The John Lennon song John Lydon called “the building block” of Sex Pistols
Punk wasn’t a genre invented by accident. For all of the great music that was being made by arena rock bands in the 1970s, the excitement that came from listening to early Led Zeppelin records tended not to stick around for much longer, with the biggest names in music suddenly looking more pompous in their limousines and personal jets. Rock and roll needed to change, but John Lydon helped invent Sex Pistols thanks to one deep cut from John Lennon’s repertoire.
If there was any outfit that should have been considered uncool during the punk revolution, it logically should have been The Beatles. They practically invented the idea of a standard rock group, and by the time they had graduated from the road to being a studio band, it felt like you didn’t even breathe the same air as them whenever their records came out.
Lennon was still keen to hold onto his roots as just another guy, and the second half of The Beatles’ career saw him repeatedly testing what he could do. Outside of his wild experiments with Yoko Ono, Lennon tried to play down his star power as much as possible, usually going for songs that were anything but commercial, like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’.
Because they’re The Beatles and are, therefore, gods in most people’s eyes, even those pieces ended up becoming revered in their own way, being mulled over the same way cinephiles pour over movies like Citizen Kane. Once the dust had settled after The Beatles’ breakup, Lennon knew that he had to remind everyone he was real.
After undergoing primal therapy, Plastic Ono Band was Lennon putting his Beatles self to rest, talking about the real broken man underneath it all. While he spent a good chunk of his solo debut putting himself back together, ‘Working Class Hero’ was the song that resonated the most with Lydon when he first got started.
Since Lennon had been through the machine of the music business for years, this folksy ballad was him teaching legions of wannabe musicians what they would be getting themselves into should they want to be a millionaire. Even though there might be room at the top for some, Lennon reminded all of us that getting up there means ruining some people’s lives along the way.
For Lydon, this was practically an education in how tracks should be constructed, recalling to Uncut, “The anger and the bitterness seemed utterly genuine, the words came out with such passion and violence. That was part of the building block for me of songwriting in the Pistols. That you could shift into these larger aspects – class hatred, anger, resentment – and get it right.”
Despite the fact that Lennon would eventually be competing with punk in the latter half of his solo career, he never felt like the enemy of the genre, either, remarking that most of those bands were doing what The Beatles had done in the clubs when they were starting out. Lennon may have had a few more pounds to rub together in the 1970s, but he never lost sight of that rebellious punk attitude that he had when he was a kid. Lydon was sure to be taking notes.
