“It was a Hitler’s bunker vibe, all the paranoia,” says Wobble. “It added to the edge. It was a bit like that Nic Roeg film Performance.” In Performance, Mick Jagger plays a burned-out sixties-rock superstar holed up in his Georgian terrace house in Powis Square, Ladbroke Grove (the same hippie-colonized, dilapidated area of West London where Rough Trade was based). “I don’t think John ever regarded himself as a rock god as such, that would be unfair,” says Wobble. “But there was that kind of general atmosphere of withdrawing from the world a bit. Sort of, ‘in here, this drama, is where it’s at,’ rather than going out there into the world.”
Looking back, Wobble sees PiL as an opportunity that was literally wasted, ruined by drugs and lethargy. The situation was worsened by the fact that the protagonists weren’t even in the same chemical head space. He once described PiL as “four emotional cripples on four different drugs.” Today he quips, “If we had been on the same drugs, we might have kept it together a bit longer! Some people were on heroin, some on speed, some on very strong cannabis, and some on combinations thereof. Me, I was a speed freak. I was into powders in a big way. Drinking and powders.”
Nowadays Levene is cagey about talking about his heroin years in any detail, but in a 1983 interview for NME he was candid about its effects on PiL, confessing, “I was dabbling with it when we formed the band. Then I was doing it constantly for about three years.” Flowers of Romance, the troubled follow-up to Metal Box, coincided with the worst stage of Levene’s addiction. “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.” Yet in the 1983 profile Levene also insisted that he “used to run PiL when I was on junk.” Despite having a full-time member, Dave Crowe, who’d been recruited to organize and keep accounts, Levene claimed that he ended up micromanaging every aspect of the band: “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, [the heroin use]was because basically I was very lonely, and very scared, and under a lot of pressure.”
One side effect of heroin is constipation. Creatively, if not literally, Levene had a chronic case of blockage during the sessions for the third album, which began in October 1980 at Virgin’s Manor studio. Several days passed with PiL’s playing video games and watching movies while being waited on hand and foot. “There was a lot of avoiding the studio going on!” Levene says. “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.” With Wobble gone, the old alchemy—the way the bassist’s untrained, intuitive approach would catalyze Levene’s warped virtuosity—had disappeared. “It would have been better if Wobble had stuck around,” admits Levene.
Finally, a breakthrough of sorts occurred several days into the session. Instructing the engineer to keep the tape rolling no matter what, Levene tapped out some percussion patterns on a strange bamboo instrument that Virgin boss Richard Branson had brought back from Bali, then added synth sounds (“the animals” inside the percussive jungle, as he puts it). The result, entitled “Hymie’s Him,” was the weakest track on Flowers of Romance, but it broke the deadlock and gave the group a direction. Making a virtue of Wobble’s absence and Levene’s aversion to the guitar (which, according to Atkins, was partly due to his arms’ being too swollen to play the instrument), PiL decided to orient the new album around drum sounds, pursuing a percussive, tribal feel Levene described as “very acoustic, human…but very fuckin’ heavy.”
Moving to another costly Virgin studio, West London’s Townhouse, PiL procured a bunch of secondhand acoustic instruments—ukulele, saxophone, banjo, violin—and generated raw sonic material for sculpting at the mixing board. Flowers is the only PiL album where Lydon, the nonmusician, actually plays instruments, such as the three-stringed banjo on “Phenagen” (a track named after a heavy-duty sleeping pill). Levene talked about deliberately using “John’s total ineptitude to an artistic advantage.”
Whereas Metal Box pushed rock’s envelope to its fullest extent, Flowers tried to burst through into a totally postrock space. “Levene had this thing, ‘I’m not going to play anything that’s ever been played before,’” recalls Vivien Goldman, a regular visitor to Gunter Grove. “Talk about hubris!” On Flowers, Levene’s guitar appeared only on “Go Back” (self-parodically) and “Phenagen” (psychedelically reversed). At the same time, he didn’t really take the synth dabblings of Metal Box any further. Flowers really was all about using the studio itself as the primary instrument.
