John Lydon's Jamaica jaunt 1978 / Dennis Morris interview

Film by Don Letts of Johnny Rotten in Jamaica (look out for a glimpse of the lovely Vivien Goldman) 

 JOHNNY ROTTEN IN JAMAICA, 1978 - INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS MORRIS

Another Man magazine, 2012

by Simon Reynolds

“I was at the forefront of a new black British generation who had a double identity, a double culture,” says Dennis Morris, the legendary photographer whose 1970s camerawork gave equal time to reggae and punk. “One minute I’d be hanging with the Sex Pistols, the next I’d be on a plane to Jamaica. Bob Marley would ask me, ‘what you think about these punks, mon?’ and I’d go, ‘they cool’. He’d say, ‘but the swastikas?’ and I’d be, ‘nah worry, mon. It’s just for the shock value.’

Sixteen years old, armed with a Leica, Morris first met Marley and the Wailers in 1973 and was invited by the then barely-known group to accompany them on the Catch A Fire U.K. tour.  A few years later Morris made his professional breakthrough when his shots of the Wailers appeared on the front of several music papers in the wake of their epochal July 1975 show at London’s Lyceum.  Reggae fan John Lydon noticed Morris’s gritty reportage-style work and when the Sex Pistols signed to Virgin Records the singer asked for him to handle their first photo session. 

Morris and Lydon immediately clicked: not just because of the shared passion for Jamaican musics but because of an affinity between Irish and Caribbean immigrants as victims of discrimination in the U.K. Lydon would go on to title his memoir Rotten: No Irish, No Black, No Dogs after the sign that racially prejudiced landlords put in windows. Dennis and Johnny also frequented the same parts of East London: Morris grew up in Dalston, Lydon attended the nearby Hackney Technical College, and unbeknownst to each other they’d gone to many of the same clubs. Morris spent much of 1977 following the Pistols around, at a time when “God Save the Queen” made the group lightning rods for rage from the great British public. “For me it was a dream scenario, the equivalent of photographer heroes of mine like Larry Burrows documenting the Vietnam War, or Don McCullin’s work in Northern Ireland.”

At the end of a chaotic American tour in early 1978, the Pistols split in bitter disarray and Lydon returned to London with no idea what he was going to next. “He was pretty distraught, the Pistols meant a lot to him,” recalls Morris.  Around that time Morris was asked by Virgin Records supremo Richard Branson to come on a trip to Jamaica. Reggae was at the peak of its creativity and spiritual militancy and Branson planned to scoop up the cream of roots’n’dub talent for a new Virgin imprint, The Front Line. Morris would photograph the signings for album covers and promotional shots. “I said to Branson, ‘why don’t you take John too? He loves reggae and knows a lot about it. And he’s looking for something to do’.”

Within days, Branson, Morris, and Lydon, plus DJ/film-maker Don Letts and music journalist Vivien Goldman, arrived in Kingston, Jamaica. “First thing that happened at the airport was this group of Rastas saw us and they were, like ’hey Johnny Rotten mon! God save the Queen!’. And we looked at each other and smiled and were like, ‘we gonna be cool here’.”

Life in JA slipped into a luxurious and leisurely rhythm: Branson had booked an entire floor at the Sheraton, Kingston’s flashest hotel, and Lydon and his companions lounged by the pool, where they chatted with visiting reggae royalty while gorging on lobster. (Much to the distaste of the devout Rastafarian musicians, for whom shellfish—“anything that crawls or creeps”—was forbidden by ital, Rasta’s dietary laws).  The reggae greats—U Roy, The Mighty Diamonds, The Heptones, The Abyssininans–trooped to the Sheraton because word got out that there was a crazy Englishman offering big money for their music, cash in hand.   “I think it was Big Youth first. He comes to the hotel with a cassette player and we’re all sitting around the pool listening to his tape. Richard Branson says, ‘Yeah, l like it... but what do you think, John?’ And Lydon goes, ‘yeah, yeah, it’s great’. So Richard says, ‘okay, what do you want for it?’ Big Youth says, ’20 grand’. And Branson, says ‘Fine... Come back tomorrow and I’ll have it for you’. Off he’d go to the bank. After that we had people coming to see us every day.”

