PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - MEMORIES (SINGLE) @ 45

 

Released 45 years ago today, on October 10, 1979, it's Public Image Ltd's third single, Memories. The A-side song is wailing denunciation of misplaced sentimentality. Wobble's thunderously insistent bass line drives the track against a furious disco beat, courtesy of former 101'R, Richard Dudanski, who filled the kit briefly during the Metal Box sessions. Keith Levene layers in Spanish Flamenco influenced guitar chords with what sounds like organ flourishes (no, it's all guitar), while Lydon's vocals swoop in, warbling and whooping through the song. "It should be clear by now" that this is one of PiL's all time best songs. The single mix is different from the Metal Box version, which inter-cuts two different mixes together in an alternating back & forth oscillation. The single version, however, sticks to the mix with the heavy bass, driving it home all the way through.

The B-Side features the track, Another, which would only be included on Metal Box in a radically different instrumental mix called, Graveyard. Wobble would also "steal" the backing track and remix it again for the instrumental, Not Another, on his first solo album, The Legend Lives On... Jah Wobble in "Betrayal". The vocal mix on the single is a perfect match-up for the A-side, reinforcing the overall "haunted house" vibe of the record.

The front cover features a series of black & white photos of a moustache wearing Lydon in a wedding scene to someone who looks like Jeanette Lee (she looks too short to be Nora), with the scratches and saturation making it look all worn and forgotten. The back cover is a shot of a spiderweb covered oval mirror, reflecting the PiL logo, that was at John's Gunter Grove house in London. It can also be seen on the front cover of the Flowers of Romance single from 1981.

The single would peak at #60 on the UK charts, but along with the previous single, Death Disco, it would provide a tantalizing sneak peak at the behemoth Metal Box album that was right around the corner.

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.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - DEATH DISCO @ 45

 

Released 45 years ago today, it's that harbinger of mutant disco and Public Image Ltd's second single, Death Disco, which was released on June 29th, 1979. It was a glimpse into the striking new direction the band were heading for their soon to be unleashed Metal Box album. The single fused the otherworldly sound of dub with a furious disco 4x4 rhythm, underpinned by Jah Wobble's sonorous bass and over-arched with Keith Levene's Tchaikovsky cribbed furious guitar scraping. Weaving about within the maelstrom was John Lydon wailing away, exercising the demons of having recently witnessed his mother's demise from cancer.

The single was released in two forms, a 7" backed with No Birds Do Sing on the B-side, and a 12" extended "1/2 mix" of the title track on the A-side, and an instrumental revamp of Fodderstompf from their debut LP, titled "Mega Mix" on the flip. This B-side is the only recording to ever emerge from a planned re-recorded version of their debut album that US label Warner Bros had demanded after refusing to release the original version due to its uneven production values. The re-recorded "First Issue" never materialized, however, and the LP remained unreleased in the US for decades, with only this alternate version of Fodderstompf ever surfacing.

Drums were played by David Humphrey, who was the first to replace original drummer, Jim Walker, after his early 1979 departure. Humphrey was gone by the time No Birds was recorded, which features former 101er, Richard Dudanski, on the kit. He lasted through some of the Metal Box sessions and one live gig before departing, eventually being replaced by Martin Atkins.

The sleeve design for the single was taken from an original drawing by John Lydon. The 12" mixes remained unique to that release for many years until they were finally reissued in a couple of CD box sets, Plastic Box (1999) and The Public Image Is Rotten (Songs From The Heart) (2018). There is also a super-extended "1/2 Mix" variant on John Lydon's The Best Of British £1♫'s DVD (2005).

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.

PUBLIC IMAGE - FIRST ISSUE @ 45

 

Released on December 8th, 1978, the debut LP from Public Image Ltd, First Issue, turns 45 years old today. After the spectacular implosion of the Sex Pistols at the beginning of the year, and encouraged by the band's debut eponymous single two months prior, punk fans were eager to see what Johnny Rotten had in store for an encore. Chances are they weren't expecting to get hit over the head with an album that kicks off with a 9 minute art-rock dirge, pleading for a death that never comes, and ends with a 7 minute disco piss-take whinging about how they "only wanted to be loved". And while it may have been dismissed by many at the time as a petulant private joke, the reality of the album was that the band were digging in their heels in order to utterly upturn the apple-cart of what punk (and pop music itself) was and could be.

PiL came into being thanks to a casual conversation between John Lydon and Keith Levene back in 1976, when they both realized that the day would soon come when they'd be on the outs with their respective bands (Sex Pistols & The Clash) and looking for new opportunities. They promised each other they'd put their heads together when that time came, and sure enough, PiL were born a couple of months after the Pistols fell to bits in January of 1978. With close friend, Jah Wobble, quickly recruited for bass, and drummer, Jim Walker, sourced via a music paper ad, the band set about inventing their music the way they imagined it should sound, as if the Pistols has actually succeeded in destroying rock 'n' roll instead of reanimating its fetid corpse.

Beginning recording in July at Virgin Records' Manor studio, the first track to emerge was the single, Public Image. I've gone into great detail on that song's single release already, so I won't repeat myself too much here. You can look it up if you want to. Suffice it to say that the song set the bar high for the rest of the album, perhaps too high. Following its completion, the next set of songs, Theme, Religion and Annalisa, were laid down at Virgin's Townhouse studio.

Theme kicks off the album with a 9 minute excruciating wall of thunderous bass, whip-cracking drums and Keith's guitar sounding like you're in a continuous auto accident with a flurry of shattered glass smashing into your face. Lydon tops it all off with his insistent wailing of "I wish I could die", though the song is not anywhere near suicidal. Ironically, there's something actually quite obstinate and life affirming about the agony being expressed and the clear indication that nothing is capable of convincing the songs protagonist to genuinely give up the ghost. Lydon has described it thus, "Didn't you ever have that feeling when you get up with a hangover, and you look at the world and think 'Count me out, I'd rather die!'?"

