Why John Lydon labelled Syd Barrett “the original Sid Vicious”
Forged on the ramshackle stages and sticky floors of London’s underground clubs, the emergence of punk rock changed the musical landscape forever, giving rise to the sneering attitude and confrontational persona of John Lydon in the process.
With the Sex Pistols, Lydon was the poster boy of punk, spreading its safety-pinned gospel far and wide across the nation, inspiring the formation of countless groups in the process. From Joy Division to X-Ray Spex, half of Britain’s greatest punk and alternative outfits might never have existed were it not for Lydon’s unshakable anti-establishment attitude. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the former Pistols frontman has to like all of the bands that he inspired.
It’s been 50 years since Sex Pistols first got together, and Lydon hasn’t mellowed out very much in the intervening years, it would seem. In particular, the frontman has always had a knack for slagging other bands off, setting his sights on everybody from Green Day to Ramones, The Clash, Patti Smith, and even his own bandmates over the years. If the songwriter’s record collection is composed exclusively of bands he hasn’t ever publicly attacked, it wouldn’t look too different from the Public Image Limited discography.
That fact shouldn’t be all that surprising, of course, as punk rock was built upon an ethos of rejecting the musical mainstream. To groups like Sex Pistols, the artists rising up the pop charts of the period represented the enemy, and Lydon was never afraid to call out specific names. In fact, he was reportedly given an audition for the Pistols after the teenager was spotted wearing the infamous Pink Floyd t-shirt, on which he had scrawled “I hate” above the band name.
You would be forgiven for assuming that Lydon’s apparent hatred of the band then led by Roger Waters has endured over all these years. After all, no other group represented the pinnacle of mainstream rock quite like Floyd back in the mid-1970s. However, it seems as though the former Sex Pistol has warmed to the revolutionary outfit over the decades. “The whole ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ thing was hilarious. Anyone who took that seriously needs a new head,” he told Uncut in 2014.
Going further, Lydon even spoke of his adoration of the band’s material, particularly their earlier years under the guidance of psychedelic visionary Syd Barrett. “As it happens, I love early Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett,” the frontman explained, going as far as to dub Barrett “the original Sid Vicious”. He added, “I just hated the assumption that they were holier than God and you couldn’t give them a knock”.
Comparing Barrett and Vicious, where the former is among the preeminent songwriters of the 20th century, responsible for popularising the mind-expanding aural experiment of psychedelia in Swinging Sixties Britain, and the swastika bedecked bassist Vicious, sans a lick of musical talent, who’d walk around shooting heroin and may or may not have stabbed his girlfriend to death, is insulting, to say the least.
Still, Lydon’s outspoken appreciation for Pink Floyd, and their early years in particular, just goes to show that even the most ardently contrarian man in music cannot deny the brilliance of that pioneering band.
