“EVER GET THE FEELING
you’ve been cheated?”
Johnny Rotten’s infamous parting words to the audience at Winterland in San Francisco on January 14, 1978, weren’t a question so much as a confession. Despite being the front man of the most dangerous band in the world, John Lydon was
bored
—sick of the Sex Pistols’ music, tired of his own “Rotten” persona, and disappointed with how punk as a whole had panned out. Winterland was the last date of the Pistols’ turbulent debut tour of America. Within days, the band would disintegrate in acrimonious confusion.
Lydon’s disillusionment had been brewing for months. The first public sign occurred during “The Punk and His Music,” a July 1977 show on London’s Capital Radio station, during which Lydon voiced his frustration with the predictability of most punk bands, saying he felt “cheated” by the genre’s lack of diversity and imagination. Splicing together interview segments with Lydon and records he’d personally selected, “The Punk and His Music” revealed that the singer had far more sophisticated and eclectic taste in music than his, er, public image suggested. Those who tuned in anticipating punk rock were immediately thrown for a loop by the first selection, Tim Buckley’s “Sweet Surrender,” a lush, sensual R&B song swathed with orchestral strings. Over the next ninety minutes Lydon further tweaked expectations, playing languid roots reggae, solo tracks by former Velvet Underground members Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico, a surprising amount of hippie-tinged music by Can, Captain Beefheart, and Third Ear Band, and two tracks by his hero Peter Hammill, a full-blown progressive rocker. Just about everything Lydon played on Capital Radio contradicted the punk myth of the early seventies as a musical wasteland. If this wasn’t treasonous enough, Lydon broke with his Malcolm McLaren–scripted role as cultural terrorist by effectively outing himself as an aesthete. Along with his hipster music choices, the interview revealed a sensitive, thoughtful individual rather than the monster of newspaper legend.
For Lydon, this image makeover was a matter of survival. A month before his Capital Radio appearance, the Pistols’ anti-Royalist single “God Save the Queen” had been released to coincide with the Jubilee celebrations marking the twenty-fifth year of Elizabeth II’s reign. Defying radio bans and record retail embargoes, “God Save the Queen” became the best-selling single in Britain. Demonized by the tabloids, Johnny Rotten was repeatedly assaulted by enraged patriotic thugs. Scarred, scared, and in practical terms virtually under house arrest, Lydon decided to take control of his destiny. His anarchist/Antichrist persona—originally Lydon’s own creation, but hyped up by manager Malcolm McLaren and distorted by a media eager to believe the worst—had spiraled out of control. Agreeing to do the Capital Radio interview without consulting his management, Lydon embarked on a process of persona demolition that would result in “Public Image” the song and Public Image Ltd the group.
During “The Punk and His Music,” Lydon sounded fragile and vulnerable as he discussed the attacks by angry Royalists. “It’s very easy for a gang to pick on one person and smash his head in. It’s a big laugh for them, and it’s very easy for them to say ‘what a wanker, look at him run away!’ I mean, what’s he meant to do?” Positioning himself as victim and revealing his feelings of humiliation, Lydon deliberately rehumanized himself. This naturally incensed McLaren, who accused Lydon of dissipating “the band’s threat” by revealing himself as a “man of taste.” McLaren saw the Pistols as antimusic, but here was Lydon waxing lyrical about his esoteric record collection and gushing, “I just like
all
music…I
love
my music,” like a fucking hippie! From that point onward, McLaren decided that Rotten was at heart “a constructive sissy rather than a destructive lunatic,” and focused his energy on molding the more suggestible Sid Vicious into the Pistols’ true star, a cartoon psychopath, wanton and self-destructive.
In the latter months of 1977, a chasm grew between Lydon and the other Sex Pistols that mirrored the polarization of punk as a whole into arty bohemians versus working-class street toughs. Lydon came from an impeccably deprived background, but his sensibility was much closer to the art school contingent. He wasn’t the unemployed guttersnipe mythologized by the Clash, but earned decent money alongside his construction worker dad at a sewage plant and worked at a playschool during the summer. Although he often professed to hate art and despise intellectuals, he was well read (Oscar Wilde was a favorite) with fierce opinions (Joyce was not). Whereas Steve Jones and Paul Cook left school at age sixteen, Lydon even made a brief foray into higher education, studying English literature and art at Kingsway College. Above all, Lydon was a music connoisseur. He couldn’t play an instrument or write melodies, but he had a real sonic sensibility and a much more expansive sense of possibilities than his fellow Pistols.