Religion started off as lyrics written while Lydon was on tour in the US with the Pistols. He tried showing them to the rest of the band, but they weren't interested. The idea of splitting the song into a spoken recitation followed by the full mix was another example of the LP balking at convention, refusing to pander to expectations. The song was divisive among the band members. Wobble, particularly in later years, felt the disparagement of religious belief was unfair, and he wasn't happy with the contrivances of the mix, with its radical panning of instruments and voices sounding forced. Keith always loved the track and came up with the idea of the two versions. Annalisa follows with its harrowing true life story of a young German girl starved to death by her superstitious parents, who believed she was "possessed". That wraps up the first side of the LP, while the single kicks off the second, leaving the remainder of the album to struggle towards completion.

After the first four songs were recorded, Virgin's advance dried up and the band were forced to resort to recording at Gooseberry Sound Studios, a cheap reggae studio used because Lydon knew it from the recording of some Sex Pistols demos. Lowlife, Attach and Fodderstompf were all recorded there, sounding less produced and immediate in their impact than the first half of the album. Fodderstompf, in particular, was another divisive track due to its absurdity and expedience. Jim Walker hated it, considering it a rip-off for anyone who bought the album. Keith didn't have anything to do with it. It's really all Wobble and Lydon. Built on a tape-looped drum beat & some kind of electronic squelching sound, musically it's all about Wobble's bass, which bubbles and percolates incessantly. Atop this minimalism, Lydon and Wobble exchange quips in annoying Monty Python style falsetto voices, wittering on about how they "only wanted to be loved" and how "love makes the world go 'round". At one point, Wobble lets slip the true motivation of the track, "We only wanted to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort, which we are now doing very SUCCESSFULLY!" As puerile as the humour is, if you love it, you LOVE IT! I'm in that camp, personally, and consider it the clearest harbinger of where the band would go on their landmark sophomore release, Metal Box. The formula, "slap a beat down and do weird shit on top", is sturdy and flexible and one I've utilized COUNTLESS times in the creation of my own music. The song even became an underground disco hit at NYC's infamous Studio 54, where its sentiment had an ironic appeal for the club's decadent celebrity clientele.

For the packaging of the LP, the parodying of the press begun with the tabloid newspaper style wrapping of the single was taken to another level. The record was packaged in gorgeous glossy photos of the band members, each emulating a different popular magazine cover. Lydon graces the front, with his hair a natural colour, combed and contained, all pimples covered in picture perfect foundation makeup and sporting a vacant stare that exactly captured the hollow essence of a vapid celebrity. The same is true for the rest of the band images. On the bottom of the back cover, the final indignity is printed as "Public Image Ltd would like to thank absolutely nobody. Thank you." Up yours!

With all its contrarian cantankerousness, the press had a field day ravaging the album. Sounds reviewer Pete Silverton said that the single is the "Only wholly worthwhile track on the album." He dubbed the rest of the songs as "morbid directionless sounds with Rotten's poetry running just behind it." CREEM's import reviewer dismissed the album as art-rock nonsense, comparing Lydon's singing to a rabid Yoko Ono. Yet that initial disparagement has given way to retrospective praise as the album's daring and uncompromising nature became an inspiration for future generations to push their own limits and take their own chances. It was the beginning of a process that would come to full fruition on albums like Metal Box and Flowers of Romance, albeit the latter represents something of a dead end for the intrepid musical traveller when it comes to PiL's forays into the unknown.

The album wasn't released in the US until a remastered reissue in 2013. Warner Brothers, the band's US label, felt it was unsellable and demanded the group re-record parts of it. They went back in the studio in February of 1979, but their efforts were for naught and only an alternate version of Fodderstompf emerged, used as a B-side on the Death Disco 12" single, released later that year. No other alternate recordings seem to exist, save a different mix of Annalisa, which was included on the 2018 retrospective box set, The Public Image Is Rotten. There are rumours of another song, You Stupid Person, being recorded after the single and subsequently abandoned, but only Jim Walker seems to recall it, claiming to have a cassette copy of a rough mix, but the other band members are more vague about it, and Lydon has no recollection of it at all.

As far as debut LPs go, First Issue is certainly one of the most audacious to have come from the original "punk" movement, offering numerous clear signposts for escaping out of the "Death Valley" of punk's restrictive three chord thrashing. It's a bratty bastard of an album, but it has proven to have staying power and influence well beyond the practical joke it was initially accused of embodying.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - PUBLIC IMAGE b/w THE COWBOY SONG @ 45

 

Released on October 13th, 1978, Public Image Ltd's debut single, Public Image b/w The Cowboy Song, turns 45 years old today.  It's a single which could arguably be positioned as the cornerstone of post-punk.

After the chaotically spectacular implosion of the Sex Pistols on their first US tour in January of 1978, the music world was eagerly awaiting to see what frontman Johnny Rotten would conceive of as an encore.  Few could have foreseen that he had far more in mind than merely "business as usual".  The seed for that next step had actually been planted nearly two years earlier during a gig where the Pistols were playing with The Clash, when they were still a five piece with Keith Levene on guitar.  During that gig, Levene and Lydon struck up a chat and vowed that, should they find themselves without their respective bands at some point in the future, they'd hook up for their own musical adventure.  Sure enough, they were true to their word and, after John went on a sojourn down to Jamaica for Richard Branson to scout for reggae bands, the two started to put their new band together before the summer began to bloom.  Finding the next piece of the puzzle was easy, with close friend John Wardle, renamed "Jah Wobble" by a slurring and drunk Sid Vicious, eagerly stepping up to play bass.  The only thing left was to get a drummer, which they did via a music press advert where they eventually unearthed young Canadian jazz drummer, Jim Walker, to round out the quartet.  