Jamaica in the 1970s was a land of crazy mixed-up contradictions: deep mystical vibrations coexisted with fast-money hustling, sun-kissed upfulness clashed with life-is-cheap bloodshed.  The island was “under heavy manners”, the state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Michael Manley to suppress violence between the ghetto gangs that supported the country’s rival political parties. “One time we went up to this mansion in the hills at night. Then coming down the hill we hit a roadblock. This was a time when it was like martial law in Jamaica, with curfews. Up in the mansion, we’d all been acting like bad boy Jamaicans, smoking spliffs. But when these soldiers started poking guns in our faces, demanding ‘what you doing in these streets?’, we were like [Morris puts on a posh, super-polite, tremulous voice] ‘we’re English, we’re English, we’re just going back to our hotel’. We were terrified. Saw our lives going down the pan. They searched the car and then said ‘get out of here’.” 

Another occasion when Morris and Lydon were made painfully aware they weren’t in Blighty anymore was at a big sound system in Trenchtown. “All the reggae dances in Jamaica are open air, unlike in the U.K. where the clubs and ‘blues’ parties were indoors.  And in Jamaica, when the selector drops a good tune, all the gun men point their weapons up and fire into the air. But we didn’t know that, so first time that happened—BANG BANG BANG--we were on the floor, cowering! Scared shitless, we were.”

That wasn’t Morris’s only up-close encounter with fire-arms during the trip.  After a photo session with The Gladiators, the band quizzed him about the record industry and told him about their management contract. “I said, ‘that doesn’t sound too good, you should really be getting this, and that...’  Few days later there’s a knock on my hotel suite door and two guys burst in: one holds me down, the other puts a gun to my head and snarls ‘don’t come down here telling my group what to do’.  I remember telling him ‘Go on then, pull it, pull it’.  The two guys look at each other and I can tell they’re thinking, ‘this guy’s got some balls’. So then I say, ‘Listen man, I wasn’t trying to take your group away from you..... ‘. We worked it out in the end. But that was what it was like those days in Jamaica—dodgy contracts and dirty deals left right and centre, between bands and their managers and the labels, just like in The Harder They Come.”

Meanwhile Johnny Rotten was having his own problems with a conniving and unscrupulous manager.  Former manager, to be precise: Malcolm McLaren was trying to piece together his movie project The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle and sent a minion, John “Boogie” Tiberi, to Kingston to film the ex-Pistol being confronted with the cryptic question “Who killed Bambi?” When Lydon refused to cooperate, Boogie was reduced to snooping around the Sheraton poolside area and trying to shoot footage of the singer surreptitiously. “We saw the bushes moving and realized we were being watched,” laughs Morris. “So we pushed him in the pool.”

The Jamaica trip wasn’t all stoned shenanigans, though. During the three week stay, Lydon began to formulate a sound-and-vision for his future. “John was picking up a lot of information, a lot of vibes,” says Morris, pointing in particular to times spent hanging out at Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s famous studio The Black Ark, where legend has it that Lydon recorded a vocal for a track that never saw the light of day. “Scratch was the most charismatic figure we met in Jamaica, a total genius.  And I think it was at the Black Ark, and going to sound systems, and just hanging out in Jamaica, that led John to conceive the idea for Public Image Ltd.”  Immediately on his return to London, Lydon hooked up with his reggae-fiend pal Jah Wobble, who taught himself to play bass. He also recruited ex-Clash guitarist Keith Levene, who has said that “the whole reason PiL worked at all was that were all just total dub fanatics.”

Morris was virtually a member of the group, serving as its unofficial in-house art director. He designed the PiL logo, punningly intended to resemble an aspirin. He did the photos and cover art for the debut album, which saw Lydon jettison the stereotypical punk look for zoot-suit sharpness. And he came up with the radical packaging of Metal Box: three 45 rpm discs encased in a matt-grey tin canister.  During this period Morris also worked as an Art Director at Island Records, where he oversaw the careers of The Slits and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Then he got signed to Island himself as the guitarist in Basement 5,  often described as the black PiL.

Throughout this period Morris was the court photographer at King John’s house in Gunter Grove, Chelsea. Here Lydon entertained a rotating retinue of guest luminaries--ranging from punk chanteuse Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex to reggae stars like Gregory Isaacs--with Guinness from kegs stowed in the living room and the bass-thunder of the latest Jamaican imports played through his  massive hi-fi system. Documentation of this golden period for postpunk music can be found, along with shots of Lydon’s working holiday in JA, in the photographer’s new book A Bitta Pil. “Gunter Grove was this massively creative hub, just buzzing,” Morris recalls. “And I was there, taking pictures.” 

