Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, might be the perfect candidate to express disgust with anything in the current music landscape. The snarling "Anarchy in the U.K." singer spoke to a crowd at Oxford University Monday (Dec. 8) about his disdain for Simon Cowell and Band Aid, NME notes. It was entertaining, to say the least.
"Simon Cowell, that's our worst enemy... I don't think [the contestants] on the show are that awful, it becomes awful when they become trained into that cruise ship show band mentality, and that's the poison of it..." he said, citing Cowell's well-known show The X Factor. "[Simon Cowell] has got us all on his big cruise ship lollipop, and I ain't licking his lollipop."
Lydon is not a fan of the TV series. "It's really bad, all of them shows. How seriously the judges take themselves, and the way they judge! People, just being innocent. The brutality and the cruelty of it; that ain't the world I live in."
The Sex Pistols leader, who was at the university to promote his recent autobiography, Anger is an Enemy, also took aim with the anti-poverty supergroup Band Aid. He said Bob Geldof's project is "open to corruption."
"There's this thing called administration and that's where all the money is eaten up. Do you remember the one with Phil Collins and they were jetting around, doing New York, London? How much f-----g money? How many cans of Campbell's do you think that one cost? And who really needs Phil Collins in two continents in two hours? Even his missus would have a no on that," he said.
Geldof recently told Rolling Stone that critics of the supergroup can go "F--k off."