All four of these disparate souls were on the same page about one thing at least, and that was the kind of music they wanted to make wouldn't be a continuation of standard punk three chord thrashing.  Keith had very different ideas about what a guitar could do and Wobble was very much looking to bring the depth of dub into the mix.  Combined with the flexibility of Walker's drumming, it didn't take long for the fission of their talents to spark and the first flame they ignited was the song, Public Image.  Lyrically, it was a snarling backlash aimed at his former band and manager, decrying their inability to appreciate what he was offering and only being concerned with his superficial presence.  "You never listen to a word that I said, you only seen me for the clothes that I wear.  Or did the interest go so much deeper, it must've been the colour of my hair."  

The song is propelled by the subsonic throbbing of Wobble's insistent bass, bouncing off the gunshot impacts of Jim's powerhouse drumming.  Filling out the space between the rhythm section and the searing vocals was a wall of harmonic chiming, shimmering and glistening guitar, as Keith shredded out myriads of harmonics from his Veleno aluminum special.  It's a sound that was light years away from the "chug-chug" of punk bar chords, inspiring the later sounds of dozens of guitarists in bands like U2 and The Banshees.  It was a clarion call, a siren, a great bell ringing and declaring a new approach to the instrument.

While the A-side of the single was laying foundation stones for musical futures, the B-side was content to be a prickly prank, demonstrating that PiL were not shy about spending Virgin Records money on a bit of nonsense.  The Cowboy Song takes a galloping western drum & bass rhythm and then slathers it with incomprehensible caterwauling and the irritating noise of a record skipping and scratching, ending it all on a locked groove that repeats that noise indefinitely until the needle is ripped off the record.  It's a juvenile joke which shows how young the band were, but I've always found it rather a good laugh, in the grand scheme of things.  It showed that PiL didn't take themselves too seriously and could have a sense of humour about themselves and the music business.

That sense of humour was also reflected in the packaging, which featured the 7' single being wrapped like a piece of fish in a custom printed sheet of newspaper.  The paper was a parody of the salacious gutter press, which had been stalking Lydon's career from the get-go.  It feature lurid made up stories of the band members, with sensational photos and suitably garish typesetting.  The whole package worked together brilliantly with the band's name, creating a meta-commentary on the music press while ripping its guts out in the song's lyrics.  

The single was a significant hit in the UK, peaking at number 9 in November of that year.  A promotional video was created for the song as well, recreating the PiL live set of the time with its green lighting and draped backdrop.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG @ 40

Released in June of 1983, Public Image Ltd’s most commercially successful single, This Is Not a Love Song, turns 40 years old this month. This may have been THE most anticipated record to ever keep me hounding my local record shop in my entire life.

I originally became obsessed with PiL in March of 1980, when Second Edition (Warner Bros NA version of Metal Box) showed up in Records on Wheels, an Ontario based chain that just opened up in a little strip mall next door to the Burger King I was working in at the time. I’d read a review for PiL’s debut LP, First Issue, in CREEM sometime in 1979, but never got to hear it at the time because it was not domestically released in the US or Canada. Their sophomore album got repackaged as Second Edition after the Metal Box edition sold out, and it became my musical muse for at least six months after I got it. I played it in its entirety at least once a day, minimum. As soon as I heard Wobble’s booming bass and Keith’s discordant guitar and synths, I was hooked and I collected every little nugget I could from them, including solo releases from Wobble and Martin’s Brian Brain project.  

By 1982 however, PiL were in an uncertain state, with Wobble gone and John & Keith relocated to NYC. There wasn’t a lot in the press at the time, at least since the Ritz riot in NYC in 1981, so I had no idea what was happening with them. It wasn’t until I moved from Thunder Bay, ON, to Vancouver, BC, in October of 1982 that I heard PiL was going to play in Seattle the following month. After their bizarre "multi-media" show at NYC's Ritz nightclub, with its "hired hand" old man jazz drummer, which instantly became legendary for its sheer madness, I had no idea what to expect, nor who was in the band. But I dutifully got myself a ticket and a bus down to the show. Once there, I discover that PiL had reconstituted into a surprisingly tight, potent quartet again. Martin Atkins was back on drums and Pete Jones, from Brian Brain & Cowboys International, was on bass, with John and Keith fronted the band.  

At the show, before the gig started, they played a recording of a brand new song, Blue Water, which sounded amazing and was a clear proclamation that they were working on a new album and SOMETHING was in the pipes for immanent release. During the gig, they debuted a couple of other new songs. I definitely remember Bad Life being one of them, and I think Where Are You was the other. After the gig, I managed to find a mailing address for them and wrote off a gushing fan letter about how much I loved the show and inquired as to when the new LP would be available. I was thrilled to get a response back from Martin, informing me that the album was going to be called "Welcome to the Commercial Zone" and that it would be "coming soon”, though there was no release date stated.  

This was early in 1983, so for the next few months, I was in my local record shop, Odyssey Imports, at least once every week, especially on the days I knew they got their shipments of new records. I’d be lurking around the back counter where they unpacked the boxes, waiting like a dog for a treat, to see if the new PiL record was in. I must’ve driven them nuts with my constant inquiries, and after a while it, seemed like it would NEVER materialize. Word eventually reached the press that Keith had been ousted from the band due to some falling out with John over a mix of the new single, so I was starting to wonder if anything would EVER be release.  

