At first, PiL basked in the acclaim. A confessed TV addict and lazy sod, Lydon told
Sounds,
“If I could get away with it I wouldn’t even walk. I’d love a mobile bed. One thing I’ve never understood is people complaining about bed sores. That’s a luxury, isn’t it?” In April 1980, PiL deigned to tour the United States, but only on the least-strenuous schedule possible. Ten American dates were spread across three and a half weeks. Drummer Atkins recalls spending three nights in Boston, in his own hotel suite, for just one gig and a couple of radio interviews.
Despite its easygoing pace, the short traipse across America turned PiL off the idea of touring for good. Playing live had never been a passion for Lydon or Levene. The latter declared, “I’d rather send out a video of us than do a thirty-date tour.” Wobble, though, enjoyed connecting with the audience, which Lydon mocked as “this whole condescending attitude of playing for the kids.”
Twenty years old and bursting with energy (not all of it natural), Jah Wobble felt increasingly frustrated by PiL’s inactivity on all fronts. He squirmed with embarrassment at the yawning gap between what PiL professed itself to be (not a band, but a communications corporation) and what they achieved (fuck all, really). Levene still talked grandly in interviews about doing movie soundtracks, making video albums, even designing musical equipment such as a drum synthesizer and a portable recording studio the size of a briefcase. But these were pipe dreams at best, pure bullshit at worst. “That whole idea of the umbrella corporation…even at the time I thought, ‘Fuck, what are we gonna do? We’re going to make a
film
?’” laughs Wobble. “‘We’re going to do
nothing!
’ And that irritated certain people, because I’d take the piss a bit.”
More seriously frustrating for Wobble was PiL’s indolence when it came to making records. He’d already made a few solo singles and in May 1980 released his first album, the wonderfully goofy
The Legend Lives On…Jah Wobble in “Betrayal.”
His gesture of independence triggered the first major crack in PiL’s regal facade. In August, the bassist left the group in a cloud of acrimony. Officially the dispute concerned Wobble’s reuse of some PiL backing tracks on
The Legend Lives On
. But as part of its “umbrella company” concept, PiL had always intended to diversify with solo releases as well as nonmusical projects. “Versioning” reggae riddims was a widespread practice in Lydon’s beloved Jamaica, so what exactly was the problem with Wobble’s thrifty recycling? In truth, the tension within PiL had been building as far back as the later stages of recording
Metal Box
. “The feeling got quite bad,” says Wobble, “so I’d go off and do the rhythm tracks by myself in Gooseberry Studios in Chinatown.” Wobble’s frustration mounted during the mixing stage of
Metal Box,
when Levene hogged the board and hardly allowed him any creative input.
Another grievance was the irregularity and paucity of Wobble’s PiL wages. “I was on sixty pounds a week and even struggling to get that.” PiL’s employment practices generally left a lot to be desired. After the American tour, Atkins was summarily fired, purely and simply, he claims, so that PiL could avoid paying him a weekly wage when the band was inactive. Later in 1980, Atkins was rehired when PiL started recording their third album. “PiL wasn’t run like a business,” says Atkins. “It would take me five attempts of going across London from Willesden Green to Chelsea before I could get anyone at Gunter Grove to open the door and give me my sixty pounds. And I’d spend half of it on speed before I’d got home. If it was a Thursday, I’d probably stay at Gunter Grove until Sunday. We’d all be up watching
Apocalypse Now,
speeding.”
In his last months as a member of PiL’s dysfunctional family, Wobble told
Sounds,
“I think sometimes we border on psychosis. I’m not using that word lightly. I really mean psychosis. In other words we lose touch with reality.” All through the second half of 1980, rumors circulated of ugly vibes at Gunter Grove, including stories of hard drugs and Lydon’s degeneration into a paranoid recluse. The regular police raids didn’t help with the latter, and Lydon had also recently been traumatized by a brief stint in Mountjoy, an infamous Irish prison, following an altercation with two off-duty cops in a Dublin pub. Factor in the amphetamine intake and one can see why a poster on the wall at Gunter Grove declared: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
“It was a Hitler’s bunker vibe, all the paranoia,” says Wobble. “It added to the edge. It was a bit like that Nic Roeg film
Performance
.” In
Performance,
Mick Jagger plays a burned-out sixties-rock superstar holed up in his Georgian terrace house in Powis Square, Ladbroke Grove (the same hippie-colonized, dilapidated area of West London where Rough Trade was based). “I don’t think John ever regarded himself as a rock god as such, that would be unfair,” says Wobble. “But there was that kind of general atmosphere of withdrawing from the world a bit. Sort of, ‘in
here,
this drama, is where it’s at,’ rather than going out there into the world.”
