John Lydon explains the extraordinary true story behind Public Image Ltd’s ‘Car Chase’
John Lydon has never struggled with sustaining relevance. Since the minute he became the only auditionee for the Sex Pistols, he has played the music world like a marionette. This is, in part, because one of the core tenets behind his acerbic identity is a steadfast anti-institutionalism that has never eroded. In fact, it has only grown stronger over the years, providing him plenty of fuel to keep his raging fire roaring, so much so that a tufty red mohawk still blazes on the top of his head.
On the latest Public Image Ltd album, End of World, he skewers this notion once more. However, one song, in particular, seems to spin it in a very quirky direction. Alas, as they say up north, “there’s nowt so strange as folk”, and on this occasion, the weirdest and most wonderful tale on the record, ‘Car Chase’, happens to be entirely true. Or at least that is how Lydon puts it to us.
When we chatted with the former Sex Pistols frontman recently, he told Far Out about the inspiration behind this very singular hit. “A friend of ours got himself institutionalised,” he says in an off-the-cuff manner. “In other words, they put him in an old folks’ home in Britain. Because the authorities decided he wasn’t capable of looking after himself.”
His eyes then light up, and he leers towards the camera: “Well, he certainly was because, at night, he would break out, steal cars and rob supermarkets.” Rejoicing, he exclaims: “Oh, what a fucking brilliant, beautiful spirit of independence. I’m not advocating crime at all. But there he was, and he would go back to that old folks’ home and sit in his chair in the morning and go, ‘It wasn’t me!'”
As the song states – with lyrics like, “They let me out on the weekends, They kick me out in the dark, I like to think that I’m starkers, On my ‘ed, I carved a big question mark” – there is an elderly fellow somewhere in old Blighty, who escapes his old people’s home, unbeknownst to the carers, joy rides in cars to local supermarkets, does a spot of thievery, and returns to his bed, tucks himself up with his stolen Twix and nobody, bar John Lydon, is any the wiser.
His manager, John, told him about this friend, and Lydon said, “I had to write a homage to this fellow. I think that’s a man after my own heart. It is people like that in my life that have the biggest influence. They’re still independent regardless of what the institutions would have you believe.”
So, he told the band to bring that energy to the fore, and things came in a flurry. “And yeah, the song is as mad as the fucking reality,” Lydon cackles. “That is one of those songs where the lyrics came like [clicks fingers] that to me. I was so enthralled and thrilled by what was going on with the other three at the time putting that together, I just jumped in, and there it was a couple of takes later, finished.”
Perhaps the other reason it came so quickly is that anti-institutionalism is Lydon’s favourite subject. In fact, he’s against just about any institution, decreeing that life needs people to throw an “anarchistic spanner in the works” to shake things up. He looks to maintain that punk ethos in everything he does, explaining his calling as simply crying out, “Hello, boys or girls: we can actually think our way out of that,” and pointing his bony finger at anything and everything he perceives to be a problem, annoyance, or barrier to joy.