Finally, sometime near my birthday in June, the day actually came when I stepped into the shop and there was this inconspicuous white 12” single, a Japanese import, with a large PiL logo subtly embossed on the front and a tiny text in black with the title, THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG. Flipping it over, I was thrilled that the B-side had Blue Water, which I had committed to memory from the gig and was desperate to hear again. Rushing home with the record, I slapped it on and was immediately struck by how stripped down and minimal it was, but with a solid groove and bare-essential embellishments by Keith on guitar and synth. Martin and Pete laid down an insistent beat while John whined about “going over to the other side” and being “happy to have, not to have-not”. It was a statement of capitalistic intent which I really didn’t quite know whether to interpret as ironic or not. Blue Water sounded as wonderful as I remembered at the show, and was a much stranger animal than the A-side, showing that PiL were still able to straddle both commercial accessibility and their experimental tendencies.  

The single became a hit in the clubs and the video found frequent rotation on MTV, which was just staring to make a mark on the landscape of pop music. The single became PiL’s most successful to date and remains so to this day. But it was ultimately a capstone of sorts in the end, at least in terms of the PiL I fell in love with. A couple of months after its release, the dreadful Live In Tokyo album came out, showcasing what would become disparagingly referred to as the “Holiday Inn” incarnation of the band. John was still working with Martin, but they’d hired a trio of lounge band hacks to fill in for Keith and Pete, who abandoned ship shortly after Keith’s dismissal, and it was a completely different ballgame. While the album technically sounded great, being one of the first ever digitally recorded live gigs, the performance was mechanical, lifeless and entirely too pedestrian, by PiL’s standards. It was like a lame cover band imitating PiL.  

The fate of the Commercial Zone album was up in the air at the time that Love Song was released. The following year, Lydon and Atkins re-recorded most of the album with some session musicians finishing it off with some leftovers from Flowers of Romance and a couple of new tracks, producing This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get, It's a somewhat middling, though occasionally satisfying last gasp of the original PiL remnants. Keith, on the other hand, spirited away his rough mixes of the Commercial Zone album, which he subsequently released on his own independent label in a limited white sleeved edition just prior to Lydon’s LP in 1984. The two records ended up going head to head, attempting to make their own arguments as to who made the better album. Personally, I favoured Keith’s release, but it was like they were both incomplete and wanted to be put back together again to create a proper whole. What Commercial Zone lacked in professional polish, it made up for in soul, while the latter had all the spit & polish, but felt like a bit of put-on. Ultimately, those were the final shots fired by the band that merited much interest from me.  

After that, PiL pretty much became a solo venture for Lydon, though he’d get proper musicians after his collaboration with Bill Laswell, producing "Album". It had its moments, while it underscored the fact that Keith and Wobble brought something to the table which couldn’t be replicated by any other musician, no matter how capable. After Love Song, I don’t think I ever got as excited about a new record ever again.  

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.

THE CLASH @ 45

 

Marking 45 years on the shelves today is the eponymous debut LP by The Clash, which was released in the UK on April 8th, 1977. Recorded over a scattered three week period in February of that year at a cost of a meager £4,000, it would go on to be considered one of the most important and influential albums to come from the UK punk movement.

The Clash came together early in 1976 after founding members, Mick Jones & Keith Levene, made a concerted effort to recruit Joe Strummer into their ranks and out of his position fronting the 101ers. Filling out their lineup with Paul Simonon on bass and Terry Chimes on drums, the group began playing gigs around London along with friendly rivals the Sex Pistols. Before recording their debut album, Levene would end up departing the band to dabble with Sid Vicious in the Flowers of Romance before eventually founding Public Image Ltd with ex-Pistol John Lydon in 1978. Levene is only credited with one song writing acknowledgement for What’s My Name from the debut LP.

Upon delivery of the album to label, CBS, its US counterparts passed on releasing it, citing that the production values were sub-par, rendering the LP not “radio friendly”. This, however, didn’t stop the album from gaining chart traction in the UK, along with several singles, which helped to make the band premier ambassadors of the punk movement along with the Pistols and The Damned. Even though the album wasn’t released in the US, initially, it became one of the best selling imports of the year, racking up over 100,000 unit sales. The album would eventually find release in the US and Canada in 1979 after the group’s second album, Give ‘em Enough Rope, though with a slightly altered track listing and cover color. The US edition swapped out 4 tracks for 5 different ones and a re-recorded version of White Riot.

The legacy of the album has become clear as it is acknowledged as one of the most important releases to come from the initial punk movement on either side of the Atlantic. My own relationship to the album goes right back to the dawn of my fascination with non-mainstream music early in 1979. The “A-B-Cs” of my “gateway” albums into the realm of the paths less traveled goes: The Cars (debut) > Ramones - Road to Ruin > The Clash (debut). Those three albums were the trifecta which knocked my musical trajectory off the “middle of the road” and onto a path that would lead to progressively more and more extreme music. DEVO, PiL, TG and others might never have caught my ear if it weren’t for getting curious about all these new groups being written about in music magazines like CREEM. The Clash also helped me meet people who would become musical compatriots, like that gruff blonde kid who asked me about my Clash record in high school assembly that one day and told me he was into the Pistols and had a cousin in the UK who periodically sent him cassettes of upcoming bands (hello Mark!). As such, it’s a watershed album for me and, I’m sure, for many from that generation.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - FLOWERS OF ROMANCE @40

 

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.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD. - THE FLOWERS OF ROMANCE (SINGLE) @40

 

March 27th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Public Image Ltd’s fourth single, The Flowers of Romance. The song title is a reference to the near mythical short lived 1976 punk band that Sid Vicious was a member of before joining the Sex Pistols. The group’s fluctuating lineup also included such luminaries as Palmolive, Viv Albertine & Keith Levene; among others. They never recorded or performed, but left enough of an impression on John Lydon that he immortalized them in the title of this song and the subsequent LP which followed.

