PiLhead's Progress (happy 40th Metal Box)

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD
Public Image: First Issue (Virgin 1978)
Metal Box (Virgin 1979)
Second Edition (Island 1980)
Paris Au Printemps (Virgin 1980)
Flowers Of Romance (Warner Bros 1981)
Live In Tokyo (Elektra 1983)
This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get (Elektra 1984)
Album (Elektra 1986)
Happy? (Virgin 1987)
9 (Virgin 1989)
The Greatest Hits, So Far (Virgin 1990)
That What Is Not (Virgin 1992)

[from Spin Guide to Alternative Rock, 1995]

If Johnny Rotten had gotten his way, the Sex Pistols would never have made the thuggish but populist hard rock that make them such a world-historical force. Instead of mod, glam and proto-punk (The Stooges, New York Dolls), the Pistols would have been informed by his favored listening: Captain Beefheart's fractured avant-boogie, Peter Hammill's art-rock exorcism, the space and stealth of Can and dub reggae.  Of course, if Johnny had prevailed, the Pistols wouldn't have revolutionised rock, merely exempted themselves from it. Which is precisely what Rotten did with Public Image Ltd, the studio-based experimental unit he formed after he turned his back on punk rock godhood in 1978.

Making a sharp left away from the 'heavy-metal production' of Never Mind The Bollocks, Rotten (who'd now reverted to his given name, Lydon) made bass the centre of PiL's sound. He brought in his dub-freak pal Jah Wobble, a self-taught but instinctively spiritual bassist who worshipped Can's Holger Czukay. That said, PiL would have been nothing without the ferociously unorthodox guitar-work of Keith Levene.  Furthermore, for all the 'anti-rockist' ideology the group spouted (much hot-air about branching out into other media like film, never touring, not being a 'band'), the debut album rocks surprisingly hard.  "Public Image" is a searing statement of intent: the glorious minimalism of Wobble's chiming bassline and Levene's ringing chords mirrors Lydon's thrust for purity, as he sheds the Rotten persona and declares "I will not be treated as property".  "Lowlife" puts further distance between Lydon and his Pistol-packin' past, lambasting the "egomaniac trainer" and "bourgeoisie anarchist" Malcolm McLaren. Other tracks--the brutalist funk of "Annalisa", the dessicated dub-disco of "Fodderstompf"--look ahead to Metal Box.

Initially released as three 12 inches in a tin canister (an attempt to deconstruct the 'album', that actually succeeded in making you approach records in a new way), subsequently repackaged as the double LP Second Edition, Metal Box is where PiL's anti-rockism ceases to be a pipe-dream and starts looking like the future, your future. From the soul-flaying savagery of "Chant" to the appalling grace of "Poptones", Levene's guitarwork makes him post-punk's very own Hendrix; he's equally stunning with synths on the apocalyptic "Careering" and Satiesque "Radio 4".  Lydon's scalpel-sharp words--dissecting suburbia's "layered mass of subtle props" on "No Birds", anatomising the abject horror of his mum's death on "Swan Lake"--are matched by his most untethered singing. But it's Wobble who is PiL's heart-and-soul: his deep-strata bass is what drags you through the terror-ride, but it's also the hand-rail that keeps you hanging in there.

After Paris Au Printemps (live-and-inferior-sounding), Wobble left PiL acrimoniously; after a decade in the wilderness, he resurfaced in the '90s with his ethnodelic dance ensemble Invaders of The Heart, peddling a distinctly New Age creed of 'healing rhythms'.  Without Wobble's vital pulse, PiL's next effort Flowers Of Romance was decentered and sterile.  Levene & Lydon's methodology was to generate a heap of raw sonic material using motley acoustic instruments, from which they constructed 'songs' using the mixing desk as compositional tool.  Flowers was touted by PiL, and received by critics, as a revolution in music; in retrospect, the LP can be seen as a half-assed reprise of pre-punk avant-garde ideas, betrayed by its creators' inveterate laziness. Only the demonic strings and spectral voices of the violin-scented title track, and the tribal tumult of "Under The House" (inspired by a real-life ghost story) establish any kind of compelling atmosphere. The rest is lifeless dirge-beats and random smears of texture, topped by Lydon's now self-parodic muezzin-howl and sour subject matter (the misognyist sexual reminescence of 'Track 8', the anti-nostalgia rant 'Go Back').

Then Levene left too.  For This Is What You Want...This Is What You Get, Lydon hired a bunch of anonymous session musicians to lay down a shockingly thin-sounding New Wave/muzak hybrid, complete with asthmatic sax-honks.  "This Is Not A Love Song" is catchy enough, with its disco walking bassline and multi-tracked vocal bedlam; Lydon's avaricious intentions are shamelessly proclaimed with lines like "I'm crossing over into enterprise". If This Is What is money-for-nothing cynicism at its most audience-contemptuous, the four PiL albums that follow at least offer solid, professional product in return for your hard-earned dollar. In '86, Album (a.k.a. Cassette, Compact Disc--geddit?) seemed refreshing, with its Led Zep riffs (Lydon was now a rockist) and crisp Bill Laswell production. Now, it exudes the stale airless reek of a superstar-plus-session-players career-makeover bid, a la Robert Palmer or Stevie Winwood. Still, "Rise"--with its radiant guitar-peals, undulant bass and Irish-folk chorus--is Lydon's last gasp of brilliance.

Happy? continues the stadium-wannabe drift, with John McGeoch's rippling chords straying into U2 territory or--on "Rules and Regulations"--glossing up Killing Joke for FM-radio. Lydon's lyrics dramatise himself as the Last Individual, but his imagery is standard-issue Noo Wave ("cows now join the herd", "a mass of mindless ants", "like lemmings to the cliff"), and his music utterly depersonalised. Only "Fat Chance Hotel"--a fine whine about a rotten holiday, with lines like "the dinner gave me the splattery botty" and a weird horn-sample like a mariachi band going down a whirlpool--sounds remotely distinctive.

The slick, glib 9 and the litely metallic That What Is Not failed to fulfil their manifestly mercenary motives, and PiL was unceremoniously ditched by Virgin.  Since then, the only peep we've heard from Lydon is a one-off single with house outfit Leftfield (this despite his oft-proclaimed contempt for rave culture), plus some talk about reforming the Pistols, if the price is right. Don't bother with Greatest Hits (it's half-shit). Go straight to Metal Box, when there was "meaning in the moaning".


