John Lydon has said he is competing to represent Ireland at this year’s Eurovision song contest primarily in order to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease. The former Sex Pistols frontman (once known as Johnny Rotten) will appear with his band, Public Image Ltd, on the Late Late Show on 3 February, performing Hawaii, a love letter to his wife of 44 years, Nora Forster, who is living with the illness.
“I’m doing it to highlight the sheer torture of what Alzheimer’s is,” said the singer, who holds an Irish passport as well as US citizenship. “It gets swept under the carpet, but in highlighting it, hopefully we get a stage nearer to a cure.” Lydon insisted that spreading this message was much more important than competing to win, so he isn’t listening to the five other entrants.
He said: “I don’t want all that stuff to clutter me up, although if there’s a gold cup in it, I’ll have it.”
The announcement of the 66-year-old former punk’s appearance in a contest associated with bombastic power ballads and energetic dance routines raised eyebrows, although Lydon suggested “the Irish side” had been courting him to represent them for some time. “I kept telling them, ‘Don’t touch. I’m a married man’. But somehow or other this song got picked up and here I am.”