After well over a year’s wait for new material, Metal Box being released in November of 1979, the song itself was the world’s first peek at a post Jah Wobble PiL. With his acrimonious departure after their US tour the prior year, the remaining members had decided that the best way to cope with losing their bassist was to simply drop the instrument from their arsenal. Instead, the focus became percussion and Flowers highlights this with its tribal tom-toms and Spanish Flamenco style hand-claps. The rest of the track is built from droning cello, aberrant violin and a sax solo that sounds like the instrument got caught in a tornado. The rest is Lydon’s wailing vocals with lyrics bringing to mind fragmented images of disillusioned romanticism, worn out nostalgia and abandonment.

For all practical purposes, this could easily be seen as a solo song for Johnny as he played just about everything except the percussion, which was apparently done by an uncredited Martin Atkins. When the band mimed the song on Top of the Pops, Jeannette Lee took on the cello while Keith played the drums. Of course, Jeannette never played anything, but she was responsible for the lovely Polaroid photo of John adorning the front cover of the single.

The non-album B-side, Home Is Where the Heart Is, is a heavily dub-mixed reworking of a previously unfinished song that originated during the 1979 Metal Box sessions and which can be heard on a few live bootlegs from the band’s short US tour in the spring/summer of 1980. Wobble’s bass part was rerecorded by Keith, who created a tape loop of it for the finished version and Martin Atkins, again, plays drums and, AGAIN, misses a credit as the single mistakenly lists original PiL drummer, Jim Walker, in the writing credits.

The single peaked at #24 in the UK charts and was listed as the single of the week by NME upon its release with the reviewer calling it a “sheer delight” and “One of the starkest, most single-minded pieces they've ever done.” It would certainly do the job in terms of setting the stage for the outrageously uncompromising album that they were about to unleash upon an unsuspecting fan base.

METAL BOX AT 40

METAL 1

Forty years ago, on November 23rd, 1979, Public Image Ltd unleashed their second "album".  Its initial release was in the UK, coming a year after their debut LP.

That "First Issue" had come at the tail end of 1978, a year which had begun with the infamous Sex Pistols disintegrating while wrapping up their one and only US tour.  In the wake of that chaos and all the recriminations surrounding their demise, Johnny Rotten, now back to being John Lydon, went on vacation to Jamaica where he scouted reggae acts for Richard Branson before returning to the UK to get back to the business of making music himself.  Once home, he recruited a couple of friends for his new venture; a bass player who didn't know how to play bass plus an ex-Clash guitarist.  A quartet was completed with a Canadian drummer found via a music press classified ad.  Together they knocked up an album which was greeted with a mixture of suspicion, contempt and occasional praise.  It was an uneven affair, offering glimpses of genius when they'd been able to pay for proper studios and production, but it lagged in spots once the money ran out and they had to tack on rushed pieces recorded in budget studios.  In at least one self declared case, they "only wanted to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort".  It was a contentiously auspicious debut that demanded an unequivocal follow up for this entity to be taken seriously.  So during the beginning months of 1979, PiL set about assembling new tracks while churning through drummers like toilet tissue. 

Prior to it's release, Metal Box was buffered by two singles, Death Disco (issued in June) and Memories (in October).    Both of these set the stage for what was to come, but no one was really prepared for the full force of the post-punk monolith which was about to descend.  Recorded in fragmented sessions at various studios throughout the year, Metal Box rolled out of the gate while smashing it to pieces along the way.  It was unlike anything anyone had seen or heard before, both in structure and content.  Housed in a logo embossed circular metal canister, it contained three 12" 45rpm "singles" with a dozen tracks spread across them and a  running time of about an hour.  It posed questions on every level, from how to get the records out (they were so tightly housed, you'd have to shake the container and try not to scratch or drop them as they tumbled out), to what order to play them (play order was meant to be flexible) to what kind of stereo system was capable of reproducing the sound in the grooves (I personally know people who bought whole new audio systems in order to handle the extremes of bass and treble contained on those records).  

Where their first LP had indicated movement into new musical directions, such as the nine minute dirge of Theme, it still retained remnants of what could legitimately be called "rock & roll" on songs like its title track and Annalisa.  This new product, however, left those conventions behind on all fronts.  There were elements of disco, dub, German "motorik", martial music, funk and some unidentified strains in the mix.  That "mix", itself, was another thing all together.  The bass was front and center, pushing the capacity of the medium to reproduce it.  Guitars & synths buzzed, scraped and squalled in thin ribbons across the top.  Drums were generally utilitarian, minimal and repetitive, providing support for the bass, but never offering too much flash.  Kick drums were EQ'd with enough thud to pop needles out of the grooves and hi-hats sizzled with enough top end to fry bacon. Occasionally, a drum track was no more than a tape loop of a simple beat.  Lydon's voice moaned and squeaked or screamed in vacant hallways, always sounding lost or distant.  Even the editing of the tracks was fair game for mischief.  Some tracks would abruptly cut off and bump into the next.  Sometimes it sounded like the tape player was shut off or switched on as the music did a sharp pitch drop into a halt or lurched to a start.  A song might trail off into the locked groove at the end of the record and either loop there indefinitely or be roughly snatched away by the auto-return kicking in on the tone arm.  It all felt inside-out, like a building with the plumbing and wiring deliberately showing on the outside.

SECOND EDITION

It wouldn't be until early in 1980 that the album would find its way into my 16 year old hands in Canada.  By then, it had been reissued in a more conventional double LP format, in a standard gate-fold cardboard sleeve, as "Second Edition".  I remember going into Records on Wheels, which had opened up recently in a little strip mall next door to the Burger King where I worked, after my shift on a cold April day in Thunder Bay, ON.  I spotted it instantly as I entered the shop and saw it on the wall in the new releases section by the entrance.  I'd heard of PiL by then, but never heard them.  The first LP was never released in Canada, so I had no idea what they sounded like.  I didn't even know if this was a different album from the one I'd read a review of in CREEM magazine the year before.  I knew I had to check it out, so I plunked my hard earned burger flipping money down and then had to wait until later that evening to hear it.  The whole family went out that night to visit friends, so I spent most of the evening staring at the cover graphics while the adults talked and drank.  

