Public Image Ltd

John Lydon created Public Image Ltd. right after the dying out of that incandescent flame that had been the British punk movement, a movement of which he himself had been the most representative “image”, as singer of the Sex Pistols. But the one who bawled out anarchic, subversive slogans alongside Matlock, Cook, Jones and Sid Vicious wasn't John Lydon: it was Johnny Rotten, an entity artfully created by manager Malcolm McLaren and built on the wild, overflowing personality of the young Lydon.

Once the adventure with the Pistols was over, the bard of punk's rebellious, (self-)destructive dream now demanded his own space: that's why he joined forces with guitarist Keith Levene, formerly of the Clash, and with a rhythm section as formidable as the one formed by bassist Jah Wobble and drummer Tim Walker, brought to life his new artistic incarnation in PIL.

From the ashes of punk, as is well known, dark/goth was born, ushered in by Siouxsie, Cure and Joy Division. PIL also fit within this musical strand, but already with their first two records (“First Issue” and “Metal Box/Second Edition“), John Lydon's band stood sharply apart from the rest of the goth movement. The band's leanings actually pointed toward far broader horizons than those mapped out by Siouxsie, Smith and Curtis: the dominant rhythm across most of their tracks was a hypnotic groove closer to dub than to punk, Levene's guitar supplied the dissonances typical of gothic rock, and over it all spread Lydon's disjointed, rasping vocals, an extraordinary interpreter of the psychoses gripping the immediate post-punk generation.

PIL release “Flowers of Romance”, their third album and arguably their masterpiece, with a lineup extensively reshuffled that, of the original members, retains essentially only Lydon full-time: Levene appears only sporadically, Wobble has launched a solo career as an ambient-dub musician, and Walker has already been replaced by the exceptional Martin Atkins (who, not by chance, would go on to become one of the leading figures of "industrial" music), who alongside Lydon is the true protagonist of the shift this record marks.

The obsessively tribal rhythms hammered out by Atkins and the manic streams of consciousness intoned by Lydon are essentially all that make up the structure of the songs on this record. Here and there timid layers of electronics and guitar distortion appear, while the bass is an occasional accessory. The result is a record that retains only a superficial kinship with punk and goth, but which points decisively toward avant-garde music, toward a rock song so stripped down and reduced to its essential elements that at more than a few points it even surpasses the most radical new wave experiments, leaving behind any genre definition and setting out to turn inside out the musical unconscious of an entire musical era.

“Four Enclosed Walls” opens the album with Martin Atkins keeping a rhythm as regular and precise as a metronome: but Lydon's vocal wanders off entirely elsewhere, completely detached from the song's backbone, sounding more like an agonized, graceless Middle Eastern muezzin than the old sneering Johnny Rotten. Even more complex is “Track 8”: this time Atkins' rhythm turns anxious and dark straight out of the goth-punk manual, but once again none of the other musicians seem inclined to fall in line: Levene launches into a concerto of guitar dissonance, the bass merely mutters along listlessly and detached, Lydon delivers a few lines as if in a trance. “Phenagen” then throws caution to the wind and abandons any resemblance to rock music once and for all: this time it's an out-of-tune, discordant piano that sets the theme, immediately abandoned by the litany intoned by a Lydon well past the edge of a nervous breakdown, accompanied by bells, faint pulses, and stunning guitar distortions.

The title track complicates the arrangement by introducing violins and ghostly choirs, along with a slight electronic presence: but what still dominates the scene are Atkins' ethnic percussion and Lydon's vocals, which never as much as in these tracks (as in many moments of the previous “Metal Box”) manage to truly update the “spleen” of the poètes maudits to the derailed psyche of the punk generation.

The record carries on stringing together masterpiece after masterpiece, weaving exhausting rhythms that don't allow a moment's pause: truly extraordinary is the pairing of “Under The House” and “Hymie's Him”, essentially two solos by an increasingly unleashed Martin Atkins: the first relegates voice and effects to the background compared to the drummer's show; the second is an instrumental in which the percussion concerto, dissonant, metallic, ceremonial and industrial by turns, is joined by keyboard drones that give the piece a visionary, mysterious stature that recaptures the true essence of "dark".

“Banging The Door” is perhaps the most conventional track, not far from Siouxsie's macabre nightmares. “Go Back” even attempts to reclaim the roots of "rock" with Levene's opening riff (though still pierced by an ocean of dissonance): too bad that Lydon's robotic vocal and the counterpoint of a few scattered piano notes sink even a semblance of normality into demonic chaos: so it's time for the closer, entrusted to “Francis Massacre”, the most hallucinated (and hallucinatory) piece on the record: Atkins pounds like a man possessed on whatever he can find within reach, Lydon screams like a psychopath seized by an epileptic fit, while electronic buzzing and fleeting piano interventions can be heard in the background. A track that is a genuine avant-garde piece, it brings out better than any other the lucid madness of the PIL project. Nothing happens by chance on this record, everything is calibrated with meticulous care to achieve an effect of total disintegration of sounds, words, even the images it manages to conjure at every turn, in this singular, monolithic, delirious and terrifying kammerspiel that is “Flowers of Romance”.

It seems like centuries have passed since Lydon, or rather Johnny Rotten, and the Sex Pistols set the world ablaze with their crude, irresistible anarchic anthems. “Flowers” no longer has anything to do with rock music: what PIL achieved is a catalogue of monstrous visions, a devastating experience of laying bare the real desolation that lies as much within us as around us. Which is, in the end, nothing other than punk's true, declared goal: only no one before PIL had made it so explicitly clear.

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06/11/2006