Nostalgia — or whatever this is — is a funny thing. Last year, The Flaming Lips and Dennis Coyne’s band Stardeath and White Dwarfs reinterpreted Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon (TMT report). Henry Rollins and Peaches guested on the recording, and this summer, the whole thing is happening again live at Bonnaroo. While strange, it was not any more surprising than hearing about Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu’s plans to cover Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures live this spring.
Such homages are bizarre, but the connections are nonetheless predictable. Recently, The Quietus editor John Doran interviewed John Lydon, who revealed his own (and much more bewildering) willingness to cover Dark Side of the Moon. Wayne Coyne is today’s psychedelic legend; he covers Dark Side, and it’s just another day in Oklahoma City. But John Lydon, a.k.a. the frontman of (the newly reunited) Public Image Ltd., a.k.a The Sex Pistol’s Johnny Rotten, joining forces with Pink Floyd? “I’d love to go into the studio and do something with the album with them,” he mused. Who knew?
Apparently, such a collaboration is more plausible than one might think. During the same interview, Lydon admitted that Pink Floyd asked him in 2008 to perform some of Dark Side on stage with them at a concert in Los Angeles. He very nearly did it, too, but explained to Doran that he would rather play alongside the group in a studio than for a crowd of “20,000 people.”
Of course, this isn’t the strangest thing to hear from Lydon, who, aside from his infamous thousand-and-one crazy, punk antics, once starred in a British commercial for Country Life butter. For now, his casual statement of intent is all we have to go on for a Dark Side Goes Rotten project, but who knows what the future will hold?
• Johnny Lydon: http://www.johnlydon.com
