The “exotic” song John Lydon said exposes people’s dark places
John Lydon is mostly associated with punk, best known as Johnny Rotten, the gobby and controversial leader of the Sex Pistols. In the group, he set the UK on fire as the leader of a new musical revolution. But Lydon’s own tastes expand way beyond his own genre, into the neighbouring worlds that were also trending in the 1970s.
During the mid to late 1970s, music in the UK was in a strange space. The hippie era of the 1960s was over; the battle between mods and rockers had long since found an armistice, and several countercultural camps had cropped up in the void. Lydon was a key part of one of them, as the Sex Pistols helped birth the punk movement one raging gig at a time. They were the soundtrack to a scene as hoards of angsty teenagers ripped up their clothes and pinned them back together with safety pins, dyed and spiked up their hair and poked as many piercings into their skin as their ears could handle. They’d get dressed up and head out to designated punk clubs and shows.
But in neighbouring venues, there was a whole other uniform. It was sleeker, more editorial, with white face makeup and bold eye shadow, flamboyant dresses and characterul costumes. They were the New Romantics, a crowd soundtracked by music that bridged the gap between synth-pop, krautrock and what would later become post-punk.
Really, Lydon should’ve hated that crowd as punks typically do. But his love for one musician proves that his tastes would never be bordered by the social status quo. No trend or tribe was going to stop him from enjoying Bryan Ferry.
From their breakout in the early 1970s, Ferry and his band Roxy Music helped establish the New Romantic sound as they merged influences of glam rock with more synth and electronic details provided by Brian Eno. Just as how the Sex Pistols were doing something new and thrilling, so were Roxy Music, just with much less violence and vitriol.
But that doesn’t mean their music was all sunshine and roses. In fact, Lydon loved one of the band’s songs most for its darkness as, just like his own band, Ferry dared to wander into some twisted corners of the mind.
The song in question is ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, a 1973 track from Roxy Music with Lydon explained is “about a love affair with a blow-up doll”. He said the track “reveals a corner of your psyche that not many people would like to admit exists: that the mind wanders into dark places and the body follows. It’s a romantic delusion, and it’s fascinating material for a song.”
In the same vein as how Lydon allowed his lyrics to contemplate heavy and dark topics, with nothing being too controversial to say, he clearly felt a kind of kinship with Ferry despite their different sound. “I get what Bryan Ferry is trying to do,” he said, “Experimenting in a bizarre world and then couching what he finds in the style and language of the hunting set.”
He took his praise one step further by singling Ferry out as a total individual and a pioneer, saying, “It’s an exotic, intriguing concept, and he’s the only one doing it.”
