(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 10 January 2026 14:31, UK
In the grand scheme of things, punk may be the best thing that could have ever happened to rock and roll. They may not have been the most technical bands in the world, but the amount of energy every band got out of their instruments with just a handful of chords is more than many capable musicians could get with 15 different musical pieces. For John Lydon, the attitude was more than half the battle, and it was important to stomp some progressive rock titans in the process.
Because when you see the rock charts before and after punk, it looks like night and day. Just before bands like Sex Pistols and Ramones started to rise to prominence, the main figures of the day had been acts like Yes and Pink Floyd. They may have started out scruffy, but these bands were now taking grand concepts and turning them into theatrical pieces, which felt miles away from the golden age of rock and roll.
The entire point of the genre in the first place was to be an escape from the more professional sides of recording, so why were bands like Yes betraying the simplistic arrangements that Chuck Berry preached about? Lydon sought to change that with a vengeance, and he had a pretty big target in mind when looking at bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Along with Yes, Lydon thought that the prog giants were making a mockery of what true rock and roll was supposed to be, saying, “All of us were very bored and frustrated with everything in music at that time because all you had was Yes and bloody Emerson Lake and bloody Palmer. It really did look at that time like the end of rock ‘n’ roll, if you want to call it that because rock ‘n’ roll did become flappy flared trouser stuff and posturing and ridiculousness”.
Which is being a little bit too hard on that flavour of rock and roll. Sure, both bands did have their bloated moments across every record, but they still had their earnest moments as well. Emerson Lake and Palmer still had a great song like ‘Lucky Man’, and no one was going to believe that anything Jon Anderson sang wasn’t coming from deep within his soul.
John Lydon on stage as Johnny Rotten. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Prog rock was ever going to be something that Lydon was a big fan of. The punk icon relished taking the most abrasive sounds and throwing them into a blender, pouring them into a shot glass, then shoving that glass into an audience’s collective eye.
When looking at them objectively, though, it’s amazing how long fans stuck around with these bands before realising that punk was the answer. Before you even turn on an album like Tales from Topographic Oceans, it’s clear that something has gotten too overblown, especially considering the entire double album only contained four different movements.
This was rock and roll if it were made by classical musicians, which may as well have been a cardinal sin for Lydon. Once Sex Pistols started gigging around England, the entire premise was to bring rock back to its roots, especially considering half the band members didn’t bother to learn that many chords when making songs like ‘Anarchy in the UK’.
That’s because they didn’t need them. Compared to the long-drawn-out epics that every prog band loved to play, Lydon’s approach was more of an artistic threat. He may have shouted at the top of his lungs, but that form of anti-singing may as well have been an air raid siren announcing the next generation of rockers.
The truth is, across his career, Lydon has always hated any new invention in the world of rock music. The Sex Pistols star has routinely found space on newspaper columns and magazine back pages to claim that the very virtues of music had been desecrated by one band or another. So perhaps his words should be taken with a pinch of salt.
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