PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - COMMERCIAL ZONE @ 40

 

Released on January 30th, 1984, what was supposed to be Public Image Ltd's fourth studio album, Commercial Zone, turns 40 years old today. I use that qualifier as a way to indicate that, while this album was released, it has never been considered an official entry in the PiL canon of albums, at least not by John Lydon. Its existence is purely the result of the actions of former guitarist, Keith Levene, trying to salvage the wreckage of a project he was exiled from before it could be completed.

After the release of Flowers of Romance in April of 1981 and following the disastrous Ritz NYC multimedia performance-turned-riot in May of that year, PiL were fed up with their situation in the UK. London didn't feel like home anymore and John Lydon was exasperated with the constant harassment of the police, who regularly executed unjustified raids on his Gunter Grove townhouse, usually in the middle of the night while acting on spurious reports of illegal activities. It was a campaign of persecution being pursued by officials to try to silence someone who'd made too much of the wrong kind of noises. Fortuitously, while in NYC to do the Ritz show, they had established some contacts in the city, so John, Keith & Jeanette Lee packed up and headed to the Big Apple shortly after the Ritz debacle.

Not long after moving, John and Jeanette headed off to Italy so Lydon could shoot his parts for the film, Cop Killer (aka, Corrupt, Order of Death, etc). For some unpublished reasons, when John returned from the shoot, Jeanette was no longer in tow, having returned to the UK, with Lydon announcing she'd left the band, a situation that ultimately inspired the song, Where Are You? (Lou Reed pt2). While Lydon and Lee were abroad, Keith had started sketching ideas for the next PiL album. As John was shooting, he'd supposedly negotiated a deal for PiL to provide soundtrack music for the film, with he and Keith working out ideas by humming them over the phone on long distance calls, but the soundtrack never materialized, though the song, The Slab/Order of Death did result from their long distance brainstorming.

Once they'd set up a loft to live in and contracted Park South Studios for recording, John and Keith set about trying to reconstitute the band. Rumours of their splitting had circulated in the press early in 1982, likely partially triggered by Jeanette Lee mysteriously bailing from the PiL camp. Their contract with Warner Bros in the US had also expired, so they no longer had any US label support, though Virgin were still onboard in the UK. Getting a band together to play gigs became a necessity as a way to generate some income and finance recording.

Initially, Ken Lockie from Cowboys International was working with Lydon and Levene, contributing to a number of early recordings, but he quickly left the project and none of his contributions were ultimately used. Former PiL drummer, Martin Atkins, who had worked on Metal Box and Flowers of Romance, as well as touring with the band throughout 1980, was in NYC at the time, performing with his own band, Brian Brain. John and Keith went down to one of his gigs and proposed he rejoin the group. To fill in on bass, Martin brought in Pete Jones, also from Brian Brain, thus completing a functional lineup. Throughout the latter half of 1982, they alternated between playing a series of gigs across the US and returning to NYC to record at Park South. The engineer for the studio, Bob Miller, became heavily involved in the production of the recordings to the point of becoming a de facto fifth member, and the makings of a new LP began coming together, with announcements of releases being made to the press.

On stage, the band had redeemed themselves from the chaotic fiasco of the Ritz riot, offering up a rejuvenated, tight, aggressive and potent version of PiL, sprinkling their sets with some of the new songs that were coming together during their studio time. I got to see them in Seattle, and it was one of the most memorable live gigs I've ever been privileged to attend. There was a palpable tension in the atmosphere that gave the show a distinct edge, like everything could fly apart at any second, but somehow they managed to keep a lid on it all. They even kicked off some of their shows with a recording of a new song, Blue Water, which was initially planned to be the first single released before the end of the year.

With the location of the studio in a heavily industrialized section of the city, there was a sign nearby that read, "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A COMMERCIAL ZONE". The group felt this was a perfect title for the band's planned new album. The irony of it made sense given how Flowers of Romance was so decidedly NONE commercial, and the new material was striving towards a level of accessibility that was relatively new territory for the band. Having painted themselves into a corner with their avant-garde leanings, the only thing left to do was make some unapologetic pop music, of course with PiL's own idiosyncratic twists.

