Johnny Rotten, aka John Lydon, is such a colourful, controversial and out-spoken character that it’s not surprising that so much has been written about him. But nine times out of ten what’s written about him completely ignores, or even seems to deny, the fact that, underneath all the media hype and silliness - admittedly often created by Lydon himself - there lays an underrated genuine musical genius. How else can you explain the fact that Lydon was a key character in four - count ‘em - of the most remarkable albums of the past 50 years?

Everyone of course, is aware of ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ by the Sex Pistols. But what is often over-looked is that after he left the Pistols, he produced with his new band, Public Image Limited (PIL), another three phenomenal and phenomenally influential albums, ‘Public Image’, ‘Metal Box’ and ‘Flowers Of Romance’ between 1978 and 1981.

PIL was quite a different outfit to the Pistols.

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The first wave of Punk – from say late ’76 to late ’78 - was consciously revolutionary. As it attempted to rip everything up and start again it shouted its intentions very clearly and very loudly in both the press and in the lyrics it wrote as it went along. Being seen to be revolutionary was at least as important as actually creating something revolutionary. But what seemed radical, dangerous and confrontational at the time, now seems a little tame and safe and in many ways more the natural successor or evolution of ’50′s Rock’n'Roll than a revolution.

That’s not a criticism - some of the most remarkable music ever comes from that period and that genre.  It’s also not a suggestion that Punk wasn’t a very big and necessary departure from what came immediately before - it was and it acted like a well needed cleanser on the bloatedness and laziness of much mid ’70′s music.

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Iggy Pop as John The Baptist to Johnny Rotten’s Jesus. Discuss.

At the beginning of the ’70′s a new genre in Rock started to develop and became accepted as the ‘way forward’ out of the ’60′s. Ever more complicated, and often technically very difficult to play, music; an obsession with instrumental solos; frequent changes of tempo; lyrics that were based in fantasy or science fiction rather than the here and now; concept albums and the avoidance of singles; the complete absence of any rhythm you could possibly dance to. I could go on. Overall it felt like a ‘baroque-ing’ up of Rock that would eventually lead to the phenomenal popularity and album sales of acts like ELP, Yes, Genesis, Rick Wakeman and a hundred others.

But there was a voice in the wilderness warning against such folly. And that voice was Iggy Pop’s. A voice that understood that all the over-complication of the Prog Rockers was taking Rock away from the guttural power and ability to move people and their feet that it once had. You don’t need to think too hard about great Rock, you feel it. And Iggy understood that instinctively.

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