The artist John Lydon was too intimidated to talk to: “It was terrible”
Most of the punk regime was about bringing rock superstars down a couple of pegs. There might have been some great music to come out of the early 1970s, but when Sex Pistols came roaring in, John Lydon was looking to take every piece of rock’s past, crumple it in his hands, and pave the way for something completely new. He did have his limits, though, and he said that stepping into someone like Paul McCartney was a bit too much for him to take in.
Before we even touch what Lydon was doing, it’s not like Macca was going to be competing with punk any time soon. Considering he was responsible for some of the most chipper music The Beatles ever made, was there ever going to be someone less adept at brash guitars and offensive lyrics than Paul McCartney?
That’s not to say he didn’t have his finer moments. ‘Helter Skelter’ was a perfectly hectic number from The White Album, but no one was expecting that same amount of material from the same guy who was now making pieces like ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and ‘Silly Love Songs’.
McCartney wasn’t punk in genre, but he was punk in aesthetic. For all of the soft-hearted musical moments spread throughout his records, there are just as many times he went against the mainstream. A track like ‘Band on the Run’ goes against all the conventions of a pop song structure, and yet he’s able to shoehorn it into the hit parade with no questions asked.
Even when Wings were still riding high, Lydon remembered being mortified when meeting Paul McCartney for the first time. Since Sex Pistols had been folded into Public Image Ltd, Lydon was not ready to face the idea of being one of the next big rock stars.
When talking to Piers Morgan, Lydon said that he was far too nervous to even look in McCartney’s direction, saying, “That was terrible. I was with my wife Nora, and we were going to visit my brother in Tottenham. We had to go through past Harrods, and two people come running across the street, and it’s Paul and Linda McCartney. They’re banging on the cab window. I put the lock down and turned my head around. I could not cope with it. It was too much.”
Although Lydon has since claimed that he has instinctively tried to purge The Beatles from his musical vocabulary, it will always be there in some form or another, and that’s normally down to McCartney. If you just look at the common chords that Sex Pistols used on their first album, the fact that they are playing straight-ahead major chords and Chuck Berry-style guitar fills wasn’t that different from what the Fab Four were doing in the Cavern years before.
McCartney was also fairly modest in his praise, talking about how he loved the song ‘Pretty Vacant’ and even trying his hand at writing a few punk-adjacent tracks on Wings album like ‘Spin It On’ from Back to the Egg. Punk may not be the most graceful genre for ageing rock stars like McCartney, but if he could spook someone like Lydon, there may have been more edge to him than we gave him credit for.
