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.

Riot On The Radio: Gigs that ended up in a massive punch-up Part 2

Part 2 of Craig Stephen’s look at gigs that turned ugly …

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Phoenix Festival, Stratford-on-Avon, 1993

The Phoenix Festival began in 1993 but the only licence promoters Mean Fiddler could get had severe restrictions that made any proper festival unworkable. In contrast to Glastonbury's 24 hour bustle, at Phoenix 1993 the music stopped at 11pm, and security guards ruthlessly quelled campfires and campfire sound systems that went on beyond midnight.

On one night (I recall this as the first) this caused a near riot, to which the security guards responded by taking off their standard security shirts with their identifiable numbers, and battering punters with batons and broken up pallets.

I was at the front of the angry crowd and as always there’s one halfwit using it to sell something, in this case “riot lager” for a pound a can. A stereo was blaring John Peel’s show, and appropriately the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ came on, and the volume was cranked up.

With no sign of the crowd departing, out came all these fascistic black-shirted security guards bashing whoever got in their way. I got smashed on the back, it was so hard it sent me flying but I got up immediately and ran like bloody fuck, as did everyone else.

Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site says that when a list of security guards was handed to the police to run checks on them after the event, it revealed that several of them were wanted for violent crime. Mean Fiddler defended the guards, blaming instead fence jumpers for the trouble. But according to Cope, photographic evidence clearly showed those beaten up had three-day wrist passes.

   

Status Quo, Dundee, 1969

Francis Rossi said of this gig in the eastern Scottish city: “You used to get extra money for playing in Scotland because it was so dangerous, although luckily the Scots took to us early on. We were in this brand new room with parquet flooring, and this fight broke out. I'd never seen anything like it – 1500 people, everybody punching everyone else: men punching men, men punching women, women punching men, women punching women … it was like the Wild West. People bottling each other in the back and neck, glasses flying. And we were onstage and there was no way out. Luckily someone told us to get our stuff, get out, and come back in the morning. We didn't argue, we just left. We came back in the morning and these 20 old women were there in a line, on their knees, scrubbing the blood out of this lovely new parquet floor.”

Public Image Limited, New York, 1981

PiL were in confrontational mode before the gig at the Ritz even started: arriving late, making the audience wait in the rain, then mocking them as they stood in the queue, soaking.

According to Ed Caraballo, who was the band’s “video guy”, the venue refused to let the support band go on stage until John Lydon arrived. The support act (a folk band spotted in a pub says Caraballo) thus came on an hour later than scheduled. They were booed off.

“The crowd was really cranky and pissed by then,” says video guy.

A ‘presenter’, Lisa Yipp goes on stage to introduce a pre-recorded interview with Lydon and Keith Levene.

“The crowd had it by then. They turned on Lisa for everything that happened and pelted her with beer bottles.”

Eventually the band come on, but behind a screen. At the end of the first song, ‘Flowers of Romance’, Lydon says “Silly fucking audience, silly fucking audience...”.

The crowd demand the screen be pulled back.  “John's never been one who likes to be told what to do so he's chiding the audience,” recalls video guy. “He says what fuckers they were to pay 12 dollars to see this, just taunting the audience. The more they say 'raise the screen,' he says 'we're not going to raise the fucking screen.”

After a long, largely improvisational track Lydon ups the abuse, and the response is beer bottles. “Even in the balconies, they were throwing bottles and some of it was hitting the audience down below. The more that they threw bottles, the more that John would chide them,” recalls video guy.

The manager’s demands to raise the screen are ignored by the tech team, and is told that it’s a performance art show and should have been advertised as such.

By now the crowd is pulling on the tarpaulin screen, and eventually a roadie grabs the mic out of Lydon’s hand and declares the show over.

“From the back of the auditorium, it was a beautiful site,” says video guy. “It was a sick feeling because part of me said 'wow, I'm responsible for this carnage' and part of me said 'wow, I'm fucking cool’.”

Hans Werner Henze, Hamburg, 1968

Henze and co-writer Ernst Schnabel wrote this piece as a requiem for Che Guevara. During its debut performance in Hamburg, a student hung a poster of Che over the balcony. An official then tore it down. Other students raised a red flag and a second portrait of Che, while some anarchists raised black flags. Scuffles ensued between the two groups then the police arrived. Students were hauled off, as was Schnabel.

Westlife, Indonesia, 2001

Yes, even at Westlife gigs there would be trouble.

As Shane Filan recounts: “It was an amazing gig, but it ended badly. There were about 20,000 people there because it was our biggest territory outside of the UK: our album had gone 22 times platinum or something.

“But it was afterwards that things went horribly wrong. There was total hysteria and we couldn't leave the stadium until they cleared it of people. Unfortunately, as the police tried to do so, all these security men started running at them. It was like a battle. They were flat-out attacking each other, thumping and kicking. It was unbelievable, about 100 police and 100 security. Eventually, the army got called in. It was like something out of Braveheart.”

