Rip It Up and Start Again (5 page)

Levene and Lydon first bonded in a Sheffield pub after a joint Clash/Pistols gig in July 1976. The singer and the guitarist were both sitting apart from their respective groups and looking miserable. Levene approached Lydon and during their conversation suggested that they work together if their bands ever fell apart. Eighteen months later, PiL was shaped by Levene’s and Lydon’s disgust with their previous bands’ relapses into American hard-rock tradition. “To me the Pistols were the
last
rock ’n’ roll band, they weren’t the beginning of anything,” says Levene. “Whereas PiL really felt like the start of something new.”

The name Public Image Ltd was ripe with meaning. The phrase first caught Lydon’s imagination when he read Muriel Spark’s
The Public Image,
a novel about an unbearably egotistical actress. “Limited” initially signified keeping his persona under a tight leash, “not being as ‘out there’ as I was with the Sex Pistols.” Seemingly symbolizing this jettisoning of the swollen alter ego Johnny Rotten, the singer reverted to his real name, John Lydon. In fact, Malcolm McLaren had claimed ownership of “Johnny Rotten” and acquired an injunction against the singer’s using the stage name. At the time, almost nobody knew about this legal backstory, though, so the Rotten/Lydon shift seemed like a really powerful statement: the singer symbolically reclaiming his true identity and making a fresh start as part of a collective, Public Image Ltd.

The idea of “Ltd” soon escalated to take on its business meaning, the limited company. PiL, proclaimed Lydon, was not a band in the traditional sense, but a communications company for which making records was just one front of activity. Enthused, Lydon and Levene talked about diversifying into movie soundtracks, graphics, making “video albums,” even designing music technology. To show they were serious, PiL recruited two nonmusician members. Dave Crowe, an old school friend of Lydon’s, acted as the band’s accountant. Jeannette Lee, a former girlfriend of Don Letts’s and his comanager at the clothing store Acme Attractions, was recruited to be PiL’s video maker. Lee also happened to be going out with Levene. “Jeannette was telling me how she’d had a lot to do with the editing of Don’s punk rock documentary, and the script for his next movie,
Dread at the Controls,
which never got made. I was into the idea of PiL not doing straightforward videos, and she basically talked me into her joining. Wobble was dead against it.”

Part of the impetus behind PiL posing as a corporation was to continue punk’s project of demystifying the record business. While the Clash lamented the industry’s knack for “turning rebellion into money,” PiL reversed that syndrome, suggesting that money making was a potentially subversive strategy of working from within, a stealth campaign that was less spectacular than the Pistols’ revolt but more insidious. It was also more honest and less starry-eyed to present rock bands as the money-making enterprises they really were, as opposed to gangs of guitar-wielding guerrillas. Accordingly, Lydon and his colleagues overhauled their image, purging anything redolent of punk clichés and instead wearing tailored suits. This anti–rock ’n’ roll image culminated with Dennis Morris’s artwork for PiL’s debut album, fashion-magazine-style portraits of each member of the group, immaculately coutured and coiffed. Lydon appeared on the front under Italian
Vogue
lettering, while the reverse saw Wobble sporting a debonair 1920s lounge lizard mustache.

Stridently opposed to all the standard rock routines and procedures, PiL had no manager and initially vowed that they would never tour. Above all, it was not the Johnny Rotten Band, but a genuine collective. This was a noble idea, but in reality the group’s privileged status—an experimental outfit funded by a major label—depended on Virgin’s belief that Lydon was their hottest property, the most charismatic and significant British front man to emerge since Bowie, and a potential superstar set to dominate the next decade of music. Thanks to the peculiarly indeterminate feel of the music scene in 1978—punk in its death throes, the future wide open—PiL found themselves in an unprecedented position of strength. Virgin was prepared to indulge Lydon’s artistic whims, believing that he would either come up with the goods, or come around eventually and embrace a more accessible sound.

