PiL's METAL BOX @ 45

The first track is called Albatross. Bass notes as thick as any dub track pulse and are joined by a solid drum pattern peppered with snare fills. High guitar squeaks and noodles sound constant and discordant. Lydon comes in on one side of the stereo image, subdued, singing fragments of a limited range melody. The lines are about albatrosses and an unbearable second person, sowing seeds of discontent, running away and killing the spirit of '68. This was an improv track concocted in the studio but the lines suggest unfinished business with the self-proclaimed manipulator of The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren. The stabs on the first album were clearly not sufficient. The bird is the bringer of ill-fortune from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner whose narrator roams the earth, repeating his story of woe. The situationist students of the May '68 revolt in Paris provided McClaren with more non-comic stan-up material than Lydon found digestible. Sure, this ten minute long dirge might well have been off the cuff but Lydon was never shy of opining and if it fit then it was chosen. As significant is the same kind of outsize grind on an idee fixe might remind us of Theme that opened the first album but this time it is not an onslaught but quiet and relentless, clear to the point of being spacey. The lines float back past our ears the thoughts that stop us from sleeping, murmurs of worry.

Memories picks up the pace with wobbly flanged guitar and Lydon's voice in a more familiar reedy whine. This suddenly changes as thought someone  opened the mix's window. Repeat. Lydon's vocal takes on a kind of unschooled Islamic call to prayer. Lines of doubt and self accusation continue as the mix goes in and out of definition and the squealy electric Flamenco figure warbles onward. Swan Lake had been released as the single Death Disco. The drum pattern is authentically late '70s disco. Lydon wails about his helplessness to cope with his mother's drawn out death. Levene plays figures around the Tchaikovsky ballet theme as the vocal rises to a tireless scream and ghostly wails appear in the distance. The fade has a strange effect in that what sounds like a looped sample of synthesised strings starts at a loud note before toning down, out of rhythm with the rest of the song. Want to suggest something that's out of your control? Make it cross your rhythm patterns whenever it wants to.

Poptones is my favourite track on the album. It starts mid-phrase as the bass and drums provide a bedrock and the guitar plays increasingly hypnotic arpeggiated chords high on the fretboard. Lydon uses his attacking voice  to narrate a story from the news about a woman suffering assault after being driven to the country. The detail the victim recalled clearly was that the radio was playing what she described as poptones. Lydon's lyrics are fragmented but build a picture of chilling violence while the music keeps flowing, the guitar figure adds an eerie beauty to the atrocity. Careering has Levene on the synth instead of a guitar and he plays dissonant horror movie chords as Lydon's lyric tells of a gunman in Northern Ireland who lives as a suited city worker in London. A rugged bass and drums punch courses beneath the horrifying juxtaposition. "A face is raining across the border..."

No Birds takes its title from Keats's eerie poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci in which a knight is tempted by a supernatural beauty only to find himself enveloped in evil. Here the effect is transposed to what looks like suburbia. "This could be heaven, shallow spreads of ordered lawns..." But the more he describes it the more plainly static and breathless it appears. Graveyard begins, giving us the same dub groove with spiky guitar that speaks for the album in general But this time it's an instrumental. Levene's shining discords dance above the bedrock like bratty ghosts.

The Suit adds to a short bass figure repeated throughout, a series of snide taunts at conformity to a conventional life where if it's consumable it's good and vice versa. Lydon's vocal is more of a chant, the outsider kid smirking at the playground games and powerplays with observations that rise and fall through his cigarette smoke. Bad Baby pits a fractured drum pattern against an energetic bass groove and Levene's piercing horror synths as Lydon in a creepy high voice mixes the every day in the housing estate with the harrowing image of a baby abandoned in a car park. Everyone who sees it tells themself to ignore it until it vanishes. 

Socialist is an upbeat workout of beeping synthesisers with a bass groove. Chant begins with ragged guitar and a downmixed chanting of words love, war, fear, hate. Lydon's vocal snakes above it, distorted sneer. "It's not important. It's not worth a mention in the Guardian."  And then he repeats the word chant under the screaming guitar wash. After that study in sour, Radio 4's big warm synth strings wash feels almost sarcastic. Is this what you wanted after all that, it seems to ask. No drums but the bass is busy beneath, spodging around. It sounds improvised and left as is. And guess what, it's really lovely.