Sixteen teenagers were said to have been taken to hospital after the concert in Jakarta.

Cockney Rejects, Birmingham, 1980

After punk, came Oi and the second wave of the movement. If the first outbreak of punk was a bit violent, this was the bloody carnage, with football hooliganism and hardline politics mixed in.

The band had just appeared on Top of the Pops in West Ham United shirts. "After that, everybody wanted to fight us, but you couldn't back down," says Rejects frontman Jeff ‘Stinky’ Turner. "Once you were defeated, it would have opened the floodgates for everybody."

So, on this night, the Rejects were backed into a corner and forced to stand and fight. Guitarist Micky Geggus was charged with GBH and affray, and the Cockney Rejects' career as a live band was effectively over.

"There was a lot of people cut and hurt, I got cut, Micky really got done bad, with an ashtray, the gear was decimated, there was people lying around on the floor. Carnage," added Turner.

Guest Post: 1977 and all that … Turning Rebellion Into Money?

It’s time for another Guest Post, where we welcome our good friend Porky to the everythingsgonegreen pigsty. Porky tries to claim he was “too young” for the first outbreak of punk, but he still has some thoughts about the legacy of 1977 and all that …

This year is the 40^th year of punk, if you take your starting point as 1977, rather than 1976 or 1969, or even 1956.

Punk’s origins are less important, the essence is. The Sex Pistols’ anger, The Clash’s passion, the Slits female revolution, the Saints and Radio Birdman’s honest, upfront bad attitude, the Suburban Reptiles’ uncomfortable Auckland abrasiveness and Bad Brains’ fusion of hardcore punk and roots reggae. These and many other bands shaped music in a way that still has some authority today.

Punk was the kick up the backside music needed in the 1970s, the swift sweep of the broom to prog, American MoR, cockrock and novelty guff that permeated the airwaves and Top of the Pops at the time. Music had become the mere background to lavish costume designs, puerility and daft dances as style supplanted substance.

 It wasn’t just angry; it was political: whether from 1977 (Pistols, Clash, Adverts) to its younger siblings (Crass, Dead Kennedys, The Exploited), on through the ongoing revivalist acts such as NOFX and Rancid, punk has been resolutely anarchist, socialist, feminist, reggae-loving, anti-racist, eco-warrior, and opposed to conservatism. It’s the voice of the disaffected.  

And yet, four decades on, I feel a cold breeze feather my skin as I think of what punk has become. What exactly does punk mean anymore? Is it about rebellion or has it become a nostalgia it’s okay to like? Was it even radical in the first place, and just another phase that the music industry soon latched on to and exploited? Oh my, I never wanted to have these questions floating around in my head. I was too young for the first outbreak, but you didn’t have to live through the Punk War to know what it fought for, daddio. 

So now we have the ungainly sight of John Lydon becoming John Liedown. The antagonistic rebel typified the movement in 1976 when he reflected the views of millions of bored British teens, beaten-down by the threat of rising unemployment and austerity, with Thatcher’s ghastly ‘I’m all right Jack’ vision just an election away.

John Lydon

 Now, Lydon is happy to reveal he thinks ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage is fantastic, Brexit is good for the working class and that Donald Trump is a nice chap and not racist at all. Always an enigma, Lydon carefully crafted himself an image of the apolitical warrior, the man on the street who just wants to stick two fingers to the man. His latest comments seem to suggest he is part of the establishment, happy to promote New Zealand butter.

He is only one, of course, and I’m unaware of any other punks that have drifted to the right. Joe Strummer’s final gig was a benefit for striking firefighters, Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers remains resolutely anti-fascist, and most new punk bands retain some semblance of that bolshy youthful angst.

But what of one of my original questions, has, in the Clash’s words “turning rebellion into money” become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Perhaps the answer lies in the actions of Joe Corre, the son of ex-Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.

On a barge on London's River Thames late last year, the businessman set fire to his ₤5 million collection of punk memorabilia in protest against the commercialisation of the once-feared movement.

Joe Corre

Corre didn’t have anything to lose, he’s already rich, so the excessive worth of his pile of bondage trousers, bootleg recordings and trinkets would never have made a dent in his bank balance.

“Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need,” he said before striking a match to some Sid Vicious posters.

Who indeed is making money from the many punk special publications, the compilation albums and the books reflecting on the productive period from 1976-79 when anything seemed possible? I’d bet my prized copy of The Clash’s self-titled 1977 debut that the people that many punks hated are banking that filthy lucre.

But strip away all the exploitation and murky views and punk remains the one true musical revolution, when hating the British monarchy, opposing the fascist National Front, and wanting a riot of your own was not merely two fingers up to the establishment, it was the voice of an angry, youthful working class.

Now, fuck you. 

You want more Porky? ... you can find him here.