12. Public Image LtdPoptones
This song is absolutely fantastic because of the way it goes "zhooooop!" They just press play on the tape and it goes "zhooooop!" into it. You can switch gears with this any time during your DJ set from any two types of music. I think it’s amazing but the thing that I wanna talk about with this song is, first of all, the PiL project – right there – is so much more than the ingredients, to me: Jah Wobble’s interest in dub and Johnny [Lydon] coming from forging this punk rock identity. You know, he claims he was into Can and dub and all this stuff before that when he was growing up, and Keith Levene’s approach on the guitar and then the polyrhythms on the drums and all that stuff coming together – I don’t think any one of those guys was smart enough to formulate what they actually created; the sum of its parts is so much more.
To me, that is kind of like The Doors. They’re the only thing that I can see that’s kind of like that. In a weird way, it reminds me of The Doors because Johnny and Jim [Morrison] are both iconoclasts with their subject matter but with different pitches. And it’s a combination of different styles of music by talented musicians.
When that stuff came out and I heard those records I was just like, nothing sounded better on acid. And going to see those shows! I saw all those shows as they were happening. I’m not talking about the ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ bullshit, I’m talking about those shows. They were just so amazing and the sound was so amazing.
Back in the day, there was no indie section in the record stores, it was all imports from the UK so these records were all like, at the time, $25 – 30 which was like £50 a piece or something, and you really learned to like these albums. First of all, you learned that great records probably had great covers. You also learned that you better fucking like that record because there was no eBay then! So you got an open mind real quick.
I would steal records from my older sister and stuff but that one really struck me and since that came out I must have had 25 or more copies of it. Every time I lose track of that record I buy another copy or if I see one for like £2 then I’ll pick it up because I’ll just give it to somebody because I find it that interesting. I’m not the only one. Alan McGee named his second label after this track, but all of these tracks were really interesting and inspiring in the post-punk world. Certainly more interesting than they knew and then Johnny just turned on everybody. It was like, "No, this isn’t a confederation of equals; this is a corporation and you’re my employees. Fuck you all!"
