Wobble had grown up in an East London housing project located at the junction of Jamaica Street and Stepney Way, which neatly symbolized the collision of West Indies and East End that would define him. Wobble met Lydon at Kingsway College and the two became part of a misfit crew known as the Four Johns (the others being John Grey and John Ritchie, aka Sid Vicious). In those days, Wobble had a reputation for being something of a thug. “I think we were all emotional cripples back then,” he says with a hint of regret. But when he picked up Vicious’s bass guitar, something was released in him. “I immediately felt bonded to the instrument. It was very therapeutic, although I didn’t understand that at the time.” Drawing on his gut understanding of the Jamaican music he adored, and fueled by speed, Wobble taught himself to play reggae bass, in which a simple recurring phrase works simultaneously as a melodic motif and a steady rhythmic pulse. Picking up reggae tricks like using old strings (they have no twang), he learned how to “play soft, not in a percussive way. You caress the string. Pure vibration.” Wobble’s basslines became the human heartbeat in PiL’s music, the roller coaster that simultaneously cocooned you and transported you through the terror ride.
With Wobble’s bass supplying the melodic element of any given PiL song, Keith Levene’s guitar was freed up to freak out. One of PiL’s most curious features is that, for an avowedly antirock band, they had a guitar hero at their core, the Jimi Hendrix of postpunk. Unlike most of his peers, Levene had serious chops. Before punk, he’d done what guitarists were supposed to do in the days of prog-rock virtuosity: practice, practice, practice. As a teenager growing up in North London, he’d spend days on end jamming at a friend’s house, with sessions lasting as long as eight hours. Even more blasphemous, in punk terms, was the fact that young Keith’s favorite guitar hero was Steve Howe of Yes. At age fifteen, Levene even roadied for Yes for a while.
Punks were supposed to purge their collections of King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, or at least hide them in the cupboard. “There’s a lot of people in punk who could play guitar much better than they made out,” says Levene. “But I never pretended I couldn’t play lead.” Despite all the prog skeletons in his closet, Levene hurled himself into the early punk fray and became one of the founding members of the Clash. But his harsh, discordant style became increasingly at odds with that group’s anthemic rock ’n’ roll. Even then he was developing the style that would become his PiL trademark, an improvisatory mode of playing that deliberately incorporated “errors.” When Levene hit a wrong note, he’d immediately repeat the mistake to see if the wrongness could become a new kind of rightness. “The idea was to break through conditioning, take yourself out of one channel and into another space.” It wasn’t “creative differences” that led to his exit from the Clash, though. Levene was expelled because of his negative attitude toward the band, which his colleagues attributed to amphetamine-fueled mood swings.
Levene and Lydon first bonded in a Sheffield pub after a joint Clash/Pistols gig in July 1976. The singer and the guitarist were both sitting apart from their respective groups and looking miserable. Levene approached Lydon and during their conversation suggested that they work together if their bands ever fell apart. Eighteen months later, PiL was shaped by Levene’s and Lydon’s disgust with their previous bands’ relapses into American hard-rock tradition. “To me the Pistols were the last rock ’n’ roll band, they weren’t the beginning of anything,” says Levene. “Whereas PiL really felt like the start of something new.”
The name Public Image Ltd was ripe with meaning. The phrase first caught Lydon’s imagination when he read Muriel Spark’s The Public Image, a novel about an unbearably egotistical actress. “Limited” initially signified keeping his persona under a tight leash, “not being as ‘out there’ as I was with the Sex Pistols.” Seemingly symbolizing this jettisoning of the swollen alter ego Johnny Rotten, the singer reverted to his real name, John Lydon. In fact, Malcolm McLaren had claimed ownership of “Johnny Rotten” and acquired an injunction against the singer’s using the stage name. At the time, almost nobody knew about this legal backstory, though, so the Rotten/Lydon shift seemed like a really powerful statement: the singer symbolically reclaiming his true identity and making a fresh start as part of a collective, Public Image Ltd.