That’s the cynical way of looking at it. In truth, Virgin’s cofounder and main music man, Simon Draper, paid more than lip service to ideas about experimentation and innovation. During the early seventies, Virgin was one of the key “progressive” labels, home to Henry Cow, Faust, Can, Tangerine Dream, and Robert Wyatt, among others. The label cannily adapted to punk, trimming its roster, shifting focus from albums to singles, and, not least, signing the movement’s most important group, the Sex Pistols. By 1978, Virgin had repositioned itself as the leading major label for “modern music,” with a strong postpunk roster including XTC, Devo, Magazine, and the Human League. “They weren’t such a big label in those days, still living off the luck of Mike Oldfield’s
Tubular Bells,
” recalls Levene. “Branson was like a superhippie, a hippie with no qualms about making money. He didn’t mind trying a few crazy things.” Branson may have been a “superhippie,” but Virgin did subsidize three of the most extreme albums ever released by a major label:
Public Image, Metal Box,
and
Flowers of Romance
.

Given Lydon’s initial talk of PiL as antimusic and antimelody, the group’s debut single, “Public Image,” was a massive relief for all concerned—the record company, Pistols fans, and critics. It’s a searing, soaring statement of intent. The glorious, chiming minimalism of Wobble’s bassline and Levene’s plangent, ringing chords mirror Lydon’s quest for purity as he jettisons not just the Rotten alter ego (“somebody had to stop me/…I will not be treated as property”) but rock ’n’ roll itself. “That song was the first proper bassline I ever came up with,” says Wobble. “Very simple, a beautiful interval from E to B. Just the joy of vibration. And incredible guitar from Keith, this great burst of energy.” “Public Image” is like a blueprint for the reborn, purified rock of the 1980s. One can hear the Edge from U2 in its radiant surge. “It’s so clean, so tingly, like a cold shower,” says Levene. “It could be really thin glass penetrating you but you don’t know until you start bleeding internally.”

Wrapped in a fake newspaper with tabloid headlines, “Public Image” shot to number nine on the U.K. chart in October 1978. While the single was greeted with universal rapture,
Public Image
the album got a more mixed reception.
Sounds
voiced the widespread sense held by punk diehards that Lydon had lost it, abandoning both the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in being
the
punk figurehead and instead wallowing in arty self-indulgence. The album
was
uncompromising, throwing the listener in at the deep end with the nine-minute death wish dirge “Theme,” a near cacophony of suicidal despair and Catholic guilt, with Lydon howling about masturbation as mortal sin. Next up was the anticlerical doggerel of “Religion I”/“Religion II” (a blasphemous ditty written for the Pistols and originally titled “Sod in Heaven”), followed by the hacking thrash funk of “Annalisa,” the true story of a German girl who starved to death because her parents believed she was possessed by the devil and turned to the church rather than psychiatrists for help. If side one of
Public Image
was loosely themed around religion, the more accessible second side was largely concerned with the tribulations of being the punk messiah. In “Public Image,” Lydon reasserted his rights over “Johnny Rotten”—“Public image belongs to me/It’s my entrance, my own creation, my grand finale”—only to end the song by shedding the persona with an echo chamber yell of
“goodbye!”
“Low Life” fingered McLaren as the “egomaniac trainer/traitor” who “never did understand,” while the foaming paranoia of “Attack” showed that the mental scars from summer 1977, when Lydon was U.K. Public Enemy Number One, were still livid.

What’s striking in retrospect about PiL’s debut is that, for all the rhetoric about being antirock, a hefty proportion of
Public Image
actually rocks
hard
. Combining raw power and uncanny dubspace, “Low Life” and “Attack” sound like
Never Mind the Bollocks
might have if Lydon’s reggae-and-Krautrock sensibility had prevailed, while “Theme” was nothing if not an orgy of twisted guitar virtuosity, Levene generating an astonishing amount of sound from a single guitar. “In the beginning, it was just my onstage sound, no effects, just wacking things off in one take,” recalls Levene. “No second takes, no overdubs. Sometimes not even knowing what I was going to play, writing the tune on the spot. See, the first album is the one time when we were a
band.
I remember worrying a little at the time, ‘Does this do too much what we publicly say we’re not going to do?’—meaning,
rock out
. But what we were doing really was showing everybody that we were intimately acquainted with what we ultimately intended to break down. And we started that dismantling process with the album’s last track, ‘Fodderstompf.’”

