“CATASTROPHE will be the order of the day.”

Here he comes. John Lydon, ranter, performer, former Sex Pistol, current leader of Public Image Ltd (PiL), taking no prisoners as ever, being irresponsible and disrespectful, being in short, and in the words of Malcolm McLaren, everything this society hates.

He probably wouldn’t appreciate the co-opting of McLaren’s words. As he told Vic Galloway on Radio Scotland last Monday evening, he has very little time for the late Mr McLaren, the Pistols manager or, with McLaren’s partner Vivienne Westwood, the originator of much of punk’s look.

“To us,” Lydon said of McLaren and Westwood, “they were creepy adults lurking around.

“I would call the whole gaggle of them parasites.”

It doesn’t sound like there has been any thawing of attitudes in the decade since McLaren’s death.

Read More: Who wa the real Malcolm McLaren?

Lydon is in Scotland on a vook tour next week. And to promote it he gave Galloway an hour-long whistle-stop tour through his life his music, his opinions and his financial and emotional state.

It was a proper performance; clownish, defiant, bellicose, and yes, Trumpian at times, but also showing a hint of vulnerability despite his best efforts not to be seen as a “weak milksop coward”.

Lydon had become something of a cartoonish irritant over the years. Maybe he always was, but the cartoon has long since engulfed the man, perhaps to the detriment of his reputation.

One of the pleasures of Galloway’s interview, then, was that the interviewer was as interested in the music as the madness that went with it. In short, it offered a reminder of why we should care.

Galloway also remembered that Lydon’s contribution to the culture didn’t end with the raucous, messy and, following the tawdry death of Sid Vicious, ultimately traumatic demise of the Sex Pistols.

“We made some astounding music,” Lydon said of his time in PiL and he’s right. Not that it was without drama either. “Financial issues got in the way and egos, I’ve got to say, are always, always, always going to raise their ugly head.”

As a result, there have been 47 different members of the band since it formed at the end of the 1970s.

This felt like a proper interview, given space and time to breathe. That’s worth remembering in a week in which Times columnist Alex Massie has been criticising BBC Scotland’s output on TV and radio for its lack of ambition (and not without cause: Radio Scotland does suffer from being hideously reliant on a schedule that is formatted to within an inch of its life. And its football obsession is at times overbearing. And I like football.)

But what the station does well – most obviously in its various music strands – it does very well. And this was a good example of what is possible.

The recent court case, which saw his fellow Pistols take Lydon to court to allow the use of the band’s music in a new Danny Boyle biopic, inevitably came up. Lydon clearly won’t be watching it.

“It’s not the truth,” he harrumphed. “The better story would be the truth.”

Really, though, if you want to make a film about Lydon the one I’d like to see is the one about his relationship with his wife of 45 years, Nora, who has now been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Lydon talks of her with affection and of her condition with real sorrow. “I’ve got to painfully accept that,” he said of the diagnosis. “That broke my heart two years ago.”

At which point in the interview Lydon the cartoon disappeared and we were left with a human being. Whatever you may think of him, he’s that too.

Listen Out For: Laura Barton’s Notes on Music, Radio 4, Thursday, 11.30am. Writer Laura Barton returns with a new series of essays on pop, starting with a reminder in these Covid times of the joy of the live gig.