“So ahead of its time”: the 1978 album that rocked John Lydon to his core
Those who frequented Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road boutique SEX in the mid-1970s might have spotted an orange-haired young man hanging around the premises with his friends.
Intrigued by his peculiar look, McLaren auditioned the distinctively dressed man for the punk band he had recently assembled, quickly assigning him the role of lead vocalist, and chief loudmouth.
That’s how the Sex Pistols came to be, with McLaren forming the band after working with early punk rockers The New York Dolls while abroad. Alongside Steve Jones, Glenn Matlock, and Paul Cook, John Lydon rounded out the four-piece, and they released their debut single, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, in 1976. Lydon soon went by the name Johnny Rotten, asserting himself as a punk icon in the process.
In John Robb’s Punk Rock: An Oral History, Lydon explained that when the band formed, Britain was “a very depressing place … completely run-down,” he said. “There was trash on the streets, total unemployment – just about everybody was on strike, if you came from the wrong side of the tracks then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all. Out of that came the Sex Pistols and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers after us.”
So, in some manner, all Lydon was really looking towards with his scathing music was some form of brighter future. “Punk was never about one particular clean-cut imagery… it’s about many, many individuals coming very loosely together,” he once said.
So, it could take myriad forms, but the vital ingredient was some sort of anti-prog innovation. As he explained, “Before the Sex Pistols, music was so bloody serious, all run by university graduates. It was all head music devoid of any real intellectualism. There was no deep though in it, merely images pertaining to something mystical, too stupid and absolutely devoid of reality.”
Then along came an album in 1978 that rocked him to his core. It was almost too innovative to fully reconcile the first time around.
1978’s giant leap forward
Despite Lydon’s influence on the punk genre, when it comes to his favourite albums, his choices are rather eclectic and often surprising. He has declared his love for records like Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside and Cliff Richards’s self-titled album, two choices you wouldn’t associate with Mr. Rotten.
However, his expansive music taste is only a testament to his dedication to the medium, with Lydon soon proving his true skills as a musician with Public Image Ltd after the dissolution of the Sex Pistols. He retained his bite, tackling subjects like Apartheid, but the sound was a ferocious assortment.
One of his favourite records is Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine, released in 1978. While the Sex Pistols were causing chaos in the United States, German musicians Kraftwerk innovated electronic music in their Kling Klang Studio. The record was praised for its sparse vocals and robotic sensibilities, going on to define the course of pop music in the following decade.
With tracks such as ‘The Model’ and ‘The Robots’, Kraftwerk’s seventh album remains one of their most acclaimed.
Lydon told Pitchfork: “I met one of the members of Kraftwerk last year and was very surprised – they weren’t at all how I imagined them from looking at the album covers. They were in what I would call Beach Boys shirts. In an odd, twisted way they were saying I had an influence on them. I didn’t believe it for a second but I’ll take it.”
He added: “I loved anything by them. Their cold, emotionless way of presenting a pop song was always entertaining to me, so novel and so deadpan and cynical and kind of heartwarming. So ahead of its time.”
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