The genre John Lydon said achieved nothing: “Fascist”
Public Image Ltd frontman and former Sex Pistol John Lydon‘s reputation for fierce, excoriating takes on musical and political orthodoxies has taken a knock of late. Lapsing into reactionary conservatism in light of President Donald Trump’s political ascendency across the last near-decade, Lydon has unfortunately showered praise on the inheriting son of a multi-millionaire and uncritically dubbed the corporate enmeshing of capital and politics as marvellously anti-establishment.
If you want to hear how the mighty have fallen, have a listen to the abysmal ‘Being Stupid Again’ from 2023’s End of World, an ‘old man yelling at cloud’ shopping list of “woke” grievances every bit as free-thinking as a Lee Hurst Twitter tantrum.
His self-parody buffoonery still hasn’t quite tarnished his legacy yet. Before he took courageous potshots at students and trans people, Lydon was vociferously attacking the real institutes of power and their top-down class oppression, the Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ so inflammatory the House of Commons allegedly had discussed its grounds for treason. While the swearing on Bill Grundy’s Today show is less impressive with contemporary hindsight, the infamous TV moment crudely articulated a generational malaise-stricken contempt for fusty social strata still yet to shake off its Victorian residue.
He was also possessed with a sharp creative hunger and drive to forge new and innovative artistic terrain. Releasing 1977’s punk rallying cry Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Lydon had the integrity and good sense to scarper after the Pistols’ 1978 implosion and put together Public Image Ltd along with Keith Levene and Jah Wobble, pouring their combined love of dub, krautrock, and the avant-garde into an early run of pioneering post-punk while the rest of the Pistols were larking about in the dreadful The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle musical “comedy”.
During his creative peak in ’79, a characteristically belligerent and combative Lydon was interviewed on Australian TV regarding his thoughts on the state of punk and his hopes for the 1980s’ musical output. “Hopefully, it’s getting better. In that, many attitudes will be accepted, not just one way. Punk became like fascist; it has to be this way or else.” Lydon told Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum on the music show Countdown. “I’ve always said music should be many attitudes. All are tolerable, it becomes intolerable when one particular form takes over and obliterates the rest, that is wrong.”
The frosty encounter may be explained by the alleged bust-up two years earlier. According to Meldrum’s account in a 2015 Herald Sun article, an attempt to interview Lydon and Sid Vicious in a London pub resulted in he and his camera crew being told to “get fucked” before Lydon flicked a cigarette in the cameraman’s eye, resulting in blows from Meldrum and naturally, no interview.
But aside from unnecessary pantomime provocations, Lydon had plenty to be surly about. His former band had been usurped by the showman ego feed of Malcolm McLaren, and the potently seditious charge that organically stirred in Sex Pistols gave way to a cartoonish expectation to meet increasingly stale stereotypes of what punk was supposed to be. As tartan trousers and mohawks became de rigueur uniform for UK punk entering the 1980s, Lydon was donning suits and playing with the whole unspoken marketing dimension of the musical ‘year zero’, starkly illustrated on First Edition‘s faux-magazine cover.
With Public Image Ltd’s later Metal Box and Flowers of Romance LPs, Lydon showed he was light years ahead of punk’s momentary dead-end relevancy, but the movement’s ethos of community solidarity, inclusivity, and challenge to authority and power structures is still alive and well despite its challenges in a climate of gentrification, something Lydon has long lost any authentic connection to.