Unless you bought the later double vinyl Second Edition release, the bustling uniformity might be hard to take. Designer Dennis Morris' packaging was intended as a taunt to user friendly pop music delivery. The album was released as three twelve inch forty-fives which were stuffed tightly into a metal container that resembled a cine film cannister. The cans were hard to open and the discs were hard to get out without damage. Worse still, the metal used for the case was intended to rust and deteriorate over time and did. Propaganda by deed? Well, I never saw an original copy but I remember how funny I found the idea. The punk wars had failed but in the wake a new critical music was emerging with intent to disrupt and challenge, sometimes with a gleaming smile and sometimes with a guttural curse. Metal Box dissed its own market with this beautiful monstrosity. I wonder if anyone in that fevered era thought to keep their copy safe from its own intended doom?

When the conventional gatefold album came out and followed on from the debut with the title Second Edition, more people heard the music and experienced the one-song band from before was actually making music you could get into. It was a different deal to have to change the disc over and then the disc itself to hear the whole thing and then just to change four times. That strikes me as being a more benign measure. Take it in smaller doses, make each side special enough to go through those (mostly) two songs and think about them. My CD (yes, with a mini metal box which, yes, is rusting) presents everything in one long string and anyone who heard it first like this (I had it on a C-90 cassette, at first) will have come away exhausted. The smaller doses work a lot better. As I listened for this blog I began to split up the old side listings separately. That's when this record makes sense.

Metal Box is often given the accolade of being the apex of post punk. I don't find lists of cultural artefacts that interesting but I don't know if I'd agree, entirely. The anti-consumerist paradox of the packaging is gloriously of its time and the music is a strong consolidation of the tatters of the debut album. However, when you move beyond the purity of the concept, it's the album that it should have been. The big spacey concerns of Albatross tell us that we're in for something more seriously crafted and that is what we get.

Lydon has clearly moved on even as far as to put himself to one side of the stereo field or low in the mix to accommodate the overall project. Keith Levene joined the spiky discord brigade of difficult guitarists like The Banshees' John McKay and Gang of Four's Andy Gill in fashioning a post-rock sound that begged for development after its first few forays. This album of many drummers benefits from diversity and also from Jah Wobble's grounding bass work. It is a great work but to elevate it above a field of similarly great works misses the point, the assured and cool anonymity of it that graced the best of music for about five bristlingly rich years of musical exploration. Yes, it all got swallowed into the big mainstream whale but for that time when you could be scary without pretending you were a vampire, classical without faux-poshness, and music first without the music press, things changed enough to carry into the future and left plenty of archaeology for the curious listeners of nowdays. For the prickly contrarians who made this record, that's a pleasing feat that never has to sell out. 

PUBLIC IMAGE FIRST ISSUE @ 45

A boomy bass wanders in space before a distant scream brings a drum roll and a big spacy pattern filled with heavily treated guitar playing what sounds like a metalwork shop with saws and the kind of tools you don't want to share a room with. More screams before Lydon comes in with lines about boredom, change and the repeated refrain, "I wish I could die." This might be Lydon's disgust with the scene he and his former cohorts did so much to make. The old punks (meaning those veterans form a very short lived scene) clung to what had become cultural traditions. The call to arms of British punk turned out to be more of a fanfare for the expansion and exploration of post-punk. Electronica, industrial, dub, and anything else that worked. That was the real revolution. Lydon's final words after nine minutes of oppressive dirge are spoken like a doctor pronouncing cause of death: Terminal boredom.

Religion is a spoken word track. Lydon rails against religion with a series of attacks. Religion II is the same with some expansions and a three chord grind like the opening track. I clearly recall how thrilling this was, hearing someone take aim like this. Then, perhaps less than a few listens later, it sounded like the poem that the Year 11 malcontent couldn't get into the school paper. The musical version packs more punch.

