TAKE IT AWAY! (DUB AS DECONSTRUCTION)

(Part 2 of 'Intensify The Contradictions', a deep dive into Post-Punk. First part here.)

“Dub is minimalist by definition: Reggae music deconstructed then rebuilt in deep echo and reverb… to emphasise the hypnotic power of its repeating, resounding bass and drum.”
- Chris M. Slawecki  

“My own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”
- Samuel Beckett

“The nature of dub was the holes.”
- Mark Stewart of The Pop Group ('The Wire', No. 293)

In short, by ’78 Punk’s leathers had started to feel like a straight-jacket, a form of fundamentalism taking rock back to its foot-stomping origins. This felt like a cop-out, a retreat to the already-trod.

But at the same time much of the suspect Seventies music had been additional, hyphenated… Progressive Rock, Jazz Rock, Rock Operas, concertos for group and orchestra etc… as if Rock was mere meat and potatoes needing extra, more exotic ingredients poured over in order to titivate it. With enemies to the fore and aft, which way to go?

The guide out of this impasse was Dub. Keith Levene latter commented “those Jamaican dub plates fascinated me, because they had nothing to do with accepted structures and formats at that time. Nothing to do with the blues or rock music. Those dubs sounded so strange, like music from another planet…. it takes a real discipline to actually subtract from the spaces rather than add all the time.”

And the last sentence is key. Magically, dub was subtractive without being restrictive. It was quite literally the art of taking things out, stripping elements from a track and occasionally throwing them back in, just to see how it sounded. Or maybe throwing in something from a completely different track, them mangling them all with studio trickery or making up your own elements.

So to Post-Punk ears, Punk’s failure had been to not strip things back far enough, getting to guitar/bass/drums then stopping arbitrarily like a British workman hitting break-time. Confronted by the famous ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ slogan – “here’s a chord, here’s another, now form your own band!” – Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christopherson complained “but why do you need that many?”

Some took this reductionist approach literally. Plentiful are the songs covered in this book which really did only use one chord. Still others, Throbbing Gristle among them, got by with less. (Not a joke! Not hyperbole! Not an imaginary story!)

But the real point was to apply the Dub sensibility philosophically. As Reynolds says of PiL (perhaps the defining Post-Punk band), they “assimilated… the dub aesthetic of subtraction without ever resorting to obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.” Despite Wobble’s rumbling bass, a less than clued-up listener might even have missed the influence entirely.

British Punk had always loved reggae in any form. Before their own records had been released, it was usually Reggae that got played over the PA before the bands came on. But it had been a hopeless unrequited white-boy love, forever behind the beat. Most Punk attempts to play reggae had been both literal and excruciating, for example the Clash’s cod-awful cover of ‘Police and Thieves’ (which Lee Perry detested). This borrowing of a Reggae sensibility was new.

Striving to escape Punk’s genre trap, Post-Punk had no unified sound but a diversity of styles and approaches. Yet underneath these there was a common underlying philosophy of deconstruction, which came through dub reductivism. While the Slits couldn’t have sounded more Dubby if they tried (and doubtless they did), the clipped austerity of Wire and Gang of Four or the gothic howl of the Banshees couldn’t have sounded less Dubby. Yet both bands had started with a quite conscious process of removal and reduction.

“It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché”, commented Banshee Steve Severin. “Never having a guitar solo, never ending a sound with a loud drum smash.” Wire’s (quite literal) list of ins and outs was assisted by a lucky accident. When the original guitarist was waylaid by a broken leg, the rest found that the same songs simply sounded better without him. “All the fat, all the meander suddenly disappeared,” noted Bruce Gilbert. Colin Newman commented “the idea was not to do Punk [but something] more reduced... How do you get to the next stage? You take elements away.”

Skipping his parts inevitably shortened songs, even from Punk’s two minutes fifty nine. Almost all of their first album comes in under the two-minute mark; too quick, as the paleo-Punks discovered, for pogoing. (So, in a move which would become typical, they took to hurling cans.)

Gang of Four’s Andy Gill commented how they’d replace guitar solos with “anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole.” What you took out had just as much a presence as what you left in. More generally, Factory’s producer Martin Hannett, in many ways the Phil Spector of Post-Punk, was a big Dub fan who strove to create a sense of space in music – “deserted public places, empty office blocks.”

The other main input Post-Punk transfused from Dub was a playful attitude. Dub always prized the spliff in hand above the masterplan. “Play was very important,” commented Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. Or as it was put by Captain Beefheart (another Post-Punk touchstone), “I play music. Too many work it.” This sense of play cross-fed with a general (if largely undefined) left-libertarian attitude, with its emphasis on the liberation of desire and disdain for the hairshirt militancy of (the numerous) Trot factions. The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart cited “the French ultra-left, the Situationist International, Artaud and the dissident surrealists, the Dutch Provos, 60s and 70s fringe groups.”

