The Blackpool wind whipped a strand of surprisingly soft, dyed-green hair across John Lydon’s face. He spat, more from habit than actual phlegm these days. The promenade was a kaleidoscope of faded grandeur and hopeful neon, a fitting backdrop, he thought, for a man who’d once declared himself an antichrist and now found himself… well, here.
He wasn’t Johnny Rotten anymore, not really. That snarling, safety-pinned icon felt like a character he’d played, a necessary explosion to detonate the stagnant pop scene. John Lydon, the bloke sipping a lukewarm cup of tea from a chipped mug in a greasy spoon overlooking the Irish Sea, was… different. Not necessarily tame, mind you. The glint in his eye still held a spark of rebellion, a refusal to suffer fools gladly.
He’d come back to Blackpool for a reason he couldn’t quite articulate, even to himself. Maybe it was the salt-laced air, the echo of his childhood holidays spent dodging donkey hooves and sticky candy floss. Maybe it was the faint, almost ghostly strains of old-time music drifting from a distant amusement arcade, a reminder of a simpler time before the world went mad, or at least, before he helped push it a little further over the edge.
He watched a group of teenagers, all ripped jeans and defiant haircuts, swagger past. One of them sported a faded Sex Pistols t-shirt. A flicker of something – pride? Amusement? A touch of melancholy? – crossed Lydon’s face. They had no idea, these kids. No idea the chaos, the fury, the sheer exhilarating audacity of it all. They just saw the t-shirt, the symbol.
He took another sip of his tea, the bitterness a familiar comfort. He’d been called a lot of things in his life: a punk, a provocateur, a genius, a charlatan. Maybe he was all of them, a tangled mess of contradictions like the town he now found himself in.
A small, scruffy dog trotted up to his table, tail wagging tentatively. Lydon, the man who once sang about being an anarchist, looked down at it. He didn’t shoo it away. Instead, a small, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a forgotten biscuit, offering it to the dog.
As the dog crunched happily, John Lydon looked out at the grey expanse of the sea. The wind still howled, but now it felt less like a threat and more like a familiar companion. Johnny Rotten might be a ghost, a legend etched in the annals of rock and roll. But John Lydon was still here, in Blackpool, with a cup of weak tea and a friendly stray, watching the waves crash and the world turn, in his own uniquely unrepentant way. The fight might be different now, quieter, but the refusal to conform, the stubborn spark of defiance, still flickered within him, a green flame in the grey.