s about it”.
An unreliable narrator? Absolutely. But if we rewind to 1978, before the butter, the reality TV, and certainly before the MAGA hat, you couldn’t deny that Lydon had a pretty good taste in music. An admirer of reggae and dub long before the breakup of the Sex Pistols, and before the bass‑and‑reverb heavy experiments of Public Image Ltd, Lydon only began to get his career back on track after a 1978 visit to Jamaica.
At the end of a chaotic American tour in early 1978, the Pistols split in bitter disarray, and Lydon returned to London with no idea what he was going to do next. Around that time, legendary photographer Dennis Morris was asked by Virgin Records supremo Richard Branson to join him on a trip to Jamaica. Reggae was at the peak of its creativity, and Branson (ever the plotter) planned to scoop up the cream of roots’n’dub talent for a new subsidiary of Virgin Records called The Front Line. Morris would photograph the signings for album covers and promotional shots, and like the good friend he was, he decided to bag his reggae-loving pal Rotten Lydon a free holiday.
And so, Johnny boarded his Branson all‑inclusive, quickly finding himself in the orbit of DJ and Clash videographer Don Letts and Jamaican legend Big Youth, while Morris diligently captured Lydon in full tropical disarray: a pale, wiry Londoner trying to inhale half the island. The Jamaica trip wasn’t just three weeks of colossal spliffs and sun‑bleached chaos though, as somewhere in the haze, Lydon finally started sketching out what his future might sound like (not before Branson tried to recruit him to join Devo, though).
“John was picking up a lot of information, a lot of vibes,” said Morris, pointing in particular to times spent hanging out at Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s famous studio, The Black Ark. “Scratch was the most charismatic figure we met in Jamaica, a total genius. And I think it was at the Black Ark, and going to sound systems, and just hanging out in Jamaica, that led John to conceive the idea for Public Image Ltd.”
When Lydon returned to London, he moved fast, linking up with his reggae‑obsessed mate Jah Wobble, who taught him bass, and former Clash guitarist Keith Levene, who later quite rightly joked that PiL probably only worked because they were “all total dub fanatics”.
You can see the footage of Lydon’s time spent in Jamaica below, complete with creepers on the beach and not even a whiff of a pair of shorts.
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