Public Image Ltd
Metal Box (deluxe expanded reissue)
Pitchfork, November 1st 2016

by Simon Reynolds

Out of all the fascinating alternate takes, B-sides, rare compilation-only tracks and never-before-released sketches that comprise this expanded reissue of Public Image Ltd’s post-punk landmark, it’s a live version of “Public Image”  that is the real revelation. Part of an impromptu June 1979 concert in Manchester, the song keeps collapsing and restarting. “Shut up!” snaps John Lydon, responding  to audience jeers. “I told you it’s a fucking rehearsal.” Another PiL member explains that the drummer, Richard Dudanski, only joined three days ago. PiL relaunch the song only for Lydon to halt it with “Miles too fast!” The jeers erupt again and the singer offers a sort of defiant apology: if the crowd really wanted to “see mega light displays and all that shit,” they should go watch properly professional bands who put on a slick show. “But we ain’t like that... We’re extremely honest: sorry about that... We admit our mistakes.”

This performance—an inadvertent deconstruction of performance itself—takes us to the heart of the PiL project as well as the post-punk movement for which the group served as figureheads. At its core was a belief in radical honesty: faith in the expressive power of words, singing and sound as vehicles for urgent communication. After the Sex Pistols’ implosion, Lydon was trying to find a way to be a public figure again without masks, barriers, routines, or constraining expectations. So it’s especially apt that “Public Image”—PiL’s debut single, Lydon’s post-Pistols mission-statement—is the song that  fell apart at Manchester’s Factory Club. “Public Image” is about the way a stage persona can become a lie that a performer is forced to live out in perpetuity. Lydon sings about “Johnny Rotten” as a theatrical role that trapped him and which he’s now casting off. Starting all over with his given name and a new set of musical accomplices, Lydon was determined to stay true to himself. The group’s name came from Muriel Sparks’ novel The Public Image, about a movie actress whose career is ruined but who, the ending hints, is freed to embark on an authentic post-fame existence. Lydon added the “limited” to signify both the idea of the rock group as a corporation (in the business of image-construction) and the idea of keeping egos on a tight leash.

A comparison for Lydon’s search for a new true music—and a truly new music—that would leave behind rock’s calcified conventions is Berlin-era Bowie’s quest for a “new music night and day” (the working title of Low). Indeed it was Virgin Records’ belief that Lydon was the most significant British rock artist since Bowie that caused them to extend PiL such extraordinary license and largesse when it came to recording in expensive studios. That indulgence enabled the recording of three of the most out-there albums ever released by a major label: First Issue, Metal Box, Flowers of Romance. But it’s the middle panel of the triptych that is the colossal achievement:  a near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled post-punk’s promise(s) to a degree rivaled only by Joy Division on Closer.

The key word, though, is reinvention. Lydon talked grandly of abandoning rock altogether,  arguing that killing off the genre had been the true point of punk. But unlike the absolutely experimental (and as with many such experiments, largely unsuccessful) Flowers of Romance, Metal Box doesn’t go beyond rock so much as stretch it to its furthest extent, in the manner of the Stooges’ Fun House or Can’s Tago Mago. It’s a forbidding listen, for sure, but only because of its intensity, not because it’s abstract or structurally convoluted. The format is classic: guitar-bass-drums-voice (augmented intermittently by keyboards and electronics). The rhythm section (Jah Wobble and a succession of drummers) is hypnotically steady and physically potent. The guitarist (Keith Levene) is a veritable axe-hero, as schooled and as spectacular as any of the pre-punk greats. And the singer, while unorthodox and edging off-key, pours it all out in a searing catharsis that recalls nothing so much as solo John Lennon and the intersection he found between the deeply personal and the politically universal. There are even a few tunes here!

But yes, it’s a bracing listen, Metal Box, and nowhere more so than on the opening dirge “Albatross.” 11 minutes-long, leaden in tempo, the song is clearly designed as a test for the listener just like the protracted assault of “Theme” that launched First Issue had been. Absolutely pitiless music—Levene hacking at his axe like an abattoir worker, Wobble rolling out a looped tremor of a bassline—is matched with utterly piteous singing: Lydon intones accusations about an oppressive figure from his past, perhaps the master-manipulator McLaren, possibly his dead friend Vicious, conceivably “Johnny Rotten” himself as a burden he can’t shake.

“Memories,” the single that preceded Metal Box’s November ’79 release, is more sprightly. Like “Albatross,” though, the song is an embittered exorcism: Lydon could almost be commenting on his own nagging vocal and fixated lyrics with the line “dragging on and on and on and on and on and on and ON,” then spits out “This person’s had enough of useless memories” over a breath-taking disco-style breakdown.

With “Swan Lake,” a retitled remix of the single “Death Disco,” Lydon is possessed by an unbearable memory that he doesn’t want to forget: the sight of his mother dying in slow agony from cancer.  If the wretched grief of the lyrics—“Silence in her eyes,” “Final in a fade,” “Choking on a bed/Flowers rotting dead”—recalls Lennon’s “Mother,” the retching anguish of Lydon’s vocal resembles Yoko Ono at her most abrasively unleashed. On the original vinyl, the song locks into an endless loop on the phrase “words cannot express.” But “Swan Lake”—named after the Tchaikovsky melody that Levene intermittently mutilates—is nothing if not a 20th Century expressionist masterpiece: the missing link between Munch’s “The Scream” and Black Flag’s “Damaged I.”

Just as placing “death” in front of “disco” was an attempt to subvert the idea of dancefloor escapism, the title “Poptones” drips with acrid irony. A real-life news story of abduction, rape and escape inspired the lyric, with one detail in particular triggering Lydon’s imagination: the victim’s memory of the bouncy music streaming out of the car’s cassette player. This juxtaposition of  manufactured happiness and absolute horror is a typically post-punk move, exposing pop as a prettified lie that masks reality’s raw awfulness: for some post-punk groups,  an existential condition (dread, doubt) and for others, a political matter (exploitation, control). On “Poptones” this truth-telling impulse produces one of Lydon’s most vivid lyrics (“I don’t like hiding in this foliage and peat/It’s wet and I’m losing my body heat”), supported and surrounded by music that’s surprisingly pretty, in an eerie, insidious sort of way. Wobble’s sinuously winding bass weaves through Levene’s cascading sparks as well as the cymbal-smash spray he also supplies (PiL being temporarily drummerless during this stage of the album’s spasmodic recording).

