The awful Sex Pistols cover that pleased John Lydon: “Money in the bank”
The 1980s were a weird time. Not for all the social unrest and political tension, that’s just life, but many things went mainstream in the ’80s that just wouldn’t happen at any other time. Things like Arnold Schwarzenegger, computer games and, most of all, heavy metal. Though many would argue that hard rock ruled the world in the previous decade, those bands sold concert tickets and albums. They did not sell singles. The 1980s changed all that.
Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Sabbath, and The Who are all bands who dominated the 1970s but never had a number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100. Meanwhile, some of the following decade’s most intolerable acts, Poison, Extreme, Whitesnake, and even Nelson, all did. It’s the only time in the history of pop music that heavy metal as a genre became a chart-straddling success.
At its peak, it was making household names out of bands that would otherwise be also-rans, and Nirvana hit them all like a train. Suddenly their brand of party-time rock and roll, full of riffs, synths and lyrics about chicks and good times, suddenly became more passé than Make Poverty History bracelets are today.
However, the earth wasn’t entirely salted. A precious few bands of that era survived and thrived in the era of grunge. Guns N’ Roses were still one of the biggest bands on the planet. Aerosmith’s comeback reached new heights with 1993’s ‘Get A Grip’. Even Kiss were somehow staying afloat with 1992’s gold-certified record ‘Revenge’. It could be done. You just had to drop all the silliness and fun and let yourselves get a little bit edgy. This is where Mötley Crüe come into the story.
Now, Mötley Crüe should have taken to this like ducks to water. Sure, they were always more of a set of dirty anecdotes with a band attached, but that band were never really as lightweight as a lot of their peers. Synths never really found their way into their music; instead, they focused more on the punky, metallic edge that even hits like Dr Feelgood had. Vince Neil also set himself apart from the trained wailers of other hair metal bands by virtue of never bloody learning to sing anyway. It’s borderline stuff, but they were at least more punk than the likes of Def Leppard ever got.
So, when the lights went out, and it became a lot more dangerous for bands like them to exist, how did they adapt? They dipped into the back catalogue of one of their key influences, the Sex Pistols. That’s right, as one of the singles for their compilation album ‘Decade of Decadence’, Mötley Crüe covered ‘Anarchy In The UK’. Surprising absolutely no one, it’s way below the watermark set by the original. But that didn’t matter to the man who wrote it.
John Lydon told the NME: “They peppered it with the wrong words ’cos they didn’t know the full monty. I would have quite happily told them what the real words were. They lost the meaning somewhat.” Ironically enough, this was in a quiz called ‘Does Rock ’n’ Roll Kill Braincells’. Clearly, it does because 20 years earlier, in an interview with his own website, Lydon contradicted himself.
He said, “I knew they were gonna do it because they rang me up. They wanted the lyrics, so I gave ’em to them. I thought… Lovely, that’s money in the bank for me.”
And that’s always been the bottom line for Lydon, hasn’t it? Maybe in the end, all these hair bands honestly singing about good times and getting loaded were more authentic than the man formerly known as Johnny Rotten. After all, the only difference between the Crüe and the Pistols is the Crüe weren’t manufactured by two shopkeepers.
