Paris Au Printemps

Released primarily to cut down on bootlegs of the same concerts from early 1980, Paris au Printemps catches Public Image Limited at the peak of the band's career. While the album was criticized at the time for being nothing more than a live album and thus not adhering to the group's avant-garde rhetoric, the music more than makes up for any breakdown in the band's ideology. Jah Wobble issues forth pseudo-reggae liquid basslines while John Lydon moans and whelps over heavy, almost free-form guitar from Keith Levene. Although the songs remain quite similar to their album versions, there are far more prominent synth effects on this recording, adding more of an element of dark psychedelia to the mix and enhancing the menacing aspect to such songs as "Bad Baby," and the droning "Careering." Meanwhile, the epics -- "Theme" from First Issue, and "Poptones" from Metal Box -- sound arguably even better live. Unfortunately, while the music is great, the album has been pasted together quite sloppily from two concerts, placing the tracks in a bizarre order while leaving out some of the group's best numbers. Nonetheless, Paris au Printemps is a fine release, especially in the absence of any other live recordings of the band from this period.

Metal Box (Re-booted)

Martin Atkins, who went on to become PiL's longest-enduring drummer, was recruited when the second album Metal Box was virtually finished. He received a summons to the studio in the form of an inconsiderate 3 a.m. phone call. 'When I got to Townhouse Studios (where the band was recording), someone says, "There's the drum kit, make something up"', Atkins recalls. 'Wobble and I wrote "Bad Baby" off the top of our heads - what you hear on Metal Box is literally that first five minutes of us playing together for the first time'. As you might imagine, this isn't the best way for a band to operate. Indeed, "Bad Baby" is the only real blemish on what otherwise stands as not only PiL's masterpiece but post-punk's pinnacle.

The album starts with "Albatross", ten minutes of pitiless bass pressure from Wobble, over which Levene scythes the air and Lydon sings like he's being crushed between two giant slabs of rock. "Albatross" is "Public Image" turned inside out: Lydon's confidence that he can outrun his past curdling into despair. "Memories" and "Death Disco" follow, the latter retitled "Swan Lake" and now ending in a locked groove, Lydon's grief and horror frozen for eternity, like Munch's Scream.

After the surging urgency of the two singles comes the slow suspension and numb trance of "Poptones". Gyrating around Wobble's deep, probing bassline, Levene's guitar scatters a wake of harmonic sparks that merge with the lustrous halo of cymbal spray. Talking about his 'circular, jangly', almost psychedelic playing on "Poptones", Levene once compared its repetitiveness to staring at a white wall: 'If you look at it for a second, you'll see a white wall...If you keep looking at it for five minutes, you'll see different colours, different patterns, in front of your eyes - especially if you don't blink. And your ears don't blink'. Rising to the occasion, Lydon matches the music's sinister grace with one of his most quietly unsettling lyrics: sketched in oblique, fractured images, it's an account of someone who's been abducted, driven into the woods, and raped. 'Hindsight does me no good/Standing naked in this back of the woods', intones the victim, bitterly recalling the reassuring 'poptones' playing on the car's cassette player. It's not clear if the song is being sung by a corpse, or if the person got away and is now cowering and shivering in the wet foliage. On "Poptones" and other Metal Box songs, Lydon's delivery meshes with Levene's guitar in a weird modal place somewhere between Celtic and Arabic. 'When someone can't sing you get these natural voice tones', explains Wobble. 'So PiL's music was based more around overtones and subharmonics, rather than harmony per se. The Beach Boys we were not! PiL actually had more in common with music from Lapland or China'. "Poptones" whooshes straight into the Northern Ireland-inspired terror ride of "Careering", during which Levene abandoned guitar for ominously hovering and swooping electronic sound-shapes created on the Prophet 5 - an early and expensive form of polyphonic synth. Then came "No Birds Do Sing" - PiL's zenith, as far as Levene is concerned. Wobble and drummer Richard Dudanski set up a foundation-shaking groove, over which Lydon intones another scalpel-sharp lyric, dissecting suburbia's 'layered mass of subtle props', the serene narcosis of its 'bland, planned idle luxury'. Levene's guitar emits a strange metallic foam that's simultaneously entrancing and insidious. The instrumental "Graveyard" is disco music for a skeletons' ball: it really sounds like dem bones doing the shake, rattle 'n' roll. After this, Metal Box loses its way with the underdeveloped "The Suit" and "Bad Baby", but then recovers dramatically with the last three songs: the psycho-disco of "Socialist", all dry, processed drums and synth blips; the thug-funk stampede of "Chant", with Lydon ranting about street violence and wet-liberal Guardian readers; and the unexpected Satie-like poignancy of "Radio 4", with its sighing synths and gently sobbing bass. In honour of reggae and disco's twelve-inch aesthetic and to ensure the highest possible sound quality, PiL insisted on releasing the album as three 45 r.p.m. records, rather than a single 33 r.p.m. disc. The idea of putting the three discs inside a matt-grey film canister came from Lydon's friend Dennis Morris, rock photographer and member of the all-black post-PiL band Basement 5.