The reggae and art rock that Lydon played on “The Punk and His Music” sketched out the emotional and musical template for Public Image Ltd. When he talked about identifying with Dr. Alimantado’s “Born for a Purpose,” a song about being persecuted as a Rasta, Lydon gave his audience an advance glimpse of PiL’s aura of paranoia and prophecy, casting himself as a visionary outcast in Babylon, U.K. Musically, what he loved about Captain Beefheart and the dub producers was their experimental playfulness, the way “they just
love sound,
they like using any sound.” Effectively, “The Punk and His Music” offered a listening list for a postpunk movement yet to be born, hints and clues for where to take the music next.
PUNK SEEMED TO BE “OVER”
almost before it really got started. For many early participants, the death knell came on October 28, 1977, with the release of
Never Mind the Bollocks
. Had the revolution come to this, something as prosaic and conventional as an album?
Bollocks
was product, eminently consumable. Rotten’s lyrics and vocals were incendiary, but Steve Jones’s fat guitar sound and Chris Thomas’s superb production—thickly layered, glossy, well organized—added up to a disconcertingly orthodox hard rock that contradicted the group’s reputation for chaos and ineptitude. Lydon later blamed McLaren for steering the rest of the band toward “a regressive mod vibe,” while admitting that his own ideas for how the record should have sounded would have rendered it “unlistenable for most people” because the listeners “wouldn’t have had a point of reference.”
Journalist Jon Savage reviewed
Bollocks
for
Sounds
and today recalls it feeling “like a tombstone, airless, no spaces in the music,” a comment that pinpoints the record’s failure as a deficiency of dub. Compared to the miragelike unreality of reggae production—all glimmering reverb haze, disorienting effects, and flickering ectoplasmic wisps—most punk records sounded retarded, stuck in the monochromatic and mono midsixties, before psychedelia’s expanded palette of timbres and stereophonic sorcery. The sharper bands coming out of punk knew they had serious catching up to do. Some groups, such as the Clash and the Ruts, picked up primarily on the protest aspect of roots reggae—the blunt sloganeering and sermonizing of the Wailers’ “Get Up Stand Up,” the radical chic of Peter Tosh’s Rasta guerrilla persona. At the other extreme, the more adventurous postpunk bands responded to reggae as a purely
sonic
revolution, an Africanized psychedelia, shape shifting and perception altering. During the half decade from 1977 to 1981, reggae’s spatialized production and sophisticated yet elemental rhythms provided
the
template for postpunk bands looking to experiment.
In Jamaica itself, roots militancy and dub ethereality were indivisible. The glue that held them together, Rastafarianism, is a millenarian creed, “part journalism, part prophecy,” in the words of critic James A. Winders. Rasta spirituality was something most white Britons couldn’t buy into easily. This was partly because of its illiberal traits, such as the nasty streak of antifeminism, but mostly because the absolutism of Rasta’s blood-and-fire visions was temperamentally alien to secular British youth, whose idea of religion generally derives from Anglicanism (noncommittal, wishy-washy, as close to being agnostic as one can get without pissing God off). From the ranks of postpunk, perhaps only one person really tapped into a spiritual ferocity to rival Rasta: John Lydon.
Raised in London as the child of Irish Catholic immigrants, Lydon had his own window into the postcolonial dislocation of the former British Empire’s neglected subjects. It’s no coincidence that his autobiography bears the subtitle
No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs,
the phrase many English landlords put in classified ads or window signs when looking for tenants before the Race Relations Act outlawed such blatant discrimination. Lydon’s identification with the black British experience of “sufferation” and “downpression” and his passion for Jamaican riddim and bass pressure suffused his post-Pistols music, desolating PiL’s sound with eerie space and heavy dread.
Now an ex-Pistol, Lydon arrived in Britain after the disastrous American tour only to be immediately invited to board another jet plane, this one heading out to Jamaica, by Virgin Records bigwig Richard Branson. Lydon, renowned for his reggae expertise, would accompany Branson as an A&R consultant for Virgin’s roots and dub imprint, the Front Line. This “working holiday” would give Lydon time to consider his future. Nice work if you can get it: Lydon spent most of his time lounging poolside at the Kingston Sheraton Hotel, gorging on lobster and hanging with the cream of Jamaican reggae, including several of his heroes, such as Big Youth, U Roy, Burning Spear, and Prince Far I.