I was fascinated by the photos on the front and inside the gate-fold.  I didn't know who was who yet.  I knew what John Lydon used to look like, but not the rest of the band and the distortion of the warped image effect used made it nearly impossible to tell which one was him.  The cover also had all the lyrics printed on the back.  They weren't originally included with the Metal Box edition due to cost, so PiL had run an ad in one of the UK music papers with the lyrics printed in it so people could take that and fold it up to stick inside the tin.  They were in the same hand written style in both cases, I'm assuming in Lydon's writing.  They weren't in the same order as the songs on the LPs, so when I did finally get to hear the records, it took a bit of sorting to figure out which song was which.
 

When I finally did get home that evening, I went to the big old wooden console stereo system in the living room, grabbed the headphones, set myself up in a comfy chair and dropped the needle on the first track.  It wasn't a great system, so I didn't have the best first listening experience, but it was good enough for me to be able to appreciate how different this all was.  Looking at the labels on the records, I noticed the run times for the track listings.  Side one started with Albatross, which clocked in at an intimidating 10 minutes!  I wasn't used to songs being much longer than 3 or 4 minutes.  Maybe 6 was long when you're talking about something like Bohemian Rhapsody or a Zeppelin track and, in those cases, they were intricately orchestrated with major changes in structure and arrangements as the track progressed.
 

YOU ARE UNBEARABLE

Albatross kicked in and I was immediately anxious and anticipating when it was going to start changing.  After a few minutes in, it became apparent it wouldn't.  Jah Wobble's bass line comes in first and it sounds lazy, like it can barely stand to differentiate the three notes it keeps repeating.  It doesn't even want to try to do anything but lumber along.  And it's so deep!  It's just this rumble under the floorboards.  It sounds scary and maybe a little pissed off about something. Brooding?  Yeah, that's the feel.  Then the drums start plodding along and this scraping, screeching noise from Keith Levene's guitar comes in like a carrion bird way up in the sky, circling and waiting for something to die so it can swoop down and gorge itself.  The ghost of Johnny Rotten then looms up from his grave and starts moaning about something he can't get rid of.  His thoughts are fragments, piecemeal musings you might extract from a cadaver's brain.  "Frying rear blinds"?  What does that even mean?  It's bits and pieces of ideas and images, but there's a sense of exasperation  and boredom.  What's he on about?  Is it his career and fame?  Is it the carcass of rock & roll being flogged like that dead horse?   "Slow motion... slow motion..."  The whole thing fucks with your sense of time.  It goes on so long and is so ruthlessly repetitive, that you lose any sense of time passing.  Everything stands still.  Then it's over and the last thing you hear is that squalling vulture flying off into the distance.

IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW

Next up, Memories kicks off with some pep as the tempo picks up.  Now, the bass is hollow sounding and bouncy while a disco beat pops along, encouraging some toe tapping.  A curtain of vibrato guitars starts shimmering in the background.  There's something vaguely Latin about it, like flamenco or something, but it's not even certain what instrument you're listening to.  It sounds a bit like an organ too.  There's a flurry of notes that dance around, but they never quite create a melody.  It's merely a suggestion of conventional structure.  Lydon's voice comes in with a sneer and declares he's "had enough of useless memories" and proceeds to tear into the concepts of sentimentality and nostalgia.  Then, just when you think you've got a handle on things, the entire mix suddenly cuts to something completely different.  The bass is back to booming again.  The drums are heavier now too, with the kick threatening to bounce the stylus right out of the grooves.  It's all compressed so that the loudness of the track hits the maximum and you can imagine any VU meter pinned to the top when the mix cuts over.  That curtain of Spanish moss is now a wall made of steel and it's pushing that voice as it bellows and snarls about being "used" and "dragging on and on and on and on and on AND ON AND ON!"  Back and forth, the song snaps between the two mixes until it goes careening out of sight.  As previously mentioned, this song was released as a single, but that version only used the bottom heavy mix throughout and did not have the abrupt edits between mixes.  Personally, I can never really decide which is more effective, though I tend to favor the single most of the time, but the juxtaposition of the two mixes on the LP was a fresh, jarring concept and executed flawlessly. 

FLOWERS ROTTING DEAD

By the time I'd finished the first side, I was feeling like I'd been punched in the head in the best way possible.  My initial apprehension was replaced by an exuberance as I could feel the sense that something new was taking hold in my brain.  Flipping the record over, the next track up was Swan Lake.  This had been released in a more stripped down, rough mix as Death Disco in the summer of that year.  This finished mix would take the rawness of the single and refine it into a truly heartbreaking exploration of loss and death.  The song was written by Lydon about watching his dear mother pass due to the ravages of cancer.  His delivery during the song is nothing short of agonizing.  There's no measuring or muting his suffering and he lets it out with every excruciating wail of "words cannot express!!!".   Again, a disco beat provides the bedrock while Wobble's bass thunders with the tension and anxiety of an anxiously racing heartbeat.  Levene's repeating guitar and synth motif, borrowed from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, creates the sense of mourning and lamenting the loss of a loved one.  The emotion in the song is so raw and uninhibited, it's very strange to see the promo video made for it as the band seem to be mugging it up during their miming of the track for the camera. On Second Edition, the track spins into a frenzy before before being abruptly cut off by the next track while, on Metal Box, it bleeds into the run-out locked groove to find its terminus.

