(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 5 January 2026 8:53, UK
It is not unusual for John Lydon to take aim at another band and let loose with his arrows of discontent. For a long time, as part of the Sex Pistols legacy, it seemed unlikely Lydon would do anything but lambast other acts.
For the most part, Lydon’s entire reputation was built on his disdain for pretty much everything the music business stood for. He hated everybody else’s band, he hated their songs, he hated the business that made money on it, he hated the fact that his bands didn’t seem to make much money. To put it mildly, it always seemed like Lydon regretted being afflicted with musical talent.
When I recently chatted with John Lydon, he bemoaned what he perceived as the current commercial inclination of music and how anyone remotely radical is quickly saddled with an industry-approved safety tag. “Corporate thinking,” he explains, as the death of the Sex Pistols of this world. “Record labels are very much a death by committee.“
He no longer answers to a label himself; he escaped that world, but he recalls, “They have their little committee meetings or rather BIG committee meetings, and they decide what blah-blah-band should be doing for the next ‘hit’ single, right? This is a dangerous world to be trying to navigate through. I’ve always been accused of being ‘difficult to work with’. Yes, of course, I am!” he proudly exclaims, almost headbutting his zoom lens with a particularly dramatic leer.
“I will not be dictated to, or my fellow cohorts in PiL now,” Lydon adds. “This is our life’s experience. And we’re not going to have somebody misinterpret that on our behalf without our say. It’s a stupid trap. The promise, of course, is instantaneous wealth, fame and fortune. Well, I preferred infamy right from the start. And I found it the easier road to travel. Because I wake up in the morning knowing I haven’t lied to anyone. It’s fantastic.”
However, it isn’t always the industry that pushes bands into this pitfall; sometimes, it is the fading capacity to convey your own life experience, the dreaded shackling of stilted originality. In those incidents, artists themselves can become their own committee, simply conflating ideas from other acts into a new single that shuns their own impetus. Lydon has always been keen to say that Public Image Ltd have existed as a band bubbling with their own ideas and smashing them together in a pot of madness. But he certainly feels others just nab lines of his work and slightly edit the wording, so to speak.
“They’ve done several close approximations to us, that’s for sure,“ when Creem asked him about Guns N’ Roses. “They did one that’s almost identical to our version of ‘Stepping Stone’, the ‘e-i-e-i-ei’ part and all that. Get your own technique, you thief! Leave mine alone!“
However, he wasn’t stopping there when it came to calling out musical burglars. “I don’t understand how they became so popular,“ he said regarding Axl Roses’ outfit. But they were not alone. “I don’t understand U2 either, I mean, that’s absolutely preposterous. Particularly songs like ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’, which is almost a complete rip-off of a PIL song!“
Lydon continued: “Very annoying. In fact, they use several Public Image ideas in the rhythm guitars. The thievery is amazing because they don’t even give a nod or wink to their sources. They’re too self-righteous for that. These God worshippers stealing off the devil’s incarnate – that’s decadence! And there’s no real guts to them. That’s the tragedy, they’re all such milksops.“
Mr Rotten, however, never had much time for worship. As he said, bemoaning the lack of humour in music, “I’m not doom-laden, I’ve never been into goth rock, I always found that to be childish. ‘Oh, we’re all going to die’ – well, of course, but enjoy what you’ve got in between.“
This is something that has stayed with him during recent tragedies, as he told Far Out, “That vibe of don’t let the bastards grind you down? That ain’t gonna happen. And I think you have to in life lead by example. And I’m a positive thinker. I always have been. I hope that that rubs off on our audience and, lo and behold, the world at large, but we’re not doing it with an overly commercial attitude. This is something that you seek out if you really need it in your life. If you don’t, well, you know, wait for the next bus. It might not arrive on time.”
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