“I ain’t licking his lollipop”: How Simon Cowell became John Lydon’s worst enemy
Few rock stars go through the entirety of their careers without making a few enemies, but John Lydon has made more enemies than most. In fact, the former Sex Pistol seems to revel in insulting and lamenting his fellow musicians, and there is one figure who earned the crown of being his ultimate “worst enemy”.
You only need to take a cursory glance over Lydon’s various career interviews, op-eds, and memoirs to come away with an extensive list of people who have earned the frontman’s ire over the years. Whether it was Joe Strummer, whom he branded a “tosspot”, new wave heroine Debbie Harry, whom Lydon once referred to as “that Blondie fat bag”, or even his former Sex Pistols bandmates, of whom he said “They can all fuck off,” Lydon could rarely be accused of being wishy-washy when it comes to his opinions.
In many cases, it seems as though Lydon dishes out these fantastical insults merely for their shock value. After all, shock was the prevailing weapon of the Sex Pistols during their initial tenure, and the joy the band took in telling the world to “fuck off” never seems to have left the frontman’s inner psyche.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and one of Lydon’s least contentious bouts of fury arrived in 2014, when he dubbed record executive and X Factor mastermind Simon Cowell “our worst enemy”. Promoting his then-recent memoir Anger Is An Energy, the punk posterboy lamented the rise of X Factor and its exploitative nature, for a crowd at Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre.
“I don’t think [the contestants] on the show are that awful,” he admitted, in a brief moment of warmth. “It becomes awful when they become trained into that cruise ship show band mentality, and that’s the poison of it.”
“Simon Cowell has got us all on his big cruise ship lollipop, and I ain’t licking his lollipop.”
Simon Cowell
Cowell certainly had a grip on the UK’s musical landscape throughout the 2000s, thanks to both Pop Idol and X Factor, both of which introduced some chart-topping yet painfully middle-of-the-road performers to our collective consciousness.
Not only did these programmes render talented vocalists as cookie-cutter cover song performers, but it also made a point of exploiting auditionees, many of whom later claimed to have been misrepresented by the programme in the final edit.
It was car crash TV, at best, and John Lydon seemed to resent its dumbing-down of the nation’s music scene. Still, by the time that he gave that speech in 2014, The X Factor’s viewing figures were already on a downward slope, and Cowell’s command on the pop charts wasn’t what it once was.
Cut to more recent times, and Lydon himself appeared on similarly dumbed-down prime-time television show The Masked Singer earlier this year, singing Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ while dressed in a Yak outfit. So, perhaps those in glass dressing rooms shouldn’t throw stones.