THE SMELL OF RUBBER ON COUNTRY TAR

Things abruptly switch to the next track, Poptones.  The song tells the tale of kidnapping and murder, snatched straight out of the headlines of the tabloids.  It's almost beautiful, musically.  Keith spins a delicate spiderweb of guitar notes, cascading down upon each other and churning like a glittering Ferris wheel.  I say "almost" because it's all a bit like a bouquet of flowers that has died on the dressing table.  The tale being told is past tense, so there's no sense of urgency or threat.  There's only the aftermath as the deceased in question relates its own demise, the sound of music playing on a cassette in the car communicating the dispassionate telling of this sordid true crime story.   A walking bass loops around along with the guitar, meandering through a cycle of notes while the drums tumble along for the ride.  It's a dizzying swirl of sound as we feel the chill of a car boot in the country air and the "wet" of the dirt while we lose our "body heat".  Lydon intones the vocals in a cracked, reedy tone that reinforces the detachment from any direct experience.  Faintly in the background, his voice echoes down into the vortex, barely audible amid the distortion. 

MANGLED MACHINERY

Cut to the battle field for the completion of the trifecta on side two of the 2nd-E track listing.  The tape machine kicks into gear with a sweep of the pitch and we're marching.  The drums pat out a militant trundle while the bass, deep as usual, pushes underneath,  an insistent drill sergeant, counting out steps as the troops move forward.  All around, synthesizers swirl, discordant and droning, swooping through as teargas lingers on the horizon.  We're going to war, but it's corpses for cash in this modern military industrial complex.  The big money is meticulous and well organized as it poisons the landscape.  Lydon's voice searches for "meaning behind the moaning", but all he finds is dollar signs.  This is not conflict over ideals or beliefs or even traditional material concerns such as land rights.  This is military for money, as a mechanism for generating financial profit.  PiL were predicting the future here and, 40 years on, it's horrifying how precisely accurate their prediction was.  Synthetic gunshots ring out in jarring bursts.  When they hit rapid-fire, it makes you jump in your seat.  It's frightening and relentless and it all ends in a crescendo barrage.

IT IS YOUR NATURE

The next set of tracks gives the listener a bit of a breather.  I'm going by the double LP track listing here for this article as this is the ordering I was ingrained to follow until I finally got a proper copy of Metal Box a good year after first getting Second Edition.  First up are a couple of instrumentals.  Socialist comes staggering out of the speakers like some sort of short-circuiting robot.  The drums are weirdly syncopated with the bass and the whole thing is sprinkled with nothing more than some random synth bleeps and bloops.  This is followed by Graveyard, a track which previously appeared in a different mix with vocals on the B-Side of the Memories single as Another.  It was also recycled by Wobble for the track Not Another, reverting back to an instrumental, on his first solo LP.  It's a rhythmic, atmospheric piece with a decidedly morbid mood, most suitable for some midnight forays to the land of tombstones.  It would make a good soundtrack for waiting for The Great Pumpkin in the pumpkin patch.  This moody, brief trio is rounded off with The Suit, also recycled by Wobble for his solo album as Blueberry Hill.  Here, it's little more than a lonely bass line playing against a tape looped kick & snare with Lydon doing some of his infamous piano tinkling in the background (he often did this in the studio simply to annoy everyone).  Keith is nowhere to be found here.  Lydon's lyrics sneer and snigger at those who live off the ideas of others, never originating anything themselves.  Their look, their attitude, their manners, all borrowed from others and sold cheap to anyone stupid enough to buy into their fake personas.  It eventually  disappears down an echoing corridor to end this set.

ONE MORE SOB STORY

The final quartet of tracks brings us to some of the most harrowing moments of the album.  First up is another story torn from the morning papers, Bad Baby.  This was the audition piece for drummer Martin Atkins, who knocked it out in a single take, thus clinching his hiring by the band.  Here, he drops a minimalist funky beat while Wobble saunters along on bass.  Keith ads no more than the occasional car horn inspired atonal synth stab, but that's enough.  The track doesn't need any more.  Lydon fills in the rest with his recounting of a story of an infant being left alone in a parked car.  It's a story you hear every year, at least a dozen times, still to this day.  Lydon relates it rather offhand and almost distracted, like he's busy looking for gum in his pockets or something.  It's a song about thoughtlessness and that's the feeling that comes across in the delivery.

DON'T KNOW WHY I BOTHER, THERE'S NOTHING IN IT FOR ME

Things start to get harrier with No Birds, the post-punk equivalent to The Monkees' Pleasant Valley Sunday.  In this case, it's suburban malaise taken into discordant abandon.  The drums ripple with tribal toms while the bass pushes them along.  Once more, Lydon's piano is plinking in the background while Keith shaves off sheets of searing guitar.  Lydon's vocals paint a picture of disaffection, "a layered mass of subtle props."  He keeps insisting "this could be Heaven", but you know it's a long way from that.  The song trots along until it's suddenly struck down by the most manic piece on the album, Chant.  The drums are primal and thudding, like a mob stomping in rage.  The bass grumbles underneath and, like Albatross, there's barely any distinction between the notes, only an uneasy minor variation.  Keith's guitar thrashes and spits in all directions.  There doesn't seem to be any pattern to it, it's chaotic flailing imitating the mob mentality being evoked.  There's a "chant" building in the background.  "Love, war, fear, hate"!  At lease, that's what it sounds like.  It's not really possible to say for sure.  The chanting is so incessant, the words lose their meaning from repetition.  Then the lead vocals charge in, scouring the air with condemnation.  "Voice moaning in a speaker, never really get too close".  Riots, protests, demonstrations, a futility of empty gestures accomplishing nothing.  Meaningless slogans, unfulfilled promises, empty threats.  It's the anger of the world stewing away with no target, no hope of success and no objective to accomplish.  The song riots along until the channel gets abruptly changed because it's too miserable to take any more. 

