Probably publicity.

A love letter to the lyrics of Open Up by John Lydon and Leftfield.

Still from the official video.

You’re very frank Clarice. I think it would be quite something to know you in private life.

So says serial killer Hannibal Lecter to FBI Agent Clarice Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs. Lecter’s appreciation of Starling’s forthrightness is extreme. He is visibly nourished by her sincerity. It is disturbing. But the audience feels it too. We are just as transfixed by her testimony as Lecter. Frankness is an uncommon and beguiling virtue. Candour begets charisma. When the intensely private undertaking of searching one’s soul is made public, it becomes an act of communion.

Blissful communion.

Open up — make room for me.

‘Open up,’ says John Lydon in the opening lines to his eponymous collaboration with Leftfield. This is an unusual act of vulnerability. Lydon made his name as a smash and grab artist. He takes without asking. He is Mr Cash-From-Chaos. But here he is, asking to be granted entrance. Let me in, he beseeches the Hollywood establishment. It is a shocking act of supplication. Lydon doesn’t wear humility well. Prostration doesn’t become him. This is the man that sneered, ‘We don’t care,’ at the end of Pretty Vacant. Surely he would never want to join a club that would have him as a member? And yet…

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Johnny.
Johnny who?
Johnny Lydon.
Come again.
Johnny Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, you know, of Sex Pistols infamy.
Oh that Johnny. Fuck off, your face doesn’t fit.

So he is jilted John Lydon. He has huffed and puffed but he has failed to blow the house down. So it must burn instead.

Burn Hollywood burn
Take down Tinsel Town

Hell hath no fury like a Sex Pistol scorned. “Jesus, the song to me is about not getting a movie part and burning down the studio in sheer frustration. In a metaphysical sense, of course,” says Lydon in a 1993 NME interview in the wake of Open Up being released. Therein lies a clue to the enigma that is John Lydon. He switches without warning between the literal and the metaphysical.

Hell hath no fury like a Sex Pistol scorned, especially when he is singing atop a progressive-house volcano. Played loud, Open Up is like tectonic plates colliding, or finding yourself the object of close-proximity echo-sounding by a pod of sperm whales. For my money it is the best thing Lydon did after the Sex Pistols. Musically, it is a techno-punk masterpiece. Vocally, it is either a sincere performance, channelling genuine outrage, or it is a masterclass of method acting. It’s hard to know which, but ’twas ever thus with John Lydon. Does he mean it maaaaaan?

What you see is what you get.

On the front cover of Lydon’s limited edition Mr Rotten’s Songbook is a legend that says, “Will sin for money.” This is what the branding business calls radical transparency. The branding business would describe frankness, volatility and provocation as Lydon’s core values. The branding business would say that his brand proposition is accessible anarchy. Indeed, all of his work sits somewhere on the anarchy spectrum — from God Save The Queen to his Country Life butter adverts. What is not so clear, from the outside looking in, is whether the Lydon brand is an expression of truth or a clever fabrication. The fact that he is so open about ‘doing’ anarchy for the money muddies the water in this respect. He is a mercenary of mayhem. So do we take the first verse of Open Up at face value, or do we marvel at the brazen irony? Should his beef with Hollywood be our beef with him?

You lied — you faked — you cheated
You changed the stakes
That great god, that pie in the sky
Unrehearsed let the bubbles burst
All in all a three-ring circus
Affinity with parody
Tragedy or comedy?
Probably publicity

Depending on your view of Lydon this could be seen as the lyrical equivalent of firing a laser at a mirror. The accusations he hurls at Hollywood could easily be hurled back at him. Only without the same level of outrage of course. If you think Mr Lydon has been faking it all these years, then you also have to accept that, unlike Hollywood, he has never pretended otherwise. He hasn’t veiled the parody, he has telegraphed it. Read his lips. Yes it’s a three-ring circus. Yes it is most likely a publicity stunt. The transparency and the frankness are disarming. Eat your heart out Clarice Starling*.

*Not the most sensitive idiom in the context of Hannibal Lecter.

In contrast to the veiled double meaning of the first verse, the second verse can only be taken one way. This is not an allegory for John Lydon’s life, even if he did want movie stardom to be a chapter. This is him berating himself for not recognising fool’s gold sooner. This is his Emporer’s New Clothes moment.

Lose myself inside your schemes
Go for the money honey
Not the screen
Be a movie star
Blah, blah, blah
Go the whole hog
Be bigger than God

Hollywood is in the altogether, the altogether, altogether as shallow and superficial as the day that it was born.

His own words in his own handwriting. (From Mr Rotten’s Songbook.)

If there were an Italian musical term for the tone and musical style of the final stanza, it would be vendicativo, vengeful. Lydon rains down verbal blows upon his victim, each beat a shovel strike. The pause between, ‘Down,’ and, ‘into the ground,’ is like him taking a breath before administering the coup de grace. Imagine him dancing on the city’s grave as he wails, ‘Burn, burn, burn.’

Burn Hollywood burn
Burn Hollywood burn
Take down Tinsel Town
Burn down to the ground
Down
Into the ground
Burn, burn, burn

Open Up has been remixed and sampled but, as far as I can tell, it has never been covered. Lydon is a hard act to follow on any song, but this one has an exceptionally high degree of difficulty. Maybe someone could reinvent and steal it, like Johnny Cash with Trent Reznor’s Hurt, but it’s hard to see it belonging to anyone else. It is a quintessential Lydon performance.

Whether it is an act is another matter.

Is this his true personality or a cleverly constructed, beautifully crafted persona? To know that you’d need to know him in private life, and, with all due respect to Ms Starling, I expect that really would be quite something.

If you enjoyed this, please recommend it. Clap, clap.

A Longing Look is also on Twitter.

If you liked Open Up, you might also like Hurt (below).

Thank you.

And you could have it all, my empire of dirt.