Looking back, Wobble sees PiL as an opportunity that was literally wasted, ruined by drugs and lethargy. The situation was worsened by the fact that the protagonists weren’t even in the same chemical head space. He once described PiL as “four emotional cripples on four different drugs.” Today he quips, “If we had been on the same drugs, we might have kept it together a bit longer! Some people were on heroin, some on speed, some on very strong cannabis, and some on combinations thereof. Me, I was a speed freak. I was into powders in a big way. Drinking and powders.”
Nowadays Levene is cagey about talking about his heroin years in any detail, but in a 1983 interview for
NME
he was candid about its effects on PiL, confessing, “I was dabbling with it when we formed the band. Then I was doing it constantly for about three years.”
Flowers of Romance,
the troubled follow-up to
Metal Box,
coincided with the worst stage of Levene’s addiction. “When you have to do something creative, it’s very hard. When we did
Flowers,
I tried to make the session coincide with the part of the day where I really had the least amount in my system.” Yet in the 1983 profile Levene also insisted that he “used to run PiL when I was on junk.” Despite having a full-time member, Dave Crowe, who’d been recruited to organize and keep accounts, Levene claimed that
he
ended up micromanaging every aspect of the band: “I used to make all the music, get the money out of Virgin, make sure the record was promoted, find out if we were on
Top of the Pops
that week…. When I analyzed the situation, [the heroin use]was because basically I was very lonely, and very scared, and under a lot of pressure.”
One side effect of heroin is constipation. Creatively, if not literally, Levene had a chronic case of blockage during the sessions for the third album, which began in October 1980 at Virgin’s Manor studio. Several days passed with PiL’s playing video games and watching movies while being waited on hand and foot. “There was a
lot
of avoiding the studio going on!” Levene says. “I’d set up all the equipment, lots of funny little synth toys, and I’d be twiddling, getting sounds, but not necessarily making a record.” With Wobble gone, the old alchemy—the way the bassist’s untrained, intuitive approach would catalyze Levene’s warped virtuosity—had disappeared. “It would have been better if Wobble had stuck around,” admits Levene.
Finally, a breakthrough of sorts occurred several days into the session. Instructing the engineer to keep the tape rolling no matter what, Levene tapped out some percussion patterns on a strange bamboo instrument that Virgin boss Richard Branson had brought back from Bali, then added synth sounds (“the animals” inside the percussive jungle, as he puts it). The result, entitled “Hymie’s Him,” was the weakest track on
Flowers of Romance,
but it broke the deadlock and gave the group a direction. Making a virtue of Wobble’s absence and Levene’s aversion to the guitar (which, according to Atkins, was partly due to his arms’ being too swollen to play the instrument), PiL decided to orient the new album around drum sounds, pursuing a percussive, tribal feel Levene described as “very acoustic, human…but very fuckin’ heavy.”
Moving to another costly Virgin studio, West London’s Townhouse, PiL procured a bunch of secondhand acoustic instruments—ukulele, saxophone, banjo, violin—and generated raw sonic material for sculpting at the mixing board.
Flowers
is the only PiL album where Lydon, the nonmusician, actually plays instruments, such as the three-stringed banjo on “Phenagen” (a track named after a heavy-duty sleeping pill). Levene talked about deliberately using “John’s total ineptitude to an artistic advantage.”
Whereas
Metal Box
pushed rock’s envelope to its fullest extent,
Flowers
tried to burst through into a totally postrock space. “Levene had this thing, ‘I’m not going to play anything that’s ever been played before,’” recalls Vivien Goldman, a regular visitor to Gunter Grove. “Talk about hubris!” On
Flowers,
Levene’s guitar appeared only on “Go Back” (self-parodically) and “Phenagen” (psychedelically reversed). At the same time, he didn’t really take the synth dabblings of
Metal Box
any further.
Flowers
really was all about using the studio itself as the primary instrument.