Along with the touring and recording, a couple of new corporate entities were created to help manage various aspects of the band's activities, ostensibly to finally bring to fruition the promise that PiL were not just a "band", but a "corporation". Public Enterprise Productions (PEP) and Multi Image Corporation (MIC) were two of the entities that were announced at press conferences during 1982, and a deal was struck with Stiff Records in the US to licence their recordings released under the "PEP" umbrella. Things were going along so well that the group had managed to secure a contract to tour in Japan, which would be the first market where the new recordings would be released. A 12" single, This Is Not a Love Song, was planned for release in June of 1983. But just as things seemed to be coming together, simmering tensions between John Lydon and Keith Levene erupted into full blown conflict.

The breakdown came to pass in March of 1983 when a disagreement about mixes for the single set the spark. Keith recounted the events as follows:

“I went to the studio to remix 'Love Song', I told them 'I've got to remix it, it's embarrassing.' Martin called John in L.A. and told him I was in the studio. John called up screaming that I should get out of the studio immediately, right? I said 'John, I can't put out a tune that sounds like that!' Martin was just pacing the studio all night until he could call John in L.A. John just said 'Get out of my studio!' I said 'Your studio? Fuck off and die!' When these Japanese guys came that morning to pick up the tapes, I said to Martin 'Fuck it – I'll give them both mixes and I'll let them decide. When the Japanese guys arrived John got on the phone from L.A. at 5 am yelling 'Get out of my fucking studio!' And me replying 'It's not your fucking studio!' and so on. A load of shit went wrong literally in the space of 18 hours that made it that I just said 'Fuck it!'”

After returning from LA, Lydon regrouped with Martin Atkins after Pete Jones decided the situation was untenable and also quit the band. Lydon and Atkins recruited a trio of musicians from a local lounge band to play guitar, bass and keyboards, and took them to Japan to fulfill their touring obligations. The result of those shows eventually ended up as the Live In Tokyo album, which was one of the first digitally recorded live albums ever released.

While they were touring Japan, Keith managed to sneak into Park South and clandestinely mixed a bunch of songs, absconding with the resulting masters with no one the wiser from the PiL camp. Keith then took his rough mix of the Commercial Zone LP to London and attempted to present it as a finished PiL album to Virgin's Richard Branson. Virgin rejected the recordings with Lydon insisting that this was NOT his album. Virgin instead releasing the This Is Not A Love Song single in the UK in September. The record proceeded to become the biggest selling PiL single to date, reaching number 5 in the UK charts. Despite that success, Lydon and Atkins abandoned the remainder of the Commercial Zone recordings and headed to a London studio with some session musicians to start the project from scratch, rerecording five of the Commercial Zone tracks and filling out the rest of the album with a few new compositions and a remix of a leftover from Flowers of Romance (1981).

Returning to NYC, Levene decided to release his mix of the Commercial Zone album himself on his own label and, on January 30th, 1983, registered PIL Records Inc. For the first run of the album, he had 10,000 copies pressed at a cost of $8,500, packaged in a plain white slip cover with a modified PiL logo on one label of the record and the track listings and publishing credits on the reverse. Levene distributed the album himself, literally loading up boxes of records on his skateboard and humping them around the city to various record shops. Copies were then sent from these retailers to importers in the UK and Europe. A few copies managed to find their way to Vancouver, which is how I was able to acquire mine, with it appearing unceremoniously in the record bin, taking me entirely by surprise. A second run, with a slightly different track order, a few modified song titles and a black slip cover, was pressed in a run of 30,000 copies in August of 1984, timed to coincide with the release of Lydon's version of the album, This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get.