With PiL still between drummers, on “Careering” it’s Wobble who doubles up roles, pummeling your ribcage with his bass and bashing the kit like a metalworker pounding flat a sheet of steel. Levene swaps guitar for smears of synth, while Lydon’s helicopter vision scans the border zone between Ulster and the Irish Republic: a terrorscape of “blown into breeze” bomb victims and paramilitary paranoia. “Careering” sounds like nothing else in rock and nothing else in PiL’s work—as with several other songs on Metal Box, it could have spawned a whole identity, an entire career, for any other band.

“No Birds Do Sing,” unbelievably, surpasses the preceding five songs. Levene cloaks the murderous Wobble-Dudanksi groove with a toxic cloud of guitar texture. Lydon surveys an English suburban scene whose placidity could not be further from troubled Northern Ireland, noting in sardonic approval its “bland planned idle luxury” and “well-intentioned rules” (rolling the ‘r’ there in a delicious throwback to classic Rotten-style singing). For “a layered mass of subtle props” and “a caviar of silent dignity” alone, Lydon ought to have the 2026 Nobel locked down.

After the greatest six-song run in all of post-punk, Metal Box’s remainder is merely (and mostly) excellent, moving from the juddery instrumental “Graveyard” (oddly redolent of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ early British rock‘n’roll classic “Shakin’ All Over”) through the rubbery bassline waddle of “The Suit” to the stampeding threat of “Chant,” a savage snapshot of 1979’s tribal street violence. The album winds down with the unexpected respite and repose of “Radio Four,” a tranquil instrumental entirely played by Levene: just a tremulously poignant and agile bass line overlaid with reedy keyboards that swell and subside. The title comes from the U.K.’s national public radio station, a civilized and calming source of news, views, drama and light comedy beamed out to the British middle classes. As with “Poptones,” the irony is astringent.

Listening to (and reviewing) Metal Box in a linear sequence goes against PiL’s original intent, of course. As the flatly descriptive, deliberately demystified title indicates, Metal Box initially came in the form of a circular canister containing three 45 r.p.m  12-inches—for better sound, but also to encourage listeners to play the record in any order they chose,  ideally listening to it in short bursts rather than in a single sitting.  But what once seemed radically anti-rockist (“deconstruct the Album!”) is now a historical footnote, because anyone listening to a CD or other digital format can rearrange the contents however they wish.

And if you do doggedly listen to Metal Box in accordance with its given running order, what comes across strongly now is its sheer accumulative power as an album. That in turn accentuates the feeling that this is a record that can be understood fairly easily by a fan of, say, Led Zeppelin. It works on the same terms as Zoso:  a thematically coherent suite of physically imposing rhythm, virtuoso guitar violence, and impassioned singing. Lydon would soon enough ‘fess up to his latent rockism on 1986’s hard-riffing Album (also reissued as a deluxe box set at this time) on which he collaborated with Old Wave musos like ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker. That incarnation of PiL even performed Zep’s “Kashmir” in concert.

Listening to Metal Box today, the studio processing—informed by PiL’s love of disco and dub—that felt so striking at the time seems subtle and relatively bare-bones compared to today. As the Manchester concert and some wonderfully vivid live-in-the-studio versions from the BBC rock program “The Old Grey Whistle Test” prove, PiL could recreate this music onstage (despite that fumbled “Public Image”).  Levene, especially, was surprisingly exact when it came to reproducing the guitar parts and textures captured in the studio. Even the band’s debts to reggae and funk can be seen now as a continuation of the passion for black music that underpinned the British rock achievement of the ’60s and first-half of the ’70s—that perennial impulse to embrace the formal advances made by R&B and complicate them further while adding Brit-bohemian concerns as subject matter. If PiL’s immediate neighbors are the Pop Group and the Slits, you could also slot them alongside the Police: great drummer(s), roots-feel bass, inventively textured guitar, a secret prog element (Levene loved Yes, Lydon adored Peter Hammill) and an emotional basis in reggae’s yearnings and spiritual aches.

Metal Box is a landmark, for sure. But like Devils Tower, the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s an oddly isolated one. In marked contrast to Joy Division, PiL’s spawn was neither legion nor particularly impressive (apart from San Francisco’s wonderful Flipper). Nor would PiL’s core three ever come close to matching the album’s heights in their subsequent careering (Wobble being the most productive, in both copiousness and quality). I was apprehensive about listening to this album again, fearing that it had faded or dated. But this music still sounds new and still sounds true to me: as adventurous and as harrowingly heart-bare as it did when I danced in the dark to it, an unhappy 16-year-old. Metal Box stands up. It stands for all time.

Metal Box remembered
Frieze, 2007

by Simon Reynolds

My most vivid memory of Metal Box is a week before Christmas Day, 1979. My parents went 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 universally acclaimed as a giant step into a brave new world beyond rock’s confines, and 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 hold movie reels. Like the band-as-corporation name Public Image Ltd, the matt-gray box 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 records, separated only by paper circles the same size as the platters, from the container. Removing the 45rpm 12 inches without scratching them was a challenge. Almost thirty years later, my three discs look in remarkably good nick, but then I was precious about my possessions, owning approximately six albums in toto then. I was an avid postpunk fan hamstrung by weak finances, and Metal Box’s  hefty 7 pounds 45 pence price was the reason I requested it for Xmas, despite the delay in listening to its contents that would result.

All this user-unfriendly palaver 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 insisted that you should definitely NOT play Metal Box in sequence, but listen to one side of a disc (two or three tracks at most) 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, each track stood out more. 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 framed 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 apparent 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  home in Gunter Grove, Chelsea, and also a member of the all-black PiL-like band Basement 5. Where the first album Public Image lampooned rock’s cult of personality (Morris photographed the band in Vogue-style make-up and suits) Metal Box went one step further to blank impersonality, the absence of any kind of image at all. Flowers of Romance, the third album, took a step too far towards not-giving-a-toss with its desultory Polaroid of band associate Jeanette Lee, but by that point Morris had been ousted from the PiL milieu.

