Why did Johnny Rotten claim that punk had become fascist?
There’s no way the Sex Pistols would have led the punk insurrection without Johnny Rotten at the helm. A perfect frontman for their raucous sound, who brought razor-sharp wit and an aggressive spirit to the fold, he became their mouthpiece, the flame-haired symbol of their generation’s cultural revolution. With songs about the monarchy being a fascist regime and anarchy on the streets of the UK, even if people didn’t know it before they heard them, he perfectly packaged their jaded thoughts into snappy anthems that soundtracked the charge.
Just as the Sex Pistols were the vanguard of punk, they also came to embody its inevitable implosion. After bassist and songwriter Glen Matlock left under contentious circumstances—ranging from rumours that he was ousted for being a fan of The Beatles to his own claims that he left voluntarily because he was “sick of all the bullshit”—the band’s end felt imminent. Although Matlock is credited as a co-writer on 10 of the 12 tracks on their sole studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, which was released in October 1977, he was gone by February of that year. The album was completed with his replacement, Sid Vicious, who was tragically inept as both a musician and a person.
Vicious joining the fold changed the band overnight. They went from being a group with a genuine philosophical and musical force to just a hollow, sensationalist act meant to sell records, with the bassist becoming notorious for his violent outbursts. In early 1978, the group was over, and just the following year, aged 21, Vicious died. This decline was hastened by the mysterious death of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungeon.
Thanks in part to Vicious’ behaviour – which disgusted him – suffering a terrible flu and a breakdown in relations with guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and manager Malcolm McLaren, Rotten left Sex Pistols on January 18th, 1978. He then switched his name back to his birth name, John Lydon, and formed post-punk pioneers Public Image Ltd. He knew his old band and the first wave of punk had become a farce and wanted to strive for musical refinement of his own accord, free from the shackles of genre and do something truly substantial.
While it was brave starting a new band so quickly after leaving Sex Pistols, Lydon didn’t mess around, and their acclaimed debut arrived in December that year, marking the era’s shift from punk to post-punk, as typified by the artful single ‘Public Image’. This was the new sound, and Lydon was putting the past and Never Mind the Bollocks behind him.
In 1979, when Lydon was fully in the flow of Public Image Ltd and had come into his own as an artist, he gave a revealing interview wherein he slammed his old band and called the entire first wave of punk “fascist”. Asked if the Sex Pistols were a gimmick, he responded: “It never started out as one. It started out as a piss take, a mockery of… went sour, so I left.”
Responding to the question of whether he was proud of Never Mind the Bollocks achieving its objective of cultural change, he was brutally frank about its importance, maintaining it was “fine” for the time, but people are fools if they live in the past. He was looking forward. He then outlined his hopes that music would be better in the 1980s. In what way? He explained: “In that many attitudes will be accepted, not just one way. Punk became like, fascist, ‘it has to be this way or else.'”
Strangely, Lydon said he did not influence punk to become “fascist” despite being its figurehead. He asserted: “I’ve always said music should be many attributes, all are tolerable. It becomes intolerable when one particular form takes over and obliterates the rest. That is wrong.” Of the first wave ending, he concluded: “The pathetic conclusion of that movement was one load of arseholes replaced another load. Nothing was achieved.”
It’s intriguing that Lydon should be so damning of the very movement he once served as the mouthpiece for. While this disdain reflects his nature as a restless creative—quickly growing to hate punk’s rigidity and shifting towards something more stylistically fluid—it also offers a lens through which to view his recent political leanings. Lydon’s support for figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, who seemingly contradict everything he once stood for, aligns with their populist appeal to voters who see themselves as rebelling against the status quo. In a way, it encapsulates his contrarian spirit, even if it leads to contradictions that speak volumes.
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