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

JOHNNY ROTTEN IN JAMAICA, 1978 - INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS MORRIS
Another Man magazine, 2012

by Simon Reynolds

“I was at the forefront of a new black British generation who had a double identity, a double culture,” says Dennis Morris, the legendary photographer whose 1970s camerawork gave equal time to reggae and punk. “One minute I’d be hanging with the Sex Pistols, the next I’d be on a plane to Jamaica. Bob Marley would ask me, ‘what you think about these punks, mon?’ and I’d go, ‘they cool’. He’d say, ‘but the swastikas?’ and I’d be, ‘nah worry, mon. It’s just for the shock value.’

Sixteen years old, armed with a Leica, Morris first met Marley and the Wailers in 1973 and was invited by the then barely-known group to accompany them on the Catch A Fire U.K. tour.  A few years later Morris made his professional breakthrough when his shots of the Wailers appeared on the front of several music papers in the wake of their epochal July 1975 show at London’s Lyceum.  Reggae fan John Lydon noticed Morris’s gritty reportage-style work and when the Sex Pistols signed to Virgin Records the singer asked for him to handle their first photo session. 

Morris and Lydon immediately clicked: not just because of the shared passion for Jamaican musics but because of an affinity between Irish and Caribbean immigrants as victims of discrimination in the U.K. Lydon would go on to title his memoir Rotten: No Irish, No Black, No Dogs after the sign that racially prejudiced landlords put in windows. Dennis and Johnny also frequented the same parts of East London: Morris grew up in Dalston, Lydon attended the nearby Hackney Technical College, and unbeknownst to each other they’d gone to many of the same clubs. Morris spent much of 1977 following the Pistols around, at a time when “God Save the Queen” made the group lightning rods for rage from the great British public. “For me it was a dream scenario, the equivalent of photographer heroes of mine like Larry Burrows documenting the Vietnam War, or Don McCullin’s work in Northern Ireland.”

At the end of a chaotic American tour in early 1978, the Pistols split in bitter disarray and Lydon returned to London with no idea what he was going to next. “He was pretty distraught, the Pistols meant a lot to him,” recalls Morris.  Around that time Morris was asked by Virgin Records supremo Richard Branson to come on a trip to Jamaica. Reggae was at the peak of its creativity and spiritual militancy and Branson planned to scoop up the cream of roots’n’dub talent for a new Virgin imprint, The Front Line. Morris would photograph the signings for album covers and promotional shots. “I said to Branson, ‘why don’t you take John too? He loves reggae and knows a lot about it. And he’s looking for something to do’.”

Within days, Branson, Morris, and Lydon, plus DJ/film-maker Don Letts and music journalist Vivien Goldman, arrived in Kingston, Jamaica. “First thing that happened at the airport was this group of Rastas saw us and they were, like ’hey Johnny Rotten mon! God save the Queen!’. And we looked at each other and smiled and were like, ‘we gonna be cool here’.”

Life in JA slipped into a luxurious and leisurely rhythm: Branson had booked an entire floor at the Sheraton, Kingston’s flashest hotel, and Lydon and his companions lounged by the pool, where they chatted with visiting reggae royalty while gorging on lobster. (Much to the distaste of the devout Rastafarian musicians, for whom shellfish—“anything that crawls or creeps”—was forbidden by ital, Rasta’s dietary laws).  The reggae greats—U Roy, The Mighty Diamonds, The Heptones, The Abyssininans–trooped to the Sheraton because word got out that there was a crazy Englishman offering big money for their music, cash in hand.   “I think it was Big Youth first. He comes to the hotel with a cassette player and we’re all sitting around the pool listening to his tape. Richard Branson says, ‘Yeah, l like it... but what do you think, John?’ And Lydon goes, ‘yeah, yeah, it’s great’. So Richard says, ‘okay, what do you want for it?’ Big Youth says, ’20 grand’. And Branson, says ‘Fine... Come back tomorrow and I’ll have it for you’. Off he’d go to the bank. After that we had people coming to see us every day.”