Morris’s crucial contribution to PiL is something that comes through loud and clear in the new PiL book,  Metal Box: Stories from John Lydon’s Public Image Limited [sic]. If

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 (PiL’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 bizarre 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”, the stand-out track on Metal Box, 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 and paranoia, egomania, money disputes, mismanagement. (PiL actually had no manager, on account of Lydon’s bad experiences with Malcolm McLaren;  tasks were portioned out to various cronies and the band finances were 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, exiting 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 not surprising, because he’s conscientiously distanced himself from PiL over the years. At some point he must have grasped that his place in Rock History (and future income) depends on the Sex Pistols adventure and then threw all his energies into burnishing the Johnny Rotten legend. But I wonder if it’s not also because the PiL years are painful, 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, meant it when he dismissed the Sex Pistols as way too trad. And for a moment there, rock’s intelligentsia agreed with him. Metal Box’s stature in 1979-80 was so immense that many commentators invoked Miles Davis’s 1970s 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 gray tin can.

It’s the music inside that counts, though, doesn’t it?  I guess so. 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 innovations is the 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--musical, and it’s rumored, otherwise--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 kind of self-replicating meme that inoculated an entire generation against the idea of retro. A perfect alignment of packaging form and sonic/lyrical content, Metal Box gave substance to PiL’s tall talk and pointed to a post-rock future. 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 50 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 inch format. 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; while 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. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

bonus beat - a Brexit-boosted bit of Lydon-bashing

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.

KEITH LEVENE
director's cut, The Wire,  issue 226, December 2002

by Simon Reynolds

Getting to interview Keith Levene is challenging.  It took  half a dozen attempts before we finally connected. One scheduled meeting is scuppered because  sudden money troubles have left Keith a bag of jangling nerves. Another gets cancelled at literally the last minute, just as I’m setting off into the Tube-less wilderness of Hackney, East London. The vibe  isn’t right, Levene explains via mobile phone,  he just doesn’t feel up to reopening the multiple wounds still festering from his half-decade stint as Public Image Ltd’s aesthetic helmsman. 

Finally, I’m speaking with the legendary post-punk guitarist in the flesh, chez Levene--a studio flat in a nondescript building that looks like it was once designed for light industry. It’s literally a studio flat, because along with bed and kitchen area the large single room contains a recording studio: a compact mixing desk, several computers and keyboards,  massive Marshall speakers, and an array of guitars neatly ranged across the floor in upright position.  Levene’s home doubles as HQ for MurderGlobal, the rubric under which he’s releasing his first recordings for 13 years.

Looking a bit like a cross between Fagin and a Nirvana roadie, Levene is gaunt-faced and bony of frame, and dressed in a loose-fitting green-checked flannel shirt and  baggy slacks of indeterminate brown; a toe pokes through a well-worn sock. The place, though, is immaculately kempt. Indeed Levene and his American wife Shelley seem to be obsessively tidy, springing up to empty the ashtray every time a cigarette is stubbed out.  

The interview proceeds in disjointed and meandering fashion.  There’s a major interruption when Levene gets tipped off about someone on Ebay who’s selling bootleg CDs of Commercial Zone (itself a bootleg released by Levene, the original version of the   PiL album re-recorded and officially released as This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get in 1984). Impatient to fire off a threatening email to the perpetrator, Levene struggles for 45 minutes with Ebay’s registration protocols.  Finally, he calls a friend, asking him to pretend to be his manager and put the frightners on the miscreant. “I’m sick of being ripped off,” he says to me, apologetically.  “I’ve been been ripped off by labels like you wouldn’t believe!”

The mistreatment of Keith Levene is a running theme, or sore, throughout our conversation.  He has

numerous still-rankling grievances, with John Lydon, with other former PiL colleagues like Martin Atkins and Jeanette Lee,  with Virgin Records. What comes across keenly from our five hour conversation is the sense of  Keith Levene as a basically trusting  and somewhat fragile soul, who perhaps lacked the hard heart and thick skin to really hack it in the soul-mincing machine that is the record industry. In some ways, it is surprising that he lasted so long in the belly of the beast. As PiL’s de facto musical director for its first five years of existence, Levene created (with help from Jah Wobble and a Spinal Tap-like succession of drummers)  three of the most  out-there albums of the post-punk era: Public Image, Metal Box, and Flowers of Romance.  The lyrics and the attitude stemmed from John Lydon, sure, but when it comes to sonics PiL essentially was the Keith Levene Experience.

A  post-punk Hendrix is exactly how Levene was regarded at the 1980 peak of PiL’s prestige, immediately after Metal Box’s release at the end of ’79: the most innovative guitarist of his generation. The Jimi analogy isn’t so far off, because unlike most of his peers, Levene had serious chops. Before punk, he did what guitarists were supposed to do in those days of virtuoso musicianship: practice, practice, practice. As a teenager growing up in North London, he would spend eight hours  jamming at a friend’s house most days of the week. “Because he was older than me, a Jerry Garcia fiend, and an egomaniac, he always played lead.  But it didn’t bother me ‘cos I liked playing the rhythm.”

In those days, Levene’s favorite band was Yes. “I actually worked for them as a roadie when I was fifteen. This was at the time when music paper readers were voting them the best band in the world.” Levene was awestruck to be in the presence of his hero, Yes guitarist Steve Howe,  but the gig didn’t last long because he irritated the band by taking every opportunity to mess around on their instruments.

Prog-rock’s pomposity and obsession with technique was punk’s antithesis. But a surprising number of post-punk musicians have prog skeletons in the cupboard, from Zappa fans like David Thomas, Mark Perry and Human League, to the Soft Machine devotees in This Heat and Scritti Politti.  Here’s a shocker for the Metal Box fans: Levene reckons “Poptones” is seriously indebted to Yes. “I was playing ‘Starship Trooper’ the other day, and I thought ‘fuck me, that is exactly what I’m doing in ‘Poptones’. It’s not a straight lift, but it is very Howe influenced.”

Levene and his jam buddies were into a dizzyingly eclectic range of music, from reggae to Steely Dan, Mingus to American West Coast rock. Punk’s Year Zero edicts meant you had to hide your Crimson and Mahavishnu elpees  in the closet, though.  “There’s a lot of people in punk who could play guitar much, much better than they made out,” says Levene. “But I never pretended I couldn’t play lead.”

Keith Levene has the singular distinction of having been a prime mover in both the most traditional band and the most radical band to emerge from UK punk: The Clash and PiL. After manager Bernie Rhodes introduced him to Mick Jones in early 1976, the two guitarists co-founded The Clash. Levene claims that he was the driving force behind the decision to recruit Joe Strummer, then frontman of the pub-rock outfit The 101-ers. By the end of that year, though, Levene was pushed out of the band. The classic “musical differences” were part of the reason: Jones’s tastes lay in a more traditional rock’n’roll direction, whereas Levene wanted a harsher guitar sound and less conventional verse-chorus-verse structures.   Levene also claims that  Jones was envious of his superior guitar skills and  green-eyed about his youthfulness (“Mick was 21 and I was only 18---that really freaked him out”). Then there was the fact that both of them were competing for  the affections of  Viv Albertine, Levene’s squatmate and future guitarist of The Slits. “Mick got all weird when I started teaching her to play guitar.”

