Classic Album Review: Public Image Ltd - First Issue (1978)

Craig Stephen on a game-changing post-punk classic ... 

Most commentators head straight to Metal Box for the definitive PiL album. But I’ve always had a sweet spot for their coruscating and brilliant debut. Few contemporary bands ever matched it, and the Gang of Four are likely their only rivals for any post-punk accolades.

 The remarkable thing about First Issue is that its release in December of 1978 came just under a year after the infamous implosion of the Sex Pistols at the Wonderland in San Francisco. That chaotic gig was swiftly followed by acrimony and the band splitting up. Bassist Sid Vicious went on his own tragic path, drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones went in search of notorious crook Ronnie Biggs and singer Johnny Rotten renamed himself John Lydon and did a startling volte face to ditch the screaming volatility of punk for what would become the thoughtful confrontation of post-punk.

He recruited childhood friend Jah Wobble on bass, Keith Levene, the short-lived ex-guitarist of The Clash, and Canadian drummer Jim Walker. They would experiment in dub music, African rhythms and the avant garde. This would not be Sex Pistols MK II or another punk band.

First Issue begins with a statement of intent in the shape of the nine-minute ‘Theme’. The now John Lydon is laughing. Yes, laughing as he sings “Now I understand” to Walker’s incessant drum bashing and Jah Wobble’s insane basslines. Lydon’s vocal style is unmistakable but it’s not at the forefront, in fact you have to stretch your eardrum’s capabilities to capture his words amid the glorious din.

‘Religion’ comes in two parts, initially with Lydon on his own in spoken word format followed by the abrasive and much longer band version. The lyrics are the same, the approaches are very different. It was written on the Sex Pistols’ fateful tour of America where the then Rotten saw how much religion was embedded into the national culture. The other band members and manager Malcolm McLaren didn’t want a bar of it even after having a pop at that venerable institution, the British monarchy in the Pistols’ crowning moment ‘God Save the Queen’.

These lyrics made them look the other way: “This is religion and Jesus Christ/This is religion, cheaply priced/This is bibles full of libel/This is sin in eternal hymn/This is what they've done/This is your religion.”

The final track on the first side, ‘Annalisa’, is equally joyless and another prod at religion, based as it is on a real life story of a misguided exorcism in Germany that went tragically wrong.

The very name Public Image is Lydon’s riposte to his perceived ill-treatment at the hands of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and the other band members, and in particular how he felt they viewed him as the image-maker, not the songwriter or the artist.

The eponymous debut single, which came out three months ahead of the album, reads like a bitter break-up letter: “What you wanted was never made clear/Behind the image was ignorance and fear/You hide behind this public machine/Still follow the same old scheme.”

It's actually the most accessible track on the album and sold enough to warrant a place in the British top 10.

After it comes ‘Low Life’, which could be another attack on McLaren though various other names have also been banded around. And it’s possible that Lydon has more than one character in mind when he wrote it.  This “bourgeois anarchist” is an “ego-maniac traitor … ignorant selfish”.

This is as good as it gets for First Issue … ‘Attack’ is three-minutes of infantile critiques of his former band members (“All our deals confiscated/Legaling with magistrate”) while ‘Fodderstompf’ is so moronic and pointless that Lydon was moved to dismiss it. It sounds like it was a studio joke lasting seven minutes and 40 seconds that somehow ended up concluding the album, presumably with nothing else in the can to use.

First Issue wasn’t to everyone’s taste – some reviewers panned it, a court in Malta ordered it be removed from stores because of the lyrics to ‘Religion’, and it was considered too uncommercial for release in the United States.

When it was reissued, a bonus disk included the B-side to Public Image, ‘Cowboy Song’, and an unedited 56-minute radio interview Lydon did with the BBC in 1978 which was never aired because of his less than idolatry attitude towards certain stars. One of those was BBC TV’s own Jimmy Savile – outed after his death as a paedophile, and Lydon hinted that he knew about Savile’s sick tendencies.

Album Review: Natacha Atlas - Strange Days (2019)

Craig Stephen steps beyond the blog’s comfort zone to share some thoughts on Natacha Atlas’s latest album …

Strange Days: now wasn’t that an album by The Doors?

Indeed it was, and you can but wonder if Atlas was referencing the title of Morrison et al’s second album when she set off on her latest musical journey. But these are far stranger times than the world was in 1967, where the summer of love was a sweet memory by the time The Doors’ second album came out, and the two words have almost become a byword for a world in which populism and environmental destruction are now part of the lexicon. 

Atlas has a fascinating background, where East meets West: British and Egyptian parents and being brought up in Belgium. She is multilingual, and crucially multi-talented, with stints in Transglobal Underground and Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart.

For her 15^th solo work - a double album - Atlas dips into jazz and maintains her background in Middle Eastern music.

 The first time I heard Atlas as a solo artist was on an EP covering the James Bond film theme ‘You Only Live Twice’, giving it a whole new dimension. So it seems appropriate that Atlas here returns to the 60s and another notable item from the era: James Brown’s ‘It’s A Man’s World’. It’s fitting that such a song has a feminine voice to give it credence, and Atlas’s version supplies that first-party emphasis.

On an album sung in both English and Arabic, the opening track, ‘Out of Time’, mixes the two, breaking with the universal tongue but, after some jazz-style solo play, Atlas switches to her father’s vernacular to immense effect. As the song segues into ‘Maktoub’ Atlas now fully focuses on Arabic, which she has always made sound equivocal.

Soul star Joss Stone appears on ‘Words of a King’ - which was released as a single - and this is likely to attract diverging opinions for fans of both artists. From the point of view of this writer it lacks the poise of the album and is a humdrum exoteric duet in which the voices complement each other but don’t have the spark that’s required for a truly great team-up.

The man very much involved in this work is Samy Bishai, who as well as claiming co-composer credits for much of the material here, arranged all the music. Utilising a string quartet and a jazz quintet, Bishai creates a sound world in tune with Atlas’s unique delivery and delicate tonal inflections. This is obvious on ‘Lost Revolutions’ at the end of side three, a truly monumental atmospheric track with the singer at her most haunting as she laments the general failure of the Arab Spring, and in particular the one in Egypt where hope has now mutated into fear and repression.

As the title suggests, it’s an album that’s never quite what it appears and contains plenty of mystery. The music is gentle and intimate, yet highly charged with emotion, melding disparate musical elements from Western and Middle Eastern influences. It may not appeal to the jazz or world music purist but this is an album that essentially transcends labels and is a great example of fusion.