“IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW”: PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED’S ‘METAL BOX’

(Top 50 Albums)

“Sewing The Seeds Of Discontent..”

It begins with bass…

Because where else? Jah Wobble’s bass was a vital ingredient of PiL’s sound. All too often in rock music, bass is really there just as a kind of stock, to thicken the sound. Whereas his playing is not at all secondary. It’s rich, full, laying out the ground everyone else moves on.

Then, as Simon Reynolds put it, “because Wobble’s bass carried the melody, Keith Levene’s guitar was given license to freak out.” Not that it needed much encouraging.

If it’s close to conventional guitar at all, it’s what you’ll hear right at the end of guitar solos, when the player’s finished running up and down the fretboard and just plays washes and tones. Usually a signal the solo’s about to end. Here it’s kept up for the whole track. It puts music through the shredder, then throws up those shreds in waves. Andy Bell compared it to “ground-up diamonds fired at you through a high pressure hose.”

It’s also similar to the ‘effects’ role rock music often assigns synths. Except of course they aren’t thought of as a lead instrument any more than the bass. Their role to provide peripheral ‘sound effects’, the musical equivalent of marginalia. Here they’re front and centre. And it’s surely not coincidental that Levene swapped guitar for synth on some tracks, most unmissably with ’Careering’.

But Wobble’s bass never quite carried the melody as much as a guitar would. Plus, both Levene’s guitar and Lydon’s vocals are as high in register as the bass is low, creating a sense of space, an open-ness. Like artists incorporate white space into their designs, PiL left space in sound. (Remarkably, we can now hear the ‘fat’ as well as the ‘lean’ version of these tracks, after Wobble released ’Metal Box In Dub’ in ’21. Live version reviewed here.) The result is one of the best Post-Punk albums. But it’s also one of the most Post-Punk albums, epitomising the sound. Alongside ’154’ (released the same year), and ’Closer’ (released the next).

As some of you may have already heard, Lydon had been the frontman of the Sex Pistols. And Levene was a founder of the Clash (if only briefly a member). Only Wobble had been uninterested in Punk, which he dismissed as “bad rock & roll”. How did they get from there to here? ’Metal Box’ let’s not forget, came out in 1979, a mere two years from ’Never Mind The Bollocks’. 

The answer’s given by the two things Lydon did on leaving the Pistols. He called Can to persuade them that he should be their new singer, only to find they’d just split up. And he travelled to Jamaica, to scout out Reggae acts for Virgin. And Krautrock and Dub were to play a major role. If you’re looking for influences, those aren’t bad choices. They’d arguably been the two most innovative forms of music from the previous ten years.

Except of course influences should never be treated as ingredients, the recipe doesn’t make the chef. And the Pistols had already been the band who launched a thousand clueless copycats, proof that what influences mostly give you is something to live up to. Levene has said “I respected my influences enough never to imitate them.”

Reynolds again: “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 the obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.”

And it wasn’t just the effects. Reggae was then popular associated with sunshine and good times. (Even if that wasn’t a description Roots fans were likely to go along with.) PiL turned that influence into something bleakly British, the sound of rain-sodden streets on wet weekdays.

’Metal Box’, you maybe able to guess the format. Which had proved expensive so it was soon repackaged as ’Second Edition’, a more regular double LP. In a sleeve which reproduced ’Metal Box’s greyness, with distorted photos of the band that look like Munch if he’d gone in for making fairground mirrors.

Opening track ’Albatross’ was effectively made up on the spot. And as Lydon has since said: "Many people don't understand that [the album] was improvisation… what we had to do was quite literally sneak into studios when bands had gone home for the night.” And the album was recorded guerilla-style, in multiple studios.

Though some have gone on to overstate this. The very next track, ’Memories’, not only benefits from multi-tracking, it’s clearly two different mixes (if not versions) spliced together. (With characteristically little effort made to hide the join.) Overall, extemporised may be a better term. Tracks were thrown together in the studio in double-quick time, with zero preparation. But the studio was then often used extensively, to work on what they had.

For all the talk of Can the album shows as much a musical debt to another Krautrock outfit, the duo Neu!, who had worked precisely this way. And Krautrock in general disdained the traditional way of recording, diligently transcribing the songs, practising until you were drilled in them, then going into the studio to get the finished product on tape. The Fall’s ‘Slates’ EP (1981) was mostly put together the same rapid-fire way.

