April
10th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Public Image Ltd’s
third studio album, Flowers of Romance, issued on this day in 1981. It
followed on the heels of the release of the single of the same name a
couple of weeks prior.
After PiL returned to the UK from their
short tour of the US in May of 1980, things quickly fell apart for the
band. Bassist, Jah Wobble, was ousted or split, depending on who you
talk to, and went out the door with a box of the band’s money as payment
for his services. Wobble’s penchant for recycling PiL backing tracks
for his solo albums had bent Johnny’s nose out of shape enough that a
working relationship was no longer possible between the two. Drummer,
Martin Atkins, was kinda out of a job too, though amicably, for no other
apparent reason than the band going into a state of inactivity. PiL
essentially went dormant for a few months, only releasing the live Paris
Au Printemps album as a stopgap against the bootleg market and to give
fans something to tide them over as there seemed to be no new music on
the horizon for 1980.
The remnants of the band wouldn’t venture
into the studio to begin work on a new LP until early October and they
would do so with an arrest and court case looming for Lydon thanks to a
trumped up assault charge incurred while on a trip to Ireland. It was
an incident which would have him spending time in the notorious Mountjoy
Prison, an experience which would contribute directly to one song and
color John’s mood for the entire album. Add to that the near constant
police and overbearing fan harassment at his Gunter Grove home and
you’ve got the perfectly oppressive, paranoid and claustrophobic aura
necessary to create some uncompromising, confrontational music.
However,
once Lydon and Levene found themselves in Virgin’s Manor Studio,
inspiration wasn’t exactly forthcoming. At first they seemed to be lost
and directionless. Keith was often distracted with his “habit” while
Lydon languished in front of the TV, though not without spotting the odd
“ghost” in the old mansion, a specter which, though destined to become
subject matter for a song, had more substance than the yet to manifest
album. The Manor unsettled John enough that he took to sleeping in the
coal shed because the main house creeped him out so much. The presence
of a new studio toy did end up helping a bit though. Virgin head,
Richard Branson, had managed to score some Balinese bamboo drums while
traveling, which Keith put to use for Hymies Him, an instrumental track
that was intended to be a soundtrack component for a feature film
project (Wolfen by Michael Wadleigh), but that offer ended up falling
through. Hymies Him was the only track to come from those first two
weeks of studio time before they relocated to the brand new Townhouse
studios in London, which were still receiving some finishing touches in
its construction.
After Steve Lillywhite was dropped, engineer
Nick Launey came onboard as co-producer. Since they no longer had a
bass player, rather than try to bring someone new into the band, their
intuitive decision was to shift the focus to the drums and ignore the
bass guitar almost entirely. At the Townhouse, its drum kit had been
set up on a wooden frame in this unfinished stone room over-top a
somewhat large open pit. The acoustics in the room lent the drums a
massive natural reverb effect and recording experiments found them to
have a walloping great sound with little post processing required beyond
pinning the levels to the absolute maximum volume. The sound they got
was so impressive, after hearing it, Phil Collins would hire Launey to
engineer the same sound for his solo album he’d started work on. What
was missing from this equation, however, was a drummer. At the time,
Martin was about to go on tour with his band, Brian Brain, but had a few
days off and, after popping into the studio for a visit, agreed to come
in as a hired gun to lay down some tracks. He ended up recording three
credited, finished songs for the album: Four Enclosed Walls, Under the
House & Banging the Door. In recent years, other tracks with
Atkins such as the original version of 1981 and the unfinished track,
Vampire, have surfaced from these sessions on retrospective box sets.
Atkins
also did a lot of experimenting on other sounds with Launey while he
was there, like the strange ticking sound that provides the background
ambience on Four Enclosed Walls, achieved by placing his Micky Mouse
pocket watch on a drum head for additional resonance and amplifying it
with a dual stereo harmonizer effect. They also had access to an an AMS
digital sampler, one of the first digital devices ever available. One
day Martin played a drum groove and Nick pushed 'Loop Lock' and tried to
make a perfect loop, but the device was too primitive for precision
fine-tuning, so you couldn't actually edit it to get it in time.
Working within its limitations, Launey randomly kept locking in
different beats as Martin played them, until he got one that sounded
interesting. That limping, off-kilter loop became the basis for the song
Track 8.
