PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT... THIS IS WHAT YOU GET @ 40

 

Celebrating its 40th anniversary today is the fourth "official" Public Image Ltd. studio LP, This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get, which was released on July 6th, 1984. I use the qualifier "official" due to the fact that the unfinished and aborted Commercial Zone album was surreptitiously released by jilted former founding member, Keith Levene, in January of that year on his own independent label imprint. His version of the album contained the original recordings that had been created throughout 1982 & 1983 at Park South studio, NYC, up until his unceremonious dismissal from the band by John Lydon following a dispute over an alternate mix of the single, This Is Not A Love Song. Following his departure, Levene spirited away master tapes from the session to release on his own mix, leaving remaining members, John Lydon and Martin Atkins, holding an empty bag when it came time to produce an official version of the album for Virgin Records.

Lydon and Atkins returned to the UK after their 1983 Japanese mini tour, for which they'd hired a trio of New York lounge musicians to fill out the band's empty slots vacated by Levene and bassist Pete Jones, who departed of his own accord immediately after Keith's sacking. Once in the UK, they set up at Maison Rouge Studios and began to rebuild the album from the ground up. Five of the Commercial Zone songs got a reboot, including "Bad Life" (originally titled "Mad Max"), "This Is Not a Love Song" (originally titled "Love Song"), "Solitaire" (entitled "Young Brits" on the second pressing of Commercial Zone), "The Order of Death" (originally titled "The Slab"), and "Where Are You?" (originally titled "Lou Reed Part 2"). Two new songs were recorded from scratch: "The Pardon" and "Tie Me To the Length Of That", with the latter being improvised in the studio with Lydon and Atkins playing all the instruments. For most of the rest of the album, the NYC lounge musicians, plus a few others, worked as session players. The track, "1981", was actually an outtake from the Flowers of Romance sessions, though some minor overdubs were added to bring it up to snuff for the current LP.

Though PiL had scored a hit with the single version of This Is Not A Love Song, using the Park South recordings with Levene and Pete Jones, the album was received with a large degree of ambivalence, feeling like the soul of the band had been supplanted by the use of faceless studio musicians. Only "Tie Me To the Length of That" really offered any sense of proper PiL music, principally because it lacked the sterile presence of studio hired guns. Still, the album's version of "The Order Of Death" has popped up in numerous soundtracks over the years, including the 1990 science fiction-horror film, Hardware, and on the soundtrack to the 1999 horror film, The Blair Witch Project. It was also featured in the Miami Vice episode "Little Miss Dangerous", the Mr. Robot episode "eps2.7_init_5.fve", and the Industry episode "There Are Some Women...". It also appears in Season 2 Episode 6 of The Umbrella Academy when the Hargreeves siblings take the elevator to the Tiki Lounge to meet with their father. Finally, it appears in the 2023 remake of System Shock, as the music for the end credits.

When it came out, I was at the tail end of my obsession with the band. After the stunning artistic breakthroughs of their first three albums, Commercial Zone felt like a bastard echo of what might have been, while its troubled twin felt like a synthetic imposter version of the band. The release of the Live In Tokyo album, which sounded even more shallow and perfunctory as an imitation of the band, had driven the sense of demise further into the ground. In a sense, TIWYW...TIWYG feels like a capstone to the PiL story, at least as far as the project being a real band. After that, it seemed more like a Lydon solo project, and the sense of musical innovation felt like it had left the building. Without the presence of Keith, Wobble or Martin, who left after touring to support this album, the game had changed and the rules were all different, so I was pretty much out as far as following the band, at least to the degree that I'd been enraptured by them during their heyday.