Why do such a thing to yourself? Well, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that PiL were the least hardworking band in showbiz. Last minute was normally considered too early a time for them to take on something. A Virgin exec described them as as “a well-oiled machine that burns money and generates pot smoke and excuses.” (There’s an irony to their being so Can influenced. Can almost never stopped playing while PiL almost never started.) But it wasn’t just that.

Post-Punk was in its way cerebral. Both PiL and the Fall were named after books. But it also prized instinct. As soon as you start to think, you’re more likely to think something already thought. You needed devices to bypass rational processes and conscious thought. And you’re not going to think if you don’t give yourself enough time to.

Levene has said: “The idea was to break through conditioning, take yourself out of one channel, and into another space.” And Wobble: “Everybody these days thinks ‘This must be rational’. You’ll find music that’s not really on a rational level will worry people and produce extreme reactions.”

But enforced spontaneity was one means among many. Levene has also said: “I just had an ear for what was wrong. So if I … made a mistake or did something that wasn't in key, I was open-minded enough to listen to it again.” (Of course these are both classic devices used by Surrealist artists.)

On the late, lamented radio show ’Mixing It’, Wobble cited ’Poptones’ as the best PiL track. He was right. And in fact it’s also the best indication of what they were doing… As Head Heritage point out, “Lydon free-associates in clusters of words.” Listen a while and you’ll notice he dances round a few phrases, repeating them in ever-shifting combinations. Which is pretty much what Levene’s guitar does with notes.

Rather than hold their place in the mix, maintain formation, the two dance around one another, ever in flux. Motion is ceaseless, but none of it is forward motion. These aren’t songs in the traditional sense, moving between verses and choruses via pre-built bridges, they’re more like installation pieces you visit and soak up.

Wobble described this as “modal. You have a home key and you modulate around and then you come back to it… It isn’t just repetition… it’s a block of sound going on.” Much like Can the sound is audaciously stripped-down and intricate at one and the same time.

Not that many noticed back then. With bands, attention inevitably falls on their front-man. Exacerbated in this case by Lydon being the only face in a band then made up of unknowns. But, at least at this point, he was insistent they should be seen very much as a group. “In this band we are all equal. No Rod Stewarts. We all do equal amounts of work, we all produce equally, write songs and collect the money equally.”

The front cover of ’First Issue’ had been a beaming Lydon. But ’Second Edition’ featured Levene, then for ’Flowers Of Romance’ Jeanette Lee. (Theoretically a band member, though no-one seems sure what she was supposed to do.) And while interviews of the time were normally acrimonious, in perhaps the most confrontational one of all, part of Lydon’s ire is down to the show not wanting to interview the whole band. (Though unsurprisingly he still dominates events, with Levene popping off for a beer.)

Given all this, it’s bizarre how the band had a rotating drum stool throughout this time. Three different drummer play on the album (David Humphrey, Richard Dudanski, Martin Akins), while both Levene and Wobble stepped in at points. Others were roped in too, but not as far as recording. It’s something that should really ruin an album, especially one essentially about the interplay of the musicians, and it’s remarkable that it doesn’t.

“I Can’t Forget The Impression You Left”

Bur what, I hear you ask, about the words? Which had after all been Lydon’s main contribution to the Pistols. Here they were as extemporised as anything else, which straight away gave them a different, more stream-of-consciousness nature.

Lydon was previously known for accusatory lyrics, jeering diatribes, a kind of urchin version of Wilde. He sang ‘you’ songs, pointed outwards (perhaps best encapsulated in the line “the problem is you”). But he gives this up for ‘I’ songs, turned inwards (“All in your mind/ Where it all began”). They have quite a stream-of-consciousness character, perhaps inevitably with their being thought up so quickly. They feel confessional, yet cryptic and elusive at the very same time.

And his singing style changed as much as the music, less to taunt a target and more as though no-one is listening. And in this process spleen gives way to angst. Lydon later said: “PiL is more experimental but also truer and honest.”

Lydon drew the cover for the single ’Death Disco’, “Public Image Limited” added as if the artist’s signature. (Though the only album sleeve to see one of his drawings was the live follow-up, ’Paris Au Printemps’.) Add all these things together and we have an Expressionist style, described by no less than the Tate gallery as “art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas.”