Put side by side, the comparison is a fascinating exercise in fragmentation. I have always felt it apt to think of the old episode of the original Star Trek series, where Captain Kirk is split into two people, with mutually exclusive personality traits, by a transporter malfunction. If there was a way to combine these two records into one, you'd have a brilliant album. Taken individually, there are similarly mutually exclusive positives and negatives to each. In the case of the Commercial Zone album, the raw energy and passion of the recordings is far more apparent, while the album suffers from lacklustre production values that make it sound like incomplete demos, lacking the spit and polish of proper mastering, as is obvious when comparing it to the Love Song single. In the case of the Lydon album, while it has all the lustre of professional production values, many of its songs, especially those that overlap with the Levene album, feel hollow and perfunctory, missing a sense of authenticity. The Live In Tokyo album didn't help the situation either as it presented a version of PiL that sounded like a cheap cover band attempting to pretend to be the real thing, a situation further exacerbated by the crystal clear digital recording quality. It was like a K-Tel copy, missing all sense of menace or immediacy.

After those two runs, Commercial Zone would never be reissued again by Levene or anyone else, nor was it ever acknowledge by Lydon, though original versions of This Is Not a Love Song, Blue Water and Bad Night would appear on a number of official PiL anthology releases. But in 2014, Levene crowd-funded a project to do a revamped version of the album from scratch. However, rather than re-record the original songs, Levene went to Prague and recorded a jumble of brand new songs, flirting with innumerable musical styles, and initially releasing it to subscribers as raw audio files with no track order or graphics. As much of a hodgepodge as it was, it was a wonderful burst of creativity after a long period of inactivity from Levene, and it was rather fun putting together the album like a puzzle. Eventually, a sequenced and packaged edition was released, but this project would ultimately turn out to be the capstone of Levene's solo career before his death in 2022. After the Prague sessions, he fell out with his principal backer and the resulting legal embattlement ensnared him in a creative limbo, effectively making it impossible for him to release anything under his own name while court cases dragged on.

For many hardcore PiL fans, myself included, Commercial Zone represents the last true PiL album, with Lydon's post Levene version of the band never again reaching the creative heights it had achieved with Keith present, not to mention the loss of the likes of Jah Wobble. Though PiL continues to this day under Lydon's leadership, that sense of adventure, experimentation, risk taking and trouble making would never return to make the band feel like it presented a challenge the way it had been for the first five years of its existence. Keith may have been an agent of chaos in some regards, but that edginess was what made the band such a vital force in the first place.

KEITH LEVENE (18 July 1957 – 11 November 2022)

 

Julian Keith Levene was always a challenge to pin down as a musician. He was a peg that never seemed to fit into any hole. There was always an extra angle that stuck out and that’s what made him so innovative and difficult to classify. His deconstruction of guitar playing had a monumental impact on me when I was trying to figure out if I should pursue my interest in music beyond collecting records. Before PiL came into my life early in 1980, I’d dabbled with guitar lessons and halfheartedly tried to muck about with it, but when I got my hands on Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition, the version of Metal Box which was released worldwide after the initial UK film tin pressing sold out, it pulled the plug on every preconception I’d ever had about what you could do with the guitar. 

 

PiL’s musical genius came in a two pronged attack: Wobble’s throbbing bass and Keith’s razor edged guitar. The two complimented and contrasted wildly against each other, but always in immaculate balance, with Lydon’s moaning and sneering surfing and slithering in between them. It was completely alien sounding, unlike anything I’d heard before, yet it was also compellingly inviting. It didn’t intimidate me to think about trying to play something like that. It was like they’d exposed all the plumbing and wiring inside the architecture of music and let you see how it could be put together. And you realized it didn’t have to follow the rules that were shoved down your throat by traditional music theory. The idea of “structure” suddenly had a vastly broadened scope and it wasn’t exclusionary and elitist. It plainly said to any listener willing to hear, “You can make things like this. All you have to do is give it a go!” So I took them at their word and did just that.

 

In less than a year, I got my own band going, scraped together some money from my part-time job and started recording my own music. PiL got me on that path as surely as if they’d come straight over to my house and showed me how to do it in person. But they were so much more than music. They were a whole attitude and lifestyle. They weren’t merely a “band”. The “LTD” wasn’t just for show. They were a COMPANY and they didn’t solely make music. They had plans for all sorts of things. Sure, ultimately a lot of that was unfulfilled at that time, but over the years, the individual members showed that they were willing to go as independent as they could, forming their own labels, creating their own products and pushing their individual boundaries in one way or another. Even the way they looked and dressed was part of it. Despite the Public Image being “limited”, they still managed to be style icons for the reject crowd. I desperately wanted my hair to be as ratty as Keith’s and was always on the lookout for a good ill-fitting old man suit. The “wrongness” became “rightness”, if you understood the language.