Jamaica in the 1970s was a land of crazy mixed-up contradictions: deep mystical vibrations coexisted with fast-money hustling, sun-kissed upfulness clashed with life-is-cheap bloodshed.  The island was “under heavy manners”, the state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Michael Manley to suppress violence between the ghetto gangs that supported the country’s rival political parties. “One time we went up to this mansion in the hills at night. Then coming down the hill we hit a roadblock. This was a time when it was like martial law in Jamaica, with curfews. Up in the mansion, we’d all been acting like bad boy Jamaicans, smoking spliffs. But when these soldiers started poking guns in our faces, demanding ‘what you doing in these streets?’, we were like [Morris puts on a posh, super-polite, tremulous voice] ‘we’re English, we’re English, we’re just going back to our hotel’. We were terrified. Saw our lives going down the pan. They searched the car and then said ‘get out of here’.” 

Another occasion when Morris and Lydon were made painfully aware they weren’t in Blighty anymore was at a big sound system in Trenchtown. “All the reggae dances in Jamaica are open air, unlike in the U.K. where the clubs and ‘blues’ parties were indoors.  And in Jamaica, when the selector drops a good tune, all the gun men point their weapons up and fire into the air. But we didn’t know that, so first time that happened—BANG BANG BANG--we were on the floor, cowering! Scared shitless, we were.”

That wasn’t Morris’s only up-close encounter with fire-arms during the trip.  After a photo session with The Gladiators, the band quizzed him about the record industry and told him about their management contract. “I said, ‘that doesn’t sound too good, you should really be getting this, and that...’  Few days later there’s a knock on my hotel suite door and two guys burst in: one holds me down, the other puts a gun to my head and snarls ‘don’t come down here telling my group what to do’.  I remember telling him ‘Go on then, pull it, pull it’.  The two guys look at each other and I can tell they’re thinking, ‘this guy’s got some balls’. So then I say, ‘Listen man, I wasn’t trying to take your group away from you..... ‘. We worked it out in the end. But that was what it was like those days in Jamaica—dodgy contracts and dirty deals left right and centre, between bands and their managers and the labels, just like in The Harder They Come.”

Meanwhile Johnny Rotten was having his own problems with a conniving and unscrupulous manager.  Former manager, to be precise: Malcolm McLaren was trying to piece together his movie project The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle and sent a minion, John “Boogie” Tiberi, to Kingston to film the ex-Pistol being confronted with the cryptic question “Who killed Bambi?” When Lydon refused to cooperate, Boogie was reduced to snooping around the Sheraton poolside area and trying to shoot footage of the singer surreptitiously. “We saw the bushes moving and realized we were being watched,” laughs Morris. “So we pushed him in the pool.”

The Jamaica trip wasn’t all stoned shenanigans, though. During the three week stay, Lydon began to formulate a sound-and-vision for his future. “John was picking up a lot of information, a lot of vibes,” says Morris, pointing in particular to times spent hanging out at Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s famous studio The Black Ark, where legend has it that Lydon recorded a vocal for a track that never saw the light of day. “Scratch was the most charismatic figure we met in Jamaica, a total genius.  And I think it was at the Black Ark, and going to sound systems, and just hanging out in Jamaica, that led John to conceive the idea for Public Image Ltd.”  Immediately on his return to London, Lydon hooked up with his reggae-fiend pal Jah Wobble, who taught himself to play bass. He also recruited ex-Clash guitarist Keith Levene, who has said that “the whole reason PiL worked at all was that were all just total dub fanatics.”

Morris was virtually a member of the group, serving as its unofficial in-house art director. He designed the PiL logo, punningly intended to resemble an aspirin. He did the photos and cover art for the debut album, which saw Lydon jettison the stereotypical punk look for zoot-suit sharpness. And he came up with the radical packaging of Metal Box: three 45 rpm discs encased in a matt-grey tin canister.  During this period Morris also worked as an Art Director at Island Records, where he oversaw the careers of The Slits and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Then he got signed to Island himself as the guitarist in Basement 5,  often described as the black PiL.

Throughout this period Morris was the court photographer at King John’s house in Gunter Grove, Chelsea. Here Lydon entertained a rotating retinue of guest luminaries--ranging from punk chanteuse Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex to reggae stars like Gregory Isaacs--with Guinness from kegs stowed in the living room and the bass-thunder of the latest Jamaican imports played through his  massive hi-fi system. Documentation of this golden period for postpunk music can be found, along with shots of Lydon’s working holiday in JA, in the photographer’s new book A Bitta Pil. “Gunter Grove was this massively creative hub, just buzzing,” Morris recalls. “And I was there, taking pictures.”