Joe Carducci fondly remembers the late-seventies San Francisco scene as “real vital, a place people could get an audience, right up to the end of 1981.” The downside was a certain dilettantism. “There’s something about San Francisco that encourages you to fold your band up and do a side project or dabble around with somebody else.” Another problem with bohemian paradises is that they can breed their own odd kind of parochialism, Carducci argues. “Except for Dead Kennedys and Flipper, those bands didn’t take it out on the road. A lot of them felt, I think, that they were way ahead of the rest of the country.”
CHAPTER 13
CAREERING:
PiL AND POSTPUNK’S PEAK AND FALL
PUBLIC IMAGE LTD’S big year was 1979. Virgin, still convinced that John Lydon was their hottest property, allowed the group to treat expensive, top-of-the-line studios as their sound laboratories and playpens. After PiL’s shaky debut, the music was really starting to come together, culminating at year’s end in the classic Metal Box. Morale in the PiL camp was high. Indeed, most of the band even lived together as one happy family chez Lydon.
Just before embarking on the ill-fated Sex Pistols tour of America, Lydon had shrewdly used his slim earnings to buy a home. Forty-five Gunter Grove was a Victorian terrace house at the scuzzy end of Chelsea. “John had the top part of the house,” says Keith Levene. “I had the bottom, and Dave Crowe lived in this bit you had to walk through to get upstairs.” Only Wobble kept his distance, preferring to stay with his parents in East London.
Gunter Grove became a major hangout for postpunk luminaries such as the Slits and Don Letts. The fridge was always well stocked with lager, various illicit substances floated around, and Lydon’s massive speakers in the communal upstairs living room pounded out a bass-booming reggae soundtrack. Still partially in the mind-set of summer 1977, when he was Public Enemy Number One, Lydon holed up and held court to a retinue of hangers-on and cronies. “I love visitors,” he once said. “They are here for my amusement.”
It wasn’t all cozy laughs in the House of Lydon, though. Cannabis and speed were the main drugs, but heroin was creeping in with some of the coterie. Justifying Lydon’s persecution complex, Gunter Grove was regularly subjected to raids by the local drug squad. One such visit in February 1979 took place at 6:00 A.M. Ironically, for once the usually amphetamine-fiending, up-past-dawn members of PiL had gone to bed at a reasonable hour. So the police smashed down the front door, then searched the house, ripping open Lydon’s mattress and pulling up the bedroom floorboards. Although they found nothing, Lydon was taken to the local police station and had to walk home in his pajamas.
Another shadow over the Lydon household was death. In 1979, Lydon lost both his mother (to cancer) and his estranged best friend, Sid Vicious (to heroin). Witnessing his mother, the great source of strength and encouragement in his life, slowly slipping away inspired Lydon’s lyrics to the single “Death Disco,” the first PiL release since their debut album. On the single, Wobble’s hard-funk bassline pushes forward like fear rising in your gorge. Levene generates a staggering amount of sound using just a single guitar, simultaneously torturing the classical-kitsch melody of “Swan Lake,” hacking out rhythm chords that feel like blade touching bone, and scattering a microtonal scree of harmonics. Searing through this swarming anguish, Lydon exorcises his grief like Yoko Ono at her most primal-screamed graphic: “Seeing in your eyes…Silence in your eyes…Final in a fade…Flowers rotting dead.”
Released in June 1979, “Death Disco” remains arguably the most radical single ever to penetrate the U.K. Top 20. When PiL appeared on Top of the Pops, the presenter looked ashen faced as he introduced the group and reluctantly uttered the song title. Wobble sat in a dentist’s chair through the whole performance. “Everyone else lined up to get made beautiful, but I just asked the BBC makeup people to have my teeth blacked out, so I could do a big smile at the camera with my front teeth missing.”
Inviting the Grim Reaper to the pop party was one kind of subversion. Just as radical, in its own way, was pairing the word “death” with “disco,” a form of music still despised by most of PiL’s audience. The twelve-inch included two disco-style versions, the “1?2 Mix” and the “Megga Mix.” In interviews, Lydon declared that disco (and the Raincoats) was the only contemporary music he liked, while Wobble enthused that disco was “very useful, practical music.”