The album came together in a bizarrely disjointed fashion. Summoned to the studio to lay down beats, Atkins found Lydon and Levene weren’t there, so he worked closely with engineer Nick Launay to create striking rhythm tracks. “I’d fallen asleep with my Mickey Mouse watch against my ear and then woken up to that sound. So we put the watch on a floor-tom skin so it would resonate, and then Nick harmonized, looped, and delayed that sound, and I drummed to it, and that became ‘Four Enclosed Walls.’” Atkins was also heavily involved in the album’s standout track, “Under the House,” a stampeding herd of tribal tom toms with string sounds shrieking across the stereo field. On that track, Lydon’s processed vocals seem to emanate from his throat like malignant gas or ectoplasm. The lyrics allude to a supernatural experience. Some accounts claim it’s about an actual ghost that haunted the Manor studio, although Levene believes it’s about a more abstract sense of evil to which Lydon was unusually attuned.
Flowers was completed by the end of November 1980, but Virgin, who hated the record, delayed its release until April of the following year. In the meantime, as a stocking stuffer for PiL fans, they rushed out that most rockist of stopgap measures, the live album. Reviewing the pretty redundant Paris au Printemps in NME, Vivien Goldman alluded to Flowers’s “severe birth pangs,” but with her insider’s knowledge confidently pronounced that PiL had “broken another sound-barrier.”
Released as a single in March 1981, the title track from Flowers of Romance did live up to Goldman’s hype about PiL’s inventing “a new kind of rhythm.” It cracked the U.K. Top 30 and resulted in another deranged Top of the Pops performance that saw Levene pounding the drums in a lab technician’s white coat, Jeannette Lee dwarfed by her double bass, and Lydon, dressed as a white-collared vicar, sawing dementedly on a fiddle. Such was PiL’s eminence that when the album finally arrived in April, it was automatically hailed as another paradigm-shattering masterwork. More skeptical commentators, though, noted the distinct lack of work involved, from the paltry length (thirty-two minutes) to its desultory packaging (a Polaroid of Jeannette Lee with a rose between her teeth). Tracks such as “Four Enclosed Walls” and “Phenagen” may have been startling on first listen with their extreme sonic treatments, stereo-panned sounds, and Lydon’s prayer-wail ululations, but they didn’t linger in the memory.
Essentially, Flowers was a reprise of the more outré antics of Europe’s prepunk vanguard, bands such as Faust, Cluster, and even Pink Floyd (from the wackier bits of Ummagumma to their abandoned project of recording an album using household objects). Today, Flowers actually sounds like a braver mess than it did upon its release. More than aesthetic fearlessness, though, the record was shaped by an unattractive blend of indolence, negativity (“All it amounts to is that we don’t like any music at the moment,” Levene told Rolling Stone), and let’s-see-what-we-can-get-away-with gall.
Where the record ultimately fails, though, is in its emotional range. Lydon’s palette of derision and disgust had curdled into self-parody. Of the leave-me-alone tantrum “Banging the Door,” Lydon later said, “It’s horrible to listen back to that kind of paranoia.” A creepy account of being seduced by a female journalist, “Track 8” is particularly repellent, with its vindictive imagery of fleshy tunnels “erupting in fat” and naked, bulbous bodies betraying Lydon�
�s Catholic fear of the flesh. In Sounds, the self-confessed “sexless little beast” decreed sex “definitely over-rated. I think the human body’s vile and I wish everybody would appreciate that. Look at people’s faces: they’re vile, big, spotty blotches.”
Lydon’s misanthropy reached its dismal nadir with the infamous PiL show at New York’s Ritz on May 15, 1981. Intended as a sort of performance art/video spectacle, the show was hastily pulled together by Levene, his genuine excitement about multimedia dragging along the unenthused Lydon and Lee. Unfortunately, the Ritz was not an art space like downtown Manhattan’s the Kitchen. It drew a rock ’n’ roll crowd, who were certainly not happy about paying twelve dollars to see the band only in “live video” form. Skulking behind the venue’s gigantic video screen, Levene and Lee made an amorphous cacophony. Lydon taunted the audience with quips like “Aren’t you getting your money’s worth?” and direct incitements such as “I’m safe. You’re not throwing enough. You’re what I call a passive audience.” After twelve minutes, the crowd erupted into a full-blown riot. Levene, darting from behind the screen, got struck on the head by a flying bottle.
