Leftfield Lydon 'Open Up'

Chart Peak: 13

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Leftfield are producers Neil Barnes and Paul Daley... John Lydon was once a Sex Pistol called Johnny Rotton and this combo have combined to devastating effect on the pulsating 'Open Up' due for release 1st November '93 from the forthcoming Leftfield album.

As it turned out, that Leftfield album wasn't forthcoming until 1995, though at least it was widely held to be worth the wait. Nothing else on there quite managed the same impact as this collaboration though, in retrospect something of a milestone on the path towards the embrace of harder-edged dance by the rock audience. With hindsight, they were perhaps lucky to catch Lydon at the right moment on his trajectory from supposed threat to society towards the irritating ginger-haired Peter Hitchens substitute who appeared on Question Time last week. OK, he was already irritating - that was his raison d'etre after all - but at this time he still had some musical credibility from the Public Image Ltd days, and yet with that band's career effectively over (until the last couple of years anyway) so he still had something to prove. For possibly the last time in his musical career he sounds truly vital, his aggressive but cartoonish performance exactly what the pounding backing track needed; this may be why the two members of Leftfield style themselves as members of a rock band in the accompanying video, even though the recording is entirely electronic as far as I can tell.

I try not to mention things like this too often on here, as it feels like the factual equivalent of a cheap laugh, but this is longer ago now than 'Anarchy In The UK' was at the time, and another way to read that video is as an attempt to stake dance music's claim as the true successor of punk. That may or may not be true (and may or may not be a good thing, of course) but it's certainly a ball the Prodigy picked up and ran with a couple of years later - indeed it's quite extraordinary how much of their imagery (particularly circa 'Firestarter') seems to start here. Leftfield themselves went in a different direction, though, clearly recognising that they couldn't hope to better this in the same style. However, the claim you sometimes read that Lydon's chant of "burn Hollywood burn" coincided with the LA riots is patently untrue by 18 months - it's possible that he may have written the lyric in response to the riots, though.

Incidentally, when the Leftism album finally arrived, it contained an intermediate edit of the song, somewhere between the radio edit and the full 12" version. The short version that features here isn't available as a download, but it can be found on the best-of CD A Final Hit.

Available on: Leftism