John Lydon reveals his favourite American musician
John Lydon‘s start in music came from a T-shirt that included the words ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ scrawled across it. This is emblematic of his iconoclasm in the truest sense. He snarled to prominence at a time of cultural discontent, when music had turned to virtuosos who lost the youth’s vote, the peace and love of the 1960s had died, and the only thing that the streets were awash with that money couldn’t buy was poverty.
So, it is perhaps no surprise that even now, having achieved bombastic fame with the Sex Pistols, he still remains frighteningly contrarian, or as he puts it, simply honest. “It’s a stupid trap,” he tells Far Out when chatting about commercially-inclined music. “The promise, of course, is instantaneous wealth, fame and fortune. Well, I preferred infamy right from the start. And I found it the easier road to travel. Because I wake up in the morning knowing I haven’t lied to anyone. It’s fantastic.”
One thing he dismisses as a bold-faced lie is the narrative that punk came from New York. “Now, an awful lot of American journalism is saying that New York punk is where it all comes from. Oh, go fuck yourselves; it is talking shit. I was brought up in Britain!” Lydon expressed, leering towards the screen as though he was going to headbutt his webcam. He then rattled off an array of the artists that truly did inspire the Sex Pistols: “Mud, The Sweet, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Dave Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Alex Harvey Band, Status Quo, Traffic, a vast extending universe of music. That’s what influenced me.”
When asked whether there was one stand-out moment whereby he was awoken to music, he replies: “No whole bunches of people, and it’s a combination of all of them”. Then, with pause, he reconsiders and heaps praise on one US artist he is happy to applaud as an early inspiration, “I mean, one of my favourite American artists of all time will be Captain Beefheart,” declares.
Speaking about the way the late, great Don Van Vliet played with form in a manner ahead of its time, Lydon continues: “He could get tunes together, which is interesting in itself, but Trout Mask Replica is taking music completely outside of itself. It’s regurgitating it in this shambolic exploration, I suppose, like deconstructing a building, you know, all the pipes are on the outside, but the heart and soul is inside. It works in music. It doesn’t work so well in architecture.”
He continues: “And lyrics to die for? It’s just insanely entertaining. It showed me such an open mind to all of life’s possibilities, and it’s not narrow or insular or fashionable.” Indeed, the record was a trend-bucking oddity, avant-garde in the extreme, but if you listen to the perfect blues-adjacent pop songs like ‘Observatory Crest’ that Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band also mustered, it displays a mastery of songwriting that Trout Mask Replica was reconstituting. And there is something decidedly anarchistic about that middle finger to form that you can imagine Lydon adoring.
As Tom Waits said of the record: “The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.”