During the year of silence that followed the release of Flowers of Romance, PiL relocated to New York. Staying at first in hotels and then, as Virgin’s advance on the next album ran out, moving to a large loft apartment, PiL sank into a quagmire of apathy. Lydon spent whole days in bed watching TV, getting fat on lager and torpor. There was no shortage of sycophantic yes-men who eagerly trooped out to replenish the beer supply. “What was good about PiL when it worked was that he had a few no-men around,” says Levene, “like me and Wobble.”
By this point, Levene had quit heroin, but his relationship with Lydon was crumbling. What had been unique about the PiL setup—a world-famous rock star working with an avant-garde virtuoso in a major-label subsidized context of “do what the fuck you like”—slowly unraveled. Lydon, the nonmusician, began to resent his dependence on Levene’s musical ability. Levene, dependent on the Lydon brand name, chafed because all the media attention was on the singer. Early in PiL’s career, Lydon had made strenuous and sincere attempts to present the group as a real collective, not just Johnny Rotten’s new backing band. But by 1982, says Levene, “It was like John had decided to take that line in our first single literally: ‘Public Image belongs to me.’”
Another source of confusion and conflict was the question of where to go after Flowers, which had sold poorly. That kind of untrammeled avant-gardism was clearly not going to keep PiL solvent. In the short term, the group resorted to “hit and runs,” one-off gigs done cynically for the fat fees they could demand on the strength of the Johnny Rotten legend. When it came to PiL’s recordings, a strategic shift toward accessibility seemed the best course. This was signposted by the working title of the fourth album, You Are Now Entering a Commercial Zone, and the oddly radio-friendly sound of the LP’s first side, sort of “death disco” with most of the death removed. At a press conference in Hollywood, Lydon adamantly stressed that PiL was not arty and wanted to be accessible.
Tensions reached a head in mid-1983 over the single “This Is Not a Love Song.” When Levene entered the studio to salvage what he deemed a disastrous mix, he found himself under close surveillance from Martin Atkins, now Lydon’s right-hand man. After a fraught, all-night session, Levene received a phone call from Lydon, who was in Los Angeles, ordering him to “get out of my fucking studio.” Following the departure of PiL’s de facto musical director, Lydon hired a bunch of session musicians as his new backing band (Atkins doggedly hanging in there as the drummer), did a lucrative tour of Japan, and rerecorded the album.
Toward the end of his PiL tenure, Levene had noticed a weird thing happening. “John Lydon sort of became Johnny Rotten again.” In truth, the singer had never voluntarily relinquished “Rotten.” Malcolm McLaren legally prevented Lydon from using his stage name for a few years, a blow the singer turned around and made into a grand this-is-the-real-me gesture. Living in America, Lydon found himself feted by awestruck fans and courted by big-shot managers who encouraged him to exploit his legend to the hilt. Eventually he decided, or realized, that the Sex Pistols adventure was where his rock-myth bread was buttered. After Levene left, the ex-Pistol started to do something during PiL gigs he’d once sworn that he’d never do again: sing the Pistol anthems “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.” A decade and a half later, he re-formed the Sex Pistols as a touring nostalgia revue, reneging on everything PiL represented.
PART 2
NEW POP AND NEW ROCK
CHAPTER 14
GHOST DANCE:
2-TONE AND THE SKA RESURRECTION
JUST AS “DEATH DISCO” started sliding down the U.K. charts in July 1979, another single shot up like a rocket. “Gangsters,” the Specials’ debut, shares a surprising amount with PiL’s single: a bassline that pounds against your rib cage like a heart full of fear, baleful vocals (singer Terry Hall actually modeled his glowering persona on Johnny Rotten), and a sinuous, snake-charmer melody that’s almost like a cartoon version of Lydon’s muezzin wail. “Cartoon” is the key word, though. While the lyrics conjured menace and corruption (“We’re living in real gangster times”), the Specials’ manic exuberance made “Gangsters” pure pop.
