Postpunk By Design: Metal Box (Frieze, 2007)

some of my perspectives on Metal Box have changed in the 9 years since writing this Frieze piece (which is largely about the packaging of the LP as opposed to the music). Wonder if they will continue to change over the next decades of re-listening?

Metal Box Remembered  / Metal Box: Stories from John Lydon’s Public Image Limited  by Phil Strongman

(directors' cut, Frieze 2007)

by Simon Reynolds

My most vivid memory of Metal Box is a week before Christmas Day, 1979. My parents were out, so I sneaked PiL’s album out of the airing cupboard where they stashed the presents and for the first time prised off the tin’s lid, then gingerly extracted the three discs tightly crammed inside. Aged sixteen, I just couldn’t wait to play the record that was being universally acclaimed as a giant step into a brave new world beyond rock’s confines. As a result I crossed a line myself, between innocence and adulthood.

Demystification was the whole point of Metal Box’s packaging, a metallic canister of the type that ordinarily contains movie reels. Like the band-as-corporation name Public Image Ltd, the matt-gray tin was an attempt to strip away mystique, all the “bollocks” of rock romanticism, But Metal Box, of course, just added to the mystique around PiL, the group John Lydon formed after splitting with the Sex Pistols. Drab yet imposing, standing out in record shop racks or on the shelves of a collection, the can instantly became a fetish object. And although its aura was utilitarian, the packaging was actually less functional than a normal album jacket. Instead of slipping the disc out of its sleeve, you had to carefully ease out the three 45rpm 12 inches, which were separated only by paper circles the same size as the platters. Removing the vinyl without scratching it was a challenge.

 Almost thirty years later, my three discs look in remarkably good nick considering I must have played them hundreds of times. But then I was precious about my possessions: an avid postpunk fan hamstrung by weak finances, I owned about six albums in toto, and Metal Box’s  hefty £7-45 price tag was the reason I’d requested it for Xmas, despite the delay this would mean in hearing it.

All this user-unfriendly palaver with the discs did have the effect of heightening the experience of playing Metal Box, giving it an almost ritualistic quality. PiL’s own motivations were partly malicious pranksterism and partly a serious attempt to deconstruct the Album. In interviews, bassist Jah Wobble was adamant that you should definitely not play Metal Box in sequence but listen to one side of a disc (two or three tracks, tops) at a time. Spreading an hour or so’s music across three records encouraged listeners to reshuffle the running order as they saw fit; as a result, the record became a set of resources rather than a unitary artwork.

 “Useful” was a big PiL buzzword (that’s what they liked about disco, that it was danceable). It was a term that allowed Lydon to carry on opposing himself to all things arty and pretentiousness, even as he perpetrated a supreme feat of artiness with Metal Box. 

Like Factory Records’ exquisitely designed releases of the same era, Metal Box simultaneously extended the art rock tradition of extravagant packaging (Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, for instance) while subverting it through its stark plainness (which ironically, cost a bleedin’ fortune). The only precedent I can think of is Alice Cooper’s 1974 album Muscle of Love, which came in a brown cardboard carton (Lydon, as it happens, was a huge Alice fan). The concept for Metal Box originated with PiL’s design-conscious friend Dennis Morris, the court photographer at Lydon’s house in Gunter Grove, Chelsea, and also a member of the all-black PiL-like band Basement 5. 

Where the sleeve of  the debut album Public Image: First Issue lampooned rock’s cult of personality (Morris photographed the band in Vogue-style make-up and suits) Metal Box went one step further to a blank impersonality, the absence of any kind of image at all. Flowers of Romance, the third album, took a step too far with its desultory Polaroid of band associate Jeanette Lee, but that was long after Morris had been ousted from the PiL milieu.

Morris’s crucial contribution to Public Image Ltd is something that comes through loud and clear in the new PiL book,  Metal Box: Stories from John Lydon’s Public Image Limited (and yes, that misspelling of the band’s name – not a good augury – is maintained doggedly from the front cover

right through to the book’s end).If author Phil Strongman is savvy enough to name his book after PiL’s totemic masterpiece, he’s less shrewd in doggedly pursuing the story long after PiL ceased to be a creative force. 

As Mark Fisher has noted, every pop story, followed through to its narrative (in)conclusion, ends in ignominy or disappointment. So it is with the PiL-brand-disgracing travesties Lydon  released immediately after first Wobble (the group’s heart and soul) and then guitarist Keith Levene (its musical brains) were ejected. More disheartening still, in a way, was the mediocre competence of the PiL albums of the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Still, Strongman’s account of the “good years” is rich in new data, from deliciously incongruous trivia (Ted Nugent was Levene’s choice to produce the first album! Led Zep manager Peter Grant was mad keen to take on PiL as clients!) to more compelling revelations (the mystery of whether “Poptones”, Metal Box’s stand-out track, is sung by a murdered corpse or an abduction survivor abandoned and shivering in the woods, is settled).