And in fact it was ’Death Disco’/‘Swan Lake’ (depending on whether you were listening to the single or album version) where this reached his apogee. Writing a song about his mother dying must have seemed about the most unlikely thing for the ex-singer of the Pistols to do, let alone have it set to an abrasive guitar line borrowed from Tchaikovsky.

But this transition had been part-disguised. The first album had kicked off with a very much first-person song, ’Theme’. While the single ’Public Image’ gets both ‘you’ and ‘I’ into it. Yet ’Low Life’ and ’Attack’ are about as accusatory as a song can get. But who to? It was widely assumed at the time ex-manager Malcom McLaren was the target, with who Lydon was then in legal as well as personal dispute. Though Lydon himself has said before now it was the rest of the Pistols.

Yet when I first heard that first album, my first thought was that all those second-person accusations protested too much, and were pretty clearly a displaced form of self-criticism. “You fell in love with your ego/ it did not fit in the plan.” Reminding you of anyone? Besides, bitter ex energy for the dodgy manager and former band-mates? Can’t these songs be about something more interesting than that?

In fact it’s the social commentary lyrics which can now seem the weakest, which tend to a kind of O-Level social realism. (“It’s not important/Not worth a mention in the Guardian.”)

Let’s swing back to ’Albatross’. What is the title thing Lydon’s so keen to rid himself of? I think he’s describing what he’s doing, right there and then. The opening line is “slow motion’, and indeed it’s pretty at odds with punk’s paciness. Lines like “I know you very well/ You are unbearable” might refer to Punk music, which he’d grown keen to announce was now moribund. 

But that’s too narrow really. Post-Punk was not just anti-Punk but anti-rockist, insisting Rock music’s claims to be something wild, free and outside of social conventions were absurd, that it had long since degenerated to a set of stale gestures to sell stadium tickets. Same as the old boss.

In interview at the time, Lydon would vent his hostility to… well, to most things, but Rock was a common target. (And Levene too, if he ever got a word in.) “It’s dead, it’s history… it’s too limited, too much like a structure, a church.” Or an albatross, maybe. (I saw Lydon’s more recently reformed PiL, the one without Wobble or Levene, twice. And each set started with a version of ’Albatross’, suggesting to him it remained that statement of intent.)

When Life Gives You Lightning

This self-enforced spontaneity business, we looked at the pluses. But are there pitfalls? Of course there are! It relies on you escaping your own trap unscathed, scoring a surprise six. The band’s debut had been intermittently brilliant but doubtlessly flawed. And the follow up to this, ’Flowers Of Romance', was to be even more uneven. (It boldly set sail without Wobble’s anchoring bass, but met headwinds.) There’ll be few fans of original era PiL who don’t consider this their best release.

Which helps solve a riddle. The previous album had finished with a near-eight-minute track to bring it up to the minimum length that Virgin would release, brazenly admitted on the track itself. The next one was even shorter. Why did such idlers release a double album between them?

It must have been realised, at least instinctively, that this was the time it was coming together, that it was now or never. When lightning keeps striking, make lightningade. (Or however that saying goes.) Wobble’s famously described the band as “three emotional cripples on three different drugs”, which was never going to lead to stability. Notably, none of the four album sleeves (counting the live ’Paris Au Printemps’) features a photo of the band together, they’re always shot separately a la ’White Album’.

And the now best-known photo of the band is the one taken at Lydon’s home, where each stares out obliviously into his own section of space. After this album, Wobble was soon out the band. (With the usual contradictory tales about whether he was fired or quit.) The three never recorded together again.

Is it a perfect release? Well, we are talking about possibly the most perverse group of individuals ever known, so probably not. As the album moves into its second disc, it either loses its original focus or casts its next wider, as is your preference. 

’Chant’ with its ceaseless refrain “love war feel hate”, like a version of Hate Week from ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’, with Lydon channelling his inner Davros. (The device of constantly repeating a mantra phrase until it becomes almost a riff is another Krautrock motif, as found on Faust’s ’J’ai Mal Au Dents.’) If ’Poptones’ sounded sinister, this verges on the infernal. Though perhaps at variance to other tracks, it was a favourite for live sets and even TV appearances.

