How Hot Reggae and a Fiery Pepper Made Johnny Rotten Cool: Photographer Dennis Morris Show in London

The newspapers were quick to declare that it was all over, after a short infamous career, for singer Johnny Rotten when the Sex Pistols broke up.A new visual show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts by photographer and designer Dennis Morris helps to explain – as punk celebrates its 40th anniversary – how the star reverted to his original name John Lydon, discovered new music and an original visual style with a little help and inspiration from his friends.Morris had started young, at the age of 16 taking one of the most famous photographs of reggae musician Bob Marley smoking. He went on to become a confidante of the Sex Pistols, later visiting Lydon’s duplex flat in London’s Guenther Grove and capturing the first photographs of his new group with guitarist Keith Levene, bassist Jah Wobble and drummer Jim Walker.Morris speaks in an interview about the work.Those of us who have met John Lydon know he can be a prickly guy but he’s also sharp and likeable. What’s your view?As you said, he’s a bit of a Jack the Lad character in some ways. He’s always been very cool with me. I think he realizes I’m not someone to play around with, if you see what I’m saying.It looked like punk was about to be killed by New Wave by 1978. How did you get involved?John (Lydon, formerly Johnny Rotten) came back to London and he was in a bit of the state. He wasn’t sure what the future would hold for him.Later I got a phone call from (Virgin bosses) Richard Branson and Simon Draper asking for a meeting, so I went down to (the company base’s) Vernon Yard. They were going to get involved with reggae music in a big way and they were to go to Jamaica and they wanted me to do photos for press and promotion. I said, ‘Yes, of course, and why don’t you take John because he is a huge reggae fan.’ Three of us jetted off to Jamaica. We arrived in Kingston and we came out of the airport and some Rastafarians saw John and started singing (Jamaican accent imitation of ‘Anarchy in the UK’) ‘God save da Queen, man.’ From that moment on, we knew he was going to be cool. I already had quite a lot of contacts in Jamaica from working with Bob Marley, so when we were there I took John to see people like Big Youth, U-Roy and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. We went to the studios and heard how the music was made and from that the idea of Public Image was made.There was a lot in that music apart from reggae: dub, prog..Yes, when John was in Jamaica he could hear reggae music from its source. When we came back, we spent lots of days and nights in his flat listening to dub reggae but also a lot of (German prog-rock band) Can - and when you listen to PiL can hear some of that with the influences.For PiL’s debut single ‘Public Image,’ you designed a sleeve like a folded sheet of a tabloid. Then the cover of that first album was even less punk like: how did it come about?The first single design came about because John was getting a lot of flak from the press. From this kind of piss-take of the media, the natural progression was to a magazine, using the same typefaces. We put the track listing on the cover in the same way a magazine would have the contents.I knew that John basically wanted to kill the bumpkin image. I had that in mind when at the same time I was doing work with Rose Royce, who had a massive hit with “Car Wash” and they were over touring in England. I got my first exposure to the big American supergroup sort of system where they had a wardrobe unit and a make-up unit. I was backstage and was fascinated by the make-up artist in particular, so I said to her that I was helping a band called Public Image Ltd and she said she hadn’t heard of them and I said, ‘Well, you know it is that singer from the Sex Pistols.’ And she said, ‘Yes, Johnny Rotten!’ ‘So would you be interested in it?’ and she said, ‘yes, definitely.’ I wanted to change the persona of what people thought John and each member of the band should look like.The next album sits in the CD collection with its 16mm canister – do explain how you created this.John wanted to call the album “The Metal Box” and it suddenly dawned on me that close to my old (Hackney, London) secondary school there was a place called The Metal Box Factory, and I never knew what they did. So the next day I went down to the factory and it turned out that they made film canisters which were exactly the same size as vinyl, so I had a meeting with them and asked how much it cost to buy X thousand of them and how much it would cost to emboss a logo on them and they gave me a price. I went to see Virgin and they said, ‘you’ve got to be mad.’ I said ‘it’s actually quite feasible’ and I gave them the price and they said. ‘okay, fine.’A lot of the designs I do work with the subliminal, for instance the PiL logo (looking like a breakable medicine tablet) is based on the aspirin.You’ve done a lot of photos since and worked with many artists (everything from the Marianne Faithfull ‘Broken English’ album cover to images of the Sikh community of Southall, West London) – but was this something of a golden age, how do you see it?Well, the album covers, if they were for a band today, would still be seen as unique. I always tried to produce something that is timeless. It’s the same with my photograph of Bob Marley, where people say it is like he is still here: they don’t get the feeling that he’s past.Any favorite recollection of those years with John?There was a time when John was with me in Jamaica and I had taken him to see my grandmother. It was really funny: we sat down to eat Jamaican stew which always comes with a whole lethal hot pepper. John mistook it for one of those peppers you get in England, so he just ate it and he was running around like a madman going ‘Argh! Argh! Argh!’ and he couldn’t get enough water, My grandmother was saying, ‘what is wrong with the boy?’Dennis Morris’s photography exhibition, “PiL – First Issue to Metal Box,” runs from March 23 through May 15, 2016, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH. Information: https://www.ica.org.uk