Punk lore, however, maintains that the primary reason for Levene’s departure was his drug use---specifically, that the drastic mood-swings caused by amphetamine made him hard to work with. Levene denies this, though. When the band confronted him about why he was always so negative about the group, and blamed it on amphetamine, “I was like, ‘this is not about a speed comedown’. ‘Cos everyone was doing speed then. I told them it was a general overall feeling about the band’s music. Even the name The Clash I’d always thought was uncool. And finally I said, ‘it’s either got to be Mick’s band or my band’. “

After being voted out, Levene drifted through various unsatisfactory groups. With Viv Albertine, Sid Vicious, and Steve Walsh (later of Manicured Noise), he formed Flowers of Romance. During this period he helped Albertine develop her Slits guitar sound, “like a buzz-saw crossed with a wasp” as she later described it. Flowers of Romance split up in February 1977 when Vicious joined the Sex Pistols. After that Levene did the live sound for The Slits during their early days, and played in The Quick Spurts, the first incarnation of Ken Lockie’s group Cowboys International.

One day in early 1978, Levene and Lockie were walking past Great Portland tube station when they ran into an acquaintance of Keith’s who was friends with John Lydon. The friend said that Lydon, who’d just become an Ex Pistol, was desperately looking for Levene. “He gave me John’s number. And I looked at Ken and he was like, ‘Fuckin’ hell, Keith, if you can get in a band with Johnny Rotten, do it!’”

Levene and Lydon had first connected 18 months earlier, in the aftermath of a shared Clash/Pistols pub gig  in Sheffield,  July 1976. Noticing that they were both sitting apart from their respective groups and looking miserable as sin,  Levene struck up a conversation, during which he suggested they work together if their groups ever fell apart.  During this brief encounter, the seed of PiL was sown. “The bond was based on a similar hate, and a sense of humour, and a certain sort of unspoken respect,” says Levene. “When I met John we liked each other for unexploded reasons – like unexploded bombs.”

PiL was shaped by Levene’s and Lydon’s disgust with what happened to their previous bands: the relapse into American hard rock tradition. (London Calling was anointed the Best Rock Album of the Eighties by Rolling Stone; Never Mind The Bollocks is now a heavy metal classic, its songs covered by everyone from Motley Crue to Motorhead). “To me the Sex Pistols were the last rock’n’roll band, they weren’t the beginning of anything,” says Levene. “Whereas PiL really felt like the beginning of something.”

PiL’s chemistry came from the merger of Lydon’s muezzin-meets-Celtic approach to expressionistic singing,  the usurpation by Jah Wobble’s bass of the primary melodic role, and Levene’s harmolodic-in-all-but-name guitarwork. Indeed, in homage to that famous exponent of Ornette Coleman’s theories, Levene calls his signature technique, “the James 'Blood' Ulmer Effect.” Basically, this involves the deliberate incorporation of mistakes. When Levene would hit a wrong note, he’d immediately repeat the error to see if the wrongness could become a new kind of rightness. “The idea was to break through conditioning, takes yourself out of one channel, and into another space.”

Amazingly, many PiL songs were recorded in first takes, and some were written on the spot.  For instance, Metal Box’s “Albatross” is basically a document of a song being composed in real-time. Levene mostly eschewed overdubs, and generated what often sounds like multitracked guitars using a single instrument.

Although PiL didn’t go in for tidying stuff up after the event, post-production and mixing became increasingly integral to the process. Dub was the crucial point of intersection for the three core members. “The whole reason PiL worked was that Wobble, me and John were just total dub fanatics. We used to go to blues parties all the time.” But dub informed the music in a deeper, subtler way than plastering on the reverb and phaser FX. “It was like using dub before you’ve even recorded – ‘cos dub is the art of subtraction”.  Mostly you heard the reggae influence in the prominence of Wobble’s bass, in the attention to texturizing drum sounds, and an overall  vibe of dread and sufferation suffusing the music.

PiL’s anti-rock approach extended beyond the music, to encompass  image (the group dressed in suits, made by a designer friend of Lydon’s) and rhetoric. PiL talked of being not a band but a “communications company”, with plans to diversify into “video albums”, movies,  even designing music technology. The not-a-band included two non-musician members, video-maker Jeannette Lee and accountant Dave Crowe, who was as close as PiL got to having a manager. Lee was Levene’s girlfriend, and before that had been going out with Don Letts of punk  documentary fame. “Wobble was really against her joining PiL. But Jeanette was telling me how she’d had a lot to do with the editing of Don Letts’s punk rock movie, and with the script for his next movie, Dread At The Controls, which was never actually made. And she basically talked me into her joining. I was really into the idea of not doing  straightforward normal videos.”

Thanks to the peculiar interregnum feel of 1978 (punk in its death throes, the future wide open) PiL were in a position of  bizarre strength.  John Lydon was patently the most charismatic and significant British frontman to emerge since Bowie, and Virgin Records were prepared to indulge his artistic whims in the belief that he was going to be the superstar of the 1980s. Virgin’s co-founder and main music man Simon Draper also paid more than mere lipservice to ideas about experimentation and exploration. Only a few years earlier Virgin had been one of the key “progressive"  labels, home to Henry Cow, Wigwam, Faust, Can, Tangerine Dream, Robert Wyatt. By 1978 Virgin had trimmed its roster, shifted focus from albums to singles, and repositioned itself as a leading major label for  New Wave and “modern music”: XTC, Devo, Magazine, Human League. Although Lydon would publically diss Branson, Draper & Co as a bunch of  “Hampstead hippies”, Virgin deserves some kudos for financing the creation, in top-of-the-range studios, of three of the most extreme albums ever released via the mainstream music biz.

“They weren’t such a big label in those days, still living off the luck of Mike Oldfield,” recalls Levene. “Branson was like a superhippy---a hippy with no qualms about making money. He didn’t mind trying a few crazy things. The fact that we were given these big advances was great, but I was totally aware that we were working in bloody expensive Virgin-owned studios like the Manor and the Townhouse. Sixty quid an hour, a thousand a day—a fucking lot of money back then.”

