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.

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.

Classic Album Review: Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks (1977)

Where do you start with an album like Never Mind The Bollocks?

Let’s face it, for a talentless bunch of anti-social misfits who supposedly couldn’t play a note between them, the Sex Pistols left an indelible mark on popular music’s vast and rich multi-coloured quilt … even if that mark now bears a remarkable resemblance to that of a stale semen stain.

I’m quite sure the band wouldn’t have had it any other way.

It is hard to believe the Pistols operated as a going concern for little more than a year (in reality), and given the size of their discography nowadays, even more difficult to fathom is the fact that Never Mind The Bollocks was the band’s only official studio album.

The story behind the album has been told so many times it almost seems ludicrous to offer my own little piece of revisionism here, suffice to say that Never Mind The Bollocks is a landmark work … of its time, for its time – an acerbic, snotty-nosed, sneering, take-no-prisoners monolithic monster of a Rock’n’Roll record that still, even after all these years, simply has to be heard to be believed.

If you haven’t heard it yet, then why the hell are you wasting time sitting there reading this? Get to it. Life’s too short …

Oh, and great cover art too. Who knew pink and yellow were so compatible?

Five for download: ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Pretty Vacant’, ‘EMI’, and ‘Submission’.