| There must be other song
openings that can match the visceral excitement, anger and urgency of
the first few bars of Anarchy in the UK, but when you listen to the
Sex Pistols’ kinetic calling card, it’s hard to imagine
what they might be. You can hear Johnny Rotten’s snarling introduction
to the world — “Right! ... Now!” — once more
as it kicks off a new compilation of work by his alter ego, John Lydon,
the first to encompass both his bands, the Sex Pistols and Public Image
Ltd, and his solo career.
Few people get to be in a
band that changes the face of music. Lydon has been in two of them.
And the new compilation, The Best of British £1 Notes, offers
the perfect chance to examine that extraordinary achievement. The effect
of the Pistols was instantaneous: redrawing the map of rock, consigning
one set of bands to history, opening the doors for a new generation.
The influence of PiL took longer to emerge, but is glaringly obvious
in the spiky post-punk sound of dozens of contemporary bands, from Franz
Ferdinand to the Dead 60s.
And lyrically? Take Anarchy
in the UK, with its references to terrorists, the contemptuous put-down
“Your future dream is a shopping scheme”, its portrait of
a nation spiralling out of control, then add the first single from Public
Image, with its attack on the shallowness of celebrity culture, and
with just two of Lydon’s works you’ve pretty much defined
the modern world — or, at least, the modern world as fed back
to us by much of today’s media.
“Not been wrong about
it, ’ave I?” Lydon says, smiling, as we sit and talk in
a Mayfair hotel. “And that’s just from a bod off the street.”
The man who once sang “anger is an energy” is remarkably
good-humoured.
The Best of British £1
Notes began with a record-company suggestion for a new Sex Pistols compilation,
but Rotten argued for a more complete set. “I wanted the bigger
picture,” he says. “I want to make it clear that it’s
all interrelated. There really isn’t that much difference between
PiL and Pistols in terms of the way I write. Over the years, the two
have been seen as entirely separate.
I’ve found that very
difficult. In America, PiL is the band — ‘Oh, you were in
the Sex Pistols too?’” The short-lived Pistols disbanded
almost before America realised they existed. “They’re still
bogged down with this idea that punk was Patti Smith or the Ramones
— which I could clearly not have come from AT ALL,” says
Lydon, with the exasperation of a man fed up with other people telling
him where he got his ideas from. Most famously, the American critic
Greil Marcus has linked punk back through the French Situationist International
group to the 1920s surrealist movement. Lydon is having none of it.
“What on earth is that man going on about? I’m music-hall.
That’s what I am. The bleedin’ George Robey pub, for God’s
sake. You’re brought up with it, and you’re carrying on
a tradition.”
The unlikely quartet that
made up the original Pistols was completed when Lydon was spotted wearing
a Pink Floyd T-shirt that he had customised to read “I hate Pink
Floyd”. It hardly sounds the stuff of revolution, but back in
1976, that sentence marked out the dividing line between generations.
Lydon, it transpires, was having us on. “I never hated Pink Floyd.
I was having a laugh. How could you hate Pink Floyd? That’s like
saying, ‘Kill the fluffy bunnies.’ If you’re going
to make me a monster, at least give me something really worth rebelling
against. I’ve run into David Gilmour several times over the years,
and he thinks it’s hilarious. He’s a great bloke.”
Lydon still rails against
the idea that the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, carefully
manufactured the band. “Malcolm would like to claim that he created
us as a work of art, but he missed the basic fact that we were human
beings, and a lot of people got hurt as a result. It happened on instinct.
We were four different individuals with different outlooks, and it just
happened that it gelled perfectly.”
Lydon’s dislike of
other people interpreting his motives stems, he says, from the childhood
bout of spinal meningitis that also left him with a curved spine and
the poor eyesight that leads to his famous stare. “My memory went.
I had to find my own way back into who I was. When you’ve been
really seriously confused about who you are, you want to stay with what
is correct. I don’t like lies.”
