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unpublished reasons, when John returned from the shoot, Jeanette was no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.
