John Lydon lists his first musical influences: “New York punk is where it all comes from? Oh, go f–k yourselves!”
In the memoir of the punk poet laureate John Cooper Clarke, he recalls the moment that he first encountered a mere image of the Sex Pistols. Like many others his age, pop-riveted onto his impressionable young mind was a “mugshot of the group’s singer in action… his paranoid face frozen in a mask of fugitive anxiety, eyes like saucers, his hair a multi-directional mess of greasy spikes, gaunt sunken cheeks, and the complexion of a compulsive blood donor… It was Johnny Rotten. Wow! Is that his real name,” Clarke recalled. “Fancy looking like that!”
For a generation, this was a Promethean moment: a new beast had appeared to usurp the zeitgeist and reclaim the viscera of youth from the ayahuasca epiphanies of stilted, middle-class psychedelia. And that’s even before tales of John Lydon’s band utterly Chernobyl-ing venues, waging war against banality, and proudly admitting that they could barely play their instruments came to the fore. The whole enterprise was filled with novel invigoration, but there were those on the far side of the pond who felt like it was a mere tribute act.
“If it wasn’t for the Ramones, you’d be nowhere,” Marky Ramone recently pointed out to Lydon at a punk panel talk in Los Angeles, “you’d be doing fucking fish and chips somewhere.” After a string of rebuttals from Lydon slipping back into his Rotten ways, Marky continues: “I did the Blank Generation album with Richard Hell, and you took his image, and all you guys took Richard Hell’s image… that’s all you did.” While few have been bold enough to say that is all the Sex Pistols did, the notion of punk being appropriated from New York has often been cited.
Lydon does not enjoy it, and lord knows he doesn’t agree with it. When we recently interviewed the eternally edgy frontman, he discussed the genesis of the new Public Image Ltd song ‘The Do That’, and how he suddenly got excited when he uncovered a hint of Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’ in his work. Suddenly, he realised that the spirit of the song pertained to the potency of the cultural influences you adopted as arbiters of your forming personality in your youth. For Lydon, very few of these shaping sounds came from the New York underground, as has often been suggested.
“Now, an awful lot of American journalism is saying that New York punk is where it all comes from. Oh, go fuck yourselves; it is talking shit. I was brought up in Britain!” Lydon expressed, leering towards the screen as though he was going to headbutt his webcam. He then rattled off an array of the artists that truly did inspire the Sex Pistols: “Mud, The Sweet, T Rex, Mott the Hoople, Dave Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Alex Harvey Band, Status Quo, Traffic, a vast extending universe of music. That’s what influenced me.”
He continued: “Of course, there’s a few American acts in there, but they’d be the ones with record deals. Nothing in New York was really very interesting to me, even when I finally got there. Because I found a lot of the bands were really kind of hanging on to the British Invasion ideology. They were dressing similar, they had similar hairdos. That was a dead end for me. As gloriously shambolic as the New York Dolls were, Sweet were much better. Who can forget ‘Ballroom Blitz’?”
In truth, while much of what Lydon claims is debatable by nature – and he’d be more than happy to debate it himself – punk in the New York sense did actually hark back to the British Invasion by design. As Patti Smith once explained to the proto-punk beat writer William S. Burroughs in a Spin feature: “I think what [punk] was, was a hunger that we didn’t know that a lot of us had. We all felt loneliness as a hunger for something to happen. As we thought we were lonely, a group like Television thinks they’re alone. The boys that later became the Sex Pistols thought they were alone. All of us people that should have been perpetuating, or helping to build on, the ’60s we were dormant. And we thought we were alone.”
Johnny Thunders always wanted to reclaim the simple attitude of rock that roared pop culture towards a revolution in his youth. Lydon keenly points out that his youth was different and that anyone who claims that New York was the impetus for the Sex Pistols isn’t really listening to the music. As he yelled at Marky Ramone when he called him a rip-off, “You’re still covering your ears, you fucking idiot.”