Photo: John & Nora | By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | On Thursday, John Lydon (a/k/a Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. announced in a heartbreaking Facebook post that his wife of 44 years, Nora Forster, had died at age 80, following a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Lydon first publicly announced Forster’s illness in 2018, and in 2020 he told Britain’s The Mirror that he had become “her full-time carer… I won’t let anyone mess up with her head. For me, the real person is still there. That person I love is still there every minute of every day, and that is my life.”
While the brief and doomed relationship between the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and punk scenester Nancy Spungen became the subject of the acclaimed biopic Sid and Nancy in 1986, it was always the romance between Lydon and Forster that was truly fascinating and the stuff of legend. Lydon met Forster, a German publishing heiress 14 years his senior, when he was in his early twenties; Forster was the mother of Ari Up, the teenage frontwoman of another pioneering British punk band, the Slits. The couple married in 1979, and in 2000 became the legal guardians of Up’s twin sons. They also became the guardians of Ari’s third child in 2010, after the Slits singer died of breast cancer.
In 2015, during a sit-down interview with Yahoo Entertainment, seen in the video above, Lydon spoke about the many doubters who’d once assumed that his relationship with Forster would never last. “Well, good luck to people that are flippant about their relationships and their responsibility towards their fellow human beings, but people like me and Nora, we spend the time and take the effort to understand each other,” he said. “And then it becomes a life’s work in progress. And for my way of living, that’s how it want it to be. I don’t take commitments lightly. I don’t treat fellow human beings as tools of my trade. So, there you go — I’m a loyalist at heart.”
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Lydon rarely missed an opportunity to gush to the press about his devotion to his wife. In 2014, before Forster’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he told the The Guardian: “I have never been unfaithful, though I had plenty of opportunity in the Sex Pistols. … It’s love, you know. I’ve always loved that woman. And she knows it. When we met we didn’t expect to get on. We’d both been told the other was a bad ‘un. But blimey. Sparks flew. It was instant attraction. And that’s never gone. … I can’t think of a better woman on God’s earth than Nora. If we ceased to function as a couple tomorrow there would be no one else. Not ever. I mean it. … The idea of losing Nora is unbearable. If one of us goes before the other it will be murder for the survivor. She is older than me but women live longer, so we should die at exactly the same time. That would be perfect.”
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Go here to read the rest of this loving tribute:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/remembering-john-lydon-and-nora-forster-punks-greatest-love-story-once-i-make-the-commitment-its-forever-202649546.html
Photo: John & Nora
https://www.facebook.com/johnlydonofficial/photos
Remembering John Lydon and Nora Forster, Punk’s Greatest Love Story: ‘Once I make the commitment, it’s forever’