This led to a massive emphasis on spontaneity as the mother of invention, on seizing the moment, on doing something once and moving on. It led to very little emphasis on making sure experiments actually came off, or on creating a back catalogue of lasting worth. In short, you weren’t likely to worry about the risk of failure if you weren’t engaged by the prospect of ‘success’ either.

This may seem odd to some, for Post-Punk now has a reputation for dourness. And it’s true the phrases ‘Joy Division’ and ‘barrel of laughs’ may not immediately feel like natural bedfellows. But ‘playful’ shouldn’t be taken to mean simply ‘entertaining’ or ‘good time’. Watch any child and you’ll soon realise what a serious business play is. Gang of Four sarcastically titled their main album ’Entertainment’, while Fast Product label coined the slogan ‘difficult fun’ – perfectly encapsulating the distinction.

Moreover if, as already said, Post-Punk’s provocation was in part just one great big practical joke, it was one which relied for effect on being delivered deadpan – on leaving the audience edgily unsure of how to take things. My research isn’t exhaustive, but I’m not sure that a single participant ever broke into a smile between 1978 and 1982. Not in public, at any rate.

Further instalments to follow... 

“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.

LANKUM/ METAL BOX REBUILT IN DUB (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

LANKUM
Barbican, London

Thurs 4th May

If your idea of Irish folk is professionally genial types trilling “fiddle-de-i-de-o” in plastic Paddy pubs, Lankum are your necessary antidote.

They’re part of the same general Dublin scene as John Francis Flynn, last seen on the roof of the De La Warr. But a better compare-and-contrast would be, conveniently enough, the last folk gig attended before this - the Scottish duo Burd Ellen. Both are part of what I’m dubbing Drone Folk until a better name comes along. (Which hopefully won’t be long.)

Except Burd Ellen are bewitching, like if you listen to them too long you’ll never make it back out of that enchanted wood. While Lankum are definitely about this mortal world, less likely to be found in the faerie realm, and more the graveyard. Less Edmund Spenser, more Thomas Hardy. Its long been a truism that folk songs have a higher body count than gangster rap. But Lankum push that along more than a little, with mortality as inevitable as the closing rhyme. Like death in a folk tale, relentlessly stalking his victim, tracks are long, slow and - above all - patient.

’The Pride Of Petravore’ starts with violin and bowed acoustic guitar. It sounds like the creaking of the world turning, more the sort of thing the Kronos Quartet would bring to the Barbican, by a composter from some East European country you hadn’t known existed. They then throw a jaunty tin whistle tune over the top. Which only makes the thing more eerie. (And later add a vocal section, not to be found on the record, folks.)

So they can feel like they’re on a mission to take folk standards and twist them. ’The Wild Rover’ opens the set, and what’s normally a raucous drinking song in their hands become bleak as moorland. Even when they go in for reels, as they do for the finale, there’s something slightly unhinged, almost possessed about them. Their sound has been compared to Sunn 0))), Swans and My Bloody Valentine, all Lucid Frenzy faves but scarcely standard folk influences.

Except they more commonly work the other way up to that. It’s a bit like the way the Velvet Underground brought together folk and rock - not as a creative contrast but as though the two had belonged together all along, and somehow no-one had noticed before now. In their way, Lankum are quite a traditional folk outfit. Their albums come with sleeve notes relating how they came across these songs, described at one point as “long thought forgotten.” They play traditional instruments, at least most of the time. Radie Peat even sings with a hand cupped to her ear. They just bring out the unhurried nature of those songs and the natural drone tendencies of those instruments.

And this may be most evident in the Radie Peat songs, such as ’Go Dig My Grave’ or ’Hunting the Wren’, which glowers with a slow-building intensity under vocals which exude inevitability. Other instruments get added along the way, but not adding countermelodies so much as thickening the stew. And so, however much I loved the Burd Ellen gig, I guess in the final count I just love Lankum more.

A view which seems surprisingly widespread. I’d cynically expect them to be one of those bands who win armfuls of awards and occasionally sell a record or two. In fact the popular appetite for eight-minute dirges about death turns out to be quite high. The Barbican’s packed, and I’ve seen bands whose finale didn’t get as much enthusiastic applause as the opening number receives here. Is this because they’re so good at it? Or do songs about the inevitability of mortality capture the spirit of the moment? Probably both.

...and finally, correcting a heckler, Peat explained her name’s pronounced “Ray-dee.” Which means if she ever married Roddy Radiation she’d be Radie Radiation. I think we should try to set them up.

’Go Dig My Grave’, from Paris, a couple of days before…

METAL BOX: REBUILT IN DUB
(Feat. Jah Wobble + the Invaders of the Heart)
Chalk, Brighton
Sun 7th May

“Let’s just start, shall we?” Jah Wobble gets going with characteristic genial geezerishness. But we here at Lucid Frenzy Tower are more in the way of obsessive nerds, so we’re going to lead up to things…

Public Image Ltd’s, ’Metal Box’ is seen as a definitive Post-Punk album, but more than that it’s surely one of the classic albums of all time. A reputation underlined by personality clashes ensuring that line-up never recorded again. It stood alone, or so it seemed.