As so often with rock biographies, though, quite a lot of the information tends to tarnish the reputations of the protagonists. Ironically, given their fervent anti-rock stance (Lydon derided rock as a “disease”, something to be “cancelled”), PiL’s productivity was disabled by a thoroughly rock’n’roll set of failings: drug addiction, drug paranoia, egomania, money disputes, mismanagement. (PiL actually had no manager, on account of Lydon’s bad experiences with Malcolm McLaren; the role was portioned between Jeanette Lee and another Lydon crony, Dave Crowe, with the band finances kept in a box--cardboard, this time--under a bed). Equally lamentably rock’n’roll is the Spinal Tap-like procession of drummers, five in the first two years (one of whom, ex-Fall drummer, Karl Burns, stayed in the band for just a few days, quitting after being the victim of a dangerous prank involving fire).

All the main players (and numerous extremely minor ones) are interviewed, with the

glaring exception of Lydon himself. But that’s no surprise, because he’s consciously distanced himself from PiL over the years. At some point he clearly grasped that his place in Rock History (and future income) depends on the Sex Pistols adventure and subsequently threw all his energies into burnishing the Johnny Rotten legend. 

But I wonder if another factor behind Lydon’s silence is that the PiL years are painful to contemplate--not just because of bad blood (Wobble was one of his best friends) but because the music of Metal Box, rooted in his true loves ( Can, Beefheart, Peter Hammill, dub)  meant so much to him. He really believed all that “rock is dead” rhetoric, was sincere when he dismissed the Sex Pistols as way too traditional. 

And for a moment there, rock’s intelligentsia concurred. Metal Box’s stature in 1979-80 was so immense that many commentators invoked Miles Davis’s early Seventies music as a reference point. Lester Bangs declared that that he’d stake a lifetime’s writing on Metal Box and Miles’s Get Up With It. When his apartment caught fire, the first and only thing Bangs grabbed as he fled to the street below in his jim-jams was that matt grey tin can.

It’s the music inside that counts, though, doesn’t it?  My other vivid memory of Metal Box is bringing it to school after our music teacher asked each member of the class to bring in a favourite record and talk about it. I played “Death Disco” and “Poptones,” then regurgitated stuff I’d read in NME about how PiL were radical for absorbing the influence of funk and reggae. I wasn’t able to articulate what made their  mutational approach different and superior to contemporaries like The Police or indeed Old Wave rock gods like The Stones when they disco-rocked it with “Miss You”. 

But the lasting proof of PiL’s innovatory power is their music’s ever-widening ripples of influence, which encompass Massive Attack, Primal Scream (they hired Wobble for 1991’s “Higher than the Sun”), Tortoise, Radiohead, and many more. You can trace a line from PiL via On U Sound (whose Adrian Sherwood had dealings* with Lydon, Levene and Wobble back then) to today’s dubstep, which, like Metal Box, is Jamaican music with the sunshine extracted, roots reggae without Rasta’s consoling dream of Zion.

PiL’s biggest influence though, might be their rhetoric. The idea that “rock is obsolete” (as Wobble put it in 1978) became a self-replicating meme that inoculated an entire generation against the retro-virus by directing them away from rock’s back pages and towards the cutting-edges of contemporary black music.

 In the age of downloading and dematerialized sound-data, Metal Box has a fresh resonance for me as a powerful argument in favor of the necessity for music to be physically embodied. The record was significantly diminished in its subsequent incarnation as Second Edition (the gatefold-sleeved double album it became when the 60 thousand limited edition Metal Box sold out). The CD reissue, housed in a miniature metal canister, is almost risible to behold, while its digitized sound lacks the warmth and weight of the original deep-grooved 45 rpm 12 inches. 

Most crucially, you simply weren’t meant to listen to Metal Box as one long uninterrupted 70 minute sequence. 

A 1979 pressing fetches 200 dollars on Gemm; the reproduction antique vinyl reissue of Metal Box from a few years back isn’t cheap either. But this is one record you simply must have, hold and hear in its original format. 

