Oh totally ludicrous. As ludicrous as Joe Strummer, the son of a Second Secretary of the Foreign Service, posing as a street boy growing up under the shadow of The Westway - I make everyone in that band equally as pretentious.
Or Keef Richards and Shane McGowan having both been Westminster Choirboys. Everyone's at it b. Daniel Day Lewis has started reminiscing about his days on the Millwall terraces for fúck's sake - the son a poet Laureate!
I don't think the others were politically pretentious. Image-wise, in their cowboy boots, yes, but that's in the job description tbf. Oh, and all the crap Mick filled the second and third discs of Sandinista with.
It was only Joe that demanded that they should all be poor. Mick just wanted the cash, Topper the drugs.
Back in the pre-internet days of course, you could get away with all sorts of reinvention shít. Bowie originally allowed us to believe he was from Brixton rather than renting a bedsit there for a short while after he'd left home (or some such).
I'm sure I remember Strummer claiming in the NME circa 79/80 that he had never lived below the tenth floor of the Tower Block he grew up in by The Westway.
I think even Lydon's claims to have been a North Bank regular in the late 70's have a specious smack about them. I was on that terrace for most of '74 - 81 and I reckon he would have stood out like a dog's bollócks. Punks, if you remember, just did not do football.
(this was a response to Ash n Berni - can't be arsed to delete and re-post)
Just found this quote from him on that: "I think that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire's, I think, but I could be wrong. Sometimes when I look at my Baudelaire books, I can't see it in there. But it was an idea I got from French writing. And I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it. I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song."