Then about a decade ago, John Lydon reformed PiL. Some accounts say he offered Wobble ever-more silly amounts of money to rejoin. But Wobble instead took up with the other ex-member, Keith Levene, as Metal Box In Dub. And though alas I never got to see them, reworked versions of those days were already showing up in Wobble’s solo let. (Presumably why two tracks from the first album, ’Public Image’ and ’Fodderstompf’, show up here.) 

When Levene sadly died last year, that looked to be that. Except Wobble subsequently released the ’Metal Box: Rebuilt In Dub’ album. And, as you may have already guessed, toured.

Though reasons for the separate reunions were decidedly personal (Lydon had, at different times, sacked both Wobble and Levene), music differences still ensued. New PiL… let’s call them that… were essentially a new band working to the PiL mindset, and treated those tracks as covers, to be reworked in their own style. While with Wobble they’re more like standards which need souping up and rejuvenating.

He recites one of the album’s lyrics, “I could be wrong, it could be hate”. And it’s odd to think back to the time where the arch-egoist Lydon was writing so much about self-doubt. But more the point here is what this says about the music. ’Metal Box’ was a bold statement, audaciously calling time on the old, but there was also something sketch-like, almost tentative about it. The mostly improvised tracks found their way by walking it.

Yet at the same time the thumping bass of Reggae sound systems had been a big influence. Chiefly channelled through Wobble’s bass, often the through-line holding those tracks together. And so these powered-up reworkings both take the music forward and bring it back to its roots. And to hear these tracks delivered with such resounding force is something of a revelation! Old chassis, new engine.

There’s little of the spaciness so associated with Dub. “In Dub” means, I suspect, in the Dub spirit of taking what’s done as raw materials for what’s being done right now. And let’s remember what got Wobble sacked from PiL, at least ostensibly, was reworking tracks for his solo releases. ’Metal Box Goes Dancefloor’ might better capture the sound. The album cover’s of a speaker, after all. With those thumping riffs perhaps even ’Metal Box Goes Rock’, which would have been heresy back in those anti-rockist days!

So ’Albatross’ opened the album, the New PiL gig I went to, and it does again here. In fact as the Wobble and Levene gigs had a different, more free-form feel, that gives us four separate versions! And those four versions could scarcely sound more different. So many different ways to get rid of an albatross.

Wobble also says “who wants some Dub? And some fun?” And, perhaps strangely, this is a little like seeing a band who’ve played these tracks for years, and now need to throw in changes to keep themselves sane. Snatches of other numbers, not necessarily other PiL tracks, are thrown in without warning or explanation. And the band lark about on stage even more than they usually do. (Leading to some lark-like dancing in the audience.) The combination is bit like being in the path of a jet engine while the Captain cracks gags over the tannoy, exhilarating but also discombobulating.

The only weak points… As mentioned after seeing Wobble before, he may be the walking, talking definition of a character. But he does lack Lydon’s characterful voice. Moreover, vocals on ’Metal Box’ aren’t the typical upfront audience-addressing affair, they work more as another instrument in the mix. And Levene’s guitar often seemed pitched to match Lydon’s tones. All of which makes them hard to emulate.

The gigs with Levene had a separate singer. Here his solution is often just to recite the lyrics, which is a little bit “don’t try, can’t fail”. It may work best when they’re just dispensed with, as they are with ’Albatross’ and ’Swan Lake’. And if there’s many assembled here who don’t already know the words I’d be surprised. (Honourable exception - ’The Suit’, where the words are pretty much recited anyway.)

Also, the keyboards can be a strangely normalising element. They only time they were used on the album was when they took the place of guitar. Here there’s points where they seem superfluous, or even actively getting in the way. They don’t really come into their own until the encore, where ’Metal Box’ is done with and they head more into the regular Wobble world.

In brief, going back to a classic album doesn’t need to be nostalgist or retrograde. It can even be a way of looking forward…

There seems a shortage of live footage, so here’s the studio version of ’Albatross’…

MAYA BEISER/ AARON DILLOWAY/ RAY LEE: SIREN/ JAH WOBBLE (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MAYA BEISER: NEW YORK CELLO

Kings Place, London, Fri 10th Feb

Cellist Maya Beiser was a founder member of New York based contemporary music ensemble Bang On a Can All-Stars, here playing solo. (The parent outfit still exist, and played London five years back.) As the programme looked interesting and I am known to like a good cello, I thought to happen by.

The folk singer June Tabor once stated that her talent was singing, so when it came to songwriting “I just ring up Richard Thompson, it's easier”. Beiser would seem to do a similar thing with composers. Three of the other All-Stars founders – Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon and David Lang – were composers in their own right, and in the programme notes Beiser wrote of the interplay which occurs when compositions are written for specific players. I didn't know, until she mentioned seconds before launching into it, that Steve Reich's 'Cello Counterpoint' was also written for her. (In fact the programme featured only one non-New York based composer, the Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov.)