 

From 1980 until 1984, my musical world revolved around PiL. After picking up Second Edition, I moved heaven and earth to get a sanctified copy of Metal Box in its requisite tin canister. It cost me about $60 (in 1981 money) and took about 3 months to get a copy shipped over from the UK. Getting their debut LP, First Issue also took some doing as it was not released in Canada, so I had to rely on my local shop to special order the import. I remember hearing Theme for the first time and being knocked sideways by Keith’s insane guitar thrash. It felt like being in a continuous car crash with glass from the windshield constantly flying into your face. Then there was the chime of that incredible riff for the song, Public Image, the sound that launched a thousand post-punk bands. You wouldn’t have U2 without it. Getting back to Metal Box, it was the dissonant screeching of Albatross that first catches your ear as that 10 minute dirge churns away and it sounds like seagulls dying over a stagnant ocean. The other standout is Careering where the synth takes over from guitar and Keith uses his Prophet 5 to unfurl layers of queazy atmospheric drones, all shifting and mutating, never the same, throughout the entire song.

 

After that initial one-two punch of those first albums, the future of PiL became uncertain with the departure of Wobble after the 1980 US tour. He was such a fundamental component of their sound, it was hard to imagine what they’d do to regroup. I could never have guessed that they’d say “fuck it” to the bass and, instead, make the drums the star of their next album, Flowers of Romance. Here, Keith again comes to the table with a set of off the wall ideas which, somehow, manage to work. Really the whole album is an exercise in organized chaos and it’s something of a miracle that it came together at all, let alone to form something so uncompromising and idiosyncratic. Though there was a general movement towards percussion at the time, what with the double drummer format of Adam and The Ants and Bow Wow Wow, nobody saw PiL’s take on it coming. Even Phil Collins was impressed enough by the sound of PiL’s drums to hire their engineer to get him the same sound for his next album. But Keith’s standout track from this set is the instrumental, Hymies Him, a piece composed for potential use in a soundtrack using a Balinese Gamelan Richard Branson had picked up for the Townhouse studio. It’s a remarkably rich sounding piece, full of exotic flair and intrigue.

 

After the album was completed, a promotional trip to NYC resulted in an unexpected opportunity to perform at the Ritz where PiL were invited to make use of the club’s state-of-the-art video projection system. With only John and Keith available to perform, they set about hiring a local jazz drummer and concocting a sort of video installation concept. The idea was ambitious and quite ahead of its time, but Keith was always keen to explore the potential of new media, so they arranged to perform behind the screen while the live video would project them out front. It wasn’t meant to be a live gig like a regular band, but the audience weren’t in any way clued into that. Technical issues with the video resulted in the images of the band not showing up clearly on the screen, which set the whole night into a tailspin. Egged on by John and Keith taunting the audience, it all descended into a literal riot, turning it into what has become PiL’s most notorious live performance ever.

 

Though they briefly returned to the UK after that, John was fed up with the constant harassment by the police, who regularly raided his home in Gunter Grove, along with the constant nuisance of fans and freaks showing up on his doorstep at all hours. With that, John and Keith packed up and moved to NYC, taking up residency in a rented loft. With Martin Atkins on tour with Brian Brain in the US, the timing was right for him to reconnect with PiL, bringing along his bassist collaborator, Pete Jones. In 1982, the group began work on recording their next album, tentatively called “Welcome to the Commercial Zone”, a title inspired by signage they’d seen near where they had their loft. Lydon took a break to go to Italy to work on his first feature film role in Cop Killer, aka The Order of Death, while Keith, Martin and Pete were left in NYC to record the instrumental tracks for the new album. At this point, it was principally Keith who was directing the musical creations going on and the project was going in a vastly different direction from what had been done with Flowers of Romance.

