The singer John Lydon urged to retire: “It’s not about age”
Having rallied against everybody from Debbie Harry to Joe Strummer, and even his own bandmates, it is fair to say that John Lydon has never been one to pull any punches when it comes to discussing his fellow musicians, but some victims have found themselves in the sights of the punk progenitor’s vitriol more than others.
Ever since the dawn of the punk rock revolution that elevated John Lydon from being a sneering teenager with an attitude problem to being the harbinger of a cultural revolution, the enemy has always been the establishment – be it political or musical. By the time the mid-1970s rolled around, after all, the dream of the hippie age was well and truly dead, replaced by unemployment, economic downturn, and perpetual drizzle. As a result, young punks couldn’t find much to relate to in the sounds of the 1960s.
That animosity went both ways, too, in that the rock rebels of the 1960s had largely grown up by the time that Lydon and the Sex Pistols started making their mark. Mick Jagger, for instance, fostered a rather complex relationship with the world of punk, occasionally praising its raw power but, in 1981, declaring, “I don’t feel connected with bands like The Clash, the bands that still play every night. I can only see them as repeats of everything that happened before.”
You could, of course, say the same thing about The Rolling Stones; that they were merely a repeat of the various American blues artists who they owed their entire sound to. Nevertheless, Jagger wasn’t particularly meant to feel connected to punk; it wasn’t music for billionaire rock stars and tax exiles; it was for the disenfranchised kids in the street, which is perhaps why John Lydon has rarely had anything nice to say about The Rolling Stones.
Despite the inarguable fact that, without The Stones or albums like Exile On Main St., punk might never have happened, Lydon has repeatedly rallied against the ageing rockers. Most notably, during a speech at the incredibly punk venue of Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre back in 2014, the former Sex Pistol made a point of denouncing Jagger.
“Did anybody see last year’s Glastonbury? I mean, come on, Mick,” he laughed.
Lydon is, of course, also a man of a certain age, continuing to tour and perform with Public Image Ltd, but his issue with Jagger is apparently not connected to the frontman’s elderly nature. “It’s not about age here, it’s about the show-off bullshit,” he declared. “I wanted The Stones to give us the juice, the stuff that really put them there in the first place.”
“But no, it’s Mick in ladies’ tights and his testicles are frocked, and he’s running around like a speed freak, and then there’s the band looking incredibly embarrassed and wearing the awful, I call them Tommy Hilfiger kind of colours, as Cliff Richard-on-holiday wear,” he continued.
What exactly Lydon’s point was in that verbal rampage remains up for debate. After all, Mick Jagger has always been a rather flamboyant frontman, having built a career on being a “show-off” since the mid-1960s, and the band’s 2013 slot at Glastonbury was hardly the first time they had donned skin-tight trousers.
Seemingly, Lydon’s fury is based around the idea that The Rolling Stones are worlds apart from the people they were when they first wrote tracks like ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, but surely that has been the case since the late 1960s at the very latest.
What’s more, it isn’t as though John Lydon is the same person he was when he was immersed in the early days of Public Image Ltd, either, so perhaps people in glass houses should refrain from throwing stones, eh, John?