With Nick’s help, Martin Atkins would turn out to be
the “hero” during this production as his contributions ended up
galvanizing the project into something that was starting to have a sense
of direction and purpose. His drumming was so much more than mere
timekeeping as he came up with these unusual, distinctive patterns that
sounded like nothing else and contained their own musical structure,
something which allowed songs to stand with minimal arrangements. With
these foundations, Lydon and Levene were able to start to piece together
the remaining elements, often chaotically and with a kind of mad
abandon. Tracks would be left sparse in most cases with odd crazy bits
thrown into the mix, like the out-of-tune banjo missing three strings
that John beat with a drum stick on Phenagen. Even the TV, a fixture in
the studio, became a sound source for such elements as the bits of
random opera singing seeping into Under the House, the song which
commemorates Lydon’s ghostly encounter at the Manor. Levene found
little use for his guitar most of the time, favoring his modular Roland
System 100 setup. Only Go Back featured him laying down one of his
characteristically searing guitar riffs against a funky drum track,
which he also played. When guitar infrequently appeared in other
tracks, it was more incidental and was often heavily treated or
backwards. As previously mentioned, bass was nearly entirely forsaken
on the album with the exception of a bit on Track 8 and Banging the
Door, where it throbbed heavy beneath swirls of droning synth ambience
and Martin’s martial drum patterns, coming closest to anything done on
Metal Box.
Lydon’s vocals were the cherry that would land on the
top of the cake when he managed to pull his lyrics together and felt
there was enough of a musical bed for them to rest upon. For this
album, his lyrics were some of his most esoteric and ambiguous, like the
howling call to prayer that opens the album on Four Enclosed Walls,
conjuring up images of deserts and holy warriors on the prowl. Yet more
concrete subject matter was also dealt with, from sexual inadequacy
(Track 8), to annoying obsessive fans (Banging the Door) to right-wing
fascism (Go Back) to life in prison (Francis Massacre), Lydon delivered
some of the most harrowing and personal performances of his career.
Eventually,
emerging from a process that seemed like some kind of barely organized
chaos, PiL had an album, albeit a brief one. Clocking in at a lean 34
minutes, just over half the runtime of the monolithic Metal Box, Flowers
of Romance offered a tight bouquet of nine songs with none of the
sprawling 9-10 minute dirges that had kicked off the previous two
albums. Three to five minutes each was plenty for everything on this
record. The overall sound was expansive and spacious, highlighting the
air between the instruments and the vocals. This made the elements that
were there stand out in sharp relief. The emphasis on percussion was
actually quite coincidentally contemporary with the trend of the time
with bands like Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants going tribal with
their double drummers, though the end result with PiL was entirely
non-commercial. In fact, it could be argued that what they delivered to
Virgin Records was one of the LEAST commercial albums a major label
artist ever handed to their label, at least since Lou Reed dropped Metal
Machine Music on the heads of RCA.
The album’s title is a
reference to the short lived punk band that Sid Vicious had prior to
joining the Sex Pistols. It’s not clear why Lydon was drawn back to
this name for this album, but it somehow seemed to make sense. For the
packaging, which returned to the more conventional cardboard sleeve
after the financially prohibitive metal canister of the previous album,
both the single and LP used Jeanette Lee’s Polaroid photos, with the
album opting for a photo of Jeanette herself up front with no text,
simply bordered by black. She’s shown in mid frenzy, with a rose in her
teeth, in what appears to be the throws of some debauchery. The rear
and inner sleeve contain all the text in an archaic Middle Eastern
flavored font and lyrics printed in a run-on religious script style with
no separation between the songs, like a transcript from some cloistered
illuminated holy book.
I remember distinctly when the album
came out. I was heartbroken when I heard that Wobble had left and was
concerned PiL were finished. In Thunder Bay, ON, I got very meager
press regarding UK bands, so I had no idea they had a new album due when
I spotted it on the racks. I was in a hi-fi stereo store I never
usually bought records from as they only had a small selection of mostly
top 40 releases, but this day in April, I spotted this strange looking
record. I didn’t know it was PiL at first since there was no text on
the front, but it looked so different from the rest of what was on the
shelves, my instincts told me to pick it up. When I saw the text on the
back, I felt my heart skip and rushed to the checkout. I immediately
called my friend who had a good hi-fi system at his house and went over
for a first listen.
When we played it, cranking up the volume for
maximum effect, it was pretty obvious from the beginning this wasn’t
going to be more of what had been done on Metal Box. The bass was gone
and it was all drums and weird incidental sounds. It was so completely
different from anything they’d done before. It was a shock and I have
to admit I didn’t know quite what I felt about it at first, but it would
grow on me quickly and, over the years, I’ve come to appreciate its
distinctiveness as the completion of a triptych along with the prior two
PiL studio albums. But it would also mark the outer limits of their
experimentation and become a barrier past which they’d not be able to
extend.
After this and the disastrous New York Ritz multimedia
performance in May of 1981, they’d regroup and head back into more
conventional rock band territory and they’d never venture this far out
into the avant-garde again. They’d effectively painted themselves into a
creative corner and the only direction left was irony and faux
commercialism, as exemplified by the unfinished Commercial Zone LP that
followed and This Is Not A Love Song, their most successful chart
single. 1984’s This Is What You Want.. LP had the last dying embers of
that provocative fire flickering. These efforts were not without their
charms, but once Keith left, that sense of boldness and innovation
pretty much evaporated from PiL’s DNA and never returned.
