The Sex Pistols song that references Captain Beefheart
Long before punk, somewhere out in the hills of Los Angeles, lived a radical who used to put his drummer in a barrel and beat it with a stick as punishment for not hitting the right bum notes. He was born Don Van Vilet; in his youth, he was a sculpting prodigy. In his adulthood, he was Captain Beefheart, perhaps the wildest musician there ever was.
As Tom Waits proclaimed regarding his late LA pal: “Once you’ve heard Beefheart, it’s hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood.” This sense of indelible singularity was a huge inspiration to John Lydon and his Sex Pistols bandmates when they were growing up. Vilet was fun in a way that made fun seem monolithic and as potent as music gets.
“I mean, one of my favourite American artists of all time will be Captain Beefheart,” John Lydon recently told Far Out. This is something that has always shone through in Lydon’s work, with expression and experimentation being the two core tenets.
Speaking about the way the late, great Don Van Vliet played with form in a manner ahead of its time, Lydon continues: “He could get tunes together, which is interesting in itself, but Trout Mask Replica is taking music completely outside of itself. It’s regurgitating it in this shambolic exploration, I suppose, like deconstructing a building, you know, all the pipes are on the outside, but the heart and soul is inside. It works in music. It doesn’t work so well in architecture.”
He continues: “And lyrics to die for? It’s just insanely entertaining. It showed me such an open mind to all of life’s possibilities, and it’s not narrow or insular or fashionable.” Indeed, the record was a trend-bucking oddity, avant-garde in the extreme, but if you listen to the perfect blues-adjacent pop songs like ‘Observatory Crest’ that Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band also mustered, it displays a mastery of songwriting that Trout Mask Replica was reconstituting. And there is something decidedly anarchistic about that middle finger to form that you can imagine Lydon adoring.
He showcased this from the very get-go with the Sex Pistols. The classic track ‘New York’ from Never Mind the Bollocks features the line: “Everybody knows Japan is a dishpan.” This lyric is a nod to the Beefheart song ‘Japan In a Dishpan’ from the absurd record, Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Beefheart’s original is an instrument piece of madness, featuring a wailing Erhu sound that falls in and out of rhythm with a western backbeat, creating a cacophony akin to the mess of sludge and sharpness that sits in a dishpan. Lydon loved that wordplay and reprised it for a blitzkrieg of his own.
