Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
John Lydon
Plexus £12.99, pp329

John Lydon's expletive-driven departure from the Australian rainforest last week captured the headlines but it did not answer the question that continues to baffle us long-term Lydon watchers: why was he there in the first place? Then again, he has lived his life as if in illustration of Wilde's dictum that 'consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative'.

Anyone looking for clues as to the current state of Lydon's psyche could do worse than read his biography, first published 10 years ago, and hastily reissued to cash in on his current and unexpected popularity. It primarily concerns his time in the Sex Pistols, and the notoriety that attended those few years when his punk alter-ego, Johnny Rotten, was the object of the kind of mass moral panic one can never imagine a pop performer ever engendering again.

The narrative is stitched together from Lydon's highly selective rendering of punk history and the often contradictory testimonies of many of his friends. It's a story that's been told many times but not as scurrilously or with such blatant bias, and, as such, is highly entertaining. From time to time, you are given a glimpse of Lydon's otherness, not least his pathological unwillingness to embrace any orthodoxy, be it punk rebellion or celebrity conformity. He was, and remains, a man of contradictory impulses, fascinated by football hooliganism and Oscar Wilde.

And as for the other influences... 'We were more like Pinkie and his gang from Brighton Rock,' he writes at one point of his teenage friends. 'His gang was deeply peculiar, extremely different from each other. I hung around with people who challenged me continually about everything I stood for.' I wonder what they make of him now.