6. Public Image LtdMetal Box
This is my favorite post punk album. For me and the main musician in The Virgin Prunes, Dik Evans, this was absolute heaven. We didn’t know how to write songs; we were improvising. And here came the masters of improvisation – Keith Levene and Jah Wobble and John Lydon at his lyrical best. I still have my metal box, although it’s dirty and I don’t think the silver preserved very well. But the idea of three 12 inches at 45rpm – they were almost deconstructing the album before the way streaming has deconstructed the album now. Back in 1979 you could play any track you want.
But the depth! ‘Death Disco’ or Swan Lake’ being about Lydon’s mum dying, and ‘Poptones’, which is one of the great tracks, about a woman being raped, lying in the in the mud and the dirt and the peat, and hearing the radio from the car. You knew that Lydon had that in him. You’d remember ‘Bodies’ from Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks…, which is about an abortion, but never as profound as ‘Poptones’. And then there’s ‘Chant’, which gets to that far right/anti-far right shit that was happening then in Britain and it’s just a masterpiece. It conjures up that fear and paranoia. It was the rise of Thatcherism and the death of the good things in Britain for me. It’s their most articulate album. I mean, there are moments on The Flowers Of Romance that I love; I love the first album, but this is such a concise work.
I remember seeing them live when they played Futurama festival in 1979. I think Lydon had his back to the audience throughout the whole thing and Wobble was on his chair, but the sound of Levene as a guitarist! It was sort of jerky, almost like your head was being sliced off by the guitar, and this big, fat fucking dub bass that held everything together. Where they went musically, I don’t know who really took up after them. Maybe in some degrees Einstürzende Neubauten. But it just felt effortless.