As often happens with bands committed to progression, the most extreme track on the preceding album is the springboard for the next. On one level, “Fodderstompf” was a throwaway, an extended disco spoof, almost a parody of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” with Lydon the antisentimentalist taking the piss out of romance, affection, commitment. “I hate love. There isn’t a love song in us. It’s bullshit,” he told Sex Pistols’ biographers Fred and Judy Vermorel. On “Fodderstompf,” Lydon and Wobble yowl “we only wanted to be loved” into an echo chamber using shrill Monty Python–style housewife voices, ad-lib insults at the studio engineer behind the glass, blast a fire extinguisher at the mike, and generally goof off. “Me and John, I think we’d had a bit of wine or whatever that night,” chuckles Wobble. The track runs for almost eight minutes because its raison d’être was to fulfill the minimum album length of thirty minutes stipulated by the band’s contract. In a pointed fuck-you to Virgin, and arguably to the record buyer too, Wobble at one point warbles, “We are now trying to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very suc-cess-ful-leeee.” Says Wobble, “It was this confrontational thing, a real mickey take on the record company.” Yet musically the track is the most compelling thing on the debut. Its hypnotic dub-funk bassline, subliminal synth burbles, and monstrous snare sound (drastically processed and absurdly prominent in the mix) look ahead to 1979’s
Metal Box,
on which the group would fully embrace the studio-as-instrument methodology of disco and dub. “People
loved
that track,” says Wobble. “It’s got quite a sense of anarchy. In its own way, it’s as mental as Funkadelic. And it had the perfect funk bassline.”

Around this time Lydon started telling the press that the only contemporary music he really cared for was disco, a striking rhetorical move given the fact that the standard punk stance was that disco sucked. PiL, he stressed, were a
dance
band. Disco was functional, useful music. It dispensed with all the bollocks, the false hopes, and unwise investments in rock as counterculture that punk had ended up perpetuating. All this was part of Lydon’s continued rhetorical campaign against rock, which, if not dead, to his mind certainly ought to be killed off. PiL were the men for the job. Chiming in with his anticlericalism and his “Anarchy in the U.K.” self-description as Antichrist, Lydon compared rock to “a church, a religion, a farce.”

But the reluctant savior still had to deal with the expectations of his devout congregation of punk believers. Making their U.K. live debut on Christmas Day of 1978, PiL played London’s Rainbow theater, as traditionally rockbiz a venue as could then be imagined. Slightly less conventional was the fact that Wobble played the entire show sitting on a chair (at that point he couldn’t physically play the bass any other way). Lydon sauntered onstage carrying two plastic shopping bags stuffed with lager cans. After a year’s absence from live performance in England, he cheerily greeted the audience, “So what you fuckers been doing since I’ve been away, eh? I hope you ain’t been spending time and money down the King’s Road” (a reference to the London street where Malcolm McLaren and his designer partner Vivienne Westwood’s punk boutique was located). The audience hollered for Pistols tunes, but Lydon was adamant: “If you wanna hear that, fuck off! That’s history.” Although the music was intermittently powerful, PiL’s performance suffered from first-night nerves and equipment problems. Lydon pontificated, upbraided the audience, but ultimately failed to connect. One of the cans he handed out to the audience was hurled back, unopened, glancing off his face and drawing blood. As a result, Lydon and Levene spent portions of the show with their backs turned to the crowd. There was no encore and the gig ended sourly, energy blocked, like bad sex.

The year 1978 limped to a close for PiL, the group’s future unclear. Many wondered whether Lydon had thrown it all away, that awesome power at his disposal, effectively abandoning the audience he’d mobilized and who were now looking for leadership. But 1979 lay wide-open, and Lydon’s greatest
musical
triumphs actually lay ahead of him.

THERE ARE PEOPLE
who will say in all earnestness that the Buzzcocks EP
Spiral Scratch
was a more epochal punk single than “Anarchy in the U.K.” Released in January 1977 on the Buzzcocks’ own New Hormones label, the EP wasn’t the first independently released record, not by a long stretch, but it was the first to make a real polemical
point
about independence. In the process,
Spiral Scratch
inspired thousands of people to play the do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself game.

