In London in 1976

In 1976, in London, a T-shirt could be enough to make history. And to build a misunderstanding destined to last much longer than its protagonists. But legend has it that it was precisely after seeing him walking down King's Road wearing a T-shirt that read “I hate Pink Floyd” that Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren's associate and future manager of the Clash, approached John Lydon, inviting him to audition for the Sex Pistols.

John Lydon is the perfect embodiment of the punk paradigm shift: working-class origins, a patchy education, an idea of music that prizes urgency and attitude over instrumental skill. That T-shirt, for him, was like the banner of a rebellion, that of the entire punk movement against the “dinosaurs” of the Seventies. In young Lydon's perception, Pink Floyd stood for the symbol of a kind of rock music seen as elitist, conceptual, wrapped in an almost sacred aura. The rejection wasn't so much aimed at the sound as at what it meant culturally: a way of distancing himself from an idea of rock removed from everyday life.

From there the leap to the Sex Pistols is quick: Lydon becomes Johnny Rotten, the band takes shape, and that T-shirt becomes a symbol, also worn onstage by Steve Jones and Paul Cook.

And yet, even then, the contradiction was plain for all to see. In 1977, among other things, Pink Floyd released “Animals”, one of their most experimental masterpieces. A raw, political album, charged with a tension that has little to do with virtuosity for its own sake. Inspired by George Orwell's “Animal Farm”, the record is a bleak reflection on England and the dynamics of power, and it's precisely this kind of approach that would go on to influence, in later years, many trajectories of post-punk and new wave. Hardly the portrait of a band frozen in a backward-looking aesthetic.

At the same time, the Sex Pistols got saddled with the famous (and unfair) label of “The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle” and, amid provocations, tragedies (Sid Vicious's death) and departures, soon burned through the mythic aura sparked by their legendary debut “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols” (1977), a cornerstone of Britain's 1977 and of the whole punk era. Lydon himself would go on to channel his creativity and his flamboyant, muezzin-like vocals into the darker yet even more magnetic Public Image Ltd.

As the years went by, however, John Lydon himself would downplay the story of that youthful animosity. On several occasions he clarified that he had never truly hated Pink Floyd, going so far as to consider David Gilmour a personal friend. In an interview a few years later, revisiting the notorious t-shirt affair, he recalled: "The whole 'I Hate Pink Floyd' thing was hilarious. Anyone who took it seriously needs to get a life. As it happens, I love early Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, and even some of their stuff from the '70s. I simply hated the idea that they were treated as holier than God and untouchable." Earlier, in an interview with British music magazine The Stool Pigeon, Lydon had admitted that the "pretentiousness" he attributed to Pink Floyd didn't match their actual personalities: "I've met the band members and I get along fine with them, because they're nothing like that at all. There was a kind of misreading and distortion on the part of the press."

In a later BBC radio interview, John Lydon would reveal that he had given his friend John Beverley, aka Sid Vicious, the nickname "Sid" as a tribute to Syd Barrett. And again, in 2017, speaking to Newsweek once more about Pink Floyd, he explained: "We're all related, whether we like it or not. Don't make an enemy where you don't need one. You might not like their sound or whatever, but they're doing something important for all of us. They make us think, and anyone who thinks can never be my enemy."

Gilmour himself, for his part, has always brushed off the whole affair with a touch of irony. During a chat with Q magazine in 1999, when asked whether the hatred was mutual, he replied: "No, I thought the Sex Pistols were rather good. I went to a show with Johnny Rotten, at Sadler's Wells, and he told me he'd never really hated Pink Floyd — in fact, he was a bit of a fan. I confess I didn't quite believe him at first. Then again, who could hate us?" In 1982, on the other hand, he had told Musician magazine: "That whole Sex Pistols thing scared a lot of people, but not me. I like a good shock. It's good for you."

Looking closely, the very idea of a rift between punk and art rock/prog has often been more legend than reality. Many bands from the first wave of punk, while building a language in opposition to it, actually listened to and appreciated groups associated with prog, absorbing elements that would resurface in the movement's later evolutions. The dividing line, in short, was far less clear-cut than the rhetoric of the era would suggest.

So while Pink Floyd were a symbolic target, other stances taken by Lydon would prove far more clear-cut. If his relationship with The Clash was marked by a certain ambivalence — personal admiration for Joe Strummer mixed with criticism of an ideological stance he considered less than authentic — the former Johnny Rotten's judgment of pop-punk champions Green Day would be far harsher, accusing them of being hollow imitators, perfectly at home within the very system they claimed to oppose. When Green Day released their most "political" album, "American Idiot", Lydon lashed out: "They say they're fighting the system, but they're part of the system, and they've stolen punk's sound and attitude from us. They're stupid, fat, rich kids."

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18/04/2026