Post by Fuggle on Jul 26, 2004 13:48:13 GMT -5
Metal box, P.I.L.
Virgin, 1979; chart position: 18
Garry Mulholland on how the Sex Pistols' singer changed everything with a different group altogether
Sunday June 20, 2004
The Observer
Metal box is what happens when you put three poverty-stricken screw-ups and a selection of bullied drummers in the studio late at night, feed them bad drugs and - for the group's informal leader - the bad memories of a dead best friend and mother and the messiest band break-up in rock history.
It is now accepted that any smart, brave rock band who want to progress beyond verse-chorus thrashing inevitably throw out the blues and the Beatles and try to find some new space in dub, electronica, world music and dance rhythms. But until Metal Box , if your rock noise didn't keep to the three-minutes-and-a-chantalong chorus point, then the only directions were metal, the avant-garde or the most discredited of all genres in the wake of punk - progressive rock. John Lydon, Jah Wobble and Keith Levene showed everyone a way out by fusing Lydon's gift for hookline and lyrical and vocal directness to a music as fluid, dark and strange as anything coming out of the art fringe, and as funky as fuck.
Metal Box does what Coltrane's A Love Supreme did for jazz and Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On did for soul - it proved that the uncompromising cutting-edge could be made accessible, even catchy. The album also killed punk.
On PIL's second album Lydon proves that he was the best singer of his generation as he wails, yelps, croons, sneers and attempts to exorcise his own demons while running a caustic eye over England's dreaming. His agonised howls and wry asides are backed by a unique, flowing, free music that goes disco, ska, flamenco, Arabic, Jamaican and African in an attempt to run away from the narrowness of Olde England. Stories are told, of Northern Ireland, social parasites, abandoned children, pretty suburbs that seethe with repressed hatred, even a kidnap and rape that had made the papers, where Lydon becomes the victim, 'hiding in this foliage and peat', on the terrifying, heartbreaking 'Poptones'. But, for a writer and performer more influenced by English comedy - Tommy Cooper and Norman Wisdom were particular favourites - than by Iggy Pop or the New York Dolls, black humour is never far away.
Within months Wobble had been sacked and Levene and Lydon later fell out completely. But the three of them could never have followed Metal Box, even if they had all been nice guys without nasty habits and bad memories. It is an album that, like all great horror stories, makes the listener flinch from, yet laugh at, things that go bump in the night, but then leaves you feeling haunted. God knows what it must have been like to make such an ugly, beautiful, cursed thing.
Burn it: Poptones; Chant
How it felt for Jah Wobble: 'What a fucking beast of an album. A lot of people don't know that both Keith and I did drums. John would come in and sit under a piano or something and write lyrics, listening to the tracks again and again. There was a lot of tension. When you have different people on different drugs that's a problem. We had a belief in our own abilities. Often music movements follow visual arts movements by 30 or 40 years. That album is to music what Munch's "The Scream" was to art.'
