Public Image Ltd.- Lydon & Levene - Press Conference San Francisco March 3 1980.

http://phenagen.blogspot.com/ Picking their way towards the stage through cables and pens come Lydon and Levene, resembling street tramps who've just crawled out of bed. In fact there's a limousine outside. It must bring back memories. John Lydon has too many memories and he's doing his best to exorcise them. He's doing away with rock'n'roll, with managers, with the whole sordid past. He's here instead to talk about PIL while people want to talk about the Pistols, a band Americans hardly saw. The myth hangs around like an albatross -- small wonder he's doing his best to forget and destroy it. On the stand the two look very young, very arrogant and very cynical. As far as they're concerned: "This is a farce. We look like fools." Lydon looks his usual disgruntled self, his eyes sweeping the audience, occasionally stopping to pierce right through the selected target. Both have a gift for seeing right through pretension, eyes that make you wither on the spot. Lydon, when asked, explains he believes in nothing and he has the ability to reduce everything to nothingness, pointlessness, which is both cleansing, depressing and exhilarating. His humour and contempt and the cartoon quality the Pistols image has now assumed make him in part a figure of fun, a fact which he resents and occasionally exploits. Throughout the questioning there's an undercurrent of cynical purity to everything he says, damaged or charged he remains a moral man without beliefs, who is intensely moral. Moral but still a manipulator as he said in 'Anarchy': "I use the best. I use the enemy."

Added 26 Mar 2026