HEY, JOHNNY ROTTEN, YOU’RE MIDDLE AGED!
A hearty, happy 54th birthday to John Lydon! As the frontman/shit instigator for the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. (PiL) he’s shaken up the musical establishment, left bruises on his contemporaries, hawked up more spit on stages than almost anyone but Joan Jett, and coincidentally made some of the most memorable (and forgettable) rock of the past 40 years. Love him or hate him (or perhaps most appropriately, a swirled mixture of the two), but there’s really no way to NOT react to Lydon, who excels at getting a rise out of even the most jaded amongst us. For example, JamBase’s Associate Editor – a Lydon vet since the early ’80s – once saw the man perform two songs before revealing that he had a banana lodged in his bum, which he then gave to a fan in the front row. Such antics are commonplace and intrinsic to Lydon’s, uh, charm. He’s one of those beasts put here to scatter the herd and incite riots, big and small. So, we say screw the Queen, God save Johnny Rotten!
We begin our natal day salute with some sandpaper PiL fun captured in the early ’80s in Tokyo.
Still a dead sexy spot of rebellion despite being covered by some god awful establishment acts in the ensuing decades, “Anarchy In The UK” will be a musical middle finger held aloft around the globe for as long as young men and women have a need to tell off those in charge.
There’s a great many Public Image Ltd. echoes in the current crop of Brooklyn indie acts rising in fame and popularity. Lydon just got to this sound about three decades before y’all!
Here’s Johnny and PiL’s Keith Levene chatting about their high minded notions for the band. It’s hard to know how much of what Lydon says is pure cheek and how much pure inspiration.
Today’s highly lucrative pop-punk acts have done little to improve on this one.
The sessions for 1986′s Album, where these two cuts are plucked from, featured Bill Laswell, Ginger Baker, Nicky Skopelitis, Tony Williams, Bernie Worrell, Jonas Hellborg, Steve Vai and other revered jam/jazz scene luminaries. It remains one of the great distillations of ’80s Cold War fear and apprehension.
And one for the Queen, and we think they really mean it, man.
Marco Benevento