Let’s compare it to Genesis. No, really! ’The Knife’ had been about a diabolic tempter, with the singer duplicating his dark charisma on stage. Which might seem a role ready-made for Lydon. But ’Chant’ is more about the dehumanising apparatus of broadcast, the tannoy’s distorting effect on the human voice, like a power object that only leads to evil. (Lydon talked a lot at the time about disliking the divide between performer and audience of the gig setting. Though his attempts to break it down tended to be handing out the mike while having a fag.)

In ’Rip It Up And Start Again’, Simon Reynolds charts the start of Post-Punk as Lydon leaving the Pistols, then adds the similar act of Howard Devoto quitting the Buzzcocks to form Magazine. And notably Devoto showed a similar disdain for the herd mentality in ’Shot By Both Sides.’

’The Suit’ is the one track where the trademark sneer returns, with “it is your nature” never used more a put-down. Though it’s more dismissive than adversarial, an understated seethe, telling its subject they’re not even worth getting worked up about. It’s not one of the album’s best tracks, but holds its place.

The two instrumental tracks, ’Socialist’ and ’Radio 4’, seem the biggest outliers, surely done on days Lydon didn’t show up. The rapid-tempo ’Socialist’ can’t help but recall the speeded-up tracks Neu! used to fill out their second album. While ’Radio 4’ is all Levine. However, when you get used to the fact they sound nothing like the rest of the album, they’re pretty good in themselves. And segueing the calming ’Radio 4’ after the frenzied ’Chant’ is something of a demented masterstroke. (On the original release with no track break between them.)

More of a problem… for some reason, they used only the instrumental version of ’Another’, re-titled ’Graveyard’. The complete version was to be found on the flip side of ’Memories’. Had it been on the album, it would have been one of the stand-out tracks.

But it’s ’Bad Baby’ which is the weak link. Mostly, the band sound like a bunch of boho artistes scoffing at your workaday notion of rehearsal, and somehow getting away with it. While this just sounds un-rehearsed, at one point Lydon even calling out timing instructions. Though the hackneyed lyrics also hold it back.

’Home Is Where The Heart Is’, a significantly better track, was for some reason abandoned and later completed for the B-side of the ‘Flowers Of Romance’ single. (With the bass line of the then-departed Wobble looped.) Contrary to the Simon Reynolds quote above, it does use some of the more classically dubby effects, so imitating its influences may be why it was originally dropped.

It’s sometimes asked why Virgin were so tolerant of Lydon’s fire-extinguisher-squirting antics. They probably figured that something would occur to him before long, being anti-commercial doesn’t really make you much money. If that was their gamble, it certainly paid off. After the relative flop of ’Flowers’, a more commercial direction was decided on. Though a less commercial direction might have proved challenging.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that originally, Levene was on board with this. He was on board with the move to America, the universally recognised sign of embracing dollars. Yet ere long Lydon had booted him from the band he co-founded, and embarked on a tour of Japan backed by session musicians. It was the first in a bewildering series of volte-faces, between fortune hunting antics and genuinely creative pursuits, that’s lasted till this day.

And yet reforming the Sex Pistols was a blatant cash-grab, while reforming PiL was an equally obvious signal he wanted to make good music again. (I saw that version of PiL and said afterwards “Lydon seems constantly able to surprise you, sometimes even pleasantly.”) Then one day he became a Trump cheerleader in the confused belied that this was being ‘edgy’ and ‘current’, and proved his well of surprise had dried up after all.

Wobble, who’d left partly to get away from the anti-work ethic, was unsurprisingly the most productive, even given a long break spent on on the non-musical Underground. He embarked on a series of solo releases and collaborations, wide-ranging in style but normally creatively successful - even if his blacked-out teeth never graced ’Top of The Pops’ again.

After seeing him one time, I said: “As the Eighties and Nineties wore on his love of dub, Krautrock and world music became less marginal and more prophetic. You could play a good game of 'Where's Wobble?' in the history of that era, his trilby ever-present if rarely centre stage.” (If you don’t believe me check out the list.)

When Levene did work again, which didn’t seem often, it tended to be in collaboration - where his contribution was even less upfront than it had been in PiL. His main post-PiL act was to reunite with Wobble to form Metal Box In Dub, a calculated snub to Lydon’s reformed PiL. I never saw them, but YouTube tells of good things. Sadly, he died in November ’22. Peter Cook liked to tell a gag about his ambition in life being not to live up to his potential. Nothing was more true of Levene.