Johnny Rotten
In their prime, The Sex Pistols were the voice of a generation and the most important British band since The Beatles. And nobody personified the teen angst of the late 1970s quite like their frontman, punk-in-chief John Lydon, also known as Johnny Rotten. Since the heyday of punk, Lydon has carried on recording and performing and has even become something of a national treasure in his native England. However, it could have all been so different had his wife not been so bad at packing a suitcase…
The singer and his lady were booked on a flight from London to Detroit just before Christmas in 1988. The code of the flight? Pan Am 103, better known as the plane that was hit by the Lockerbie Bombing. Recounting his brush with death years later, Lydon revealed that it was just sheer dumb luck that saved him from being among the dead passengers. “Nora and I should have been dead,” he told the Scottish Sunday Mirror in 2004. “Nora hadn’t packed in time. The minute we realized what happened, we just looked at each other and almost collapsed.”
Had the first couple of punk made it onto the flight, they would have not stood a chance. All of the passengers and crew were killed outright, as well as 11 people on the ground in the village of Lockerbie, Scotland. The disaster was caused by a bomb hidden in the luggage compartment. A former Libyan intelligence agent convicted of the atrocity in 2001, even though he maintained his own innocence right up until his own death.
What’s more, Lydon has also revealed that the near-miss affects him to this day, not least when it comes to air travel. In 2004, he walked off a reality TV show in Australia after the producers failed to confirm whether or not his wife’s plane had landed safely.