'Classical' music is often assumed to spring fully formed from the mind of the genius savant, with the musicians merely assigned parts. But can't composers and musicians work within scenes, like rock music can? Isn't hearing a piece by the intended player the thing to do? Like hearing the Mothers of Invention play Frank Zappa? Certainly Beiser's spirited work-through of 'Cello Counterpoint' was stirring stuff.

If the gig was solo only for one piece was it unaccompanied, with the rest using at various points vocals, electronics, loops, multi-track recordings and film projections. One feature was how the projections worked so seamlessly with the music. 'Cello Counterpoint' for example is one of the Reich works where the musician plays over pre-recordings of themselves, here handily demonstrated by seven pieces of video evidence, lined up (according to the programme) “Warholian style”.

While Gordon's 'Light is Calling' was essentially a collaboration with Bill Morrison's visuals, effectively a sequel to the eerie and enthralling 'Decasia'. Warped electronics played alongside sonorous cello strokes, just as Morrison played warped and distressed footage from an old film – images appearing through the psychedelic corrosion, then dissolving again. At first it seemed that the sound and sight were perfect metaphors for one another, the electronics fuzzing the clear cello lines, but as the piece went on they seemed to overcome separation and morph together.

Wolfe's 'Emunah' featured etherial chanting, provided life by Beiser. I can find this sort of thing New Agey, so it perhaps wasn't my favourite Wolfe work. (That may be this.) Yet as with Gordon's electronics they made an effective counterpoint to the deeper, earthier cello sounds. I especially liked the ending, after the vocals faded out for a low bowed hum, verging on a drone.

'All Vows', the second Gordon composition, though not the longest piece was the album track of the evening. It not only featured solo cello but kept to a low range, taking a simple musical line and giving it quite subtle variations. Yet if it demanded close listening it certainly repaid it.

Lang's 'World To Come' was written shortly after the Twin Towers attack, but rather than a political response felt more existential. (Perhaps an understandable response to something like that hitting your home town.) The programme described it as “a kind of prayer”, and it was accompanied by a video by Irit Batsry focusing on water, a kind of matter without form. Creation, as the saying goes, is not a noun but a verb – an ongoing process.

Formally it was almost the opposite of 'Cello Counterpoint', cello and vocal phrases were looped as rich and resonant textures over which the 'live' cello part played the lead. The movements were ably matched by the video. Strongly rhythmic bowing was accompanied by fast pans across glistening waterways, a slower and more ethereal section by close-ups of rippling surfaces, and finally churning and frothing.

If stepping back for an encore seems more a rock music tradition, then Beiser surprised at least me with versions of 'Kashmir' and 'Back In Black' - surely any sensible person's favourite Zeppelin and AC/DC numbers. A constant guiding principle of Bang On A Can has been that rock music can be a source of inspiration, not just through taking elements from it but it's spirit. And what worked was they way these were not re-transcriptions for a more classical idiom but proper rock outs, with bow strings fraying. (Essentially the cello took over the function of lead guitar and vocals.)

Oddly, however, Bach's 'Air On a G String' was sandwiched between them. Which was not only a rupture of mood, but came to feel a little self-consciously eclectic. And I don't see how you can say, as Beiser rightly has, “all these boundaries we're created [are] so unnecessary” and then slap yourself on the back for audaciously mixing it all up. (To be clear, I enjoyed all three pieces, the problem was the programming.)

'Light Is Calling', albeit not from London...

AARON DILLOWAY

The Hope & Ruin, Brighton, Sun 5th Feb

It's often said that noise music is the punk of today. And true enough it's one of the few music scenes to remain underground, not to be heard flogging designer jeans for middle-aged waists. But more to the point, it exhibits both the pros and cons of punk of old. There's no more learning two chords to form you own band, you can do it just by plugging in a laptop. But, as those of us who recall the hardcore scene of old can attest, anyone can do it is both boon and curse. There's a whole lot of bad electronic noise out there, pressbutton rage in a quite literal sense. But then the rest just makes it all the more important to track down the best...

Dilloway is formerly of noisemonger troupe Wolf Eyes. I would gather he was in the UK touring with Genesis P Orrdige, but was tonight solo. His set comprised a contact mike he placed in his mouth and, at one point, a long horn of what variety I do not know. But (from what I could tell) all the rest consisted of tape loops, treated, manipulated and overlapped.

And yet though that means the sounds were mostly pre-prepared there was something quite genuinely out of control about the set. Dilloway was like a Prospero who'd unleashed the storm on himself, elemental forces he was barely able to marshall. Unlike most electronica artists who barely move, he'd twist and convulse as though possessed by the music he himself was making.

And yet again, despite being for this sort of music a lengthy set (the best part of an hour) there were no longeurs, or klunky switches between sections. If it was like watching a man trying to conduct the weather, which it pretty much was, the success rate was surprisingly high. Several times it would build and build in intensity, breaching every barrier you had imagined existed, then suddenly breaking off into a new tangent.

