The old punk yawns again

Estate Agent and celebrity reality TV star John Lydon is currently - oh, lord - judging an online battle of the bands which exists solely to promote some sort of gambling website.

Wired ask him how The Sex Pistols would have done in this sort of competition:

The Sex Pistols would never have turned up. We wouldn't have bothered with it in the first place. And ah, dude, you've got to look at the world differently then, it was a different time.... You'd get seen by playing live in pubs, clubs, bars or anywhere else you could scrounge a quick living. And guess what, we were underage. We weren't allowed to drink in these places, but we were certainly capable of having bottles thrown at us.

I grew up in a world of boo boys. No matter what we did, it wasn't good enough, and (we played to) generally an older crowd. We eventually brought our own crowd, and changed the world because of it. Generally, the hippie lot from the previous generation were a spiteful bunch of fuckers. They didn't want to share the world with us.

Was it especially surprising that the "hippies" didn't want to share the world with a man who didn't trust them and used "hippy" like an insult?

We love the attempt to square the circle of doing something so mainstream as being a Mickie Most for the the 21st century with having been in a supposedly punk band calls on Lydon to try and pull off an "it was all different in my day, son" fib: there's probably, if anything, less reason for a band to go on a Casino-promoting game show than there would have been for the Sex Pistols to have done New Faces.

Even more amusingly, Lydon then attempts to square his support for Monarchy with his professed Anarchy:

I like the royal family. I think it could be a fun institution. The trouble was, for a few years there, we had a Union Jack stolen from us. Nazism crept into Great Britain. We managed to kick that on its head, and the royal family made some stupid decisions about people like me. They turned their back on the working class, which, frankly, is their bread and butter. We're the true supporters of their institution, and were treated as though we didn't belong. Several statements were made to that end by the royal family, and it all ended a negative way.

Hmm. Nazism creeping into Great Britain, you say, Lydon? Now... remind me again, what was the band who went on TV with friends wearing swastika armbands...