John Lydon

Fire holds four of his ten planets, air three, water three and not one of them earth. The element that would hold a position steady is missing from the chart entirely, which for a singer the record follows from one band into another is the absence to start with. Lydon sang in the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten and afterwards in Public Image Ltd, and the record gives Holloway in north London and Irish parents.

The Sun sits at eleven degrees of Aquarius, which builds an identity on not being told, with Mercury on the second degree of the same sign and retrograde. Four planets here sit within a degree and a half of a sign boundary: Mercury at the start of Aquarius, Saturn at the start of Sagittarius, Neptune on the first twenty five minutes of Scorpio and Uranus on the last nine minutes of Cancer. His Moon sits on the third degree of Libra at noon, with the sign before it still possible, Virgo. For a record built on a change of name and a change of band, a chart sitting that often on a threshold is almost too neat.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Venus five hundredths of a degree from exact, which is the hardest angle those two can manage, and it reads as a tendency to say the agreeable thing rather than the accurate one. It is difficult to think of a record this project has handled that contradicts a reading more completely. Mercury also sits sixty degrees from Saturn at under half a degree, an opening onto organisation and long concentration. Jupiter sits conjunct Pluto at three quarters in Leo, both retrograde, and a T-square holds Mercury, Uranus and Neptune with no outlet.

Saturn came back to its Sagittarius birth degree on 5 October 2015, at fifty nine, a second return rather than a first, with Jupiter closing its own lap two months earlier on 4 August. Sagittarius measures a thing by the distance it got from where it started, and for a singer the record moves from one band to another under a different name, the distance is the whole account. No earth at all, with four planets in fire, is the fact to take from this chart: nothing in it was ever going to settle, and the speech planet turned backwards in its own sign is where the voice came from.