On Christmas Day 1978, almost exactly a year after the Sex Pistols imploded while on tour in San Francisco, the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten unveiled his new band, Public Image Ltd, at the Rainbow theater in London. The audience, John Lydon remembers with amusement, was “nauseated, because the bass frequency was so low your bowels started to vibrate.” He lets out his familiar arch cackle. “Well, it’s a different experience at Christmas.”
Lydon has now chosen to relaunch PiL, after a 17-year hiatus, with a series of pre-Christmas shows. In the interim he has reformed the Sex Pistols twice, but PiL, he maintains, is his “first love.” Over the course of eight albums and as many lineups, PiL was as inspired and confounding as its frontman. Its ferociously inventive early work has influenced bands such as Massive Attack, the Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream and any number of this decade’s post-punk revivalists. Its return should be interesting. “It feels clean,” says Lydon. “It’s refreshing.”
Indeed, a clean start was the original purpose of PiL. Lydon was sickened by punk even at the height of the Sex Pistols’ fame. “I don’t like cliches, I don’t like entrapments, I don’t like uniforms, and punk was getting into a real problem with that. It’s very sad seeing people filling up the first 10 rows trying to look exactly like you.” After the band disintegrated, Lydon, broke and forbidden by former Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren even to use the name Rotten, spent some time in Jamaica, seeing how dub-reggae producers worked.
“It was the spaciousness,” he says. “For me, the best rock is not what you play — it’s what you’re not playing.” Back in England, he recruited a new band (childhood friend Jah Wobble on bass plus former Clash guitarist Keith Levene), named it after a Muriel Spark novel, and buried the myth of the Sex Pistols with its first single, simply called Public Image: “You never listened to a word that I said/You only seen me from the clothes that I wear.”
REVAMPED AND READY FOR ACTION
The PiL lineup that recorded the benchmark post-punk albums First Issue and Metal Box will not, however, be returning. “They’re off on their own tangents,” Lydon says vaguely. Are they all still friends? “Wobble always, yes. Keith used to be, but he went off into his own little universe and never came back.” After they departed (Wobble in 1980, Levene in 1983), PiL went through several incarnations: on 1986’s Album, Lydon worked with a bizarre selection of musicians, including guitar hero Steve Vai, Cream drummer Ginger Baker and even (although his contributions went unused) Miles Davis.
The current PiL features two late-1980s members: guitarist Lu Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith, plus one new arrival, multi-instrumentalist Scott Firth. “We’ll see where we can go,” Lydon says. “Some things may be quite similar. Some may not.”
Part of the impetus for PiL’s return seems to have been emotional. Last year, Lydon lost his father and learned that his brother had cancer (now in remission) — events that reminded him of the early days of PiL, when his mother and his friend and former bandmate Sid Vicious died. His mother’s passing inspired Death Disco, a howling punk-funk exorcism that surely remains one of the most harrowing songs ever to grace Top of the Pops. With Wobble’s enveloping basslines, Levene’s unsettling guitar melodies and Lydon’s knife-on-glass vocals (“like a bag of cats being slung down a staircase” is his own description), PiL was sonically radical but never cerebral. “It’s not about being in or out of tune,” he says. “The Sex Pistols were too rigid. PiL allowed me to express proper emotions. So I really wanted to get out and do [Death Disco] properly live again.”
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