PiL’s first release, the single “Public Image” was a searing, soaring statement of intent, the glorious minimalism of Wobble’s chiming bassline and Levene’s ringing chords mirroring Lydon’s surge for purity, his attempt to leave behind not just  the Rotten persona (“I will not be treated as property”) but rock’n’roll itself.  The sound of “Public Image” is a blueprint for a cleansed, reborn rock of the 1980s (you can hear U2’s The Edge in there). “I call it the cold shower club,” says Levene. “It’s so clean, so tingly. It could be really thin glass penetrating you but you don’t know until you start bleeding internally.” When he picks up an acoustic guitar to show me how he wrote the tune, it sounds almost like Sixties folk-rock, pretty and plangent, a post-punk cousin to The Byrds “Turn! Turn! Turn!”.

“Public Image” the single received rave reviews and reached #9 on the UK hit parade in the winter of 1978. But Public Image the album got a mixed reception. For many punk believers, John Lydon had completely lost it, abandoning the responsibilities inherent in his punk rock Messiah-hood and wallowing in arty self-indulgence. The opening dirge “Theme” was a borderline-unlistenable cacophany of despair,   while “Religion” offered crude anti-clerical doggerel. Things perked up, though, with the Beefheartian thrashfunk of “Annalisa” and Side Two’s thrilling “Low Life” and “Attack” make you imagine a Never Mind The Bollocks where Lydon’s dub-and-Krautrock sensibility prevailed.

What’s striking about the debut is that, for such a vociferously anti-rock group, a surprisingly large proportion of Public Image rocks real hard. “The first album is the one time when we were a band,” says Levene, scratching at a rash on his hand. “And I remember worrying at the time, ‘does this do too much what we publically say we’re not going to do’, i.e. be rock. But I think what we were doing really was showing everybody that we knew intimately exactly what we intended to break down. And we started that dismantling process  with the last track on the album, “Fodderstompf”.”

As is often the case with bands committed to artistic progression, the most extreme track on the preceding album is the springboard for the next one. On one level, “Fodderstompf” was a throwaway: an extended disco spoof with Monty Python-esque silly voices, whose underlying raison d’etre was to achieve the bare minimum album length as stipulated by their contract. (In a pointed fuck-you to Virgin, and arguably to the listener too, Wobble actually warbles at one point: “'we are now trying to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very suc-cess-ful-ly”. ) But with its treated hi-hats and walking bassline “Fodderstompf” was also the first hint of the disco-influenced studio-as-instrument methodologies that pervaded Metal Box.

Out of an album of stunning tracks–-the thug-funk stampede of  “Chant”, the dread-full “Swan Lake’ (a remix of the summer 1979 single “Death Disco”, possibly the most avant-garde record to ever penetrate the Top Twenty), the Prophet 5 synth-laced terror-ride of  “Careering”, the Satiesque Muzak-of-the-spheres that is “Radio 4”, to name just four—Levene considers PiL’s absolute pinnacle to be “No Birds Do Sing”. Lydon delivers one of his most scalpel-sharp lyrics (dissecting suburbia’s “layered mass of subtle props”, the serene narcosis of its “bland, planned idle luxury”), while Wobble and then-drummer  Richard Dudanski set up a foundation-shaking groove, and Levene’s “insect stick guitar” generates a modal swarm of simultaneously entrancing and insidious noise. “All that is, is me playing the guitar part and then duplicating it, but feeding the second one through this effect I’d set up on the harmoniser. Meanwhile John is lying underneath the piano and singing that weird feedback voice, while tinkling the keys at the same time, just  to be annoying. You can hear the piano on the record.”

Metal Box’s packaging was as striking as its sonic contents: the album came as three twelve inch 45 rpm discs housed in a matt-gray film canister. “We were celebrating the idea of 12 inch singles, reggae preleases, slates. With that format you got better sound quality, more bass. It cost us a fortune, though. Virgin called us out for a meeting on their boat, and said, ‘look, if you want to do it in a tin, it’s going to cost 66 thousand pounds extra. We can only do this if you give us a third of your advance back.”

Released shortly before Christmas 1979, Metal Box totally turned around PiL’s initially shaky standing in the post-punk universe. The record was universally garlanded with praise. One measure of its epoch-defining reputation is the fact that  NME made John Lydon its November 24 cover star, with no interview, just a full-page album review. The album even did relatively well commercially, selling out the 50 thousand limited edition film-canister format by February 1980 and going into repress as a conventional double album, Second Edition.

1979 and early 1980 was the golden age for PiL. For Levene, t’was bliss to be alive in that post-rock dawn: working with friends, making totally fulfilling music that was both groundbreaking and successful, and all on Virgin’s payroll. Apart from Wobble, the group even lived together as one happy family. With some of his Sex Pistols earnings, Lydon had shrewdly bought a house in the scuzzy end of Chelsea, a snip for 12 thousand pounds.  “It was on the corner of Gunter Grove, which was horrible, and Edith Grove, which was much nicer,” recalls Levene. “John had the top part of the house, I had the bottom, and Dave Crowe lived in this bit you had to walk through to get upstairs.” With the fridge well-stocked  with lager, various other substances floating around, and John’s massive speakers pounding out reggae in the communal upstairs living room, Gunter Grove was a major hang-out for post-punk luminaries, from Don Letts to The Slits.

Golden ages never last though. Basking in their godlike prestige, PiL rapidly became idle idols. A short traipse across  America in mid-1980 turned them permanently off the idea of touring (never a PiL passion: "I’d rather send out a video of us than do a 30 date tour,” Levene once declared). But nor were the group making music or making good on any of the big talk about diversification they still reeled out in interviews (Levene’s pipe dreams of designing a drum synthesizer and a portable recording studio that would fit into a briefcase).

In August 1980 the first major crack in PiL’s façade appeared, when Wobble left the group in a cloud of acrimony. The official dispute was over his versioning of PiL riddims on his solo album The Legend Lives On. But Wobble was also frustrated by the band’s dearth of live performances (he was the one member who enjoyed connecting with the audience), embarrassed by the company’s failure to diversify into an umbrella organisation, and pissed off with the irregularity and paucity of his PiLCorp pay packets. Levene says Wobble was also “getting frustrated ‘cos he wasn’t getting enough time on the mixing desk. PiL records were done under a lot of pressure, in a rush, and when it came to technical stuff. I just had more a knack for it than the others”.

