“Bodies” is Lydon looking at both sides of the abortion issue. It came
about because the band kept getting visits from a psychotic woman named
Pauline who would freely come and go from the asylum where she was supposed
to be living (actually, she lived most of the time in a treehouse just outside of it).
Anyway, she apparently was, at times, raped by male staff there and one time
showed up at Lydon’s house wearing nothing but a see-through plastic bag
and carrying another bag with a fetus in it (she was later arrested at a club when
she showed up there with it too). That was the impetus for the song. You mix in
the fact that Lydon’s “mum” had many miscarriages and since John
was the oldest, he was tasked with tossing out the, sometimes visible, body parts
in a bucket at a toilet just outside the house. He’s talked about having to flush
them a number of times to get the parts fully down the toilet. So, the only song
on the album that has Sid playing bass comes from a pretty traumatizing
experience for Lydon. He’s also said that the song is more “pro” than “anti” abortion,
but this was many years ago before he became an idiotic right-wing tool.
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