Spiral Scratch
was simultaneously a regionalist blow against the capital (Manchester versus London) and a conceptual exercise in demystification (“spiral scratch,” because that’s what a record materially is, a spiral groove scratched into vinyl). The back cover itemized details of the recording process, such as which take of the song they’d used and the number of overdubs. The EP’s catalog number, ORG-1, was a Left-leaning bookworm’s wisecrack: ORG-1 = ORG ONE = orgone, Wilhelm Reich’s neurolibidinous life force.

“
Spiral Scratch
was
playful,
” says Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. “Play was very important.” That spirit came through in the EP’s most famous song, “Boredom,” which was simultaneously an expression of real ennui (“I’m living in this movie/but it doesn’t move me”) and a metapop comment on boredom as a prescribed subject for punk songs and punk-related media discourse—a topic that was predictable to the point of being, well, a bit
boring
. Pete Shelley’s deliberately inane two-note guitar solo sealed the conceptual deal: a “boring” solo that was actually thrillingly tension inducing in its fixated refusal to go anywhere melodically.

Although it wasn’t actually a new phenomenon at all, at that particular moment in history the idea of releasing your own music felt fantastically novel and revolutionary.
Spiral Scratch
’s initial pressing of one thousand copies, funded by loans from friends and family, sold out with staggering speed. It ultimately chalked up sales of 16,000 (with even more to come when it was reissued a few years later). This was an astonishing achievement given that a distribution network for independent records didn’t exist in 1977. “Mail order was very important,” says Boon. “Rough Trade was just a shop with a mail-order service in those days. And we knew the manager of Manchester’s Virgin shop and he persuaded some of his regional colleagues to stock it.” People were buying
Spiral Scratch
for the music, but also for the sheer
fact
of its existence, its status as a cultural landmark and portent of change.

But why was the idea of independently recording and releasing music so surprising in 1977? After all, approximately 50 percent of American rock ’n’ roll and R&B hits in the late fifties had been released through independent labels such as Sun and Hi. All through the sixties and seventies independents flourished in regional markets and niche genres, such as jazz (Sun Ra’s Saturn, the U.K. free-improv imprint Incus), British folk (Topic), and Jamaican imports (Blue-beat). Even during the commercial boom of “serious,” album-oriented rock, when major labels dominated the market, you still had crucial “progressive” independents like Virgin and Island. But there was a significant difference between these labels and the postpunk independents. “The people who started Virgin and Island were enterprising, sure, and ‘independent’ in terms of what they did creatively,” says Iain McNay, founder of leading postpunk indie Cherry Red. “But they had the support of major record company distribution, finance, and marketing.”

Just before punk, a couple of labels formed that were independent in terms of their financing and distribution. Chiswick and Stiff both emerged from England’s pub rock scene. Chiswick debuted with the amped-up R&B of the Count Bishops in November 1975, Stiff with a Nick Lowe single the following year. Unlike the amateur-hour neophytes of New Hormones, though, the figures behind the pub rock indies were seasoned veterans of the record business, entrepreneurially savvy insiders. Furthermore, neither Chiswick nor Stiff made an ideological meal out of being independent. Both soon eagerly hooked up with major-label distribution, with Stiff becoming a leading New Wave hit maker behind Ian Dury and Elvis Costello.

When punk came along, the top bands without exception fell back into the traditional way of doing things. “The disappointing thing for me historically was the Clash and Sex Pistols’ signing to majors,” says Geoff Travis, cofounder of Rough Trade. Even Buzzcocks buckled under. After the group’s original singer, Howard Devoto, quit, Richard Boon and the band planned to put out another independent record through New Hormones, an EP to be titled
Love Bites
. “But then the drummer’s dad came to see me, saying his son had just left school and had an offer of a job as an insurance clerk and ‘what are you going to do with the band?’” recalls Boon. “So that was when we had to decide ‘God, we’re in this for real!’ Which meant finding other resources. Which meant signing to a major. Because doing it independently wasn’t supportable at that point, you couldn’t just get enough revenue selling through mail order and a few sympathetic retailers.”