Annalisa begins with a bass and drums groove as substantial as a soul workout. Keith Levene's guitar, as effect laden as any of the other tracks (probably a combination of ring modulation and chorusing, but I'm guessing) gives more settled form to the rhythm, adding more of an offset. Lydon's vocals are high and whining but very effective. The song is the story of Annaliese Michel whose religiously extreme parents took her neurological condition for demonic possession and effectively tortured her to death. The song is not aired for shock value like the previous one, there's real compassion in there, even if it can be difficult to detect at first.

Side two begins with the anthem of the year. Public Image begins in steps. A bass playing quavers alternating between first and fifth. Drums enter with a slapping snare as Lydon repeats "Allo, Allo..."  before hte guitar comes in with a ascending progression which sets off ignition with a laugh from Lydon. Levene's riffing on this song is epochal. Huge fanfare-like figures of two note patterns that sounded in 1978 that you would never be able to learn them by ear. After John McKay's sabre slashing style on The Banshees' debut album, this sounded like it was imagined in widescreen. Lydon's verses could be about his former manager Malcolm McClaren or just as easily about Sex Pistols fans, railing against the scene's expectations and misrepresentations. Here, he claims his own, singing with neither the sneer nor the snarl of his Pistols vocals, hitting the notes he needs and sounding in total control. The chorus is the title, an elongation of the vowels as Levene's new fanfare rides the rhythm section like waves. A classic of the past fifty years and beyond. It never fails to excite me.

Low Life is like a shrill retelling of Public Image. More directly about McClaren, the "bourgeoisie anarchist". While there is none of the awe-inspiring musicality of the previous song, this packs its punch in clear terms. Lydon's vocals are clear but low in the mix. There are a few echoes of Steve Jones Major third descents in the guitar in the chorus for good measure.

An echoed slag-gather. The band comes in all at once for Attack with another Pistols like chord progression. Like Low Life the mix is kept low. Lydon's vocals are even more buried and drenched in delay. The attacks of the title refer more to those received buy Lydon, this new band and the one he was cast from. Judges, ministers, press, and anyone else are targeted in a series of J'accuse tirades. the song ends in a brief shambles.

Fodderstompf. What to say? Tinkling piano. Bass and drums play what sounds like contemporary disco. Keith Levene was absent so no guitar. After a few taunts like, "be bland, be boring." Jah Wobble and John  Lydon are at the mic rambling in high shrieking Monty Python voices. Lydon at one point intones, "we only wanted to finish the album with the minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very successfully." This goes for almost eight minutes. The first time you hear it, it's funny. It doesn't survive the first listen. "We only wanted to be loved," is screamed repeatedly and forms a chant or chorus or whatever your mood at the time makes of it. The drummer, Jim Walker describes feeling angry every time he hears mention of the track, let alone the track itself. He just hears Jah Wobble and John Lydon ripping off their fans. Something like that means that the track will have its devotees as well as detractors. Me? My mood decides.

In the very early '80s the bass player of the band I was in saw the cover among my records and asked: "Did you buy this because of the single?" He meant Public Image and his grin told he had, too, and then lived through the rest of it. Yes, I had. It was played on local commercial station 4TO who had been surprising in some of their staff's support of the edgier music coming from the U.K. at the time. I thought it sounded marvellous. It felt like Lydon was really moving on rather than getting bogged down and ther result was that from what I considered greatness he had burst into flames of inspiration. I was sixteen.

So I went down to the import record shop around the corner (Ken Hurford's Inport Records) and asked about it. They neither had it nor had heard of it so I ordered it. I was called a week later. I was surprised as I assumed it was coming in from the U.K. It was on the Australian Wizard label (as the Pistols had been). It was on translucent green vinyl.

I played Public Image about five times in a row, mostly buried in headphones to live inside that gigantic fanfare. Then I turned it over and heard the rest, right up to Fodderstompf. Fodderstompf, at least to a sixteen year old Pistols fan who was expecting the ascension from the greatness of Never Mind the Bollocks to even greater wonders, fucked the whole canvas up. The endless dirge of Theme passed by without effort because, once you knew it, you knew that it wasn't trying to be a snappy pop song but an atmosphere. Religion caught me at the right age but I'd skip the spoken word part. The rest I liked but missed the rallying cries of No Future or Pretty Vacant and I only wanted them brought into the greatness of Public Image. That wasn't the band on this record, though, nor on any after it.

