The two 1970s pop bands John Lydon shamelessly adored: “I’ve always loved dance music”
If you were to dissect every single interview, memoir, and offhand comment that John Lydon has ever given during his extensive and illustrious career in music, you would likely come away with an extensive list of things he hates, and the only thing under his ‘likes’ list would be Country Life Butter.
From his very early days, during the punk epicentre of the Sex Pistols, Lydon has appeared to revel in the pastime of dismantling, insulting, and otherwise slagging off his fellow artists. Whether it’s punk contemporaries like The Clash, Blondie, and the Ramones, or even members of his own band, Lydon has rarely shied away from an opportunity to make a barbed comment or stir up some controversy.
Underneath it all, though, there are a select few groups that even the former poster boy of punk revolution wouldn’t dare to insult, and they aren’t obvious choices, either.
Despite what some rose-tinted men in music documentaries might have you believe, a key factor in the emergence of punk rock was hatred and rejection, namely of the mainstream music industry. One of the prevailing reasons why Lydon was ever even considered as the Pistols’ frontman was that Malcolm McLaren had seen him wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt with “I hate” scrawled above the band name. During the mid-1970s, prog rock was the main enemy of punk, but disco wasn’t too far behind.
Ironically, of course, disco was also born from rebellion, in the underground, Black, and LGBTQ+ nightclubs of New York City. By the time disco reached the UK, though, it had become a rather watered-down parody of itself, representing little more than a record label’s desire to shift pithy dance records. Punk bands like the Sex Pistols represented the absolute antithesis of the disco age, but that didn’t stop John Lydon from embracing its dance-centric rhythms.
Revealing some of his more unexpected musical tastes during a 1997 interview with LA Weekly, the frontman shared, “I’ve always loved dance music… This caused me great difficulty in the early years, because I loved disco, and I see no shame at all in admiring the Bee Gees and being a Sex Pistol.”
While it is difficult to imagine the famous sneer of 1977-era John Lydon sitting down to listen to ‘More Than A Woman’, or indeed sit through the runtime of Saturday Night Fever without throwing a Molotov cocktail at the television à la The Young Ones, it is worth remembering that Lydon’s musical upbringing was a product of his inner-city surroundings as a Londoner.
At that time, in the area where the songwriter grew up, one’s listening habits could quite easily be imbued with everything from Alice Cooper to Prince Buster, and Lydon attempted to soak it all in during his younger years. Inevitably, that gave him a much broader music taste than his punk-centric output might give him credit for.
The Bee Gees weren’t the only ones, either. “Well, the Carpenters,” he added in that same interview. “There’s another band that I absolutely adored.” It would appear that even a man as famously contrarian as John Lydon cannot deny the sheer brilliance of Karen Carpenter.
