Five artists who hated the Sex Pistols
The Sex Pistols are among the most important bands to hit the UK. While many people may not look back at their music and be moved or inspired, what they put in motion changed the musical landscape in the UK and worldwide. They didn’t just make energetic music; they told the truth as they saw it. This meant addressing injustices throughout their music and through interviews, which was entertaining but equally ruffled some feathers.
John Lydon is still famous for being unable to keep his mouth shut. His lyricism in the Sex Pistols was heavily critical of the British government, the monarchy, and posers within the punk scene. Outside of that, however, he was never afraid to talk derogatorily about other bands and individuals.
Some of his notorious jabs came as he criticised Ozzy Osbourne for mocking the working class, called Kiss transparent and said that Joe Strummer was a “Champagne socialist”. As Lydon put it, “The Sex Pistols, when they spotted me on the Kings Road with my ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt on, thought, ‘Oh, he’ll do’. I don’t think they knew what they were getting hold of.”
Lydon’s attitude was infectious, trickling into the band and subsequent bands after him. It was an attitude era for the UK music scene, as sound was driven not only by its literal meaning but also by how it was presented. For many fans, it was a revelation; for others, it was a horrendous noise. As a result, many musicians openly hated the Sex Pistols, and these are five of the most notorious.
The artists who despised the Sex Pistols:
Ramones
When discussing punk music, two names that inevitably come up are Sex Pistols and the Ramones. The two seem to go hand in hand, so you would think they would be fans of one another, but this wasn’t the case.
Sex Pistols brought punk into the mainstream in the UK, but the foundation for a punk band had already been set by the Ramones years earlier. As such, Joey Ramone held a grudge, saying that the band had ripped them off. “These guys ripped us off,” he said, “And I want to sound better than this.”
Freddie Mercury
Queen and Sex Pistols have a large gulf musically, but the two bands were often in close proximity to one another. One day, they were both working in studios next to one another and when Mercury met them, there was tension right from the word go. Mercury was far from what the Sex Pistols deemed cool, and Mercury didn’t think much of the punk icons either. One day, the Queen singer gave the band some jabs, and there has been beef between them since.
“I called Sid Vicious ‘Simon Ferocious’ or something, and he didn’t like it at all, and I said, ‘What are you gonna do about it?’” recalled Mercury, “And he had all these very, well, sort of…he was very well-marked, and I said, ‘Did you really make sure you scratched yourself in the mirror properly today?’ And he hated the fact that I could even speak like that. So I think we survived that test.”
The Clash
The Clash and the Sex Pistols had an interesting respect for one another. While they liked each other’s music and respected what they did for the industry, there was also a lot of tension there. John Lydon took shots at Joe Strummer once, saying, “Look, he pretended to hop off buses, you know, like in his studded leather jacket…you’ve got to be more honest with us than that.”
Strummer was equally harsh about the Sex Pistols, with similar criticisms surrounding what they said and what they actually stood for. He said the band “Didn’t have any content, and they really didn’t seem to stand for very much at all other than this abstract socialism.”
The Stranglers
The punk scene was notoriously volatile; bands who were friends one minute could be enemies the next, and that’s precisely what happened when John Lydon went to see The Stranglers. He had enjoyed the gig and was socialising with the band afterwards, but the night erupted when The Stranglers guitarist, Jean-Jacques Burnel, pinned him against an ice cream van and threatened to beat him up. Again, it all came down to image and bands thinking that the Sex Pistols said one thing and then acted another way.
“They were all wimps,” said Burnel, “In 1976, we played over 200 gigs whereas The Clash and the Pistols were only playing posh attic parties in London for the press, so we were on the frontline, and they didn’t stand a chance against us in a fight.”
David Crosby
Given he spent the majority of his life as a hippie, you would think that David Crosby might value the counterculture elements of a lot of the punk genre, but that wasn’t the case. He didn’t like the Sex Pistols, but that hatred wasn’t limited to just them as a band, but the entire style of music as a whole.
He has always been relatively vague when discussing his gripes with the genre. When asked via social media if he liked punk, he replied, “No”. When fans pried a little more, Crosby said that the punk genre was full of “Pretty much all dumb stuff” and that it had “No musical value at all and mostly childish lyrics.”
