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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The first wave of Punk – from say late ’76 to late ’78 - was consciously revolutionary. As it attempted to rip everything up and start again it shouted its intentions very clearly and very loudly in both the press and in the lyrics it wrote as it went along. Being seen to be revolutionary was at least as important as actually creating something revolutionary. But what seemed radical, dangerous and confrontational at the time, now seems a little tame and safe and in many ways more the natural successor or evolution of ’50′s Rock’n'Roll than a revolution.

That’s not a criticism - some of the most remarkable music ever comes from that period and that genre.  It’s also not a suggestion that Punk wasn’t a very big and necessary departure from what came immediately before - it was and it acted like a well needed cleanser on the bloatedness and laziness of much mid ’70′s music.

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