The idea of “Ltd” soon escalated to take on its business meaning, the limited company. PiL, proclaimed Lydon, was not a band in the traditional sense, but a communications company for which making records was just one front of activity. Enthused, Lydon and Levene talked about diversifying into movie soundtracks, graphics, making “video albums,” even designing music technology. To show they were serious, PiL recruited two nonmusician members. Dave Crowe, an old school friend of Lydon’s, acted as the band’s accountant. Jeannette Lee, a former girlfriend of Don Letts’s and his comanager at the clothing store Acme Attractions, was recruited to be PiL’s video maker. Lee also happened to be going out with Levene. “Jeannette was telling me how she’d had a lot to do with the editing of Don’s punk rock documentary, and the script for his next movie, Dread at the Controls, which never got made. I was into the idea of PiL not doing straightforward videos, and she basically talked me into her joining. Wobble was dead against it.”
Part of the impetus behind PiL posing as a corporation was to continue punk’s project of demystifying the record business. While the Clash lamented the industry’s knack for “turning rebellion into money,” PiL reversed that syndrome, suggesting that money making was a potentially subversive strategy of working from within, a stealth campaign that was less spectacular than the Pistols’ revolt but more insidious. It was also more honest and less starry-eyed to present rock bands as the money-making enterprises they really were, as opposed to gangs of guitar-wielding guerrillas. Accordingly, Lydon and his colleagues overhauled their image, purging anything redolent of punk clichés and instead wearing tailored suits. This anti–rock ’n’ roll image culminated with Dennis Morris’s artwork for PiL’s debut album, fashion-magazine-style portraits of each member of the group, immaculately coutured and coiffed. Lydon appeared on the front under Italian Vogue lettering, while the reverse saw Wobble sporting a debonair 1920s lounge lizard mustache.
Stridently opposed to all the standard rock routines and procedures, PiL had no manager and initially vowed that they would never tour. Above all, it was not the Johnny Rotten Band, but a genuine collective. This was a noble idea, but in reality the group’s privileged status—an experimental outfit funded by a major label—depended on Virgin’s belief that Lydon was their hottest property, the most charismatic and significant British front man to emerge since Bowie, and a potential superstar set to dominate the next decade of music. Thanks to the peculiarly indeterminate feel of the music scene in 1978—punk in its death throes, the future wide open—PiL found themselves in an unprecedented position of strength. Virgin was prepared to indulge Lydon’s artistic whims, believing that he would either come up with the goods, or come around eventually and embrace a more accessible sound.
That’s the cynical way of looking at it. In truth, Virgin’s cofounder and main music man, Simon Draper, paid more than lip service to ideas about experimentation and innovation. During the early seventies, Virgin was one of the key “progressive” labels, home to Henry Cow, Faust, Can, Tangerine Dream, and Robert Wyatt, among others. The label cannily adapted to punk, trimming its roster, shifting focus from albums to singles, and, not least, signing the movement’s most important group, the Sex Pistols. By 1978, Virgin had repositioned itself as the leading major label for “modern music,” with a strong postpunk roster including XTC, Devo, Magazine, and the Human League. “They weren’t such a big label in those days, still living off the luck of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells,” recalls Levene. “Branson was like a superhippie, a hippie with no qualms about making money. He didn’t mind trying a few crazy things.” Branson may have been a “superhippie,” but Virgin did subsidize three of the most extreme albums ever released by a
major label: Public Image, Metal Box, and Flowers of Romance.
Given Lydon’s initial talk of PiL as antimusic and antimelody, the group’s debut single, “Public Image,” was a massive relief for all concerned—the record company, Pistols fans, and critics. It’s a searing, soaring statement of intent. The glorious, chiming minimalism of Wobble’s bassline and Levene’s plangent, ringing chords mirror Lydon’s quest for purity as he jettisons not just the Rotten alter ego (“somebody had to stop me/…I will not be treated as property”) but rock ’n’ roll itself. “That song was the first proper bassline I ever came up with,” says Wobble. “Very simple, a beautiful interval from E to B. Just the joy of vibration. And incredible guitar from Keith, this great burst of energy.” “Public Image” is like a blueprint for the reborn, purified rock of the 1980s. One can hear the Edge from U2 in its radiant surge. “It’s so clean, so tingly, like a cold shower,” says Levene. “It could be really thin glass penetrating you but you don’t know until you start bleeding internally.”
