John Lydon<\/a> 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. <\/p>\nFor the most part, Lydon\u2019s entire reputation was built on his disdain for pretty much everything the music business stood for. He hated everybody else\u2019s band, he hated their songs, he hated the business that made money on it, he hated the fact that his bands didn\u2019t seem to make much money. To put it mildly, it always seemed like Lydon regretted being afflicted with musical talent. <\/p>\n
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. \u201cCorporate thinking,\u201d he explains, as the death of the Sex Pistols of this world. \u201cRecord labels are very much a death by committee.\u201c <\/p>\n
He no longer answers to a label himself; he escaped that world, but he recalls, \u201cThey have their little committee meetings or rather BIG committee meetings, and they decide what blah-blah-band should be doing for the next \u2018hit\u2019 single, right? This is a dangerous world to be trying to navigate through. I\u2019ve always been accused of being \u2018difficult to work with\u2019. Yes, of course, I am!\u201d he proudly exclaims, almost headbutting his zoom lens with a particularly dramatic leer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will not be dictated to, or my fellow cohorts in PiL now,\u201d Lydon adds. \u201cThis is our life\u2019s experience. And we\u2019re not going to have somebody misinterpret that on our behalf without our say. It\u2019s 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\u2019t lied to anyone. It\u2019s fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, it isn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve done several close approximations to us, that\u2019s for sure,\u201c when Creem asked him about Guns N\u2019 Roses. \u201cThey did one that\u2019s almost identical to our version of \u2018Stepping Stone\u2019, the \u2018e-i-e-i-ei\u2019 part and all that. Get your own technique, you thief! Leave mine alone!\u201c<\/p>\n
However, he wasn\u2019t stopping there when it came to calling out musical burglars. \u201cI don\u2019t understand how they became so popular,\u201c he said regarding Axl Roses\u2019 outfit. But they were not alone. \u201cI don\u2019t understand U2 either, I mean, that\u2019s absolutely preposterous. Particularly songs like \u2018Bullet The Blue Sky\u2019, which is almost a complete rip-off of a PIL song!\u201c<\/p>\n
Lydon continued: \u201cVery annoying. In fact, they use several Public Image ideas in the rhythm guitars. The thievery is amazing because they don\u2019t even give a nod or wink to their sources. They\u2019re too self-righteous for that. These God worshippers stealing off the devil\u2019s incarnate \u2013 that\u2019s decadence! And there\u2019s no real guts to them. That\u2019s the tragedy, they\u2019re all such milksops.\u201c<\/p>\n
Mr Rotten, however, never had much time for worship. As he said, bemoaning the lack of humour in music, \u201cI\u2019m not doom-laden, I\u2019ve never been into goth rock, I always found that to be childish. \u2018Oh, we\u2019re all going to die\u2019 \u2013 well, of course, but enjoy what you\u2019ve got in between.\u201c <\/p>\n
This is something that has stayed with him during recent tragedies, as he told Far Out<\/a>, \u201cThat vibe of don\u2019t let the bastards grind you down? That ain\u2019t gonna happen. And I think you have to in life lead by example. And I\u2019m 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\u2019re 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\u2019t, well, you know, wait for the next bus. It might not arrive on time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\nRelated Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still) Mon 5 January 2026 8:53, UK It is not unusual for John…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,596,65872,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-353471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-homepage","11":"tag-john-lydon","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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