Things got better; Metal Box and Flowers of Romance were classics of the post punk aeon. But this angry, contrary, mess of a record stopped everyone who might have rallied. And if they listened to the words, rallied in the best way by using it as inspiration. Having your trust thrown back in your face like a bucket of beery piss was not going to do that. Whose would? Well, it changed. The following year saw the release of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle which had fun moments but also a lot of prognosticative bullshit as well. We had to wait until Metal Box for PiL, as they started calling themselves. In the meantime the sounds from good radio stations ironed out the need for heroic band names and titles and could swathe us in the sounds of discontent that were by turns violent and breathtakingly beautiful. This was a speed bump, however inadvertently, but speed bumps are there to keep us alive and ready for more roads. So, maybe they did waste seven minutes of our time sounding like high school Monty Python kids at three a.m., maybe we needed the pause.

1981@40: PiL - FLOWERS OF ROMANCE

A thin rattle swings between the channels until the big gated drum sound starts and Lydon's tremulous wailing begins. There are breaks and synthesised interpolations but this screaming harrangue. He sings as a religious extremist heading for action, over-focussed, increasingly dangerous. Four Enclosed Walls. The sparseness of the arrangement, violence of the drums and insistence of the vocal make this one unnerving every time.

Wobbly drums, an insistent chromatic figure on the synthesiser and a tiny clean electric guitar make this sound more like a Birthday Party song. Lydon's sneering vocal is about a an attempted seduction of him by a rock journalist. Eventually, he just says,"right, I'm finihsed" and leaves the track. The guitar gets spindly and spikey and eventually just ends on a noodle.

Phenagen begins with a honking drone and a distant clicking percussion. A meandering figure on something like a hammered dulcimer adds a medieval tone. Lydon's vocal is, like all of them on this album a repeated short melodic phrase with little variation. Phenergan is a strong antihistimine that can be used as a sleeping pill. the narrator of this song has rendered himself barely extant through various forms of opiation. Low piano notes, backward guitar and more of that damn kick drum. A reprise of the last line of snarling ennui brings the dulcimer back before an abrupt end on the kick.

The title track begins with yet more of the snareless drum kit, a high ghostly distant vocal, a string drone with some formless high string bowing. Lydon sings of a relationship in the death spiral. "I'll take the furniture. Start all over again." The violin surfaces for a Turkish sounding circular riff before the song  heads, droning and kicking to the end. The lyrics seem unambiguous but put in the setting of the strange hopeless headache that the rest of the song constructs the breakup feels a lot darker than the usual.

Under the House is a horror movie score with jungle drums. Big boomy echoes of slowed vocals and frequent deep choirs as a Lydon vocal, near buried in the mix, chants about seeing a ghost and a kind of claustrophobia and evil that takes over the building. Lydon did claim to have seen a ghost at the Manor recording studios where the band stayed at the offered rooms and spent a week failing to record all but one of the songs used here. Described as a time of frustration and failure by Lydon and guitarist Levene, the accounts include imagery of shadows and people seen in empty rooms and there is a sense of being haunted by gthe frustrations and anger of unfulfilled lives. Quietly and constantly terrifying. A friend at the time said of this track: "that's not a song, that's evil." He was smiling but only just.

Hymie's Him really was intended for the score of a horror movie. Michael Wadleigh had approached Keith Levene to provide a score for his film Wolfen, wanting an urban jungle. That means more of the same drums we've already had but with sound effects and synthesised brass and woodwind playing very cinematic brief chordal figures over the percussion. It wasn't used for the film but it became a great opener for side two of the album.