It's all been a pretty bleak affair up to this point with the music and lyrics and even the packaging painting a grey, metallic picture of death, despair and hopelessness.  So how come I felt so good listening to it?  The final track in this assault, Radio 4, finally lifts us out of the bleakness for a brief glimpse of beauty.  It's the third instrumental and it's pretty much all Keith (though I've heard rumors that Ken Lockie, of Cowboys International, had a hand in it).  It's essentially no more than a wandering bass line and washes of synth chords moving in like waves crashing on the shore while a lonely lead line drifts over top.  Occasional cymbal splashes are the only accents.  It's peaceful, serine, contemplative and brings you back down to earth after the rest of the album's jarring, hypnotic melee.  It's waking up from the nightmare and realizing you're still okay... for now. 

WE'RE NOT A BAND, WE'RE A CORPORATION

After my first listen, I was stunned.  I went to high school the next day and tried to explain that I'd heard something beyond anything I'd heard before, but I didn't have the words and no one took note of me.  For the next 6 months or more, Second Edition was played at least once, start to finish, every single day.  I obsessed over it. I played it for anyone who would listen. It made most of the other records in my meager collection irrelevant.  Verses and choruses?  How quaint and old fashioned.  Melody and harmonies?  Passé.  It had thrown itself so far ahead of the pack, listening to most other music seemed pointless.  It also inspired.

Before hearing PiL, I'd had ideas of wanting to make my own music and had even taken guitar and bass lessons.  As a result, I had instruments sitting in my room and a cheap amp, which were mostly ignored for the prior two years.  I never seriously felt like I could do music myself.  I never thought I had the ability to make anything anyone would want to listen to.  I didn't think I was good enough and I didn't know where to start.  But Second Edition was like an instruction manual and it was a tool kit and a pile of building blocks, all in one.  It wasn't something to merely listen to.  It was something to study and learn from.  Its structures were primary and easy to comprehend.  Throw down a simple beat, add a few notes on bass, jam some guitar on top or just make weird noises and blather on about whatever you wanted to finish it off.  That was it.  That was all you needed to make your own music.  Within a year, I'd managed to buy a synth and a drum machine and a cheap cassette recorder.  I'd met a few friends who were also interested in fucking around with music, so we'd hang out in someone's basement or bedroom and crank out some noise.  I wouldn't have felt like I could do it if it weren't for PiL and this album, in particular.

PiL made you question every structure around music and understand that the rules were not fixed and that every aspect could be played with.  The way you play an instrument, the way to make a record, the way you package it, the way you structure your band.  You could have an accountant and a publicist be part of the band.  They did.   It was all up for grabs and you only needed to have the nerve to throw caution to the wind to try to make shit happen.  That was an important lesson and one I will always be grateful for learning. 

Eventually, as I mentioned, I got my hands on a sanctified original pressing of an actual Metal Box.  Back in 1980, living in Canada, that wasn't easy to do.  The Records on Wheels shop was getting in copies of NME and Sounds music papers on import, so I was buying them and checking out the classified ads at the back.  I found one selling copies of Metal Box plus the 12" of Memories and Death Disco.  I got my calculator out, went to the bank and managed to figure out the exchange between British Pounds and Canadian Dollars, bought a money order and sent it off in the mail.  With no internet or cheap overseas phones, it was a huge risk to send so much off like that.  It cost about $60 all total, which was a lot back then.  I had to wait about 3 months and often wondered if it would ever arrive, but one day, it finally did and at last, I had my hands on an actual copy of Metal Box.  I still have all those records today, prominently displayed on my CD shelf.

Over the years, I've purchased this album more times than any other.  There was my original Second Edition Canadian release in 1980, the above noted original Metal Box edition in 1981, a UK pressing of Second Edition in 1983  (still have that one),  my first CD copy of Second Edition circa 1989,  a CD replica of Metal Box sometime around 2002, the 2006 4 Men With Beards vinyl Metal Box reissue and, finally, the 2009 Virgin 30th anniversary 3 CD Metal Box replica (which I also still have).  That makes 7 different versions.  I couldn't get the expanded edition from 2016, sadly, because I'm poor now and can't afford such things.  At least I was able to hear the bonus material thanks to YouTube.  Anyway, the point is that no other piece of music in my life has demanded my attention and collecting obsessiveness like Metal Box.

Since its release, it has gone on to secure its position in popular music history as one of the most significant and influential albums of all time.  It rehabilitated dance music, allowing it to move into more experimental realms in the 1980s, after "disco" had made the 4x4 beat a cocaine dusted disgrace.  It can credibly be sited as the seed that grew into the bass music culture that spread throughout the 1990s and 2000s via downtempo, drum & bass and dubstep.  It may not have had the sales figures of a Sgt. Pepper, but it was no less revolutionary in terms of the effect it had on people who make music and art.

Where the Sex Pistols had been an attempt, at least for Mr. Rotten, to blast apart the ramparts of "rock 'n' roll", Metal Box showed you what could be built in its place, once you'd cleared away the rubble.  It was the next step beyond the nihilism of punk and actually a positive statement about the nature of creativity, which is why it had the odd effect of making me feel good even when the themes of the songs were so bleak and unsettling.  It made you feel like something was possible, in spite of all the horror.  And it also told you the truth about how fucked up things were.  You felt like it was honest about the world.  There was no fake optimism or plaster over the horrors "feel good" bullshit.  And it concealed a wickedly dark sense of humor, if you knew where to find it (just ask Dick Clark or Tom Snyder). 

In the end, it has proven itself more than capable of "sowing the seed of discontent".