The Sex Pistols cover John Lydon hated with a passion: “They lost the meaning somewhat”
Within the realm of cover songs, there’s a fine line between adding new layers to a pre-existing musical masterpiece versus coming across as an underpracticed wedding band bastardising a selection of crowd-pleasing classics, and according to the ever-open-minded John Lydon, most covers of his work fall into the latter.
On the face of things, cover songs don’t exactly fit in with the punk manifesto, which Lydon helped to establish during his Sex Pistols days back in the 1970s. After all, the age of safety pins and spitting was largely built upon a rejection of rock’s past, particularly with regard to the nostalgia-tinted image of the 1960s. So, covering any established rock tracks wouldn’t appear to be on the agenda of any self-respecting punk act, particularly of Sex Pistols.
Nevertheless, they did perform a select few cover songs during their relatively short tenure, paying homage to everybody from The Stooges to Chuck Berry, and to their credit, managed to transform the original spirit of those anthems to render them in the punk spirit of things, a quality which was often omitted when, years later, artists started covering classic Pistols tracks.
Given the culture-defining impact of the outfit and his endless appetite for being outspoken and disparaging, it should come as no surprise that John Lydon doesn’t view many of those covers in a favourable light. Although he has never publicly commented on Frank Sidebottom’s rendering of ‘Anarchy in the UK’, or the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s rendering of ‘Pretty Vacant’, the musician has repeatedly despaired over hair metal titans Mötley Crüe and their Pistols cover.
Originally, when the American outfit requested to release their own version of Lydon’s defining moment, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, the songwriter didn’t appear to have any qualms. In fact, back in 1992, a year after the band’s cover hit the airwaves, he declared, “I thought it was hilarious. In fact, I knew they were gonna do it, because they rang me up. They wanted the lyrics, so I gave ’em to them. I thought, ‘Yipee, what fun! […] Lovely, that’s money in the bank for me’.”
Seemingly, his cheeky view of the cover quickly deteriorated with age, and during an interview, decades later, with NME, the former Sex Pistol attacked the track, railing, “They peppered it with the wrong words cause they didn’t know the full monty. I would have quite happily told them what the real words were. They lost the meaning somewhat.”
As with most of John Lydon’s modern-day opinions, it is not quite clear what caused this drastic change in heart, but it is difficult to disagree with the idea that bubblegum hair rockers Mötley Crüe’s ‘Anarchy in the UK’ loses out on the raw power, authenticity, and grassroots appeal of the original. It is a kind of Halloween costume of a cover song, prioritising imitation over artistic integrity, so Lydon’s take of “that’s money in the bank for me” is perhaps the best way of looking at the cover’s longevity.
