John Lydon could have been a part of Pink Floyd after being invited to join the band by Roger Waters.
While it likely would have been a one-off experience, the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. frontman confirmed the founding member had extended an offer to join the group. The plan would have been to have Lydon join Waters for parts of The Dark Side of the Moon in Los Angeles, United States. It’s a wild offer to Lydon, who has shared both his love and hate of the group in previous interviews. The Rise hitmaker once said the band had a pretentious “aura” to them and that they had made some “rubbish”, but he also said anyone who didn’t like them was “daft as a brush”.
His back-and-forth on the band has been documented in several interviews with the frontman. He once told The Guardian: “You’d have to be daft as a brush to say you didn’t like Pink Floyd, they’ve done great stuff.” In that same interview, he maintained there was a “pretentiousness” to the group which he found hard to stomach.
Lydon added: “There was an aura of ‘Oh, we’re so great there’s no room for anybody else. [And] they’ve done some rubbish too.” But when it came to performing, the band were furthest of all from pretentious, according to Lydon, who confirmed he had met with David Gilmour a few times.
He said the band are “not [pretentious] at all, there was kind of a misreading and a misrepresentation in the press and they’re not holier than thou… David Gilmour I’ve met a few times and I just think he’s an all right bloke.”
While Pink Floyd may be a favourite of Lydon’s, he would turn down an offer to join the band on stage for what would have been an undoubtedly wild performance. Lydon, as flattered as he was, decided to turn down the offer despite wanting to perform with the band.
He explained: “The idea thrilled me no end. I came so close to doing it… [but ultimately] it felt like I was trying to set myself up as some kind of pretentious person. I’m wary of the jam-session end of things. I just don’t want to do it.
“But I wanted to do it. But just not when 20,000 people were there. I’d have gone to a studio and played around with it there. But not for the bigger picture. Privately, I’d love to go into the studio and do something with the album with them.”
It’s hard to know how well the performance would have gone, but Lydon being on vocal duties for a cover of Money or The Great Gig in the Sky could have been quite the experience. Pink Floyd would play just once with their classic line-up after Waters left the group in 1985. Their 2005 performance at Live 8 has gone down in history as a fan favourite moment from the group, who would never play together again.
