They may have been poles apart musically, but it’s remarkable how many links there are between Queen and the Sex Pistols.
The two bands shared a producer in Chris Thomas, were (briefly) on the same label and had it not been for Freddie Mercury’s toothache – which led to Queen having to cancel an appearance on ITV London’s Today programme, the Pistols substituted in and thus the infamous Grundy interview – music history might have been quite different.
Now, in an interview with Classic Rock, Roger Taylor has been singing the praises of John Lydon and co. “I really loved the Pistols album,” the drummer told the magazine. “Great producer, mate of mine, Chris Thomas. Because we were in the same studio for a while in 1976 – 77, somewhere around there. They were doing their first album, and it was dreadful at first until Chris came in and made a great record.”
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He also brought up the famous time Freddie met Sid Vicious. “Sid put his head in the studio and said: ‘Hello, Freddie, are we bringing ballet to the masses?’ And Freddie said something like: ‘Oh, Mister Ferocious, we’re doing our best here…’”
It seems that Taylor also has more positive things to say about John Lydon: “John was alright, actually. He was quite a character. We got on quite well. It’s just that Sid Vicious was such a dick.”
As for Lydon in 2026, well, he was interviewed on ITV’s Good Morning Britain last week and – surprise, surprise – was scathing about his old bandmates in the Pistols.
He and the rest of the band – Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock – fell out over the use of the group’s songs in Pistol, the TV dramatisation of Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy. Then in 2024, they recruited ex-Gallows singer Frank Carter to front the band for a couple of benefit shows, a reunion that has now been extended for over two years.
Lydon wasn’t impressed then, and still isn’t: “Cheek of them. Going out without me, singing the songs I wrote, the words I wrote, the presentation I created,” he told ITV.
When one of the presenters suggested that he “should have joined them”, Lydon replied: “Uh, well, no, ma’am. I’ve worked enough with them in the first place. They’re deceitful, lying hyenas, and I never want another thing to do with them. So can we drop the karaoke band? Because that’s what they are to me – they’re imitating me, and that’s really kind of insulting, because there’s great bands out there that imitate us already.”
