'If you went smack into the middle of the enemy's camp,' Lydon remembers, 'they'd back off, because they couldn't believe you had the cheek to do it.' He's under no illusions, though, about the durability of his achievement: 'I really do think the crowning glory of the Sex Pistols is that we've always managed to disappoint on big occasions. The book's greatest achievement is to capture the excitement of breaking out of that pre-punk English small-mindedness which the title (from a sign once seen all too frequently in boarding-house windows) embodies so perfectly. Lydon spent a year between the ages of seven and eight in hospital, acquiring not just the outsider status but also the hunched back and unfocused stare that would later (with help from Olivier's Richard III) solidify into the Rotten persona. Two snaps labelled 'before and after meningitis' tell their own story.

The family photographs of Rotten's formative years, for all their throwaway captions - 'Cocteau-esque Lydon family beach party', for instance - are illuminating.

He's not the kind of person who would, for instance, abuse animals.'

The story of her unavailing efforts to get first John and then Sid Vicious to marry her so she can stay in the country is hilarious, and her acute observations on Lydon's character are at once cruel and kind: 'John's a bastard, but there's still something sweet and tender about him. Hynde, whose pre-history as punk rock fairy godmother seems to be worth a book in itself, is especially revealing. Rotten's ranting reminiscences are interspersed with a fascinating body of testimony - some supportive, some healthily contradictory - from his father, his friends, Finsbury Park football hooligans - turned - jewellery designers, fellow Sex Pistols Steve Cook and Paul Jones, record company employees and assorted punk alumni such as Steve Severin, Chrissie Hynde and Billy Idol. THIS portrait of the author as a young Sex Pistol is an exhausting, splenetic book, but there is something very gratifying about its refusal to fall into line with the numerous other accounts of the period (which Lydon rubbishes so tirelessly as to become tiresome) and with its subject's obsessive self-validation.

Rotten no irish no blacks no dogs