“Completely different”: John Lydon’s favourite album from the punk years
What was punk? In the shade of retrospection, it’s hard to tell, but one incident at the start of the Sex Pistols‘ career helps to shed some light on it. At an early live show in 1976, where band members were cavorting with half-dressed members of the public on stage, and chairs and tables were being utterly Chernobyled in a mutiny against anything perceived as banal, a Frenchman shouted to Steve Jones, “You can’t play!” to which the guitarist flippantly replied, “So what?”
Now, it wasn’t the perceived incompetency that mattered—that has been wildly overstated in the years that have followed the Pistols’ tenure, nor did the mayhem of the show have much to do with it. The exemplifying factor was the band’s “so what” DIY attitude to everything. In those two words, there is a spirit of defiance, daring and everything else that made punk so electrifyingly essential.
When we recently spoke to the former Sex Pistols frontman, John Lydon, he put his finger on exactly what he feels has beleaguered modern music since the punk revolution. “Corporate thinking,” he instantly explains. “Record labels are very much a death by committee.” There wasn’t much of that when the manic singer was on the stage back in the day.
Corporations might have tried to steal some of their steam, but EMI quickly learned that “so what” was the group’s answer to many things, and it derailed enough board meetings for the label to promptly free them from their £45,000 contract. Their concern was with being original and being themselves. While people might have subsequently pointed out that the paper clips came from Richard Hell, the blitzkrieg nature of the music was already being practised by the Ramones, and so on; you might be able to call them out for hypocrisy, but you can’t question that they did, indeed, value originality—and if you did call them out, their reply would likely be, “so what”.
It was this bold facet of being different that Lydon valued in his peers. And he didn’t value many of them. He thinks reports that New Yorkers started the movement are nonsense; he hated The Clash, he thought The Stranglers were shit, and everything else that has dared to call itself punk since those glory days is a joke.
So, what did he actually like? “I cared deeply about what we were doing with the Pistols, and it was hurtful to be put in a ‘punk’ package alongside lesser mortals,” he told the Guardian, kindly establishing his own credentials and sincerity before continuing, “But the Raincoats offered a completely different way of doing things, as did X-Ray Spex and all the books about punk have failed to realise that these women were involved for no other reason than that they were good and original.”
The record he championed as his favourite from that period went to The Raincoats with their self-titled album from 1979. This is a view he held when they first emerged, too. “Rock ’n’ roll is shit,” he declared in a fiery early Sex Pistols interview. “Music has reached an all-time low – except for The Raincoats.” In them, he saw a dazzling new outlook of bold individual and charm. They weren’t trying to take over the world; they were just trying to be a band. That was novel and true.
The feeling was mutual. “John Lydon was what made the Sex Pistols, and what made early punk interesting,” The Raincoats’ singer Gina Birch commented. “He wasn’t going in there just to be, ‘Aargh!’ He had very interesting ideas. He was a cross between Richard III and Albert Steptoe … But he’s complicated, isn’t he? He’s not one to be put in a box. He’s a contrarian a bit as well,” she told the Irish Times.
This wasn’t a million miles from their own outlook. They might’ve looked like ordinary people, but their stern so-what-ness allowed them to make far from ordinary music. Sadly, some people couldn’t see past the former factor, and they were widely derided. Once again, they barely cared. ”What can you say? We tried to move things along, make something that was a voice from us, that had a heart to it and was a bit feisty, a bit courageous. We were doing our thing,” Birch says.
Lydon’s issue with the bulk of records assigned to the punk canon is that they don’t do their own thing. As he concluded in praise of The Raincoats in his typical barbed style, ”It’s a million miles away from the blancmange that is Green Day, where you have a Johnny Rotten first verse, a Billy Idol chorus and a Sham 69 second verse. Preposterous!”
