Why John Lydon rejected a duet with Alice Cooper: “It would have been a bit too much”
There’s always a rush of excitement when you’re watching a gig, and suddenly, the tension is building
“We have a special guest here tonight,” an artist yells into a mic and in an instant, a great night gets even better as you get two stars for the price of one. I assumed that was a universal joy, but apparently not for John Lydon.
It’s a classic case of Johnny Rotten coming out. It wouldn’t be on brand for the grouchy punk to appear excited or overjoyed about anything, really, so he even has a moody take on artists bringing special guests out at their gigs.
“As a young concert-going person I was never enamoured with celebrities who would walk out and feature in certain songs and then walk off,” Lydon said, seemingly always being a pessimist about these things. To him, it’s tokenistic and lacks impact, as he added, “It struck me as being like Come Dancing. A little pony. And a little old. What old people do.”
To his defence, though, at least this is a view he’s stuck with. With their fast impact, Sex Pistols could’ve spent 1975 being all “Surprise! Here’s the Ramones!” With Lydon’s enduring legacy, he could be like that today, bringing out a cast of stars at one of his own Public Image shows, as he surely has a strong contact list of people he could call upon. But no – he’s stuck to his guns.
He’s stuck to his guns so tightly that he even turned down a legend and said no to Alice Cooper when the American rocker wanted him to do one of the walk-on appearances he so despises. “I think it was the night before at the Hammersmith Odeon. He wanted me to come out and do ‘School’s Out’ with him. A very sweet gesture but it’s ‘AHHHHHH!’ y’know?”
“AHHHHH” says it all while saying nothing. Capturing the conflict of hating a gimmick but undeniably being torn due to the celebrity of Cooper, it left Lydon not knowing whether he should drop his guard and simply sell out for a moment that was bound to be a glorious one. But if there’s one thing Lydon has proved time and time again, it’s that he’s not one to fold. Once he’d made his mind up on an issue, that’s it. That’s why Sex Pistols will never truly and properly reform again once he’d decided he was done with it, and then likely had insult added to injury when the rest of the group reformed with exactly the thing he hates: a special guest.
Really, everything comes back to that fallout, as it so often seems to in Lydon’s world. While he claimed he cancelled on Cooper just because he didn’t want to be part of a musical moment he saw as lame, the truth is that it was about personal dramas instead.
“There was another reason too with Alice Cooper as well. The support band was some group that Paul Cook was playing in,” he said, admitting that doing the show would’ve meant running into one of his ex-bandmates. “It would have been a bit too much,” he said, so instead he concocted this whole speech about hating guest appearances, all to avoid the run-in.