I don't think there's much of a philosophy behind or real-world analogy to be applied to Dilloway. You're not supposed to think about urban alienation, commodity fetishism or Trump or whatever. (And in fact a night off having to think about the orange abhorrence is to be welcomed.) Which I suppose is the point, that he's found a way to say something which couldn't be said any other way. Which makes him a true original.

Here's a completely different set. It's all good...

'RAY LEE: SIREN'

Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex, Falmer, Fri 1st Feb

I knew almost nothing about this sound installation event from ”award-winning sound artist and composer” Ray Lee, except it was attached to a Stockhausen festival. (Which it turned out to have almost nothing to do with. But sometimes you need to go with your instincts, and sometimes they even work.

A series of sirens attached to revolving poles are switched on one by one, emittting pitches matching the height of their stands. As the sound starts to build up it first resembles the venue's description of “pulsing electronic drones” but transforms as it builds up into the electronic equivalent of pealing bells. The only other variant employed was occasional adjsutments to the spin speed, and yet the combination was richly resonant and quite mesermising. Who ever knew sirens could sound so serene? Certainly it brought up the alternate meaning of the term, a captivating sound source which draws you in.

Cool things about the event included the way it built up from a simple premise into a rich tapestry; the 'wires out' presentation, all processes on open display: (relatedly) the way the guys working the sirens seemed more workers or road crew than musicians or performers; your being encouraged to wander the space, effectively remixing the sound in your ears as you moved; and the way it didn't rely on the audience being smart or sophisticated, but merely open to what was going on. But perhaps best of all they way it was experiential, in our YouTubeable world it was something you had to be there for.

JAH WOBBLE'S INVADERS OF THE HEART

Con Club, Lewes, Thurs 26th Jan

Last time I saw Jah Wobble, as you might recall, I was much taken by much of it but found it at times straying too far into muso/fusion territory. This time he has a new album, 'Everything Is Nothing', which is essentially jazz fusion. (Improbably featuring Youth from Killing Joke and Nik Turner from Hawkwind. I bought a copy, played it once and probably will never again.) The trumpeter of that album (Sean Corby) has joined the line-up, improbably sporting a folded hankie in a smart jacket pocket, and at times they now even go in for relay soloing.

And yet, contrary soul that I am, I may have enjoyed this gig more than the last one. And I think that's down to having less of an emphasis on your actual songs, with the ones which survive counter-intuitively relegated to the second half of the set. The only Public Image song remaining is 'Public Image' itself. (Unless you count 'Fodderstompf', of which only the hook and one-line chorus are kept.) The songs that stay are mostly from the original Nineties Invaders of the Heart.

Which is really the band playing to it's strengths. As a singer Wobble is a great bass player, and the outfit simply work best not boxing themselves into song structures but spreading out. Besides, Wobble's patented patter between songs keeps the audience interaction flowing. (After one interjection the drummer bashed a cymbal.)

And the trumpeter's role proved positive. Rather than a wild card he became a calm card, pouring like cooling water over the more active bass and drums, and preventing everything getting too frenetic. I'm not sure many will have previously asked themselves what 'Socialist' would sound like with a cool jazz trumpet break in the middle of it, but the answer is surprisingly positive. Perhaps it worked through sparing use, Corby stepping to the back of the stage when not at work. You don't play all your cards at once.

BOREDOMS/ JAH WOBBLE/ THE EX (MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

BOREDOMS

Scala, London, Mon 18th April

Boredoms are not an easy band to peg to a soundbite description. People normally reach for the term Japanoise, and certainly when they choose to they can raise a right ruckus. But they present something of a moving target to description. Thrilljockey comments that “across nearly 30 years, founder and leader Eye... has taken the band on a cosmic road trip... through times of tribal frenzy, oceanic tranquility, and massive sonic constructions.... Boredoms expanded their ideal of ecstatic, thunderous, repetitive music, steeped in power rock, electronic rhythms, and psychedelic incantations.” Alas I missed last year's gig performed with eighty-eight cymbalists, and this was the first time I've seen the band in more than a decade.

The set starts with a long section where the four players stroke and tap long metal rods, conjuring sounds somewhere between chimes and temple bells which simmer in from the edge of hearing. It gives proceedings a ritual sense, like they're not concerned with playing or performing so much as getting us all in the right mental state. Think of those spacey sounds in old sci-fi films as the flying saucers land. Only this was designed around calling the flying saucers down.

Last time three drummers had pounded out Krautrock beats with compelling and almost intimidating discipline, while Eye provided keyboards, cries and wails over the top. He was effectively riding the wave powered by the other players, a centre-forward propelled by his team, a general raised above his army. Tonight he takes up the classic back-of-the-stage drummer position, even though two of the other players commonly take to drums themselves. Rhythms aren't smooth, regular and Neu!-like, but pounding and tribal, at times approaching Tom Waits troglodyte level. To add to the chaos he drops crockery and cutlery onto his bass drum, sometimes attacking them with a fish slice. (Handily projected onto a screen behind him.) The centre-forward's become the tribal shaman, guiding the ceremony.