The album came together in a bizarrely disjointed fashion. Summoned to the studio to lay down beats, Atkins found Lydon and Levene weren’t there, so he worked closely with engineer Nick Launay to create striking rhythm tracks. “I’d fallen asleep with my Mickey Mouse watch against my ear and then woken up to that sound. So we put the watch on a floor-tom skin so it would resonate, and then Nick harmonized, looped, and delayed that sound, and I drummed to it, and that became ‘Four Enclosed Walls.’” Atkins was also heavily involved in the album’s standout track, “Under the House,” a stampeding herd of tribal tom toms with string sounds shrieking across the stereo field. On that track, Lydon’s processed vocals seem to emanate from his throat like malignant gas or ectoplasm. The lyrics allude to a supernatural experience. Some accounts claim it’s about an actual ghost that haunted the Manor studio, although Levene believes it’s about a more abstract sense of evil to which Lydon was unusually attuned.
Flowers
was completed by the end of November 1980, but Virgin, who hated the record, delayed its release until April of the following year. In the meantime, as a stocking stuffer for PiL fans, they rushed out that most rockist of stopgap measures, the live album. Reviewing the pretty redundant
Paris au Printemps
in
NME,
Vivien Goldman alluded to
Flowers
’s “severe birth pangs,” but with her insider’s knowledge confidently pronounced that PiL had “broken another sound-barrier.”
Released as a single in March 1981, the title track from
Flowers of Romance
did live up to Goldman’s hype about PiL’s inventing “a new kind of rhythm.” It cracked the U.K. Top 30 and resulted in another deranged
Top of the Pops
performance that saw Levene pounding the drums in a lab technician’s white coat, Jeannette Lee dwarfed by her double bass, and Lydon, dressed as a white-collared vicar, sawing dementedly on a fiddle. Such was PiL’s eminence that when the album finally arrived in April, it was automatically hailed as another paradigm-shattering masterwork. More skeptical commentators, though, noted the distinct lack of
work
involved, from the paltry length (thirty-two minutes) to its desultory packaging (a Polaroid of Jeannette Lee with a rose between her teeth). Tracks such as “Four Enclosed Walls” and “Phenagen” may have been startling on first listen with their extreme sonic treatments, stereo-panned sounds, and Lydon’s prayer-wail ululations, but they didn’t linger in the memory.
Essentially,
Flowers
was a reprise of the more outré antics of Europe’s prepunk vanguard, bands such as Faust, Cluster, and even Pink Floyd (from the wackier bits of
Ummagumma
to their abandoned project of recording an album using household objects). Today,
Flowers
actually sounds like a braver mess than it did upon its release. More than aesthetic fearlessness, though, the record was shaped by an unattractive blend of indolence, negativity (“All it amounts to is that we don’t like any music at the moment,” Levene told
Rolling Stone
), and let’s-see-what-we-can-get-away-with gall.
Where the record ultimately fails, though, is in its emotional range. Lydon’s palette of derision and disgust had curdled into self-parody. Of the leave-me-alone tantrum “Banging the Door,” Lydon later said, “It’s horrible to listen back to that kind of paranoia.” A creepy account of being seduced by a female journalist, “Track 8” is particularly repellent, with its vindictive imagery of fleshy tunnels “erupting in fat” and naked, bulbous bodies betraying Lydon’s Catholic fear of the flesh. In
Sounds,
the self-confessed “sexless little beast” decreed sex “definitely over-rated. I think the human body’s vile and I wish everybody would appreciate that. Look at people’s faces: they’re vile, big, spotty blotches.”
Lydon’s misanthropy reached its dismal nadir with the infamous PiL show at New York’s Ritz on May 15, 1981. Intended as a sort of performance art/video spectacle, the show was hastily pulled together by Levene, his genuine excitement about multimedia dragging along the unenthused Lydon and Lee. Unfortunately, the Ritz was not an art space like downtown Manhattan’s the Kitchen. It drew a rock ’n’ roll crowd, who were certainly not happy about paying twelve dollars to see the band only in “live video” form. Skulking behind the venue’s gigantic video screen, Levene and Lee made an amorphous cacophony. Lydon taunted the audience with quips like “Aren’t you getting your money’s worth?” and direct incitements such as “I’m safe. You’re not throwing enough. You’re what I call a passive audience.” After twelve minutes, the crowd erupted into a full-blown riot. Levene, darting from behind the screen, got struck on the head by a flying bottle.