 

The idea of “commercialism” was sort of seen as a challenge to make music that was both accessible while maintaining the sense of innovation which had characterized their first three LPs. In order to help fund recording, once John was done filming in Italy, the group began touring the US, traveling coast to coast to help revive the group’s fortunes and get people talking about them again. It was at this time that they came to Seattle and I had the chance to see the newly reconstituted PiL, and it was glorious! It was one of the most intense live shows I’ve ever seen and I was stoked to be able to see them back in top form again and hear some of the new songs. But the waters were troubled and would hit the boiling point early in 1983.

 

While still working on Commercial Zone, an offer came up to perform in Japan. It was a lucrative opportunity and included the release of the first material from the CZ sessions, a 12” single of This Is Not A Love Song. Somehow, wires got crossed about different mixes of the song being considered for the release and Keith found himself working on a remix while John was off meeting with reps from Japan. Keith’s efforts were, apparently, in conflict with what John wanted and the result was that John told Keith, in no uncertain terms, to immediately stop what he was doing and “get out of HIS studio”. It all blew up into a conflict which was irreconcilable and Levene found himself out of the band while Lydon hired some lounge band session musicians to go with him and Martin to Japan.

 

Keith’s response to being ousted was to take the rough mixes of Commercial Zone and, allegedly with the blessing of Branson, press them into a plainly packaged white label limited edition LP, which Keith released on his own hastily set up PiL Records Inc imprint. Keith would pile boxes of records on his skateboard and deliver them to the local record shops himself. A few copies of the LP managed to find their way to Vancouver and I snapped one up after waiting for ages to see another new PiL release after the Japanese 12” for Love Song finally surfaced. This was all after PiL had made a huge announcement before Keith left that they were diversifying into all these different corporate sub-entities to handle different aspects of the business. There was Public Enterprise Productions and Multi Image Corporation to handle live performances and video/film projects, etc. All of this seemed to be thrown into chaos now.

 

John & Martin continued on with PiL and released This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get, which was an LP that came quickly on the heels of Keith’s Commercial Zone LP in 1984. It had many of the CZ songs, though completely rerecorded with session musicians replacing Keith’s parts. There was also a leftover from Flowers reworked slightly for the new album and a couple of new tracks Lydon recorded with Martin. The two LPs stood toe to toe with each other and reminded me of that Star Trek episode where Kirk has a transporter accident and is split into two people, each with traits of the other, but each somehow incomplete. That’s how these albums felt. They were parts of the same whole and each had its virtues, but they were also both lacking something. One couldn’t help but feel like they’d have made a spectacular whole if they could be fused together.

 

After this, Keith seemed to disappear for a couple of years until the release of his Violent Opposition EP in 1987, which was followed by another EP, 2011 Back Too Black. These were then combined with some additional tracks for the 1989 Violent Opposition album. By this point, he’d moved with his then wife to LA and was doing some session work producing groups like Red Hot Chili Peppers. After that, Keith’s music career became exceptionally sporadic and intermittent. I heard that he’d gone into working in IT/digital media, but there was little information surfacing on his activities. He was effectively silent throughout the 1990s with only a few guest appearance credits showing up throughout the decade.

 

In 2002, Keith emerged from the shadows again with a brand new website and “band”, Murder Global. There was a new EP, Killer In the Crowd, and a video to go along with it. It seemed like he was about to jump back into the music business again after a decade of absence, but the traction from this seems to have been quickly lost as Keith, again, disappeared save for the odd guest appearance until 2010 when he did this bizarre PiL revival gig with Wobble where they hired a Johnny Rotten impersonator to do vocals and they played all the old PiL songs! I remember coming across YouTube clips from the show and wondering what the fuck I was looking at as it sounded remarkably bang-on to what PiL should be, more so than the revived PiL that Lydon was touring around with at the same time. In 2012, Wobble & Levene released an EP and album of brand new recordings, reviving their collaboration and showing themselves off as the true musical innovators of PiL, while Lydon was touring with what felt like a shadow of the original.