Which makes the electronics player the devil clown. In the opening, as the sound of the struck poles mounts, you figure it will be brought to a crescendo. Instead, at an arbitrary point he wilfully disrupting everything with sudden ear-piercing screeches and slurps. And he continues to play the same role throughout, somehow participating in and disrupting proceedings simultaneously. (From my original vantage point he was obscured, making his interruptions appear out of apparent nowhere.)

As events unveil beats rise, crest and fall, often going back to the ethereal sounds of the beginning. I find I'm unable to intuit how composed or improvised it is, only that it's somewhere in the spectrum between the two. It's a study in contrasts, one of those ying/yang, frost/fire, compose/decompose things, the music in some volatile primal state where it's constantly making up to break up.

Things pull together for the finale, Eye's wails and cries becoming a steady chant over a thumping tribal beat, sounding like they're punching a hole straight through to the spirit world. You're told, when structuring novels or films, to find the end in the beginning. And this gig was remarkably similar, it's finale both the return of and the opposite bookend to the ethereal opening. A point proven when the struck rods return for a brief coda.

The balance may have swung too far to the freeform at times, like they were upending themselves almost as soon as they'd re-righted. But then Boredoms gigs aren't supposed to be tidy in that way. There's something irrepressible about them, some restless creative energy. And that force which propels and envigours them leaves little time for quality control. Besides, like the English weather, even if you don't take to what they're doing right now they'll be onto something else in a minute. Yamataka Eye is the Miles Davis of noise.

Some photos of the night

An intro session to the group

From London! But an old gig from six years ago which alas muggins here missed...

JAH WOBBLE + THE INVADERS OF THE HEART

The Haunt, Fri 15th April

It would probably seem remarkable, if we weren't so used to it, that when Jah Wobble's played bass in the legendary original line-up of Public Image Limited that was how his musical career began. That surely should be the high point, rather than the starting point. However 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. This was, by reckoning, the first time I've seen him since the Nineties, after – in an already somewhat elliptical career - he effectively took a gap decade.

Things start of with... well, there's no getting round it being a lengthy jazz fusion section. Slightly perturbingly, for those of us who don't take to that sort of thing. Then just when I was starting to figure I must have imagined this guy ever having been into reggae, those bass lines begin. However it's quite roots and ska oriented, almost as if he'd assembled a set to convey the music that influenced him more than the music he makes. More contemporary sounds creep in only slowly.

The band are quite impressively tight, though at times the musoish tendencies of the opening do creep back in. Yet, and despite his description of the bass as “the king of the jungle”, his playing doesn't dominate. He's as often at the side of the stage serving up extra percussion. Expectations are often confounded. One track is based around a house beat. But rather than treat that as a substitute for a live rhythm track, the guitars play around it – adding pitch-shifting near-drones.

Famously Wobble rejected Lydon's offer to join the reformed Public Image, instead mischievously taking up with Keith Levene and the singer from a Pistols tributeband. And while, as I can attest, Lydon's set-list had focused on the better-celebrated 'Metal Box', Wobble draws more from the first album. Overall, the PiL tracks were inventively reworked but suffered from Wobble's strange insistence on reciting the vocals, particularly on 'Public Image' itself. (Perhaps he was not keen to imitate Lydon's vocal tics.)

He even revives the infamous 'Fodderstompf'. The track from that album most built around his bassline but using it as aural polyfilla, ever-repeating while in their Derek and Clive moment the band improvised words over the top. (“In order to finish the album with the minimum amount of effort”, as they gleefully admitted on the track itself.) Here that same bass line is turned from workhorse into workout. The one 'Metal Box' number is, inevitably enough, the classic 'Poptones', transformed into something glacial, as if Joy Division had ended up releasing it instead.

Wobble's 'cosmic geezer' persona is now well cemented. He is, after all, the guy who called an album 'Full Moon Over the Shopping Mall.' While other bands, concerned about keeping their cool, barely mention their merch stall Wobble waxes as lyrical as any East End trader over the “luvverly qualtertee” of his T-shirts.

My personal favourite Wobble era, at least post-PiL, is the Deep Space stuff. Because... well, it's deep and it's spacey. (Imagine Krautrock blended with dub, seasoned with some Miles Davis.) Little of which gets a look-in here. But he has too much and too varied a history to cram into one set-list, and you should probably look to what a gig is doing rather than what it isn't. Caveats aside, and ignoring the distraction of the opening, what Wobble gave us was qualertee.

And speaking of 'Poptones', from Manchester...

THE EX

The Hope & Ruin, Brighton, Wed 13th April

The Ex are always awesome, of course. But having previously written about them not once but twice, I wasn't thinking of doing so again. Only to find that this is the one gig which actually has YouTube footage. So let's let that do the talking. This is the classic 'Double Order', done as the encore.

