We encountered Caribou and their Rough-Trade-album-of-the year, ‘Swim’, earlier (see ABON 0120). ‘Swim’ is a wonderfully original mixture of thought-provoking ideas and left field dance rhythms. Written and performed by a genuine Dr of Mathematics, it - very appropriately you may think – sets out to prove that music can make you dance and think at the same time.

Whilst it’s not the first record to do that, ‘Swim’ doesn’t have many obvious historical reference points. In fact it doesn’t sound much like anything that has gone before.

Except of course for A Certain Ratio’s early Post-Punk icey Funk.

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Public Image Limited Part 3.

When guitarist, Keith Levene (I think) said that ‘Flowers Of Romance’ was “probably the least commercial album ever delivered to a record company” he was wrong. But ‘Flowers’ is difficult, even by PIL standards.

Apart from John Lydon’s lyrics and unique vocals the stand-out features of the first two PIL albums were Jah Wobble’s Dub-inspired heavy-as-lead bass and Keith Levene’s sharper-than-a-jagged-piece-of-metal guitar.

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If Public Image Limited’s first album (see ABON 0134) helped kick start the Post Punk phenomenon, then their second album, ‘Metal Box’, demonstrated at length and in depth how rich a territory Post Punk could be.

The first album had combined Dub Reggae bass and Can-like Krautrock guitar sensibilities and sounds to create a new music that was more creatively experimental than Punk. As wonderful and ground-breaking as that album was, particularly on stand-out tracks ‘Public Image’ and ‘Annalisa’, it was also a fairly one-dimensional - and short – affair. Almost as if PIL were too awed by what they’d discovered to be able to develop the sound further or laterally beyond that initial creative breakthrough.

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Johnny Rotten, aka John Lydon, is such a colourful, controversial and out-spoken character that it’s not surprising that so much has been written about him. But nine times out of ten what’s written about him completely ignores, or even seems to deny, the fact that, underneath all the media hype and silliness - admittedly often created by Lydon himself - there lays an underrated genuine musical genius. How else can you explain the fact that Lydon was a key character in four - count ‘em - of the most remarkable albums of the past 50 years?

Everyone of course, is aware of ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ by the Sex Pistols. But what is often over-looked is that after he left the Pistols, he produced with his new band, Public Image Limited (PIL), another three phenomenal and phenomenally influential albums, ‘Public Image’, ‘Metal Box’ and ‘Flowers Of Romance’ between 1978 and 1981.

PIL was quite a different outfit to the Pistols.

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This might just be the most significant 2 minutes 27 seconds of music that has been posted on ABON so far. Because…

Back in the late ’60′s Jamaican DJ’s fronting the enormous, and enormously loud, Sound Systems that toured the island started ‘toasting’. Which involved ad-libbing over the rhythm and in between the singing on the 7″ hit singles they were playing. U-Roy was one of these DJs.

At some point around 1968 he met the then unknown King Tubby who was a disc cutter and engineer at Duke Reid’s studio. Duke Reid ran the Treasure Isle label which was producing many of the hit singles U-Roy would have been playing at Sound System parties. King Tubby of course had access to the rhythm tracks that sat behind the vocals on these singles. And he started experimenting with these tracks – producing what would turn out to be the forerunners of Dub. He also started to give these tracks to DJs like U-Roy to toast over live.

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Dub of the late ’70′s variety. By when Dub had evolved in many different directions. Lee Perry and King Perry were still evolving dub (which they’d effectively invented earlier in the ’70′s) into what I suppose could be called ‘classic’ dub – percussion and bass-heavy with a focus on hypnotic grooves (see ABON 0014). Meanwhile producers like Joe Gibbs (with his engineer and mixer Errol Thompson) and Scientist were creating a different dub style. Maybe best described as Dub-with-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-thrown-in.

With far less emphasis on the bass and rhythm it left room for a more tuneful sound with bucketfuls of sound effects and samples thrown in – from strange blips and burps to doorbells, phones and computer game soundtracks to cowbells, animals and toy instruments.

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