Wrapped in a fake newspaper with tabloid headlines, “Public Image” shot to number nine on the U.K. chart in October 1978. While the single was greeted with universal rapture, Public Image the album got a more mixed reception. Sounds voiced the widespread sense held by punk diehards that Lydon had lost it, abandoning both the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in being the punk figurehead and instead wallowing in arty self-indulgence. The album was uncompromising, throwing the listener in at the deep end with the nine-minute death wish dirge “Theme,” a near cacophony of suicidal despair and Catholic guilt, with Lydon howling about masturbation as mortal sin. Next up was the anticlerical doggerel of “Religion I”/“Religion II” (a blasphemous ditty written for the Pistols and originally titled “Sod in Heaven”), followed by the hacking thrash funk of “Annalisa,” the true story of a German girl who starved to death because her parents believed she was possessed by the devil and turned to the church rather than psychiatrists for help. If side one of Public Image was loosely themed around religion, the more accessible second side was largely concerned with the tribulations of being the punk messiah. In “Public Image,” Lydon reasserted his rights over “Johnny Rotten”—“Public image belongs to me/It’s my entrance, my own creation, my grand finale”—only to end the song by shedding the persona with an echo chamber yell of “goodbye!” “Low Life” fingered McLaren as the “egomaniac trainer/traitor” who “never did understand,” while the foaming paranoia of “Attack” showed that the mental scars from summer 1977, when Lydon was U.K. Public Enemy Number One, were still livid.
What’s striking in retrospect about PiL’s debut is that, for all the rhetoric about being antirock, a hefty proportion of Public Image actually rocks hard. Combining raw power and uncanny dubspace, “Low Life” and “Attack” sound like Never Mind the Bollocks might have if Lydon’s reggae-and-Krautrock sensibility had prevailed, while “Theme” was nothing if not an orgy of twisted guitar virtuosity, Levene generating an astonishing amount of sound from a single guitar. “In the beginning, it was just my onstage sound, no effects, just wacking things off in one take,” recalls Levene. “No second takes, no overdubs. Sometimes not even knowing what I was going to play, writing the tune on the spot. See, the first album is the one time when we were a band. I remember worrying a little at the time, ‘Does this do too much what we publicly say we’re not going to do?’—meaning, rock out. But what we were doing really was showing everybody that we were intimately acquainted with what we ultimately intended to break down. And we started that dismantling process with the album’s last track, ‘Fodderstompf.’”
As often happens with bands committed to progression, the most extreme track on the preceding album is the springboard for the next. On one level, “Fodderstompf” was a throwaway, an extended disco spoof, almost a parody of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” with Lydon the antisentimentalist taking the piss out of romance, affection, commitment. “I hate love. There isn’t a love song in us. It’s bullshit,” he told Sex Pistols’ biographers Fred and Judy Vermorel. On “Fodderstompf,” Lydon and Wobble yowl “we only wanted to be loved” into an echo chamber using shrill Monty Python–style housewife voices, ad-lib insults at the studio engineer behind the glass, blast a fire extinguisher at the mike, and generally goof off. “Me and John, I think we’d had a bit of wine or whatever that night,” chuckles Wobble. The track runs for almost eight minutes because its raison d’être was to fulfill the minimum album length of thirty minutes stipulated by the band’s contract. In a pointed fuck-you to Virgin, and arguably to the record buyer too, Wobble at one point warbles, “We are now trying to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very suc-cess-ful-leeee.” Says Wobble, “It was this confrontational thing, a real mickey take on the record company.” Yet musically the track is the most compelling thing on the debut. Its hypnotic dub-funk bassline, subliminal synth burbles, and monstrous snare sound (drastically processed and absurdly prominent in the mix) look ahead to 1979’s Metal Box, on which the group would fully embrace the studio-as-instrument methodology of disco and dub. “People loved that track,” says Wobble. “It’s got quite a sense of anarchy. In its own way, it’s as mental as Funkadelic. And it had the perfect funk bassline.”