Lydon describes his audition
for the Pistols as a “sink-or-swim moment”. He had never
sung in his life, had no ambition to join a band, but thought: “I’ve
got something in me that can make this work. My form of singing went
through murderous put-downs over the years, but it’s an accepted
style now. Look at Oasis.”
Lydon has always been dismissive
of bassist Glen Matlock’s pop sensibility and guitarist Steve
Jones’s more conventional rock-star dreams, but he reveals a genuine
admiration for the Pistols’ drummer, Paul Cook. “Paul was
the absolute solid kingpin,” he says. “To my mind, the best
drummer in the world. You could build a church on that man and it wouldn’t
fall down. Not respected enough — but he is by me. Listen to the
first few seconds of Anarchy in the UK and you’ve got it. You
know that this howling banshee here couldn’t survive without that
solid force behind me. We hardly ever talked, though. Bizarre.”
Lydon’s second band,
PiL, was longer-lasting, and went through several different and distinct
periods, from the bass-heavy sonics and sharp guitar stabs of the early
work, through the heavier rock of the album that was just called Album
(or Compact Disc or Cassette, depending on which format you acquired),
to the poppier/ dancier later work typified by the 1990 single Don’t
Ask Me. It’s the earliest incarnation that has emerged as the
most influential, helping to shape one of the characteristic sounds
of modern rock.
“It’s good to
be reminded that some people like it when people keep on telling you
you’re shit and you’re rubbish,” says Lydon. I’m
genuinely shocked. Isn’t this man an icon, a national treasure?
Who tells him that? “Well, my dad, for one,” says Lydon.
“He never stops. ‘Why don’t you write a hit record,
Johnny?’ If I hear that one more time...” Lydon has, of
course, had one of the UK’s most notorious hit records, the Pistols’
God Save the Queen, which conspiracy theorists believe was artificially
kept back at No 2 in the charts during the week of the Queen’s
jubilee celebrations in 1977 to save embarrassing the royal family,
who in those days hadn’t yet mastered the art of embarrassing
themselves.
The one-time scourge of the
Establishment is now clearly very patriotic. He has just finished recording
a five-part series for Belgian television called What Makes Britain
Great. And what does make Britain great? “It’s the people
— plain and bloody well simple,” says Lydon. For one segment
of the series, he was filmed at Stirling Castle singing Anarchy in the
UK, backed by bagpipers. “I couldn’t hear a word I was singing,”
says Lydon. “Just like the first Sex Pistols gig.”
It’s all a long way
from having your records banned from the radio, I suggest. “And
what was wrong with us? We were just people who had no money, and mixed
and matched, and did the best we could,” says Lydon, suddenly
sounding eerily like an Alan Bennett-scripted Patricia Routledge. But
if Lydon can sound surprisingly traditional, the one new track on Best
of British, The Rabbit Song, sounds pretty modern for a man approaching
50. Chugging bass, cut-and-pasted synth lines and scatter-shot vocals
reveal that Lydon clearly has more to offer. It’s a taster of
an album in progress; he has already completed 10 songs.
Lydon has been far from prolific
recently. Partly, this is a result of his burgeoning television career,
from I’m a Celebrity ... (“Taught them a lesson about life:
be yourself. Is that so hard?”) to wildlife series about insects
and sharks. It’s also because he has always found dealing with
record companies a struggle.
“I’ve fought
them tooth and nail,” he says. “I can honestly hold my hand
up and say no record company has ever liked what I’ve done when
I did it. Virgin wanted PiL to sound like the Sex Pistols. ‘Nope,
because when I was in the Pistols, you didn’t like that either.’
It can be disheartening if you feel you’re not being properly
understood. That’s the story of my life, from childhood onwards.
But guess what? I’m not alone in that. Nothing special about me
there. We’re all bloody lonely. Bloody well get on with it.”
And, fortunately for us,
Lydon bloody well has, and bloody well continues to do so. |