'BADE THE ANGELS DISAPPEAR' (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Click here for yet another Spotify playlist.

There's themes of politics and religion, and how the area where those venn diagrams bisect is normally where the money's kept. That's when the theme isn't death ...any idea of a theme is probably just in my head, to be honest with you.

Portishead: Half Day Closing
Patti Smith Group: Spell (live)
Lou Reed: Dime Store Mystery
Woody Guthrie: Tom Joad (Part 2)
The Tiger Lillies: The Story of Cruel Frederick
The Flaming Lips: Free Radicals
James White & The Blacks: Contort Yourself
Gang Of Four: Capital (It Fails Us Now)
Mark Stewart & Mafia: Beneath The City Streets
Hybrid Kids (aka Morgan Fisher): Coventry
Camper Van Beethoven: When I Win The Lottery
Rydell: My Life in Motion
Gorillaz: New Genius (Brother)
Blyth Power: Under The Sea Wind
Kyuss: Apothecaries' Weight
Mission Of Burma: Weatherbox
Rites of Spring: Deeper Than Inside
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band: Clear Spot

“That all our sins may rest concealed,

And all our stomachs duly filled”

THE CRAVATS/ PUBLIC IMAGE LTD (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO PUNK... AND BEYOND!)

Only a couple of months ago, I took in the Melvins and Sunn 0))), two bands so similar and yet so dissimilar it proved impossible not to play compare and contrast with them. And then what should come along last week but..?

THE CRAVATS

The Albert, Brighton, Sat 11th August

”Sometimes... when I'm going backwards... I feel like I'm going forwards.”

I'd commented in an earlier post on the motley assortment of folk that were The Men They Couldn't Hang, but their line-up has nothing compared to the Cravats. We have... a singer who looks like he should be securing the door, in fact considerably more so than the chap who is actually securing the door. (And who, holding to this role, frequently tells us to “calm down, please.”) A guitarist who arrives attired as a World War Two flying ace. (And somehow retains this attire, despite the extreme heat.) A bassist who looks like a Guardian journalist, perhaps initially sent to review proceedings but now drafted in. A sax player who looks.... er, a little strange. And to top it all a spiky-haired youth on drums, the only person present who at all fits the punk stereotype, and (as events transpire) knows everyone in the mosh pit personally.

I ask you, with everything so gloriuously askew - what could possibly go wrong?

This recent reformation was my first chance to catch the Cravats. (Though I did see the Very Things, their more psychedelic offshoot, sometime in the Eighties.) They had done the whole punk thing, self-releasing their first single in '78 after a loan from the singer's mum, using John Peel airplays as lifeblood, even managing a release on Crass records. And yet it was clear from the outset their run was not of the normal mill.

When most punk songs were about hating your parents, your teachers or (at more of a stretch) whoever the Prime Minister happened to be, the Cravats pitched in with a single titled 'I Hate the Universe.' Which was their whole schtick, absurdist black humour given a backbeat, Dada antics mixed with English tomfoolery. (Though the early band member whose on-stage task was to watch TV does not, alas, part of the reformation. Unless he's still rehearsing.) At the height of the Year Zero rule, when the Sixties were struck out of musical history, they took from it's more sinister side. 'Who's In Here With Me?' and 'Ceasing To Be' are like younger cousins to 'I Am the Walrus' and 'See My Friends', with the air of menace not so much thickened as stewed.

The Shend's vocals are a mixture of plummy yodels and screeches, like an after-dinner speaker gone through the looking glass. (With perhaps a nod to the Karloff-styled narration of 'Monster Mash'.) Rick London's sax is used less as a rock'n'roll instrument and more a sound generator, sometimes injecting nigh-on white noise into the mix. (After the gig, a friend avidly shows me how he possesses more effects pedals than the guitarist.) The band seem simultaneously on the edge of turning to free-form noise, whilst remaining as tight and powerful as any punk band could wish to be. You can hear klezmer or cabaret in there, not paraded as a set of look-at-me influences but thrown into the whirlygig of sound.

The systematic deragement of the senses you can dance to. What's not to like?

'Rub Me Out' live from London a couple of years ago...

...and 'In Your Eyes', from the gig above. Lower sound quality, but then that's punk, innit?

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.

Brighton Concorde, Thurs 16th August

John Lydon (aka Rotten) was not just the poster boy of Brit-punk and arch-stirrer of media shit-storms, he was also a key ingredient in one of the finest albums in the history of everything.

Of course, anyone who knows their music will know of what I do speak.'Never Mind the Bollocks' is a pretty damn fine rock'n'roll album. But it was after the Sex Pistols, when Public Image Ltd released 'Metal Box', that punk became post-punk and the rules of the game were well and truly changed. Okay, so perhaps both changed music. But with so many no-hopers taking 'Bollocks' as their starting gun, only 'Metal Box' did it for the better.

