A pre-fame John Lydon may have famously scrawled ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ on a t-shirt, but behind the punk posturing lay an appreciation for music that pushed boundaries. While th likes of Yes and Genesis were off the menu, the then-Sex Pistols frontman championed the genre’s more adventurous outer fringes, citing Hawkwind, Van der Graaf Generator and Krautrock pioneers Can as major influences.
The brand new issue of Prog magazine reveals just how far that admiration went. In an interview with Can co-founder Irmin Schmidt, the keyboardist reveals a tantalising ‘what if?’ moment in rock history: Lydon actively tried to join the band – and the only thing that stopped it was Can calling it quits.
“He was phoning and leaving messages at night, and he really wanted to become the singer of Can,” Schmidt tells Prog. “And I had to tell him, ‘It’s too late. We finished together. We don’t get onstage anymore.’ I know he wanted to sing with us, it was a brilliant idea. In life, there are situations where you can say, ‘What if?’ What would have happened if Johnny Rotten had become the singer? It’s an interesting thought.”
Irmin doesn’t specify when this happened, though Can split in 1978 – the same year Lydon left the Sex Pistols and abandoned his Johnny Rotten persona. That union may not have happened, but the singer’s next project, Public Image Ltd, shared Can’s boundary-pushing approach on albums such as First Issue and Metal Box.
Schmidt, who releases his new solo album, Requiem, on September 26, also address his view on the sometimes contentious ‘Krautrock’ tag, used to describe Can and countrymen such as Neu! and Kraftwerk.
“I don’t care about this term: it’s like lemonade, now it’s used all over the world,” Schmidt tells Prog. “There were a bunch of painters called the Fauvists, which was pejorative, but now nobody thinks about it. It’s just a category and journalists need categories.”
Read the full interview with Schmidt in the brand new issue of Prog, on sale now. Order it here and have it delivered to your door.