PiL’s next single, “Memories,” pursued the dance direction even more intently with its brisk bass, hissing hi-hat, crisp snares, and disco-style breakdowns, in which the sound strips down and the intensity ratchets up several notches. Only Levene’s glassy shrouds of Arabic-sounding guitar and Lydon’s antinostalgia invective are at odds with the dance floor imperative. Baying like a cross between a banshee and a mountain goat, Lydon rails against some nameless fool still living in the past. At the time, critics speculated that Lydon’s target was the spate of nostalgia that had dominated U.K. pop culture in 1979 in the form of the mod and ska revivals. But when he sneers, “This person’s had enough of useless memories,” it feels like Lydon is talking about his own need to sever ties to the past, be it memories of his loved ones or tangled regrets about his years in the Pistols.
“Memories” failed to make the Top 40 on its October 1979 release, but it did whip up fierce anticipation for PiL’s second album. A big chunk of what would become Metal Box had already been recorded back in May, with the rest completed sporadically during the summer. Drummer Richard Dudanski departed halfway through the process, so Levene and Wobble did the drumming on several tracks. Martin Atkins, who went on to become PiL’s longest-enduring drummer, was recruited when the album was virtually finished. He received a summons to the studio in the form of an inconsiderate 3:00 A.M. phone call. “When I got to Townhouse [studio], someone says, ‘There’s the drum kit, make something up,’” Atkins recalls. “Wobble and I wrote ‘Bad Baby’ off the top of our head. What you hear on Metal Box is literally that first five minutes of us playing together for the first time. Within half an hour of meeting everybody, I was on the record.” As you might imagine, this wasn’t necessarily the best way for a band to operate. Indeed, “Bad Baby” is the only real blemish on what otherwise stands as not just PiL’s masterpiece, but postpunk’s absolute crowning triumph.
Metal Box is a peculiar blend of real-time spontaneity and obsessive postproduction. Many songs were recorded in one or two takes, and a few were written as they were being played, but it all truly came together during the mix, informed by PiL’s passion for dub and disco. Metal Box, Levene declared, was an exercise in “finding out what mixing was, a crash course in production.” What’s striking about the record is how PiL assimilated both the dread feel of roots reggae and the dub aesthetic of subtraction (stripping out instruments, using empty space), without ever resorting to obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.
The album starts with “Albatross,” ten minutes of pitiless bass pressure from Wobble, over which Levene scythes the air and Lydon sings like he’s being crushed between two giant slabs of rock. “Albatross” is “Public Image” turned inside out, Lydon’s confidence that he can outrun his past curdling into despair. “Memories” and “Death Disco” follow, the latter retitled “Swan Lake” and now ending in a locked groove, Lydon’s grief and horror frozen for eternity, like Munch’s The Scream.
After the surging urgency of the two singles comes the slow suspension and numb trance of “Poptones.” Gyrating around Wobble’s deep, probing bassline, Levene’s guitar scatters a wake of harmonic sparks that merge with the lustrous halo of cymbal spray. Talking about his “circular, jangly,” almost psychedelic playing on “Poptones,” Levene compared its repetitiveness to staring at a white wall. “If you look at it for a second, you’ll see a white wall…. If you keep looking at it for five minutes, you’ll see different colors, different patterns in front of your eyes, especially if you don’t blink. And your ears don’t blink.” Rising to the occasion, Lydon matches the
music’s sinister grace with one of his most quietly unsettling lyrics. Sketched in oblique, fractured images, it’s the account of someone who’s been abducted, driven into the woods, and raped. “Hindsight does me no good” intones the victim, bitterly recalling the reassuring “poptones” playing on the car’s cassette player. It’s left unclear whether the song is being sung by a corpse (one lyric says, “You left a hole in the back of my head”) or if the victim escaped and is now cowering and shivering in the wet foliage (another refers to “standing naked in this back of the woods”). “John’s lyric was so evocative and partly it came from us recording at the Manor and driving through the forest near the studio,” says Wobble. On “Poptones,” as with other Metal Box songs, Lydon’s delivery meshes with Levene’s guitar in a weird, modal place somewhere between Celtic and Arabic. “When someone can’t sing you get these natural voice tones,” explains Wobble. “So PiL’s music was based more around overtones and subharmonics, rather than harmony per se. The Beach Boys we were not! PiL actually had more in common with music from Lapland or China.”