As the band’s manager, Boon got Buzzcocks a deal with United Artists, and
Love Bites
ended up being the title of the group’s second album for the major label. But as an amateur entrepreneur he continued New Hormones as a back-burner operation for several years, sporadically releasing esoteric postpunk like the Pete Shelley side project the Tiller Boys and Ludus, an arty feminist band fronted by the charismatic Linder (whose real name was Linda Sterling). Released at the very end of 1977, almost a full year after
Spiral Scratch,
ORG-2 wasn’t even a record, but a booklet of collages by Linder and Jon Savage. “It didn’t have a cover price, so it didn’t sell very well. Nobody knew what to sell it for!” laughs Boon. “But it did its job. The title
The Secret Public
was all about that other side of the DIY thing—trying to locate kindred spirits who would ‘get it’ and respond.”

In 1977, many people did “get”
Spiral Scratch
and responded to it as a call to action. “My girlfriend Hilary gave me a copy and that was the key moment,” says Bob Last, founder of the Edinburgh indie Fast Product. The idea of Fast Product already existed in his mind as a brand, but Last had no specific ideas about what the actual merchandise would ultimately be. “I had a logo and an idea of the attitude the company would embody, but it was
Spiral Scratch
that gave me the idea of music as the product. I popped into the Bank of Scotland and said, ‘I’m going to put a record out, can I borrow some money?’ And bizarrely they gave me a few hundred pounds! I had
absolutely no idea
there’d been a history of independent labels before that.
Spiral Scratch
turned my head around.”

A former architecture student and technician/designer for a traveling theater club, Last conceived Fast Product as a hybrid of art project and renegade commerce. The company’s first press release trumpeted the slogan “Interventions in any media” as a sort of all-purpose promise/threat. Starting with the Mekons’ “Never Been in a Riot” single in January 1978, Fast’s products were strikingly designed and highly collectible. At a time when business—big
or
small—was regarded suspiciously as “the Man” and consumerism was something to feel guilty about, Fast Product provocatively highlighted the notion of the commodity as fetish. This became the label’s signature balancing act, celebrating consumer desire while simultaneously exposing the manipulative mechanisms of capitalism. Fast Product represented an emergent Left sensibility that would flourish in the eighties, a “designer socialism” purged of its puritanical austerity and fear of pleasure, attracted to stylishly made things but vigilant about being hoodwinked or exploited.

Like New Hormones had done with
The Secret Public,
Fast Product moved quickly to show that it was more than just a record label. FAST 3,
The Quality of Life,
consisted of a plastic bag filled with nine Xeroxed collages—including pictures of German terrorists, taken from a Sunday newspaper’s color magazine but labeled “entertainment”—along with various items of consumer detritus. “We had someone carefully peeling oranges and putting a bit of peel in each bag, to guarantee that each package would be unique, with a different pattern of rotting on each strip of peel.” A later nonmusical release,
SeXex
—another plastic bag, this time containing a dozen Xeroxed sheets, a badge, and an empty soup carton—was conceived as a promotional campaign for a totally imaginary corporation. “Both
Quality of Life
and
SeXex
used the cut-up, photocopied aesthetic of the time,” says Last. “But what drove them was this sense that they were a perverse advertising campaign for a product that didn’t actually exist. And they sold quite well, got debated and referred to quite extensively.”

“The first really arty, clever label was Fast Product,” says Tony Wilson, cofounder of Manchester independent Factory Records. “A hell of a lot more arty than us. If I could have put orange peel in a plastic bag and released it with a catalog number, I would have been very proud!” A local TV host, Wilson was a Cambridge-educated aestheteprovocateur who loved record packaging and wanted his label to have a clear design aesthetic. He got young design student Peter Saville to give Factory its own visual identity, influenced by the starkness and severe functionalism of early twentieth-century modernist design movements such as Bauhaus, De Stijl, constructivism, and Die Neue Typographie. Saville’s record sleeves and label typography made Factory and its groups—Joy Division, Durutti Column, A Certain Ratio—stand out from the postpunk pack. The austere elegance was a new thing in rock packaging, a cleansing break both with prepunk romanticism and New Wave’s own clichés. The label’s first release,
A Factory Sample,
was a double EP packaged in glistening silver. “It just seemed so special,” says Paul Morley, who was
NME
’s Manchester correspondent at the time. “The fact that it was so beautiful looking showed the possibilities of what could be done, and it showed up the London record industry for being so boring.”