Of course since then Lydon's increasingly fallen back on his chief career of being a TV personality. He hasn't really made a great album since 1986's 'Album', in fact he hasn't relased anything at all since 1997. Instead his chief occupation has been appearing on TV documentaries about punk in order to put everyone else down. (“Be a punk. Join the army!”) Well, that and advertising butter. He was always entertaining, and somehow you can't help liking the self-aggrandising snotty taunter. But it seemed the more a self-caricature he became, the more often he got hired.

...which is hardly surprising when you come to think about it. Like Damo Suzuki, Lydon has a natural talent but plays no instrument, so is more-than-usual reliant on talented collaborators. Yet he's too egotistical to stick collaborators for long. The better they are, the shorter thy last. Famously he had ejected the bassist from the Pistols, overlooking the small matter of him writing all the music. Then replaced him with Lydon's personal sidekick overlooking the small matter of him not being able to play the bass. That really set the tone for his subsequent career. The classic line-up of Public Image lasted twice as long (ie they made two albums instead of one), but that seems something of a record.

And on the rare days when he did perform, changes in his voice seemed to work as a barometer. Just as he swapped intense glares for gurneying, his sneering put-downs became more elaborate and theatrical, trilling consonants and stretching vowels, like an elocution teacher on bad drugs. Ironically they're in some ways not dissimilar to the Shend's, but it did seem to dampen the threat element and make them more of a self-caricature.

Nevertheless, though he brazenly continued using the name Pil for what were essentially solo albums, announcing he'd 'reform' the band was a signal for those with ears to listen. He'd decided to cut back on the TV punditry for a bit and get serious about music again. The Pistols reformation involved the full original line-up, and I didn't even bother to listen when they played live on the radio. Pil has precisely one original member, Lydon himself, and I bought my ticket as soon as they went on sale.

And they were good. They were really, really good.

Barring the new stuff, 'Metal Box' is the most visited album. In fact early on they launch into the most 'Metal Boxy' of all tracks - 'Albatross.' If it's a more rocky version than the original, it's still a chip off the 'Metal Box' block – in fact it sets the tone for proceedings. While the earlier, punchier numbers lie unplayed, tracks are stretched past any kind of shape or structure. They have the same relationship to songs as instillation pieces do to pictures, they become places to hang out in. 'Flowers of Romance' started life as a single. With this version I started to wonder if the very conception of linear time had been an illusion all along. (Alas they don't play my two favourite tracks from 'Metal Box', 'Poptones' and 'Memories', but it's scarceley a greatest hits set they're doing.)

As 'Metal Box' is the album on which Lydon sings least affectedly, making it's recipe post-dub trance-outs plus emotional intensity, his more recent style of singing doesn't always work out. 'Death Disco' in particular seemed to lack something. Yet had 'Religion' been any more intense, it would most likely have provoked a war.

I am probably doing the show a disservice and giving vent to nostalgia by not saying more about the new songs, which are strong and distinctive. The deranged 'Lollipop Opera', which I'd seen on the TV without quite getting... well it would be wrong to say it made sense but somehow it clicked with me. I found myself wanting to hear the new album, which wasn't something I was expecting. The new band work well together, with the guitar of Lu Edmonds (who's played with the Mekons and 3 Mustaphas 3) particularly notable. (Probably meaning Lydon will fire him first, so get in while you can.)

“We do this because we love doing it,” Lydon tells us before leaving the stage. “Remember that.”

And against all odds, the rentagob persona, the guy who denounced all other punks as fakes while making butter adverts, you find yourself believing him.

Punk was always at it's dullest when it started chasing some spurious credibility, ranting in mockney about being unemployed in a bus shelter or sniffing glue against the system. (The Exploited managed to rant in mockney despite being from Scotland, surely the ultimate in self-caricature.)

Punk was always at its best when it was creative and arch, aiming to stay in rock'n'roll just enough to explode and expose it's absurdities, but mostly heading out of it - into the unexplored. That two bands could come along in a row, both from the classic era of Brit-punk, who are interested in neither the nostalgia circuit nor in holding to some illusory musical fundamentalism... if that's not an encouraging sign, I can't imagine what is.

I should probably link to either a 'Metal Box' or a new track for the customary vidclip, but for no good reason at all instead here's 'Rise'...

In other news... find yourself missing other founder members Keith Levine and Jah Wobble? Wondering, if there can be two competing versions of Hawkwind, why can't there be for Pil? In such a spirit, Levine and Wobble have formed Metal Box in Dub. With the singer from a Pistols tribute band and Levine's Beatles T-shirt, this is surely staged at least in part as a fuck-you to Lydon. (Whose antipathy to the Beatles is legendary.) But the music is... wait for it... genuinely great, and I might even have been tempted to London to see them had I known of it.

There's actually odd similarities to New Pil's take on the tracks, they're not so much re-entacted as used as the basis for bendy, stretchy workouts, less trance-out than the originals, more free-form. And, while Wobble's bass was a key ingredient in the classic band of yore, both are notably guitar-dominated. This is their 'No Birds Do Sing'...