At the end of 1980, PiL rushed out that most rockist of stop-gap measures, the live album (Paris Au Printemps). By now rumours abounded of trouble at Gunter Grove: creative constipation, a Hitler’s Bunker-like vibe of drug-addled paranoia.  In his last months as a PiL member, Wobble told Sounds, “I think sometimes we border on psychosis. I’m not using that word lightly. I really mean psychosis. In other words we lose touch with reality.” Years later, he attributed PiL’s downfall to the group being three different guys on three different drugs.

It’s not clear what Wobble and Lydon’s personal poisons were, but Levene’s heroin use is well documented. In a 1983 NME interview Levene admitted that his addiction had made recording the third album difficult: “When you have to do something creative, it’s very hard. When we did Flowers, I tried to make the session coincide with the part of the day where I really had the least amount in my system. I always felt bad for it; I always felt better when I hadn’ t done anything, you know? But… when you do heroin, it’s a maintenance thing, you have to have it to get normal.” Levene also said that he “used to run PiL when I was on junk. I used to make all the music, get the money out of Virgin, make sure the record was promoted, find out if we were on Top of the Pops that week…. When I analyzed the situation it  was because basically I was very lonely, and very scared, and under a lot of pressure.”

Today, Levene is extremely cagey about the subject of heroin. He insists that it was never a factor in the agonisingly slow birth of PiL’s third album. Even without the drugs, it’s true that surpassing Metal Box was always going to be a challenge.  With Wobble gone, the old alchemy between the bassist’s untrained, intuitive approach and Levene’s  twisted virtuosity disappeared. “It would have been better if Wobble had stuck around,” says Levene. “But I never thought of replacing him, for some reason.”

Making a virtue of Wobble’s absence, and his own mounting disinclination to play guitar, Keith decided to orient the new album around drum sounds. The breakthrough came three days into a session at Virgin’s Manor studios. ” For three days, we hadn’t done anything, apart from played videogames and watched a lot of videos. There was a lot of avoiding the studio going on! I’d set up all the equipment, lots of funny little synth toys, and I’d be twiddling, getting sounds, but not necessarily making a record.” Then Levene had a brainstorm, instructed the engineer to keep the tape rolling no matter what he did, and starting to knock out percussion patterns on a strange bamboo instrument that Richard Branson had brought back from Bali. The resulting track, “Hymie’s Him”, is one of the weakest moments on Flowers of Romance, but it served its purpose, breaking the deadlock and giving the group a direction for the third album: a percussive, tribal feel that Levene described to ZigZag as  “very acoustic, human… but very fuckin’ heavy”.

Moving to another costly Virgin studio in West London, the Townhouse, PiL procured a host of second-hand acoustic instruments--- ukelele, saxophone, banjo, violin—and used them to generate raw sonic material for sculpting on the mixing board. Ironically, Flowers is the PiL album where Lydon the non-musician contributes most musically,  actually playing instruments like the three-stringed banjo  on “Phenagen”. In interviews,  Levene talked later about deliberating using “John’s total ineptitude to an artistic advantage”, and of deliberately putting himself in the position of child-like novice grappling with unfamiliar instruments. “It was like two kids let loose in the studio, all restrictions lifted”.

Essentially reprising the more outre Dada/bricolage antics of Europe’s pre-punk vanguard—Faust, Cluster, White Noise, even Pink Floyd (from the wackier bits of Ummagumma to their abandoned project of recording an album using household objects), Flowers was alternately self-indulgent and underdone.  In retrospect, it sounds a braver mess than it did upon its release in May 1981. In truth, a combination of indolence, negativity ("All it amounts to is that we don't like any music at the moment," Levene told Rolling Stone) and see-what-we-can-get-away-with gall played as much a part as aesthetic fearlessness.

Still, the title track was astounding. Released as a single in April 1981, “Flowers of Romance” made #24 and resulted in one of the most deranged Top of the Pops performances ever: Levene pounding the drums in a lab technician’s white coat, Jeanette Lee dwarfed by her double bass, and Lydon, dressed as a white-collared vicar, sawing dementedly on a fiddle. Like “Flowers”, the album’s other stand-out, “Under The House” was built around voodoo-scary percussion and eldritch string sounds  swooping across the mixscape like  bats-on-fire. Lydon’s ectoplasmic vocals allude to some kind of paranormal entity—some accounts say it’s about a real-life ghost that haunted Manor Studio, but Levene claims it’s about a more abstract sense of evil that Lydon was unusually sensitive to.

Virgin hated the album, pressing up a measly twenty thousand copies, but such was  PiL’s eminence that Flowers of Romance was automatically hailed as a groundbreaking masterpiece by the music press. If Metal Box, absorbing the rhythms and studio approaches of disco and dub, had pushed rock’s envelope to its fullest extent, Flowers burst through into a totally post-rock space. (Levene’s guitar appeared only on “Go Back” and, psychedelically reversed, on “Phenagen”).  Yet where the record ultimately fails is in its emotions, which are the opposite of expansive. Lydon’s  palette of derision and disgust was curdling into self-parody, and the leave-me-alone paranoia of “Banging The Door” recalls Mick Jagger’s reclusive, burnt-out rock star in Performance. 

PiL’s negativity reached a dismal climax with the infamous show at New York’s Ritz club on May 15^th, 1981. Intended as a sort of performance art/video spectacle, the show was hastily pulled together, Levene’s genuine excitement dragging along the  less enthused Lydon and Lee. Unfortunately the Ritz was not an artspace like downtown Manhattan’s The Kitchen; it drew a rock’n’roll crowd, who were certainly not up for seeing the band in “live video” form,  skulking behind a gigantic video-screen and making an amorphous cacaphony. Lydon’s taunts of “are you getting your money’s worth?”  eventually goaded the audience into a full-scale riot.

During the year of silence that followed Flowers of Romance, PiL actually relocated to New York. “Flowers was still a PiL time, “ says Levene, but in New York the group began to devolve into the John Lydon Show. Often spending the day in bed watching TV, Lydon got fat on lager and torpor. He was surrounded by sycophantic hangers-on, yes-men who would eagerly troop out to get him beer. “What was good about PiL when it worked was that he had a few no-men around! Me and Wobble.” Levene had cleaned up, but his relationship with Lydon was deteriorating. “John was moodier, but not really saying anything about it.  I was moodier, but not really saying anything about it. ‘Cos we weren’t really sure what to do next.”