Just a few days after the Pistols’ breakup, Lydon announced his intention to form a new band that would be “anti music of any kind.” On his return from Jamaica, he started recruiting. Lydon invited his friend John Wardle—an East Ender with piercing blue eyes who had reinvented himself as Jah Wobble—to play bass, despite his being barely acquainted with the instrument. Lydon also tracked down Keith Levene, who had played guitar in the earliest incarnation of the Clash.
Reggae was the crucial point of intersection for these three core members of PiL, otherwise a motley crew both musically and personally. “The whole reason PiL worked at all was that John, Wobble, and myself were just total dub fanatics,” says Levene. “We were always going to ‘blues.’” Blues were illegal reggae dances somewhere between a house party and a sound system (those massively amplified dances featuring DJs and MCs, rather than bands, and held inside halls or outdoors on lawns). Blues generally took place in someone’s apartment, with money raised by selling alcohol and sometimes weed. Long a fanatical reggae collector, Lydon had been introduced to sound system culture by his friend Don Letts, a black DJ who played at legendary punk venue the Roxy and who is often credited with turning the punk audience on to reggae. With Letts as his escort, Lydon frequently found himself the only white person inside ultraheavy clubs like the Four Aces in East London. “You’d feel a bit dodgy sneaking into the blues,” says Wobble, “but it was fine on the whole. Black people were just cool about it. It’d be like, ‘what’s these white kids doing here?’ But no one would hassle you. In fact, as a punk rocker you were safer in those days at the black dances than you were going down to the local white-boy pub. For me, hearing the bass that loud was a huge thing. The physical nature of it just left me gobsmacked.”
Wobble had grown up in an East London housing project located at the junction of Jamaica Street and Stepney Way, which neatly symbolized the collision of West Indies and East End that would define him. Wobble met Lydon at Kingsway College and the two became part of a misfit crew known as the Four Johns (the others being John Grey and John Ritchie, aka Sid Vicious). In those days, Wobble had a reputation for being something of a thug. “I think we were all emotional cripples back then,” he says with a hint of regret. But when he picked up Vicious’s bass guitar, something was released in him. “I immediately felt bonded to the instrument. It was very therapeutic, although I didn’t understand that at the time.” Drawing on his gut understanding of the Jamaican music he adored, and fueled by speed, Wobble taught himself to play reggae bass, in which a simple recurring phrase works simultaneously as a melodic motif and a steady rhythmic pulse. Picking up reggae tricks like using old strings (they have no twang), he learned how to “play soft, not in a percussive way. You caress the string. Pure vibration.” Wobble’s basslines became the human heartbeat in PiL’s music, the roller coaster that simultaneously cocooned you and transported you through the terror ride.
With Wobble’s bass supplying the melodic element of any given PiL song, Keith Levene’s guitar was freed up to freak out. One of PiL’s most curious features is that, for an avowedly antirock band, they had a guitar hero at their core, the Jimi Hendrix of postpunk. Unlike most of his peers, Levene had
serious
chops. Before punk, he’d done what guitarists were supposed to do in the days of prog-rock virtuosity: practice, practice, practice. As a teenager growing up in North London, he’d spend days on end jamming at a friend’s house, with sessions lasting as long as eight hours. Even more blasphemous, in punk terms, was the fact that young Keith’s favorite guitar hero was Steve Howe of Yes. At age fifteen, Levene even roadied for Yes for a while.
Punks were supposed to purge their collections of King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, or at least hide them in the cupboard. “There’s a lot of people in punk who could play guitar much better than they made out,” says Levene. “But I never pretended I couldn’t play lead.” Despite all the prog skeletons in his closet, Levene hurled himself into the early punk fray and became one of the founding members of the Clash. But his harsh, discordant style became increasingly at odds with that group’s anthemic rock ’n’ roll. Even then he was developing the style that would become his PiL trademark, an improvisatory mode of playing that deliberately incorporated “errors.” When Levene hit a wrong note, he’d immediately repeat the mistake to see if the wrongness could become a new kind of rightness. “The idea was to break through conditioning, take yourself out of one channel and into another space.” It wasn’t “creative differences” that led to his exit from the Clash, though. Levene was expelled because of his negative attitude toward the band, which his colleagues attributed to amphetamine-fueled mood swings.