The 1970s band that finally united Mick Jagger and John Lydon in agreement: “The worst thing you’ve ever fuckin’ heard”
When Mick Jagger sat down to discuss Some Girls with NBC TV in 1978, he agreed that the album “stinks” when questions regarding the controversy it had whipped up were raised.
He went on to quip, “The next one is going to be more racist and more sexist. It’s going to be a whole bunch better.” This felt like a desperate bid to clamber aboard the punk bandwagon from a 35-year-old missing the point. He needn’t have bothered.
“There’s always new bands,” Keith Richards rather more dryly mused. “I’ve seen them come and go, most of them.” While the rest of the world was hailing the movement as revolutionary, he saw nothing new in punk, explaining, “I don’t know if they’re trying a little too hard to make something new out of something that really isn’t.”
On this front, he simply thought the bands were ripping off The Stones, ripping off other bands. “We didn’t consider what we were doing particularly new when we did it,” he mused, as per 50 Licks. “We were really rehashing old stuff. It’s just that people had missed out on it the first time around.”
In this cycle of rock ‘n’ roll, he just saw punk as the new instalment. “Maybe that’s what it’s all about, and what The Sex Pistols and The Clash and The Stranglers etc, are doing now in England is rehashing what we did for people who missed out on it then,” he said.
Adding, “I see a lot of similarities in terms of images, PR wise, sound-wise, of what they’re doing to what we did. Some of the press stuff, you could just delete ‘Rolling Stones’ and put in ‘Sex Pistols’.” This outlook put The Stones at loggerheads with the younger kids on the block.
Punk wasn’t merely about vitriol and violence, but that is where Jagger was willing to meet them. Regarding their run-ins, the gyrating frontman scolded: “They’ve stopped short at violence. I think even Sid Vicious is basically a nice guy, but Johnny Rotten keeps talking bad about me.” Before threatening, “He’ll get his rotten teeth kicked in one day.”
The source of this acrimony stemmed from Vicious’ decree that the mainstream rockers had lost their way. He told Rolling Stone: “I despise those turds. The Stones should have quit in 1965.” Later, the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, plucked that same crusted turd out of the punchbowl and hurled it at the wall when he commented on the death of Elvis Presley.
“It’s just too bad it couldn’t have been Mick Jagger,” he controversially quipped.
Needless to say, Lydon and Jagger were circling each other as the ‘70s began to build towards a ‘changing of the guard’ moment. Yet, in the middle of this culture war, both battling bands found unlikely unity in their contempt for one glaived group.
It is telling of the times that when I recently spoke to Hugh Cornwell about the abuse that The Stranglers faced, he was glad of it. “That’s what you did in those days, you know, slag people off, because that’s how you got in a headline,” he explained, going on to joke that he almost saw being bashed by Jagger as a stamp of approval.
That goes to show how self-assured The Stranglers were in their worth when you consider how harsh Mick’s mocking words were (and he wasn’t the only one). In 1977, the angered Stones frontman decreed, “Don’t you think The Stranglers are the worst thing you’ve ever fuckin’ heard? I do. They’re hideous, rubbishy,” he said.
Continuing his cutting diatribe in the NME by adding, “So bloody stupid. Fucking nauseating, they are.”
If anything, Lydon’s appraisal was even harsher. He found them so bad that they caused him to inflict pain on himself. “I wanted to have my ear pierced,” he told Sirius XM, “but you know this was England then, and it was all ‘men don’t do things like that’. So that’s why I decided to do it. So we did it in the women’s toilet at a pub called the Red Cow, while The Stranglers were playing.”
Why then and there, you might ask? Well, beyond the Dutch courage flowing freely, Lydon is quick to offer up his own withering reasoning when it comes to his peers. “Terrible band live, awful. Good record, fun records, but live didn’t carry,” he said of The Stranglers. “So we had nothing better to do but go in the toilet with a safety pin and a bar of soap.”
If we’re to believe Cornwell that most of the attacks you saw in the press in that period were orchestrated, then why were The Stranglers targeted so fiercely? Well, the following quote from Richards offers a bit of insight: “[The Stones] outpunk the punks. Because they can’t play, and we can. All they can do is be punks.”
To the contrary, The Stranglers really could play. Contrasting Lydon’s remarks, there are thousands of appraisals, including one from John Cooper Clarke, that hail them as one of the finest live bands of the ‘70s. Perhaps this combination of chops and cutting jib made them a worthy target for Jagger and Lydon for their own obvious reasons.
In truth, though, The Stranglers were rather proud of the putdowns. Cornwell, who was more of a jazz man – as you can see when he selected his nine favourite records for Far Out – and Jean-Jacques Burnel were happy to assert that the Sex Pistols were “all wimps” after the late Stranglers keyboardist Dave Greenfield pinned Lydon against an ice cream van.
However, while the story so far might have been one of bitterness and vitriol, in finding common ground, a far more tender end arose between Jagger and Lydon. Accepting that their war of words was perhaps closer to friendly banter than the press had cottoned onto, a relative closeness was fostered between the two frontmen, and eventually Jagger ended up secretly paying for Sid Vicious’ legal fees. It remains a gesture that Lydon is deeply moved by.
“For that, I have a good liking of Mick Jagger,“ Lydon said years later. “There was activity behind the scenes from Mick Jagger so I applaud him.“
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Punk Newsletter
All the latest Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.