“There was room for everything”: The album John Lydon called “anti-music”
As frontman and co-founder of the Sex Pistols, John Lydon was seen as an agitator who helped bring the punk scene to life in the UK and spawned a movement that was at the forefront of the public’s conscience during the late 1970s. Offering something visceral that few other styles of music delivered and with a snarling attitude that defied conventions, punk was a phenomenon that got heads turning for better or worse and would either invoke disgust or joy that something was so outlandish in its presentation.
However, after the Sex Pistols disbanded after just one album, Lydon, who was also better known as Johnny Rotten during his time with the band, moved on to another project that was a little more experimental in its approach to its punk ethos. Public Image Ltd brought in a far broader range of influences into their music, incorporating elements of dub, funk and new wave into their sound, and while they lacked the venom that Sex Pistols had, they were arguably a much more forward-thinking act.
This artistic leap wasn’t completely out of the blue but it certainly showed that Lydon was more than just a bratty youngster who was hellbent on riling up prudent individuals with their anti-establishment image. There was a certain unpolished charm about what Sex Pistols delivered, but PiL were a much more refined take on the boundaries of the genre and looked to take things in a direction that allowed more scope to keep reinventing themselves.
While Lydon is often credited as having helped birth the punk movement, particularly in the UK, there were, of course, plenty of acts that had come before both PiL and Sex Pistols that had taken the same ethos of creating music that was chaotic and confrontational. Many might look towards certain acts in the 1960s as having been precursors to punk, with elements of garage and hard rock having ultimately mutated to help define the parameters of what would become referred to as punk.
However, genres such as blues and jazz might often get dismissed as being the polar opposite of everything punk stood for, despite how they were either labelled as raucous or convention-defying genres that caused a stir among listeners. Some music prior to the advent of punk rock had been so alarmingly different and ahead of its time that it was virtually impossible to determine where it sat within genre boundaries, and people today can still struggle to help categorise them.
One record that Lydon was particularly enthralled by from way back in 1969 was Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, a record that continues to confound listeners to this day with its unorthodox approach. Instruments rarely seem to be in time or in tune with one another, and its lengthy runtime on top of this is something that often deters people from getting to the end, but Lydon was fascinated by this release and continues to hold it in high regard.
“There’s just so much on this,” Lydon proclaimed. “It’s a double album, and by the time you finish it – if you can finish it – you can’t remember what you heard at the beginning. I liked that.”
Continuing further, he would label it with a tag that almost seems derogatory but was ultimately meant as the highest form of praise. “It was anti-music in the most interesting and insane way, like kids learning to play violin — which I was going through at the time. So all the bum notes I was being told off for by the teachers were finally being released by well-known artists. That was my confirmation. From then on, there was room for everything.”
While being labelled as “anti-music” would be a harsh criticism for most, for the likes of Lydon and Beefheart, this was the biggest compliment that they could possibly be paid. They were always out to make people feel uncomfortable with their art, and if they were able to solicit such reactions from its vulgar approach to songcraft, then ultimately, they had done their job.
