“The whole ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ thing was hilarious. Anyone who took that seriously needs a new head.” The story of the unlikely friendship between The Sex Pistols’ John Lydon and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour
Famously, in 1976, Bernie Rhodes, an associate of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and future manager of The Clash, approached John Lydon and invited him to try out for The Sex Pistols after spotting the 19-year-old walking down London’s Kings Road wearing a home-customised ‘I hate Pink Floyd‘ T-shirt. In the weeks that followed, both Steve Jones and Paul Cook would borrow their new bandmate’s shirt to wear onstage, helping foster the image of the Pistols as a rebellious, provocative and fearless alternative to Britain’s rock n’ roll aristocracy.
But whatever he may have scrawled on his T-shirt, John Lydon harboured no personal animosity against Pink Floyd, and the singer would actually come to regard David Gilmour as a personal friend, declaring him a “great bloke” in a 2014 interview with Uncut magazine.
“The whole ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ thing was hilarious.” Lydon added. “Anyone who took that seriously needs a new head. As it happens, I love early Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett – the original Sid Vicious, by the way – and even some of the ’70s stuff. I just hated the assumption that they were holier than God and you couldn’t give them a knock.”
Four years earlier, in an interview conducted with UK music mag The Stool Pigeon, Lydon declared “you’d have to be daft as a brush to say you didn’t like Pink Floyd” , and admitted that the “pretentiousness” he attributed to the group wasn’t an accurate reflection of their personalities.
“I’ve met members of the band and I get on alright with them because they’re not like that at all,” he said. “There was kind of a misreading and a misrepresentation in the press.”
In a subsequent BBC radio interview, which you can listen to below, Lydon revealed that he’d given his friend John Beverley aka Sid Vicious the nickname ‘Sid’ in tribute to Syd Barrett.
“We’re all inter-related, whether we like it or not,” the singer added in a 2017 interview with Newsweek. “Don’t make an enemy where you don’t need one. You might not like the sounds they come up with or whatever, but they’re doing something important to all of us. They’re making us think, and anybody who thinks can never be my enemy.”
When David Gilmour spoke to Q magazine in 1999, the subject of Lydon’s infamous T-shirt was mentioned, and the Pink Floyd man was asked if this ‘hate’ was reciprocated.
“No, I thought the Sex Pistols were rather good,” Gilmour replied. “I’ve been on a show with Johnny Rotten – it was at Sadler’s Wells – and he said he never really hated Pink Floyd, and actually, he was a bit of a fan.
“I confess to not having entirely believed it in the first place,” Gilmour said, adding, tongue-in-cheek “I mean, who could hate us?”
Gilmour had previously been asked about the Pistols’ supposed antipathy towards his band by Musician magazine, in 1982.
“It frightened a lot of people, but it didn’t frighten me,” he responded. “I like a good kick in the pants. It does you good.”
Gilmour once actually reached out to Lydon to see if he would be interested in guesting with the band when they were playing in Los Angeles. “And I would have done it, too, except I was off doing a documentary on bugs for the Discovery Channel,” Lydon told Uncut.
Perhaps a collaboration between the two iconic English musicians might yet happen. We can but hope.