 

First Issue (Again)

Like it or not, Public Image Limited's First Issue (aka Public Image) was an album that helped set the pace for what eventually became known as post-punk. In England a vacuum had opened up in the wake of the breakup of the Sex Pistols in January 1978, and many punk fans and rival groups were impatient to see what ex-Sex Pistols front-man John Lydon aka "Johnny Rotten" was going to roll out next. Disheartened owing to events in his legal proceedings against the Sex Pistols management company Glitterbest, and disgusted by the punk scene in general, Lydon was determined to create something that was neither punk nor even really rock as it was known in 1978. Working with ex-Clash guitarist Keith Levene, first-time bassist Jah Wobble, and Canadian drummer Jim Walker, Public Image Limited produced an album that represented the punk sound after it had shot itself in the head and became another entity entirely. Embracing elements of dub, progressive rock, noise, and atonality and driven by Lydon's lyrical egoism and predilection towards doom, death, and horror, First Issue was among a select few 1978 albums that had something lasting to say about the future of rock music. And not everyone in 1978 wanted to hear it; contemporary critical notices for First Issue were almost uniformly negative in the extreme.

Not all of the material on First Issue was necessarily forward-looking: "Attack" and "Low Life" could almost pass muster as latter-day Sex Pistols songs if it weren't for their substandard production values. These two numbers were recorded late in the project, and on the cheap, as the fledgling Public Image Limited had already been kicked out of practically every reputable studio in London. And there was a bracing song about Lydon's pet peeve, "Religion," presented in both spoken and sung incarnations. It is about as vicious and personal an anti-Catholic diatribe as exists on record, and in its day was considered a high holy turnoff by many listeners. But from there it gets better -- Public Image Limited's debut single, "Public Image," was also included on First Issue, and Keith Levene's guitar part, with its tasty suspensions and held-over-the-bar syncopation, was an important departure from standard punk guitar language absorbed so quickly by others (the Pretenders, U2, the Smiths) that listeners and musicians alike forgot the source of the sound. First Issue's opener, "Theme," was a force to be reckoned with, a grindingly slow dirge with wild, almost Hendrix-like figurations on the guitar and Wobble's floor-splitting foundation. This was punk with the power of Led Zeppelin, but none of the pretension. Lydon's anguished mantra in "Theme," "...and I just wanna die," was the exact reflection of what his generation was thinking about in the wake of the collapse of classic punk. "Annalisa" is the hardest-kicking rocker on the album, with nosebleed-strength guitar from Levene; it is so good that Nirvana in all practical purposes purloined the whole number, with minor alterations, as "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" on In Utero.

But even with all of the calculated controversy seemingly built into the various cuts on First Issue, none attracted quite so much attention as "Fodderstompf." Faced with a serious shortage of material to fill out the album and with its release date looming, Public Image Limited decided to conclude the project with a track 7:45 in length, consisting of no more than a disco beat, chattering synthesizers, a bassline, and Jah Wobble singing, shouting, and screaming the phrase "we only wanted to be loved" in a joke voice. Rock critics savaged the song as a deliberate attempt to rip off the public, but it became hugely popular at the Studio 54 disco in New York; the drag queens and hipsters sang and screamed right along with Wobble out loud on the dancefloor -- nothing like that had ever happened at Studio 54. As it is perhaps the earliest extended dance mix that has little to do with disco or dub, it is apparent that "Fodderstompf" is an obvious precursor to the acid house and techno that began to evolve in the mid-'80s, although it is seldom accredited that distinction.

After it was released in December 8, 1978, First Issue peaked at number 22 on the British album charts, and import copies were snapped up in America practically as soon as they were loaded off the boat. But Warner Bros., the American label to which Public Image Limited were signed, was unhappy with the album, particularly in that the label felt the bass was mixed too loudly -- no one had ever recorded the bass so hot on a regular LP before. Public Image Limited protested, but Warner Bros. stood fast and the band ultimately relented; in the early weeks of January 1979 the whole of First Issue was re-recorded for the American market. But the only portion of this project ever to surface appeared on the backside of the U.K. 12" single of "Death Disco" in July 1979, a mix of "Fodderstompf" minus the vocals, re-titled "Megga Mix." Warner Bros. never released the remade album, and the remainder of it has since disappeared. By early 1980 Trouser Press was joking that the American issue of First Issue was the "longest rush release in recorded music history," but clearly long before First Issue was a "dead" issue with Warner Bros. Right after the remake session concluded, drummer Jim Walker surprised Public Image Limited by departing with no notice to join the interesting but now forgotten English group the Pack (Kirk Brandon). In came ex-101'ers drummer Richard Dudanski, and by their next album, Metal Box, Public Image Limited had already worked out an entirely different sound and approach.