Around this time Lydon started telling the press that the only contemporary music he really cared for was disco, a striking rhetorical move given the fact that the standard punk stance was that disco sucked. PiL, he stressed, were a dance band. Disco was functional, useful music. It dispensed with all the bollocks, the false hopes, and unwise investments in rock as counterculture that punk had ended up perpetuating. All this was part of Lydon’s continued rhetorical campaign against rock, which, if not dead, to his mind certainly ought to be killed off. PiL were the men for the job. Chiming in with his anticlericalism and his “Anarchy in the U.K.” self-description as Antichrist, Lydon compared rock to “a church, a religion, a farce.”
But the reluctant savior still had to deal with the expectations of his devout congregation of punk believers. Making their U.K. live debut on Christmas Day of 1978, PiL played London’s Rainbow theater, as traditionally rockbiz a venue as could then be imagined. Slightly less conventional was the fact that Wobble played the entire show sitting on a chair (at that point he couldn’t physically play the bass any other way). Lydon sauntered onstage carrying two plastic shopping bags stuffed with lager cans. After a year’s absence from live performance in England, he cheerily greeted the audience, “So what you fuckers been doing since I’ve been away, eh? I hope you ain’t been spending time and money down the King’s Road” (a reference to the London street where Malcolm McLaren and his designer partner Vivienne Westwood’s punk boutique was located). The audience hollered for Pistols tunes, but Lydon was adamant: “If you wanna hear that, fuck off! That’s history.” Although the music was intermittently powerful, PiL’s performance suffered from first-night nerves and equipment problems. Lydon pontificated, upbraided the audience, but ultimately failed to connect. One of the cans he handed out to the audience was hurled back, unopened, glancing off his face and drawing blood. As a result, Lydon and Levene spent portions of the show with their backs turned to the crowd. There was no encore and the gig ended sourly, energy blocked, like bad sex.
The year 1978 limped to a close for PiL, the group’s future unclear. Many wondered whether Lydon had thrown it all away, that awesome power at his disposal, effectively abandoning the audience he’d mobilized and who were now looking for leadership. But 1979 lay wide-open, and Lydon’s greatest musical triumphs actually lay ahead of him.
CHAPTER 2
AUTONOMY IN THE U.K.:
DIY AND THE BRITISH INDEPENDENT-LABEL MOVEMENT
THERE ARE PEOPLE who will say in all earnestness that the Buzzcocks EP Spiral Scratch was a more epochal punk single than “Anarchy in the U.K.” Released in January 1977 on the Buzzcocks’ own New Hormones label, the EP wasn’t the first independently released
record, not by a long stretch, but it was the first to make a real polemical point about independence. In the process, Spiral Scratch inspired thousands of people to play the do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself game.
Spiral Scratch was simultaneously a regionalist blow against the capital (Manchester versus London) and a conceptual exercise in demystification (“spiral scratch,” because that’s what a record materially is, a spiral groove scratched into vinyl). The back cover itemized details of the recording process, such as which take of the song they’d used and the number of overdubs. The EP’s catalog number, ORG-1, was a Left-leaning bookworm’s wisecrack: ORG-1 = ORG ONE = orgone, Wilhelm Reich’s neurolibidinous life force.
“Spiral Scratch was playful,” says Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. “Play was very important.” That spirit came through in the EP’s most famous song, “Boredom,” which was simultaneously an expression of real ennui (“I’m living in this movie/but it doesn’t move me”) and a metapop comment on boredom as a prescribed subject for punk songs and punk-related media discourse—a topic that was predictable to the point of being, well, a bit boring. Pete Shelley’s deliberately inane two-note guitar solo sealed the conceptual deal: a “boring” solo that was actually thrillingly tension inducing in its fixated refusal to go anywhere melodically.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 4
