Public Image Ltd's debut single, Public Image, was released in October 1978, making it, along with Magazine's Shot By Both Sides, Gang of Four's Damaged Goods and the Banshees' Hong Kong Garden, one of the records that ushered in the post-punk era. It was a period of incredible musical expansion that saw white rock bands dabble for the first time with disco and dub. John Lydon's second outfit played a pivotal role in that exciting development.
Or, at least, the early incarnation of PiL did. There were many versions, featuring a series of drummers, but it was when Lydon teamed up with guitarist Keith Levene and bassist Jah Wobble that the group produced their most groundbreaking work. That is to say, the version that gave us that startling first single, and the First Edition and Metal Box albums. Thereafter, they lurched from lineup to lineup, and although they did interesting things – most notably, 1981's Flowers of Romance single and 1986's Album – they were really a spent force in terms of invention and sonic sorcery by 1980, when the rest of rock's avant garde caught up and moved things on.
And so the news that Lydon has reformed PiL with guitarist Lu Edmonds (who has played with the Damned and the Mekons), a multi-instrumentalist called Scott Firth, and most promisingly, Bruce Smith of post-punk/funk noir types the Pop Group on drums, doesn't excite quite as much as it would have done had Messrs Levene and Wobble been on board.
PiL's problem was always that they made such outlandish claims for themselves, making it easy to criticise them when they failed to deliver. PiL were all about doing things differently, destroying convention – the most heinous sin was to be Just Another Rock Band, going through the motions of recording and touring. In fact, they announced from the start, they weren't a band at all, they were a corporation – literally a "Ltd" company – under which umbrella they would involve themselves in all manner of audio-visual trickery.
When Metal Box came out, it was as a series of 12-inch singles – nods to the worlds of disco and reggae – contained within a brushed-metal canister. More than anything, though, PiL were an experimental studio unit – watching them performing Death Disco on Top of the Pops in December 1979 on YouTube, Lydon wearing headphones, Wobble grimacing menacingly at the camera, the troubled but brilliant Levene casually inventing the Edge's guitar sound, you get a sense of a group for whom anything, for a few brief months, was possible, who could have pursued any direction and made it work. But they were never about "doing it live", they were about the astonishing alchemy that occurred when those three key players got together at the Manor Studio in unsuspecting Shipton-on-Cherwell 30 years ago. It was about the radical, the shock of the new, and as far from nostalgic revisits three decades hence as you could ever hope to get.
