The band John Lydon called “too clever”
When people first saw John Lydon, with his spikey hair and ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt, he hardly had the look of a man who was about to begin showering praise on others, and that look didn’t deceive. Lydon would eventually make a name for himself as one of the most revered people in punk, with a sharp and stinging tongue that he wasn’t afraid to hold, regardless of who he might have upset.
While his music initially grabbed the UK’s attention, his interview style steadily became just as sought after. As he swore his way through disdain, people became fascinated by what he had to say about the government, the monarchy and music. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of it was positive.
As such, when John Lydon refers to a band as “too clever”, he doesn’t necessarily mean it as a complement. He was keen on holding up a mirror to the rest of the world; everything he sang about contained the truth, as he committed his own life to music so that his opinions couldn’t be ignored. He has always believed that truth in music is essential, which is precisely why he couldn’t get on with the band Television.
“I had little time for what was coming out of America,” he said in an interview, “Bands like Television never really grabbed me, I just couldn’t connect. It was all too clever for its own good and wrapped up in too much Rimbaud poetry: get over it and write about your life, not what you find in books. I still can’t find a place in my heart for music like Television.”
Just because Lydon wasn’t a fan of Television’s approach to writing music didn’t mean he wasn’t open to musical experimentation, though. In the same list, he praised Captain Beefheart and the album Trout Mask Replica for completely flinging the doors for creativity wide open. In that sense, the inability to connect is exactly what Lydon liked about it.
“There’s just so much on this: It’s a double album and by the time you finish it – if you can finish it – you can’t remember what you heard at the beginning,” he said. “I liked that. It was anti-music in the most interesting and insane way, like kids learning to play violin – which I was going through at the time. So all the bum notes I was being told off for by the teachers were finally being released by well-known artists. That was my confirmation. From then on, there was room for everything.”
Interestingly, these opinions sum up the music Lydon would go on to make pretty well. Sex Pistols were renowned for their experimentation when it came to instrumentation. They used a lot of distortion and made their music heavy, and when they played wrong notes, they revelled in it rather than correcting it. However, the lyricism was an honest reflection of themselves and how they perceived the country around them. They used music that was tough to connect to under lyrics that were connected to by everyone.