The Specials and their comrades—the Beat, Madness, and the Selecter, all of whom started out on the Specials’ label, 2-Tone—dived into a yawning void in the market that had emerged by 1979, a consumer demand for a sound that came out of punk but was instant, full of teen appeal, and above all danceable. The postpunk vanguard, for all their experiments with funk, really made music for “heads” at home, not bodies on the floor. PiL’s “Memories” and Gang of Four’s “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist,” those groups’ most blatantly disco singles, hadn’t exactly set discotheques on fire. 2-Tone, crucially, was all about dance music played by live bands. The movement reclaimed dance music from disco, which was based around DJs’ playing records, not live performance. 2-Tone also ignored the innovations of seventies black music, all the advances involving intricate production and arrangement, and instead reached back to the rawer, high-energy black sounds of sixties soul and Jamaican ska, when a record was barely more than a document of the band playing in the studio. Appropriately, the Specials’ first number one single in the U.K. would actually be a live EP.
The Specials, the group’s self-titled debut album, makes for a striking contrast with Metal Box, which was released less than a month later in the winter of 1979. Where Metal Box was a studio concoction, The Specials was sparsely produced—by Elvis Costello—to capture the band’s live energy. Where Metal Box’s featureless packaging refused image, The Specials reveled in it, the cover showing the seven members of the band looking supercool in porkpie hats, thin ties, and sharp sixties suits. PiL’s matte gray canister was starkly functional, a pointed exercise in demystification, but The Specials’s black-and-white sleeve harked back to an older glamour, resurrecting the monochrome feel of early sixties British pop shows such as Ready Steady Go (from before the introduction of color television), early rock ’n’ roll films such as A Hard Day’s Night, and Northern social-realist movies such as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.
Yet the social reality the Specials’ songs depicted was bang up-to-date and essentially identical to that addressed by PiL, Gang of Four, and the rest of the postpunk vanguard. The Specials is a snapshot of Britain in 1979, on the cusp between failed socialism in retreat and reenergized conservatism on the warpath. Considering the group’s outward appearance of boisterous fun, it’s striking how cheerless their songs actually are. In “Nite Klub,” the wage slaves piss away their paychecks with beer that already tastes like piss. “Too Much Too Young” starts as a taunting diatribe against an ex-girlfriend who’s lost her youth to premature motherhood (“try wearing a cap,” jeers Hall), then turns rueful and almost compassionate for the life they’ve both lost (“You done too much, much too young/Now you’re married with a son w
hen you should be having fun with me”).
“Too Much Too Young” and the similarly themed “Stupid Marriage” both recall British kitchen-sink cinedramas of the sixties such as Up the Junction. The eerie thing about The Specials is that this music sounds as monochrome as those social-realist films look. The group’s oxymoronic vibe of lively bleakness dramatized the basic 2-Tone mise-en-scène, a dance floor hemmed in by desperation on every side. “Concrete Jungle,” the standout track on the album, takes a snapshot of street life in 1979, a record year for racial attacks and muggings. Embellished with the sounds of breaking glass, “Concrete Jungle” is driven by a disco-style walking bassline that periodically accelerates to a panicked sprint, as the protagonist starts gibbering “animals are after me” and “leave me alone, leave me alone.”
Few urban jungles are as wall-to-wall concrete as the Specials’ hometown of Coventry. Located in the West Midlands, Britain’s heartland of engineering and vehicle manufacture, Coventry was pounded relentlessly by the Luftwaffe during World War II. Like its neighbors Birmingham and Wolverhampton, the city was rapidly rebuilt according to the modernist architectural ideas that prevailed after the war, resulting in a drab sprawl of tower blocks, cement gray shopping centers, and tangled motorway overpasses. In one of the first music press features on the Specials, Sounds’s Dave McCullough describes 2-Tone’s birthplace with brutal precision:
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