Restless drums over a huge booming synth drone. Lydon is buried in the mix. Very high vocal as narrator sneers at people trying to get in and the neighbours complaining about the noise. After lists of statements as to why the people knocking should feel ashamed the droning chant keep banging the door insists on a single note. An experience of constant breathless irritation. Lydon's house was besieged by fans who would knock and yell through the letter slot or even camp on the steps outside. This is what he thought of them. It's one of the longer tracks on the record for a reason, the band and their producer found the means to bring this grinding situation to musical life to be compelling but as unlovely as its inspiration.

Go Back has the usual intense drums joined by synthesiser in a chromatic figure eventually joined by Keith Levene at his most spiky on guitar. The lyrics are a kind of political companion piece to Four Enclosed Walls as neo-nazis rap out their mindless chants of the good days to come. If they forget history maybe this time they won't have to repeat the failures and just head for the glory. The flat voiced repetition: don't ever look back, good days ahead. The loopy keyboard riff plays the constantly crazy marching song. Obsession. Horrible. Effective.

Francis Massacre refers to the Irish prison Mountjoy and the prisoner Francis Moran who was doing life for murder. A sprightly but still dark drum pattern bangs on as Lydon wails about keeping out of jail and piano keys are randomly slided or plonked. At the end there is the same guitar sound Bowie got at the end of the marathon Sweet Thing on Diamond Dogs, a kind of sheet metal crashing and stressing. That's how the album ends.

This album heralds the transition of the band from working unit to the various and varying lineups that Lydon put together as the sole original member. Before it was the promise of a musical unit that could come from a ragged debut that mixed filler bullshit with brilliance to an unassailable masterpiece and credible live album to this document of pain and fear.

The change is clear in the first track. There's no bass. Jah Wobble has gone and his contribution not only will be absent from this record but there will be bass only two of the tracks. After this album the instrument was relegated to its standard position in rock bands, back near the drums, leave the personality at home. Until then for PiL's audience there was this big dark monument to a few public phenomena and causes for concern but also a virtual charge sheet of everything tearing at the band's weak spots which would leave them as a brand with a face; the very thing they had originally attacked.

But, think of it, while it's true that this is the end of the group as a cooperative thinking unit it's still pretty effective. Their front covers went from a parody of glossy society magazine photos to a metal can that was intended to rust, to weird representations of the members as cartoon monsters, to someone else. The latter was Jeannette Lee who handled their video art. She managed their extended presence at their gigs but also went on to be a mover and shaker of alternative music at the prestigious Rought Trade label. For this album, she looks like the flamenco dancer from Psycho. It's still funny.

If you liked Metal Box for its cohesion and confident dark mooded anger and its rich arrangements this one might have turned you off, made you fidget waiting for the bass or guitar to break out but it never deviates beyond a few details from the migraine of assaulting percussion, stressed noise and vocals that all seem to end up as endless chants. It's either best taken in as a single relentless run, a song cycle of spite or song by song on different days. It rewards both saturation and quest.

Some might comment on the strange baton passing with this record. The gated and harmonised drum sound is straight out of Peter Gabriel's third album (same engineer) and was adopted buy Flowers' producer by Phil Collins for his next one. So, either the two ex prog rockers were still not talking to each other or only found the joke of this out later but it still fuels the fanciful sillyness that PiL gained some respectablity if only as a conduit to the sound of '80s drums. It's much better than that.

This is the kind of thing that was on alternative radio forty years ago and joined the stream of tape loops, industrial soundscapes that promised to thrill us with new worlds we could find in our own heads, the kind of personal cinema we could make that had nothing to do with the sagging conventions of rock music. Billy Joel thought he was making a new wave album the year before with Glass Houses but just made another Billy Joel album. He must have thought a little edge could get him there but if he'd heard this he would have woken up screaming in the night. That is why the likes of Lydon and Levene were clearly still doing the right thing by their public in this set. While I personally didn't love this record at the time I did enjoy the worlds it offered and, a little at a time, I grew to appreciate its depth and focus and would think of it whenever the old flag about rock being dead was hauled up at the wrong end of parties at the time. Of course rock should have been dead by this time. But none of us counted on the thrill of powerchords for those younger even than we were. However, for a while, just a little while, this was one of those records that gave us hope.