“Poptones” whooshes straight into the Northern Ireland–inspired terror ride of “Careering,” on which Levene abandoned the guitar for ominously hovering and swooping electronic sound-shapes created on the Prophet 5, an early and expensive form of polyphonic synth. Then comes “No Birds Do Sing,” PiL’s finest recording, as far as Levene is concerned. Wobble and Dudanski set up a foundation-shaking groove, over which Lydon intones another scalpel-sharp lyric, this time dissecting suburbia’s “layered mass of subtle props,” the serene narcosis of its “bland, planned idle luxury.” Levene’s guitar emits an eerie, metallic foam that’s simultaneously entrancing and insidious. The instrumental that follows, “Graveyard,” is disco music for a skeleton’s ball. It really sounds like dem bones doing the shake, rattle, ’n’ roll. After that, Metal Box briefly loses its way with the underdeveloped “The Suit” and “Bad Baby,” then recovers dramatically with the last three songs: the psychodisco of “Socialist,” all dry, processed drums and synth blips; the thug-funk stampede of “Chant,” Lydon ranting about street violence and wet-liberal Guardian readers; and the unexpected Satie-esque poignancy of “Radio 4,” with its sighing synths and gently sobbing bass.
In honor of reggae and disco’s twelve-inch aesthetic, and to ensure the highest possible sound quality, PiL insisted on releasing the album as three 45 rpm records, rather than on a single 33 rpm disc. “We were celebrating the idea of twelve-inch singles, prereleases, slates,” says Levene. “With that format, you got a better bass sound.” The idea of putting the three discs inside a matte gray film canister came from Dennis Morris, Lydon’s photographer friend. Metal Box’s striking packaging was possibly PiL’s most impressive feat in terms of breaking with standard rock procedures. It effectively deconstructed the notion of “the album,” encouraging people to listen to the tracks in any order. “The idea is that you definitely don’t play it from side one to side six,” Wobble explained. “You just put on one song or two and leave it at that.”
The unusual packaging also appealed to PiL for reasons of sheer malicious perversity. Three unsleeved discs snugly crammed into the circular canister and separated only by circles of paper were hard to remove without scratching the vinyl. “We were turned on by the idea that it would be difficult to open the can and get the records out,” admits Levene. This prank cost PiL dearly. “Virgin called us for a meeting and said, ‘Look, if you want to do it in a tin, it’s going to cost sixty-six 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 was almost universally garlanded with praise. One measure of its colossal stature was that NME put John Lydon on the cover of its November 24 issue, but with no interview inside, just a full-page review of Metal Box. The timing was perfect. The second half of 1979 saw postpunk reaching its peak of popularity, with epochal festivals such as September’s Futurama, one night of which was headlined by PiL.
Postpunk was cresting creatively, and accordingly basked in a glorious, if short-lived, consensus of admiration from critics and fans alike. In NME’s Christmas issue, the writers’ Top Five Albums of 1979 listed Talking Heads’ Fear of Music at number one and Metal Box at number two, followed by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the Jam’s Setting Sons, and Gang of Four’s Entertainment! Delayed release dates and transatlantic time lag meant that postpunk’s approval rating peaked in the United States the following year, when PiL and Talking Heads (with Remain in Light) made the top five of the Village Voice’s annual nationwide poll of critics.
By definition, though, peaks precede plummets. Indeed, there’s a sense in which musical golden ages engineer their own endings. Records such as Metal Box and Unknown Pleasures, by dint of their very originality, ensure that they’ll be copied by lesser groups whose imaginations have been overpowered. In pop, every wave of innovation inevitably installs a host of new clichés and conventions. In the wake of PiL and Joy Division, a new underground of gloomy groups such as the Sound and Killing Joke emerged. By its second incarnation in 1980, Futurama was mocked as an angst rock version of the U.K. heavy-metal festival at Castle Donington, its grim flocks of overcoat-clad boys as uniform as the denim hordes that followed Iron Maiden.
