The group John Lydon called “one of the most notoriously inept bands in music”
Technical prowess wasn’t necessarily important in punk. They were after a lot more than that. If anything, bands like the Sex Pistols opined that traditional ‘skill’ is a limiting factor of expression. As John Lydon once put it: “For me, personality and bravado and endeavour are far more important than musical skill. Because musical skill is a learned operation. It’s a set of rules written by someone else, that people all too easily adhere to. There is nothing genius or creative in a trained musician.”
So, he favoured folks like “Mud, The Sweet, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Dave Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Alex Harvey Band, Status Quo, Traffic,” and, as he told Far Out, his favourite American artist, the rather madcap Captain Beefheart. “Every single time, I will take the madcap lunatic,” he says when constructing his bands. And with good reason, “I’ve got to be fair, when I joined the Pistols, they were doing that with me, so I’m only returning the compliment.”
This mindset was an important factor of the punk revolution. While the lack of technical ability in the scene has perhaps been overstated, it was certainly the case that having something to say was more important than how you said it. It brought back the youthful rebellion of oppositional attitude, and shook-up music with a DIY philosophy that thrived almost entirely independtly of the pre-existing commercial industry.
This brought about a degree of wariness from a lot of stars of the 1960s – the musicians whose exact attitudes had, ironically, helped to inspire the music – but who had some greedily become part of the industry and perhaps saw punk as a threat. “I saw lots of old rock stars—and lots of jealous rock stars, too,” Lydon recalled of the faces at the Pistols’ latter-day gigs.
“One of the most verbal instances was Mick Jagger. ‘The Sex Pistols are awful, and they can’t play!’ Shame on you, Mick,” he continued. “The Stones were one of the most notoriously inept bands in music, and here was this old coke hag pointing fingers and calling us disgusting. The Stones were into patting themselves on the backs and being self-congratulatory, like many of those old-timers. The Pistols were an absolute threat to that nice little world they had all built for themselves.”
There was a notion that the 1960s might have been rife with rebellion, individualism and expression but that there was a bar of aptitude that you had to surpass. Lydon saw this as a myth. “I mean, they showed no signs of being great songwriters. The best they could offer me were pretty ordinary songs,” George Martin told Melody Maker of his first time auditioning The Beatles. “They weren’t great songs, but they had tremendous charisma.” And yet the Fab Four were writing songs for The Rolling Stones, who at their early stage weren’t quite competent enough to write their own material.
However, charisma saw Mick Jagger and his mates through, and Lydon clearly thought that criticising the Pistols for not being prodigies was contradictory. “They came out of the ever-so-generous-and-love-everyone sixties and soon turned into fucking greedy, shifty little businessmen doing their utmost to stifle the opposition,” Lydon wrote in his memoir. “The lot of them deserved the name dinosaurs—too big, too pompous, elaborate, enormous amounts of equipment, only playing very large auditoriums or open-air festivals.”
He concluded his cutting diatribe of the Stones by citing: “Music became as remote from the general public as you could possibly get. They became like little royal families unto themselves. They carted themselves around the country, waving to us occasionally. They bought immense houses, joined the stockbrokers’ belt, and sent their kids to—public schools! See? The system! They became it.”
Hell, even Keith Richards might even agree with that last point to some extent as he almost broke up the band when Jagger accepted his knighthood, joking: “I wouldn’t let that family near me with a sharp stick, never mind a sword!”
However, the conceit of all of this is that Lydon, the very same Johnny Rotten who ridiculed Jagger and his mates as inept, also told the Daily Record: “I heard Mick Jagger got in there and brought lawyers into it on Sid’s behalf because I don’t think Malcolm [McLaren] lifted a finger. He just didn’t know what to do. For that, I have a good liking of Mick Jagger. There was activity behind the scenes from Mick Jagger, so I applaud him. He never used it to advance himself publicity-wise.”
While Lydon might conclude things himself with a joke about how that merely proves perfectly terrible musicians are capable of perfectly nice deeds, in truth, Lydon’s cutting ambivalence towards Jagger, ironically, is almost the epitome of punk: if you’re going to voice an opinion, it better not be boring, even if whatever vitriol you spill is subject to radical change.
