John Lydon's Forgotten Fury

Make no mistake, the name John Lydon will forever be associated first and foremost with the glorious noise he and his bandmates in the Sex Pistols made over the course of two tumultuous years in the late seventies.  Personality and legal conflicts made a shooting star out of the group, and those two factors alone contributed to Lydon’s violent desire to sever his every last tie with them. Given the earth-shattering effect of the Pistols’ music, Lydon must have also felt enormous pressure to escape the shadow it cast.

His next band produced at least one effort that was up to the task. Public Image Ltd.’s 1979/80 Metal Box/Second Edition blended disco, dub and dissonance to hugely influential and enduringly listenable effect.

Between the scorched earth Pistols and trailblazing Metal Box, though, came PiL’s initial effort, the oft-overlooked First Issue. The album has been especially easy to overlook in America, where the be-suited brains at Warner Bros. delayed release of the album in 1978, supposedly because the huge bass sound made them queasy. Despite attempts at re-recording, the album was shelved, and it languished in America as an import-only obscurity for decades.

Earlier this summer, reissue label Light In The Attic finally corrected that bit of corporate negligence, and Americans can now bask in the corrosive wonder of John Lydon’s first post-Pistols effort. It’s a bracing listen.

First track “Theme” is a clear signal that the listener should be prepared for anything. Nine minutes of Keith Levene’s blistering garage/mirage guitar wrapping itself around a lurching, sodden rhythm, over which Lydon repeatedly intones, with wavering degrees of hysteria, “I wish I could die.” It’s a beast of a track.

It’s also a clear signal that PiL is a complete band effort – remove Lydon from the track and the combination of Levene’s guitar and Jah Wobble’s ever-steady bass still get the feeling across.

And it’s a not altogether pleasant feeling. The song is an ugly black cloud, no way in, no way out. Lydon has claimed that the song is simply an over-dramatized reaction to a bad day, but one could be forgiven for hearing something darker. Dark enough that the only logical response might be uneasy laughter. That reaction is given validity at the end of the track, when Lydon tongue-in-cheekly states “I just died.” Then as the instruments fade out he finishes the thought: “Of terminal boredom”.

There’s no comic relief let-up in “Religion” (PiL did love the one-word titles), a two-part diatribe against the Catholic church, and organized religion in general, if one chooses to hear it that way. The song is presented first as a no-frills spoken-word piece, then once again with jarring, rhythmically wayward musical accompaniment. Maybe it’s over-serious, but something in the delivery – the insistence of Lydon’s recitation, the way the rhythm keeps shifting – pulls in the listener and doesn’t let go.

The tempo picks up on “Annalisa”. The beat is simple, caveman-like, with Lydon wailing amelodically about a pair of English parents who let their child starve because they thought she was possessed. It’s fiery and effective, the repetition trancelike, Lydon’s monotone chilling, but like a couple of songs on side two, it shows up the transitional status of the album; not as songful as the Pistols or their punk brethren, not as risky as the post-punk that PiL would embody and inspire.

The Sex Pistols are dredged up again in “Public Image”, at least lyrically, with Lydon pouring all the venom he can muster at the unseemly machinations and exploitations that led to the rise and fall of his former band. Musically it’s something slightly different, with Levene’s chiming, echoing guitar pattern ringing around Lydon’s wavering voice in ways that Steve Jones couldn’t have dreamed of (and admittedly maybe didn’t care to.)  U2 fans should pay attention, because The Edge certainly did.

The album ends on a bizarre note. “Fodderstompf” is another long track consisting of not much more than a disco groove and the Lydon/Wobble duo repeating the phrase “We only wanted to be loved” in shrill Monty Python-as-old-ladies voices. It’s annoying, funny, boring, and hypnotic all at once. Like “Theme” it can make the listener do a 180 in their reaction. You laugh, then something in the impulse behind the phrase “We only wanted to be loved” makes you feel a little squeamish.

And if that’s what PiL wanted – to provoke – then so be it. Because it isn’t cheap. There’s too much real emotion in this music, too much intelligence, too much pure blood and guts, for it to be a simple provocation. It’s an act of palpable release, a testament to fortitude, and it can now take its place alongside The Sex Pistols and Metal Box as a fascinating Lydon-led cry from the soul.