Soon Factory was outdoing Fast Product’s collectible
Earcom
samplers and bizarre packages like
Quality of Life
by bringing a Marcel Duchamp–like absurdism to their catalog. Numbers were assigned to anything and everything: pipe dreams, whims, unrealized projects, movies that were never finished or never started. Fac 8 was a menstrual egg timer proposed by Linder but never actually constructed. Fac 61 was a lawsuit from the label’s former house producer Martin Hannett. Fac 99 was a dental bill for Factory codirector Rob Gretton, who’d had his molars reconstructed.

For Wilson, this sort of mischief was in the prankster spirit of the situationists, a French anarcho-Dada movement of the sixties whose ideas he admired. The situationists believed that rediscovering play was the remedy for “the poverty of everyday life,” the feelings of alienation amid abundance generated by Western consumer society. Above all, they wanted to smash “the spectacle,” all those mass-media forms of entertainment such as television that enforce passivity rather than participation. The situationists were also scathing critics of commodity fetishism, however, so it’s pretty unlikely that they would have approved of Factory’s sumptuously designed records.

In truth, the only remotely situationist aspect to Factory was what Wilson described as the label’s “continual denial of profit.” No contracts were signed with the groups, who were free to leave when they liked and retained ownership of their own music. “I sometimes flatter myself that the way we behaved, which was not about wanting to be rich, and the way we lived out that attitude every day, was maybe what might’ve been suggested by the situationist philosophy,” says Wilson. Weirdly combining a sometimes ruinous aesthetic perfectionism (covers that cost more than the profit margins) with lackadaisical nonprofessionalism, Factory didn’t act like a business at all.

Far from Fast Product’s and Factory’s sly, postmodern games, the punk band Desperate Bicycles had a much more dour but probably more faithful take on the situationist antagonism to “the spectacle.” Do-it-yourself, for Desperate Bicycles, meant the overthrow of the establishment music industry through people seizing the means of production, making their own entertainment, and selling it to other creative and autonomous spirits. DIY’s most fervent evangelists, the Desps chanted “it was easy, it was cheap—go and do it” at the end of their early 1977 debut “Smokescreen.” That slogan then became the chorus of “The Medium Was Tedium,” the follow-up released later that same year. “No more time for spectating,” they declared on “Don’t Back the Front,” an antifascist anthem on the flip side of “Medium,” adding the listener-inciting battle cry “cut it, press it, distribute it/Xerox music’s here at last.” A sleeve note revealed that “Smokescreen” had cost only £153 and said the band “would really like to know why you haven’t made your single yet.” As for the Desps’ actual music, it was almost puritan in its unadorned simplicity, its guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation. For the Desperate Bicycles, it was as though sloppiness and scrawniness became signs of membership in the true punk elect. The very deficiency of traditional rock virtues (tightness, feel) stood as tokens of the group’s authenticity and purity of intent.

The Desperate Bicycles’ 1977 singles had an even bigger impact in the U.K. than
Spiral Scratch
. The demystify-the-process data on the back of “The Medium Was Tedium” and the group’s fervent exhortation “now it’s your turn” catalyzed a scrappy legion of do-it-yourself bands. Among them were many of the key figures of the postpunk era: Swell Maps, Scritti Politti, Young Marble Giants, the Television Personalities, Thomas Leer, and Daniel Miller, aka the Normal. “I don’t know if I ever heard their records, I just got infected by the energy and inspiration the Bicycles put across in this
Melody Maker
article about how easy it was to make a record,” says Miller, who in 1977 was a twenty-six-year-old fan of German electronic music and a thwarted musician. After reading the
MM
feature, he rushed out and bought a secondhand Korg synth for £150 and then worked overtime at his film-editing job until he could afford a four-track ministudio. Working in his North London bedroom, he created “T.V.O.D.” and “Warm Leatherette,” the two sides of his self-released debut single as the Normal. “I never thought of approaching a ‘major’ label,” he recalled. “I didn’t like them because they’d ruined quite a few of my favorite bands—like Virgin did with Can, Faust, and Klaus Schulze.”