The untrammelled avant-gardism of Flowers was clearly not going to keep PiL Corp  solvent. A strategic shift towards accessibility seemed the best course, signposted by the working title of the fourth album, You Are Now Entering A Commercial Zone, and the oddly radio-friendly sound of its first side (sort of “death disco” with most of the death removed).

What was unique about the PiL set-up --a world-famous rock star working with an avant-garde virtuoso, in a well-funded context of  do-what-the-fuck-you-like—was slowly disintegrating. The balance was offkilter: Lydon, the non-musician, resentfully dependent on Levene to provide  the music, and Levene, resentfully dependent  on the Lydon brand name, chafing because all the media attention was on the Ex Pistol. Early in PiL’s career, Lydon had made strenuous and sincere attempts to present the group as a genuine collective, not just Johnny Rotten’s new backing band. But by 1982, says Levene, “it was like he’d decided to take that line in our first single literally—“Public Image belongs to me”. Around this period, says Levene, a weird thing started to happen: “John Lydon sort of became Johnny Rotten again”. It was if Lydon realized that the Sex Pistols adventure was where his rockmyth bread was buttered (it’s striking that in his autobiography No Blacks No Dogs No Irish, the entire PiL story barely gets a couple of pages).

Tensions reached a head in mid-1983 over the single “This Is Not A Love Song”. When Levene went into the studio in order to salvage what he considered a disastrous mix, he found himself under close surveillance from Lydon’s new right-hand man, drummer Martin Atkins. After a fraught all-night studio session, Lydon phoned from Los Angeles and told Levene to “get out of my fucking studio”. Shortly afterwards, Levene handed in his notice, leaving PiL in the lurch on the eve of a Japanese tour. When PiL re-recorded the album using session musicians and released it as This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get, Levene retaliated by putting out Commercial Zone, a record some PiL diehards believe is the real fourth PiL album, and a record that could have restored both their aesthetic credibility and their fortunes.

The immediate post-PiL years were tough for Keith Levene. “At the time I quit, I thought I still had a deal with Virgin. Legally, I did. But they were like, ‘we’re supporting John’. I was like, ‘no problem, but how about I just carry on with my artistic experiment, put out a solo record?’ And they just put me on a shelf for a good four years. And they were scaring other record companies from signing. There was this period when getting a response from Virgin was like I was calling from Addis Abbabba.”

By 1985, Levene was resident in Los Angeles. He worked on the soundtrack for a Penelope Spheeris movie called Hollywood Vice. “It was a total nightmare, the movie was awful.” Some of the music he made during this period resurfaced on 1987’s '2011- Back to Black' EP, and on 1989’s Great Spirits Have Always  Encountered Violent Opposition From Mediocre Minds. The latter record, credited to Keith Levene’s Violent Opposition, drew on the services of  his new LA rock buddies like Hillel Slovak and Flea from Red Hot Chilli Peppers. “Flea actually tried out for PiL, he auditioned, but when he found out I wasn’t in the band anymore, he just said ‘no’. I was quite pleased by that!”

During the LA period, Levene earned a living working in computers and desktop publishing. For a short time in the early Nineties, he moved back to London and worked with another Ex Pistol, Glen Matlock, in an ill-starred group called The Mavericks. Then he returned to Los Angeles. And then…. silence.

*                      *                      *                      *                      *.

“PiL went so fast,” says Levene, with a soft, disbelieving shake of his head. “What happened between 1978 and the middle of 1980 – I’ve done less in ten years!”

The last few years, though, have witnessed what passes, in Levene land, for a frenzied burst of activity.  Having returned to the UK in 1997, Levene set up a website/label, originally called Missing Channel,  then renamed Murderglobal. And this autumn he’s made available his first new solo recordings in 13 years, a five track EP entitled Killer in the Crowd.

It’s a mixed bag, ranging from surprisingly orthodox hard rock (“Object B”, for instance, sounds like PiL if they’d been Free fans and played the American arena circuit--Levene says it’s actually him trying to do something on a par with Led Zep’s “Kashmir”) to the intriguing if frustratingly brief instrumentals “Aztec Legend” and “Aztec Dub”.  As their titles suggest, these two slivers of  soundtrack-for-imaginary-movie evoke the eerie ceremonial majesty of an alien civilisation, sacrificial rites in mist-shrouded temples in the jungles of Central America. “That’s what I thought it sounded like,” Levene nods. “The titles came afterwards, but when you start out using a didgeridoo, you know you’re not going to end up with the next Ozzy Osbourne record!”. Some of the weird bombastic sounds on these tracks come from brass, or from “this fucking big tympani that I flanged out of existence”.

Better than anything on the EP is “The Camera Dodgers”, a long instrumental track from his as-yet uncompleted album.  A group improvisation recorded in a single, first take, “Dodgers” is a lustrous haze of harmonic distortion and cymbal spray, at different points in its aleatory drift recalling Neu!, A.R. Kane, Talk Talk,  Dead C, and Eno’s Another Green World. Inspired by CCTV, it’s the soundtrack, says Levene, for a yet-to-made “cartoon or a small 20 minute digital video movie”.

The Killer EP is less a real release, though, than a calling card to the music biz. Despite the massive upheavals in the industry, with prestige artists being downsized left, right and centre, Levene is angling for a major label deal. He says that EMI funded his home-studio set up, as part of a development deal giving them first options on his material. But when he relates some of the perplexed reactions of A&R folk at that company and elsewhere, it’s obvious that Levene’s dreams about finding a niche in the mainstream music business are hopelessly out-of-touch with today’s market realities.

When I gently suggest that he would actually fare better if he developed his most esoteric and uncommercial impulses (as glimpsed in “Camera Dodgers” ) and became a cult artist in the independent sector,  Levene is unconvinced, though. He’s had terrible experiences with indie labels, he says, and feels that ““if I go the independent route,  I might as well do it totally independently and put the record out myself.”

It’s poignant because clearly Levene imagines somehow returning to the situation he enjoyed with PiL: total artistic licence, with a corporation picking up the tab. “We were lucky we were on Virgin,” says Keith wistfully. “Of course, it was John who got me that freedom”. It was a unique historical moment: the record industry thrown off-balance by punk and prepared to take risks for fear of missing out on the future. That was then, this is now: if Levene could just  shed his “useless memories” of corporate-subsidised avant-garde mayhem, find the right support and the right accomplices, he could still make amazing music.