* not just musical dealings either, it's said...  nudge nudge wink wink say no more say no more

JAH WOBBLE
The Wire, issue 93, November 1991.

 by Simon Reynolds

"It was a very angry, neurotic scene, and it was perfect for me!", says Jah Wobble, recalling punk. "I was engulfed in rage. There were a lot of fellow malcontents. I've got very happy memories of it, because I don't know what I would have done without that chance to express myself. I dread to think what would have happened.

"I can't talk about punk sociologically, only subjectively – I just wanted to live. Recently, I popped into a local boozer, and it felt like pre-punk again – a living death, everybody getting tanked up, and then it's back to work in the morning. There's got to be more to life than that. I was very against authority, against formularised structures, and I still am. I'm still very adolescent, without being boringly so. Seeing people in their thirties who haven't matured can be a sad sight. You can't just be against things, you have to offer something as well."

Wobble first emerged as one of the legendary "four Johns" who used to hang out in McLaren and Westwood's boutique: there was John Lydon, John Ritchie (Sid Vicious), the mysterious John Grey, and John Wardle (soon slurred to Wobble). Wobble had something of a thuggish reputation. "I think we were all emotional cripples, back then," he says. But he seems to have rapidly snapped out of that persona, and by the time of Metal Box, the music papers presented him as "the nice one" in PiL: the self-educated, Orwell-admiring East Ender, whose dub-quake basslines were the human heartbeat in PiL's dread disco. Like a rollercoaster carriage, they were simultaneously what kept you safe and what dragged you through the PiL terror ride.

PiL were what Lydon had always wanted the Sex Pistols to sound like: an anti-rockist non-band influenced by dub, Can, Beefheart, Peter Hammill. PiL were a repudiation of punk rock's traditionalism and rhythmic naivete. "I actually thought the Pistols were a fucking good band," says Wobble. "But the Pistols were the only real rock band that I loved. Afterwards, John wanted to play in a band where the bass was loud.

"We used to fuck about with graphic equalizers and customised bass bins, and experiment with putting rock records through the system to see how far you could take the low end. I loved reggae, the bassline moving around the drum beat, which you didn't get much in rock music. Rhythm was always more important to me than melody or harmony. So I picked up the bass and immediately felt very bonded to it. It was very therapeutic, although I didn't understand that at the time.

A self-taught minimalist-by-necessity, Wobble's aspirations collided midway with those of groups like Can, virtuosos who aspired "downwards" to minimalism, who consciously trimmed their playing of excess flash. "The interesting thing about Can is that they got into rock in their thirties, after being trained in jazz or avant-garde backgrounds. And they discovered the importance of rhythm. They discovered that if you reduce your playing, the amount of instrumentation, then the music grooves better. Less can be more."

After his acrimonious, post-Metal Box split from PiL, Wobble got to play with his hero Holger Czukay, Can's bassist, resulting in the 1983 Snake Charmer collaboration. Then there was Wobble's new band The Human Condition, a jazzy, dubby, freeform proposition that took the PiL approach a little further. "It was about keeping things logical – not cold and intellectual, but geared to what truly functions, and gives, and makes you feel spiritually satisfied."

The mid-80s were wilderness years for Wobble. "I was in some ways a very sick young man, in others a very positive and brave young man. I used to go out of my way to upset people, I was very self-destructive. I lost patience, I didn't communicate, I was just a drunken bastard. But then I started to envision this beauty, this new way a band from the West could play. In my head, I could hear these eternal rhythms, but in a context that was very up-to-date and contemporary."

Wobble was listening to North African, Arabic and Romany music, sensing the connections between these sounds and the other things (dub, Can) that moved him. But "the shadow side" persisted, and for a couple of dark years Wobble was working on the London Underground, only occasionally doing a show in Europe, "for a laugh".

In 1987 he met guitarist Justin Adams, another musician who was drifting for lack of the right musical context. "I'd followed a similar trajectory out of punk," recalls Justin. "PiL opened my horizons to black music, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, dub. At the same time, having spent much of early life in Arab countries, I understood what Wobble was trying to do. In fact, just before we met, I'd actually been thinking, 'I'd really like to play with Wobble.' I'd read these sleevenotes he'd written about healing music." The pair immediately bonded musically, and Invaders Of The Heart was born.

The group were still way out on a limb, and there seemed little prospect of making much happen for their music. They played shows, and recorded an album in Holland. It was the acid house revolution – with its trance-dance vibe, DIY approach to technology, and "anything goes" attitude to sampling – that created the kind of climate in which Wobble could re-emerge. "Acid house did open people's ears towards long, instrumental tracks, weird sounds; it brought back the idea that the music was supposed to alter your consciousness," says Justin.

