With the Sex Pistols, Johnny “Rotten” Lydon helped define the everlasting image of punk: the spiky hair, the safety-pinned clothes, the wanton disregard for monarchy and the defaced Queen Elizabeth portraits to match. But in doing so, the Pistols also created a caricature, one that could be readily trotted out by sleazy TV talk-show hosts for cheap shock value and easily aped by sketch-comedy troupes. And for all the media outrage and label politicking that surrounded the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, it was ultimately a slickly produced, highly accessible set, its anti-establishment invectives latched onto shout-along hooks crafted by the world’s most ridiculed Beatles fan. Really, the Pistols were just a rock‘n’roll band fronted by a singer who happened to hate rock‘n’roll. And his next move was to show everyone just how much, by redefining punk not as a sound or costume, but as an idea, a liberation philosophy of pan-cultural musical cross-polination and strident non-conformism.
Formed in 1978, mere months after the Pistols’ infamous implosion in San Francisco, Public Image Ltd. were not so much post-punk as meta-punk. Though he’d detest the comparison, PiL initially served precisely the same function for Lydon as the Plastic Ono Band did for another famous John L., a vehicle through which he could exorcise and excoriate the albatross of his former band. Not only was the new group’s very moniker a pointed comment on Malcolm McLaren’s shrewd attempts to commoditize the Pistols as punk-rock puppets (and Lydon's former bandmates’ complicity in the gambit), their self-titled debut single scans as a particularly bitter break-up letter; spiked with barbs like “You never listened to a word that I said/ You only see me for the clothes that I wear,” “Public Image” is essentially a “How Do You Sleep?” you can dance to.
Musically speaking, “Public Image” presented a logical bridge between Lydon’s old and new ventures, retaining the punk-rock drive and agitated vocals, but with a greater sonic expanse highlighting Jah Wobble’s subterranean basslines and Keith Levene’s metallic (in the materiality sense) guitar grind, and hinting at the dub reggae and Krautrock influences that would inform the early PiL's sound. But the album on which it appears, First Issue, presents no convenient gateway, tucking the single onto Side 2 while greeting rubberneckers with “Theme”, a grueling nine-minute dirge-- on which Lydon repeatedly screams “I wish I could diiiieeee” with varying degrees of anguish-- that serves as a litmus test to instantly ward off Pistols fans looking for another excuse to pogo.
Sure, the Sex Pistols could be nasty, but the primordial Public Image was unrepentantly brutal-- punk stripped of its fashion and tabloid-baiting sensationalism and reduced to its noisy, nihilistic essence. Where the Pistols engaged in broad-stroke critiques of British institutions, First Issue’s strikes on the Catholic Church are more like close-range stabbings that gruesomely twist the blade; through the two-part spoken-word churn of “Religion” (a song reportedly rejected by the Pistols) and the relentlessly harrowing “Annalisa” (based on a true story of an exorcism gone horribly wrong), Lydon’s voice is transformed from a mere instrument of provocation to the pure embodiment of sheer terror. (Not surprisingly, Warner Bros. deemed First Issue too uncommercial to release in the U.S.; this Light in the Attic reissue marks the first time the album has been officially available stateside.)
A word-association game with Public Image Ltd. inevitably yields the phrase “death disco,” however, that sound (and the single that coined it) wouldn’t fully flourish until 1980’s Second Edition; rather than proffer a bastardized take on dance music, First Issue works the other way, applying disco production principles-- by boosting Wobble’s bottom end and foregrounding Levene’s tin-foiled guitar refrains-- to its deconstructionist rock attack. But what’s most striking today is the in-the-room immediacy and towering presence of the sound-- Canadian-born drummer Jim Walker may have only stuck around for this one record, but his Bonham-scaled boom leaves behind a career’s worth of craters. While future PiL records would provide easily photocopied blueprints to post-punk progeny like the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Liars, First Issue’s industrial-strength stompers anticipate the scabrous art-punk of the Jesus Lizard and Slint, while Levene’s guitar curlicues on “Public Image” are the stuff Daydream Nations are made of.
Not all of First Issue casts such an imposing shadow-- after completing the album’s first side at Townhouse and Manor Studios, the band had blown its budget, and finished off the album’s closing trifecta in a more affordable, lo-fi studio that specialized in reggae tracks. But the downsized dimensions encouraged the band’s experimental tendencies. “Low Life” and “Attack” succesively follow the “Public Image” single’s tunefully dissonant template but gradually debase it into echo-drenched disorientation, and though the dub-disco doodle “Fodderstompf” essentially amounts to a one-note joke stretched to seven minutes, it’s a significant one, presenting both a test run for the grotty grooves mastered on Second Edition, while paving the way for everything from Ween’s early bong-sucking pranksterism to James Murphy’s self-reflexive irreverence.
Rather than lard up the tracklist with endless outtakes and alternate versions, the First Issue reissue offers but two bonus incentives: beserker, Bonanza-inspired B-side “The Cowboy Song” and, far more intriguingly, a complete unedited 56-minute BBC interview with Lydon (conducted before the album’s release) that is well worth the price of re-admission for those who've already worn out their original vinyl import.. While Lydon has since cultivated a media personality as the consummate crank who gleefully hangs up on journalists, here he seems less surly than cagey and defensive, still stinging from the Pistols’ break-up and the perpetual flogging that band received from the press. It initially results in some painful moments of silence between Lydon and the intensely meek interviewer, but to her credit, she gradually gets him to loosen up and sound off on everything from the Rolling Stones (“they rip off everybody else’s ideas”) and Siouxsie and the Banshees (“I find their record appalling”) to the superiority of dance music over rock‘n’roll, which he’d already declared dead 35 years prior. And just as the album it accompanies set the discordant tone for next three-plus decades of indie rock, the interview yields its own uncanny prophecies-- Lydon stops just short of outing late BBC host Jimmy Saville as a pedophile, an insinuation that wouldn’t go public until an ITV documentary brought the sexual abuse claims to light last year. He may have gotten famous screaming “no future,” but as this reissue makes clear, Lydon’s greatest gift was a known future.
