“They care about lining their coffers”: the two bands John Lydon accused of being soulless
Say what you like about the Sex Pistols, …John Lydon certainly seems to have done so. He recently said that he has been “shocked by how awful” the present incarnation is. And even the Promethean force he led to snarling fruition has occasionally been met with a bout of self-deprecation from the anarchic singer. In short, nobody is safe from Lydon’s loaded spleen, least of all the sinners of this world who take themselves too seriously.
A close second to self-seriousness in the rankings of Lydon’s deadly sins is a lack of soul and sincerity in your art. He might have accused Sting and Don Henley of being the two culprits behind the erosion of humour in music, claiming that they confuse intellectualism with being unshaven, but at least he said they were earnest in their unlaughing pursuit of booksmart lyrics and middling melodies.
He did not afford the same liberty to two British bands who were clobbered together in the alt-indie scene of the 2000s, commenting, “Coldplay and Radiohead bug the hell out of me because it’s so soulless. It just seems pointless. It’s nice, but it’s tosh. They don’t care about you. They care about lining their coffers.” With Coldplay selling over 100million records and Radiohead racking up around 30m, they’ve both certainly been successful on that front, whether it was a driving force or not.
While Radiohead would retire their biggest commercial hit, ‘Creep’, in a move that seemingly disproved the punk’s point in their case at least, but Lydon still wasn’t buying it. “There’s nothing about heart and soul, they don’t know about people dying, living, aspiring,” he added. Seemingly, he figured their art pertained to more wishy-washy values than the visceral concerns of the common man.
He wouldn’t back down, either. “I’m not part of the self-pity whinge brigade, so please don’t put a Radiohead album on,” he told Details in 2007. “They just wallow in their own seriousness a little too much. And I think that that’s a stance, and it’s an unhealthy one.” This is something he has, in fairness, always avoided himself. Recently, telling Far Out that his mantra in life is: “See humour in all things.”
However, even when he met Coldplay, he failed to see the funny side of their booming success. He even levelled a pretty personal attack on them in The Sun, commenting, ”I pity the poor bastards who have to watch them. They are utterly humourless. I met them a few years ago, said hello and realised they were just men in anoraks. They looked like a gang of little poncey masturbators.”
This supposed capacity for self-pollution also extended to their not quite yellow and more so beige music in Lydon’s disdainful view. The Public Image frontman added, ”There is no fun, they don’t offer joy. Their music has a couple of quite nice tones here and there, but it’s a box of tosh sold to slightly inadequate, half-baked people.”
Alas, despite how much these bands grind on him, if he lives by his own tenets, he’ll have to give their next albums a chance. After all, he recently told us, ”It’s very nice to have political theories, but they’re not practical. And that’s a shame. If we had a more open debate about that instead of silly yelling and screaming at each other, then it won’t be… end of world.”
