John Lydon has spent decades making it clear that he never wanted punk to become a polite little museum piece. In Far Out’s look back at the bands he “hated with a passion,” the Ramones stood out as one of his most persistent targets, and the former Sex Pistols frontman did not hide behind diplomacy. His problem was not just taste. It was what he felt the Ramones represented: a version of punk that, in his view, had been flattened into style, uniform, and imitation instead of danger, invention, and intent.
The Ramones were, of course, one of the foundational bands of punk. Coming out of New York’s CBGB scene, they helped define the genre with a stripped-down sound, leather jackets, and a debut album that became a landmark in 1976. But Lydon was never impressed by the mythology around them. In the article, he is quoted saying he was “up and kicking a long time before them,” and he dismissed the band as “deeply unoriginal” to him.
That was not the only insult. Lydon also told The Sun that he hated what punk became when it turned into “uniformed, studded leather jacket nonsense,” and he singled out the Ramones as the ones he blamed for that decline. It is a classic Lydon move: take a movement built on rebellion and attack the people he thinks turned it into a costume.
What makes the swipe sting more is the old rivalry between the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. The two bands were often framed as the great punk flag-bearers on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and that competition helped turn both into symbols of the era. But while many of those grudges faded into nostalgia, Lydon kept his edge. The Far Out piece makes clear that he was still holding onto that resentment decades later, long after the original Ramones line-up had disappeared from the world.
That stubbornness is exactly why Lydon remains such a polarizing figure. He has always spoken like someone determined to puncture anyone he thinks has been crowned too easily, and the Ramones were never safe from that impulse. He did not just dislike their music. He seemed to resent the way they were remembered, especially when that memory threatened to turn punk into something neat, collectible, and nostalgic.
In the end, the Ramones got from Lydon exactly what a lot of bands used to get from him: a blunt dismissal wrapped in attitude and contempt. Whether you read it as honesty, bitterness, or performative chaos, it says a lot about Lydon’s relationship with punk history. He does not want to be told who mattered, and he definitely does not want to be told who mattered more than him.