Last year the Invaders "Bomba" single (released on hep dance label Boys Own and remixed by hep producer Andy Weatherall) was a dancefloor hit. At the same time, Charlie Gillett became interested in signing the group to his Oval label, which goes through Warners. Suddenly, Wobble was no longer languishing on the margins.

The climax came with Wobble's guest appearance this summer [1991] on Primal Scream's "Higher Than The Sun". An astonishing single, "Higher" was a resolution of all the myriad changes of the last 15 years, a re-convergence of the post-punk diaspora. In it you could hear shades of Primal Scream's rock classicist phase (Brian Wilson, Love's Forever Changes); the "cosmonauts of inner space" vibe of acid house, Sun Ra, and Tim Buckley's Starsailor; and a lyric as solipsistic as "Anarchy In The UK" (all about being your own god) except that this time the drug vector was Ecstasy not amphetamine. And underneath it all, most thunderously on Andy Weatherall's "Dub Symphony" mix, was the seismic undertow of Wobble – a beautiful irony, since the earliest incarnation of Primal Scream was a PiL copy band.

And now there's the Invaders Of The Heart's enchanting Rising Above Bedlam album. With its seamless melange of pan-global influences, and singing (by Natacha Atlas and, on a couple of tracks, Sinead O'Connor) in French, Spanish, and Arabic, Rising belongs in Jon Hassell's "Fourth World": a post-modern neo-geography where modern technology and ancient ethnic music mingle to form the polyglot pop of the 21st Century.

"Jon Hassell's one of my favourite players," says Wobble. "I much prefer the Fourth World approach to World Music's attitude of treating ethnic musics as museum pieces. We all have an ancient soul, there are these eternal rhythms, but what I do is pick up on those rhythms and bring them up to date. That's the way forward for the world. We've lost so much in the West. There's a great feeling of godlessness. We've lost that communal spirituality. We can learn about that from the Third World. But at the same time, the Third World can learn from us."

Wobble talks a lot about the spirit. Like a lot of his generation, he's made a shift from nihilism towards affirmation, an odyssey from post-punk demystification towards something close to mysticism. Rising Above Bedlam comprehends both aspects of Wobble's history in its title – angst and elation, the here-and-now and the transcendent, social realism and spirituality.

"That's what we go for, a lovely balance between neurosis (which I still love), and the spiritual solution to those feelings of alienation," says Wobble. One of his heroes is the late Miles Davis, particularly early 70s albums like Dark Magus and On The Corner. Miles was a supreme case of an artist who fused nihilism and spirituality; patently a driven, fucked-up person, his music reflected those voodoo energies, yet always grasped out for transcendence. Justin concurs: "What I like about that sort of music is there's this feeling of dread, you feel 'oh no, please don't take me there', but when you release yourself to it, it's beautiful."

Getting more mystical by the minute, Wobble talks about how "everybody has their own musical DNA code", about "redemptive, healing chants", and how you should "allow yourself to give to the world and allow yourself to receive." It sounds incongruous in his down-to-earth Stepney accent, but those piercing blue eyes burn with sincerity.

"It's all about energy flows. Opening up to your female side, allowing spirit to come into matter. The spirit of love, the spirit of God. You can allow yourself to be transformed, and that's where redemption comes in. Allowing yourself to let the ego go, and be born again."

Punk was all about ego: its drug of choice was speed, an ego-reinforcer. It seems like you've gone from that punk mindset (obsessed with being an individual, paranoid because of all the threats to your autonomy) towards a music that's about oceanic feelings, the urge to merge, to blur the borders of the ego.

"Punk was like saying 'fuck off!'. It was about rejection, cos a lot of those people felt very rejected. Punk was like all those people getting their own back. But that's what happens, karmically – you get your own feelings of negativity back, you're trapped in it. Whereas I'm a greedy bastard, I want everything in life. You can't just pretend that neurosis and feelings of rejection don't exist; you have to embrace that. But you've also got to embrace the need to connect, to love and be loved.

"You get people who were involved in the punk thing, and then they think 'this is all so negative', and they decide to become a Christian or a Krishna. And that to me is like deciding to take smack or something. It's another form of unreality. And me, I want everything. You've got to own everything about yourself. And then you can integrate when and where you want to integrate.

"The reason I've put so much work into myself is as much to do with understanding the music as for personal therapy. Punk was doomed to failure for the very same reasons that it had to come into being. Did it fail? I don't think I ever thought it could change the world."

As Greil Marcus put it, punk didn't change the world, but it did change the way some people walked through the world. The journey continues.