TIME ZONE featuring JOHN LYDON & AFRIKA BAMBAATAA - WORLD DESTRUCTION (1984)
When it comes to rock stars that I love I like 'em surly: Mark E. Smith... Ian McCulloch... grrrr! That's what I like to hear! And put John Lydon at the top of the list.
To most John Lydon will always be Johnny Rotten, the Sex Pistol. Yeah? Screw 'em! Yeah, I like 'em but I don't love 'em. When I was in London in November '07 the Pistols were having a reunion tour and we figured, what could be more essential than that?!?! So we went... and they BLEW! Just absolutely boring and atrocious. Armando summed it up best "I felt like I was watching Motley Crue". They didn't sound like this groundbreaking band but rather a tired old rock outfit. And to make matters worse Lydon chose to wear a PiL shirt that evening to remind me of his true accomplishments.
But the best thing about Lydon is he KNOWS. Knows the Sex Pistols tour is only for the money. Knows PiL is better. Knows PiL's latter albums sucked. He never tried to hide it nor does he wish to go into great details about it. Any press conference is an amazing display of the reporters trying to get out of there without some form of verbal assault and contempt for their very questions. The classic is his appearance with Keith Levene of PiL on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. You can find it on YouTube and it's a must watch. He's an absolute dick but it's entrancing.
And he's a disappointment. PiL became a joke, his music career was put away, and he allowed himself to become a reality star. And as if he couldn't get worse, I saw his face used on butter ads in the London subways. Shudder!
But I love him, that attitude, and that droning voice of his when he sings.
The other night I was at the Bigfoot Lodge and I heard a song which drove me up the wall because I couldn't initially identify it. The bar was loud and I didn't have that handy Shazam device on my iPhone at the time. But later I pieced it together as the one-off song Lydon did with Afrika Bambaataa under the name Time Zone. It reconnected me with a classic and I've been listening to it non-stop ever sense. Lydon does a one-off, one of the intial rap/rock combos to ever be released, and he nails it.
Man, I love that colossal twat!
