“He’s just ashamed”: John Lydon on why Joe Strummer was his antithesis
Divisive he may be, but inherent to the brand and cultural significance of John Lydon is that he is unafraid to speak his mind. From music to politics, the flame-haired former Sex Pistol has discussed an extensive list of topics over the years, with the punk icon’s acerbic bite never losing its edge.
While Lydon has never been short on hot takes, one subject he is particularly well-versed in is punk—the genre he helped transform into a cultural tidal wave in the late 1970s. Like his bandmates in the Sex Pistols, Lydon sought real change when they started, and their back-to-basics, furious music served as the perfect antithesis to the ostentatious pomposity of prog rock and the egotistical excesses of established classic rock acts like Led Zeppelin.
However, for Lydon, like any good thing, the purity of punk was quickly hollowed out by pretenders, egos and other factors, such as artists not being in for the right reason, the exact mindset that Sex Pistols were trying to eradicate from music. For the frontman, by the time his old band imploded in 1978, the genre had become “fascist”, and he was seeking new pastures. This led him to create Public Image Ltd. This much more creatively free and conceptualised project saw him freely merge genres outside the restrictive three-chord rock he played a key role in popularising.
There were several reasons Lydon came to loathe the first wave of punk and everything it represented. For the working-class Londoner, one was what he saw as the egregious fallacy of some of the genre’s other key figures, who, despite singing about class struggle and fighting the good fight, came from wealthy backgrounds and had no real idea of what it meant to live on the breadline. It was an issue of what we call ‘working class appropriation’ today, the sort you see endemic at universities such as Goldsmiths and UAL.
From Lydon’s perspective, one man and his band, Joe Strummer and The Clash, symbolised this. They were always posh pretenders to him, representing style over substance, and he has outlined his thoughts numerous times. In his 2014 memoir, Energy: My Life Uncensored, he asserted that The Clash didn’t “didn’t have any content, and they really didn’t seem to stand for very much at all other than this abstract socialism.”
Going one step further, he claimed The Clash songs “had nothing to offer, character-development wise”. Taking a shot at Strummer, he added: “He began to lack a sense of humour about himself. He. . .was definitely out to grab himself a crown.”
Despite seemingly personally hating Strummer, Lydon actually clarified his position when he spoke to FilmFour for an internet chat in 2001. He explained that he didn’t hate Strummer, with him “a very nice bloke”. His issue was that “he’s just ashamed of his own class roots. Which is, of course, the antithesis to me.”
He continued: “You are what you are, and you should work accordingly with the tools you’ve been given. But to pretend to be working-class drives me crazy because that’s what I come from and am! When someone tries to pretend to be that, they rubbish my achievements. My repression is not a new coat to be worn so casually as, indeed, neither is his. We all suffer but on different levels.”
Lydon concluded that as long as people stay in their lanes, it’s better for everyone. He added that living in a small council flat when he grew up was not fun and not something to glamorise. While directed at Strummer and his contemporaries, that’s a point that many people could do with hearing today.
