Post-punk's pinnacle: PiL's Metal Box

In 1979 John Lydon lost both his mother (to cancer) and his estranged best friend Sid Vicious (to heroin). Witnessing his mum, the great source of strength and encouragement in his life, slowly slipping away inspired Lydon's lyrics to "Death Disco", the first PiL release after the debut album. Wobble's hard-funk bassline pushes forward like fear rising in your gorge. Levene generates a staggering amount of sound using a single guitar - simultaneously torturing the classical-kitsch melody of "Swan Lake", hacking out rhythm chords that feel like blade touching bone, and scattering a microtonal scree of harmonics. Searing through this swarm of anguish, Lydon exorcises his grief like Yoko Ono at her most primal-scream harrowing: 'Seeing in your eyes...Silence in your eyes...Final in a fade...Flowers rotting dead'.

PiL - Death Disco 1979

Released in June 1979, "Death Disco" is arguably the most radical single ever to penetrate the UK's Top 20. I remember the Top of the Pops presenter (whose name escapes me) looking ashen-faced as he reluctantly uttered the song title when introducing the group.
Wobble sat in a dentist's chair through the whole performance. 'Everyone else lined up to get made beautiful, but I just asked the BBC make-up people to have my teeth blacked out, so I could do a big smile at the camera with my front teeth missing'.

PiL - Death Disco (Top of the Pops) 1979

PiL's next single, "Memories", pursued the dance direction even more intently with its brisk groove of hissing high hat and crisp snares, and its disco-style breakdowns, where the sound strips down and the intensity rises several notches. Only Levene's glassy shrouds of Arabic-sounding guitar felt at odds with the dance-floor imperative. Well, that and Lydon's anti-nostalgia invective, which was not exactly an invitation to get down and boogie. Baying like a cross between a banshee and a mountain goat, he railed against some nameless fool still living in the past. Some speculated that Lydon was attacking 1979's burst of nostalgia (the mod and ska revivals), but when he sneered 'This person's had enough of useless memories', it felt like he was talking about his own need to sever ties to the past, whether memories of his loved ones or tangled regrets about his years in the Pistols.

PiL - Memories 1979

Martin Atkins, who went on to become PiL's longest-enduring drummer, was recruited when the second album Metal Box was virtually finished. He received a summons to the studio in the form of an inconsiderate 3 a.m. phone call.
'When I got to Townhouse Studios (where the band was recording), someone says, "There's the drum kit, make something up"', Atkins recalls. 'Wobble and I wrote "Bad Baby" off the top of our heads - what you hear on Metal Box is literally that first five minutes of us playing together for the first time'. As you might imagine, this isn't the best way for a band to operate. Indeed, "Bad Baby" is the only real blemish on what otherwise stands as not only PiL's masterpiece but post-punk's pinnacle.

PiL - Bad Baby 1979

The album starts with "Albatross", ten minutes of pitiless bass pressure from Wobble, over which Levene scythes the air and Lydon sings like he's being crushed between two giant slabs of rock. "Albatross" is "Public Image" turned inside out: Lydon's confidence that he can outrun his past curdling into despair.

PiL - Albatross 1979

"Memories" and "Death Disco" follow, the latter retitled "Swan Lake" and now ending in a locked groove, Lydon's grief and horror frozen for eternity, like Munch's Scream.

PiL - Swan Lake 1979

After the surging urgency of the two singles comes the slow suspension and numb trance of "Poptones". Gyrating around Wobble's deep, probing bassline, Levene's guitar scatters a wake of harmonic sparks that merge with the lustrous halo of cymbal spray. Talking about his 'circular, jangly', almost psychedelic playing on "Poptones", Levene once compared its repetitiveness to staring at a white wall: 'If you look at it for a second, you'll see a white wall...If you keep looking at it for five minutes, you'll see different colours, different patterns, in front of your eyes - especially if you don't blink. And your ears don't blink'.

Rising to the occasion, Lydon matches the music's sinister grace with one of his most quietly unsettling lyrics: sketched in oblique, fractured images, it's an account of someone who's been abducted, driven into the woods, and raped. 'Hindsight does me no good/Standing naked in this back of the woods', intones the victim, bitterly recalling the reassuring 'poptones' playing on the car's cassette player. It's not clear if the song is being sung by a corpse, or if the person got away and is now cowering and shivering in the wet foliage.
On "Poptones" and other Metal Box songs, Lydon's delivery meshes with Levene's guitar in a weird modal place somewhere between Celtic and Arabic. 'When someone can't sing you get these natural voice tones', explains Wobble. 'So PiL's music was based more around overtones and subharmonics, rather than harmony per se. The Beach Boys we were not! PiL actually had more in common with music from Lapland or China'.

PiL - Poptones 1979

"Poptones" whooshes straight into the Northern Ireland-inspired terror ride of "Careering", during which Levene abandoned guitar for ominously hovering and swooping electronic sound-shapes created on the Prophet 5 - an early and expensive form of polyphonic synth.

PiL - Careering 1979

Then came "No Birds Do Sing" - PiL's zenith, as far as Levene is concerned. Wobble and drummer Richard Dudanski set up a foundation-shaking groove, over which Lydon intones another scalpel-sharp lyric, dissecting suburbia's 'layered mass of subtle props', the serene narcosis of its 'bland, planned idle luxury'. Levene's guitar emits a strange metallic foam that's simultaneously entrancing and insidious.

PiL - No Birds Do Sing 1979

The instrumental "Graveyard" is disco music for a skeletons' ball: it really sounds like dem bones doing the shake, rattle 'n' roll.

PiL - Graveyard 1979

After this, Metal Box loses its way with the underdeveloped "The Suit" and "Bad Baby", but then recovers dramatically with the last three songs: the psycho-disco of "Socialist", all dry, processed drums and synth blips; the thug-funk stampede of "Chant", with Lydon ranting about street violence and wet-liberal Guardian readers; and the unexpected Satie-like poignancy of "Radio 4", with its sighing synths and gently sobbing bass.

PiL - The Suit 1979


PiL - Socialist 1979


PiL - Chant 1979


PiL - Radio 4 1979

In honour of reggae and disco's twelve-inch aesthetic and to ensure the highest possible sound quality, PiL insisted on releasing the album as three 45 r.p.m. records, rather than a single 33 r.p.m. disc. The idea of putting the three discs inside a matt-grey film canister came from Lydon's friend Dennis Morris, rock photographer and member of the all-black post-PiL band Basement 5.