PiL's third: Flowers of Romance

A breakthrough of sorts occured several days into the sessions for recording of PiL's third album, Flowers of Romance. Instructing the engineer to keep the tape rolling no matter what, Levene tapped out some percussion patterns on a strange bamboo instrument that Virgin boss Richard Branson had brought back from Bali, then added synth sounds ('the animals' inside the percussive jungle, as he puts it). The result, entitled "Hymie's Him", was the weakest track on Flowers of Romance, but it broke the deadlock and gave the group a direction.

PiL - Hymie's Him 1981

Flowers is the PiL album on which Lydon the non-musician contributes most - he actually plays instruments, like the three-stringed banjo on "Phenagen" (a track named after a heavy-duty sleeping pill). On Flowers, Levene's guitar appeared only on "Go Back" (self-parodically) and "Phenagen" (psychedelically reversed).

PiL - Go Back 1981


PiL - Phenagen 1981

Summoned at the studio to lay down beats, Atkins found Lydon and Levene weren't there. So he worked closely with engineer Nick Launay to create striking rhythm tracks. 'I'd fallen asleep with my Mickey Mouse watch against my ear and then woken up to that sound. So we put the watch on a floor-tom skin so it would resonate, and then Nick harmonized, looped and delayed that sound, and I drummed to it, and that became "Four Enclosed Walls".

PiL - Four Enclosed Walls 1981

Atkins was also heavily involved in the album's stand-out track, "Under the House" - a stampeding herd of tribal tom-toms with string sounds shrieking across the stereo field. Lydon's processed vocals seem to emanate from his throat like malignant gas or ectoplasm. The lyrics allude to a supernatural experience - some accounts claim it's about a ghost that haunted the Manor studio, although Levene believes it refers more to an abstract sense of evil to which Lydon was unusually attuned.

PiL - Under the House 1981

The title track on the album lived up to [NME writer] Vivien Goldman's hype about PiL inventing 'a new kind of rhythm'.

PiL - Flowers of Romance 1981

Released as a single in March 1981, "Flowers of Romance" reached number 24 and resulted in another deranged Top of the Pops performance: Levene pounding the drums in a lab technician's white coat, PiL's videographer Jeanette Lee dwarfed by her double bass, and Lydon, dressed as a white-collared vicar, sawing dementedly on a fiddle.

PiL - Flowers of Romance (Top of the Pops) 1981

Such was PiL's eminence that when the album finally arrived the next month, it was automatically hailed as another paradigm-shattering masterwork. More sceptical commentators, though, noted the distinct lack of work involved - from the paltry length (thirty-two minutes) to its desultory packaging (a Polaroid of Jeanette Lee with a rose between her teeth).

Of the leave-me-alone whinge "Banging the Door", Lydon later said, 'It's horrible to listen back to that kind of paranoia'.

PiL - Banging the Door 1981

A creepy account of being seduced by a female journalist, "Track 8" is particularly repellent, its vindictive imagery of fleshy tunnels 'erupting in fat' and naked, bulbous bodies betraying Lydon's Catholic fear of the flesh.

PiL - Track 8 1981

Howard Devoto and Magazine's first three albums

With Iggy Pop's The Idiot, released in early 1977, Buzzcocks co-founder Howard Devoto loved the sonorous Sinatra-esque croon Pop had developed. 'You really started to hear the richness of his voice, and when I later tried singing in a low register on Magazine songs like "Motorcade", that was definitely me trying to emulate Iggy a little'.

Magazine - Motorcade 1978

Describing the track "Breakdown" on the Buzzcocks' debut EP Spiral Scratch, the singer archly compared the paranoid protagonist with 'Dostoevsky's underground man or any of them existentialist'. A few years later he'd condense Notes from the Underground into the pop single "A Song from under the Floorboards".

Buzzcocks - Breakdown 1977


Magazine - A Song from under the Floorboards 1980

Everything was building towards a crescendo, and "Shot by Both Sides", Magazine's debut single, rose to the occasion. The riff, originally written by Buzzcocks' guitar player Pete Shelley, had the ringing grandeur of Springsteen's "Born to Run". "Shot" sounded like an anthem, but its emotional core was the opposite of everything anthems stood for: battle-shy and non-committal, it was a clarion for all those who refused calls to solidarity or partisanship.

Without specifically referring to any of the great divisive issues of late seventies Britain (Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League versus the resurgent far right; the collectivist left that was taking over the Labour Party versus the pro-entrepreneur right wing that dominated the Conservative Party), "Shot" captures the era's sense of dreadful polarization, and the vacillation of those caught in the cross-fire with the centre ground disappearing beneath their feet. It is about a non-combatant, an inactivist. It's a defense of the bourgeois art-rock notion that the individual's struggle to be different is what really matters.

Magazine - Shot by Both Sides 1978

It's tempting to read "Shot" as an answer record to Tom Robinson Band's "Better Decide Which Side You're On". Constantly playing benefit gigs, providing info and contacts for various worthy causes on their record sleeves, TRB were icons of radical chic for all who'd hoped something constructive would emerge out of punk.

Tom Robinson Band - Better Decide Which Side You're On 1978

In "Shot by Both Sides" you also get a sense of Devoto recoiling from the rabble-rousing vulgarity that typified most punk gigs by the middle of 1977. The song's key lines are 'I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd/I was shocked by what was allowed/I didn't lose myself in the crowd'. In this respect, "Shot" could also be seen as a riposte in advance to Sham 69's "If the Kids Are United", a massive mid-1978 hit.

Sham 69 - If the Kids Are United 1978

On the brink of the Top 40, Magazine were invited to appear on Top of the Pops. At the last minute, Devoto decided to make a gesture that would indicate his disdain for the the corny charade. 'I didn't want to jump around in an obedient, "here's your entertainment" way. I wanted to be bloody-minded, but in a fairly understated way'. He got the BBC make-up girl to do him up in a whiteface, but instead of a striking glam alien, 'he looked like Marcel Marceau', recalls NME writer Paul Morley. 'And then Devoto decided, because his mind was racing so quick, that he was far ahead of the game and he'd just be still. Very, very still. And this great song was playing, but Devoto stood stock-still. And the next week the record went down the charts and from then on, everything shut down. Killed stone dead.'

Magazine - Shot by Both Sides (Top of the Pops performance) 1978

Following the unexpected failure of their most singular single, Magazine fell back on the prog-rock approach of slow-and-steady career building through albums and touring. 'Prog' was the invidious reference point brandished in the inevitable critical backlash that greeted 1979's Secondhand Daylight. 

Densely produced and overwrought, Secondhand Daylight still contained at least one masterpiece in 'Permafrost', a deliberately sluggish tune whose highlights include Barry Adamson's glutinous bassline, an angular solo from guitarist John McGeoch worthy of Bowie's Lodger, and Devoto's most quoted couplet: 'I will drug you and fuck you/On the permafrost'.

Magazine - Permafrost 1979

Magazine's third album, 1980's The Correct Use of Soap, received a warmer greeting: it was hailed, correctly, as the band's masterpiece. Devoto's lyrics drew inspiration from an idea he'd found in a book of essays on love and lust by Theodor Reik - the notion that you are particularly vulnerable to falling in love after you've experienced some kind of trauma or life crisis.