Public Image Ltd, "Home"

8 Days to Find a Home



Look at the chorus to "Home": "Better days will never be, home sweet home." Then remind yourself that this is PiL, which means John Lydon is delivering the message.

The rest of the song is as acerbic as one could expect the sometime Johnny Rotten to be, skewering warmongering politicians and world leaders but too deft to call them out by name, creating a message that is equally universal in 1986 and 2015. Like the best political artists, Rotten delivers revolutionary ideas with revolutionary music, his post-rock dance beats and free vocals landing as violently as his ideas. Steve Vai, the dizzyingly flashy guitarist then best known for his showmanship on Frank Zappa and David Lee Roth records, shows up to play metal guitar, but Rotten keeps him in check more than any of Vai's previous bosses. I wouldn't want to cross him either.

John Lydon on Voting

Johnny Rotten's Winter of Discontent

At age seven, John Lydon contracted spinal meningitis and spent a year in Haringey's St. Ann's Hospital. Nurses injected him with penicillin and used surgical needles to draw fluid from his spine while the boy suffered from nausea, migraines and the knowledge that, were he to make it out of the hospital alive, he'd be right back in impoverished Holloway, fighting off a high crime rate, bullying, canings from his schoolmaster and prejudices against Irish immigrants.

Like many boys, Lydon found much of his solace in cinema. Not escapism, but inspiration. As he remembers in his autobiography No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs:

"Best of all, I loved the way Laurence Olivier played Richard III. He portrayed the character so utterly vile, it was great. As I said before, Johnny Rotten definitely has tinges of Richard III in him. I saw it a long time before I conceived Rotten. No redeeming qualities. Hunchback, nasty, evil, conniving, selfish. The worst of everything to excess. Olivier made Richard III riveting in his excessive disgust. Having seen it aeons ago, I took influences from Olivier's performance. I had never seen a pop singer present himself quite that way. It wasn't the norm. You're supposed to be a nice pretty boy, sing lovely songs, and coo at the girlies. Richard III would have none of that. He got the girls in other ways."

Deformed, unfinish'd John Lydon could not prove a lover, and thus determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days. Unwilling to be crippled, Johnny Rotten turned his hunched look into one of the most iconic cultural images of the 20th century.

Not long ago, I saw Mudhoney at the Bowery Ballroom. Frontman Mark Arm hammed up the encore by hunching over with a wild-eyed stare, gnashing his teeth and spitting out the words to "Suck You Dry." None of these gestures were acrobatic, yet anyone with a passing interest in punk rock could have told you, "He's imitating Johnny Rotten." Not bad for a sickly boy confined to a metal-framed bed.

Appetite for Destruction: "Think About You"

How is it that "Think About You" didn't hit? If Guns N' Roses didn't alrady have six other singles to push, "Think About You" could've landed on the charts. Instead, it's the crème de la deep cuts, a reminder that for a few years, Izzy Stradlin wrote better rock songs than all but maybe about six people in the world.



It's a sweet, catchy song with a danceable rhythm, which is probably why it wasn't a single. "Think About You" is the nicest song that GNR ever wrote, and when you're playing hard rock's Jerry Lee Lewis, you don't give us the nice songs. As John Lydon, one of GNR's heroes, tells us, "'Nice' is the worst insult you could pay anybody. It means you are utterly without threat, without values. Nice is a cup of tea."

But even at their nicest, GNR's music is no cup of tea. The hand claps, cowbell and declarations of love come with a few meaty solos and some awesome plugged vs. unplugged guitarmonies. Best of all is the finale, where Axl tops off some of his greatest melismas with an ominous "only you," set to a haunting Stradlin arpeggio that demolishes the song's pace in a matter of seconds. Only a few metal musicians have ever matched Stradlin's songbook, but one of them shared a band with him.

If Ozzy Osbourne or Judas Priest had written "Think About You," it'd be a staple of their tours and compilations. But on Appetite for Destruction, it's just track eight.