Paradoxically, the clone army also put huge pressure on the pioneers to keep moving to new frontiers. PiL started 1980 with huge advantages. They still had Virgin’s support. Despite its experimentalism and high retail price, Metal Box had done well commercially, selling out the 50,000-copy limited-edition canister format by February, after which it was re-pressed as a conventional double album called Second Edition. But as the year proceeded, the challenge of surpassing their own landmark record seemed to paralyze PiL.
At first, PiL basked in the acclaim. A confessed TV addict and lazy sod, Lydon told Sounds, “If I could get away with it I wouldn’t even walk. I’d love a mobile bed. One thing I’ve never understood is people complaining about bed sores. That’s a luxury, isn’t it?” In April 1980, PiL deigned to tour the United States, but only on the least-strenuous schedule possible. Ten American dates were spread across three and a half weeks. Drummer Atkins recalls spending three nights in Boston, in his own hotel suite, for just one gig and a couple of radio interviews.
Despite its easygoing pace, the short traipse across America turned PiL off the idea of touring for good. Playing live had never been a passion for Lydon or Levene. The latter declared, “I’d rather send out a video of us than do a thirty-date tour.” Wobble, though, enjoyed connecting with the audience, which Lydon mocked as “this whole condescending attitude of playing for the kids.”
Twenty years old and bursting with energy (not all of it natural), Jah Wobble felt increasingly frustrated by PiL’s inactivity on all fronts. He squirmed with embarrassment at the yawning gap between what PiL professed itself to be (not a band, but a communications corporation) and what they achieved (fuck all, really). Levene still talked grandly in interviews about doing movie soundtracks, making video albums, even designing musical equipment such as a drum synthesizer and a portable recording studio the size of a briefcase. But these were pipe dreams at best, pure bullshit at worst. “That whole idea of the umbrella corporation…even at the time I thought, ‘Fuck, what are we gonna do? We’re going to make a film?’” laughs Wobble. “‘We’re going to do nothing!’ And that irritated certain people, because I’d take the piss a bit.”
More seriously frustrating for Wobble was PiL’s indolence when it came to making records. He’d already made a few solo singles and in May 1980 released his first album, the wonderfully goofy The Legend Lives On…Jah Wobble in “Betrayal.” His gesture of independence triggered the first major crack in PiL’s regal facade. In August, the bassist left the group in a cloud of acrimony. Officially the dispute concerned Wobble’s reuse of some PiL backing tracks on The Legend Lives On. But as part of its “umbrella company” concept, PiL had always intended
to diversify with solo releases as well as nonmusical projects. “Versioning” reggae riddims was a widespread practice in Lydon’s beloved Jamaica, so what exactly was the problem with Wobble’s thrifty recycling? In truth, the tension within PiL had been building as far back as the later stages of recording Metal Box. “The feeling got quite bad,” says Wobble, “so I’d go off and do the rhythm tracks by myself in Gooseberry Studios in Chinatown.” Wobble’s frustration mounted during the mixing stage of Metal Box, when Levene hogged the board and hardly allowed him any creative input.
Another grievance was the irregularity and paucity of Wobble’s PiL wages. “I was on sixty pounds a week and even struggling to get that.” PiL’s employment practices generally left a lot to be desired. After the American tour, Atkins was summarily fired, purely and simply, he claims, so that PiL could avoid paying him a weekly wage when the band was inactive. Later in 1980, Atkins was rehired when PiL started recording their third album. “PiL wasn’t run like a business,” says Atkins. “It would take me five attempts of going across London from Willesden Green to Chelsea before I could get anyone at Gunter Grove to open the door and give me my sixty pounds. And I’d spend half of it on speed before I’d got home. If it was a Thursday, I’d probably stay at Gunter Grove until Sunday. We’d all be up watching Apocalypse Now, speeding.”
In his last months as a member of PiL’s dysfunctional family, 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.” All through the second half of 1980, rumors circulated of ugly vibes at Gunter Grove, including stories of hard drugs and Lydon’s degeneration into a paranoid recluse. The regular police raids didn’t help with the latter, and Lydon had also recently been traumatized by a brief stint in Mountjoy, an infamous Irish prison, following an altercation with two off-duty cops in a Dublin pub. Factor in the amphetamine intake and one can see why a poster on the wall at Gunter Grove declared: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 31