 

Keith followed that up with the Search for Absolute Zero album of brand new solo recordings. Suddenly he was all over social media, particularly on Twitter. He’d follow-back anyone who followed him and was always willing to engage with people, responding to every inquiry. Absolute Zero was a standout collection of new songs, showing Keith was still able to put things together in a way that only he could conceive. He was doing music like he’d never done before and it was all sounding great. After completing that project, the ghosts of Commercial Zone began to surface as the 30th anniversary of its release came up. Keith ended up going to Prague where he began recording what would become CZ2014, what he conceived of as his ultimate realization of the ideas inherent in the original Commercial Zone project. This was all part of a larger umbrella project Keith regularly referred to as “2051”. It’s not clear what that all entailed, but it was something Keith enthusiastically talked about in interview as tying together all his work over the years. The mechanics and physical manifestation he intended where never clearly elucidated, but it was obvious he had SOMETHING in his mind.

 

It was around the beginning of CZ2014 production when I was able to establish a personal interaction with Keith. I’d started to exchange messages with him and had commented that I wished I’d been able to contribute to his Indiegogo campaign that was partially funding the project, but that I was unemployed and had no extra income. I was also dealing with health issues. Keith, in an act of great generosity, sent me a complete set of recordings from the new album as a gift. I wrote a review for it all, which Keith loved and shared wherever he could. I also started creating little promotional memes for him to share to help generate publicity for the project. It was all going great until Keith posted a video on his YouTube channel that included a “dedication to Ugo” in the title/description. This inadvertently caused something of a storm with his principal financial backer, who was partially financing the recordings in Prague. They were incensed that they didn’t get a dedication and I did and it all got very weird and awkward and I kinda withdrew from any further direct involvement in the promotion of the project.

 

Subsequently, I kept my distance, but also kept tabs on Keith’s activities as he moved on to doing a series of bespoke “Teenage Guitarist” limited edition art pieces and began publishing biographical texts about his days with the Clash and forming PiL. He was doing original paintings and selling them with CDs and records and copies of his booklets. He had a few different websites up and it seemed like he was all over the place with talk of a film project in the works as well, but then it all turned into a legal nightmare as his relationship with his business partner turned toxic and he was ensnared in a web of lawsuits and litigation. These issues even managed to hold up the release of Keith’s last major recording project, Jah Wobble’s Very British Coup single from 2019. With all that going on, it seemed like Keith vanished from social media and the music business. I only found a couple of interviews with him after that talking about his Bitcoin interests, but nothing relating to any new musical or artistic projects. Until hearing about his death, I had no idea he was ill or suffering from liver cancer. Hearing that hit pretty close to home because it’s what killed my dad back in 1987.

 

Keith was a spiky person in a lot of respects and that’s one of the things I loved about him. I remember seeing him and John on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show in 1980 and being in stitches as they made Tom beg for any kind of response to his often inept and obviously uninformed questions. Tom was usually a much better interviewer, but he seemed stumped by these two. Keith was also a bit brutal on social media. After opening up to everyone, he turned the tables and started to block anyone who said anything he didn’t like. I ended up getting blocked when I made a dumb joke about a guitar of his that had been stolen in 1983. It was just a silly comment, but it was enough to get me on Keith’s shit list. The situation with his ex-business partner was a mess and they were seemingly everywhere whenever anyone mentioned Keith, ready to pounce on even the most innocent comments. It’s not surprising he gave up on social media for all practical purposes. I was hoping he might be coming back again after seeing him talking about Bitcoin, but he never responded to my inquiry when I tried to contact the Twitter account he gave out during one of his last interviews.

 

Hearing about him passing at such a relatively young age is a huge shock. Though his output could be sporadic and infrequent, when he did get it together to do something, he managed to make an impression and do something unexpected and innovative. He certainly made an impact on me. I wouldn’t have pursued music as a form of expression had it not been for him and Wobble showing me that I could do it too. I’m sure he did that for a lot of people and that’s a pretty good legacy to leave behind. Oh and there’s all that revolutionary mind blowing music too.