Public Image Limited : When did you get off the bus?

Happy, Album, and 9 were the three that I listened to most when I was 13-14 and just getting into "Weird" (at least weird by the standards of pop/rock radio at the time...) music. I haven't heard them in years and I have no real desire to. I remember when That What Is Not came out, I tried to like it, but ultimately decided it was a crappy record and I stopped listening to PIL.

Oddly, I had a very similar reaction to Stoned and Dethroned by JAMC a short while later. It's funny how a bad record can make you stop caring about a band. I still love the early JAMC stuff(especially Up Too High, and the 4 track version of On The Wall...best drum sound ever...) but I haven't heard anything the did after that record to this day.

As I got a little older, I got into the first three PIL records. 2nd edition was on endless repeat on my car cassette deck sometime in the last 90's, and PIL and Flowers were records I picked up around the same time. During my last move(a year ago), I decided to sell my copies of 2nd Edition and Flowers. I don't think they are bad records, I just have no desire to listen to the again. I still own the first one, but never play it.

They are one of those groups who had a lot of potential and just didn't realize it and then got dragged down by careerism. It is a shame that the early line up couldn't get it together and make a few more great albums.

As it stands, IMHO early Jah Wobble records shit all over PIL from a great height. I have infinitely more time for the How Much Are They EP and the Snake Charmer EP. I think a lot of it just boils down to the fact that I really don't give a shit about rock music anymore. There is nothing wrong with rock per se, I am just over it.

Honestly I can't listen to FOR despite much effort: it's 'experimental' in a half-assed way.

I returned This Is What You Want to the record store when it came out, traded it right back in for a Swans LP. So that one.

Did anyone ever hear Lydon's Psycho's Path? (contender for worst album title ever)

yes

it is not good

Did anyone ever hear Lydon's Psycho's Path? (contender for worst album title ever)

Yes.

I thought it was pretty damn good.

Albums: after Metal Box. I sort-of meant to get around to buying Flowers Of Romance, but economic circumstances went against it.

Singles: after "Don't Ask Me".

"Disappointed" in the running for best PIL single though.

Didn't we poll them?

This is not a love poll: Best/Favourite Public Image Limited single Poll

oh yeah, *I* did...

Think I would have voted for 'Home' in that.

also, for those who haven't seen this..:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y161/MarkGrout/DSC00335.jpg

Paris au Printemps remains my fave PiL, btw--even tho i never really listen to it these days (i generally wimp out to the more sedate strains of ye olde Metal Box instead, tbt). but, man, the fucking ambiance of the thing is so beyond oppressive that i don't believe i could ever imagine better (or more appropriate) doomsday scenario music. add to that the fact that the live version of "Poptones" contained therein may well be my favorite live rock + artist/audience interaction performance extant (Wanker: "ATTACK! ATTACK!!"; John: "Wanker-shut-up..."; Audience "?"; John: "I'll walk of this fuckin stage if you keep spitting...DOGGG!"). and that its got a great/sick painted cover "portrait" of Lydon-Levene-Wobble as Jackass-Big Bird-looking thing-hirsute swamp beast(?), too. so, yeah, i really dig that one. and the sound of the original vinyl edition is truly brootal. but in a really good way. (sound on the cd sucks, natch. but then whadja expect?)

off, maybe...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

ILM OTM imo

"Disappointed" still their second best single (after "Public Image")

Anyone thinking of getting back on the bus for <i>This is PiL</i>? Heard the new track linked over at <A HREF="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/song-premiere-public-image-ltd-deeper-water-20120517)";>Rolling Stone</A> and it seems okay enough. Got the <i>One Drop</I> EP for RSD this year but still haven't gotten around to listening to it...was a bit scared, tbh.

Whoops, meant to convert my code. New track is at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/song-premiere-public-image-ltd-deeper-water-20120517

Yeah, almost bought the e.p.

Should, really...

huh that's pretty good!

Actually I really like that new track!

I don't think I ever got off the bus with PiL, but Lydon's collab with Afrika Bambaataa would make me get off any bus or cliff

After two spins, the new album is half-brilliant, half-not-doing-it-for-me. About the same as "That What Is Not" in terms of hit/miss ratio. I'm particularly enmored with "Lollipop Opera", which feels like a Fall song!

I don't think I ever got off the bus with PiL, but Lydon's collab with Afrika Bambaataa would make me get off any bus or cliff

wtf @ this, "World Destruction" is a killer single

One Drop ep is very good.

Aero otfm. "World Destruction" is all-time, and I bet it'd get a helluva reception in any club

Oh, and the track PiL did on the Dennis Miller show is fantastic:
http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=vyOJ91KYh7E

Never got off this bus

Not really.

By the way, they were awesome live in 2010 with some interesting reinventions of old songs. There's been a bunch of live shows from that tour released, anyone have a recommendation on which one is the best?

there is a live show or two on spotify, which I guess were released? they are pretty good, and I liked the new single, will check them out again if they tour since I missed that 2010 show. but yeah, happy through that what is not is some serious dregs that they wisely have avoided in recent setlists.

album is a fucking classic though, I love it (along with Swans Burning World, the other 'laswell jazzbo sellout' production from the same era)

"World Destruction" is the sound of two all-time musicians reaching their nadir at the exact same moment.

there remained an awful lot of nadir to go, man

btw I won't hear a thing said against "Disappointed."

finding it hard to believe that anyone hates 'world destruction'

we live in a world that has made Justin Bieber an international superstar, of course there are people who hate "World Destruction"

oh not you too, Dan

Huh! I'm genuinely surprised it has its fans!

GTFO, World Destruction slays.

this recent anti-WD mood on ILX takes me completely by surprise

Want to boldly say something like 'Album is the only thing involving Laswell I ever need to hear again' but ehh I guess there's Ask The Ages.

what, She's The Boss didn't move you?

D^%E&Y*&^(&*#$^*(

World Destruction is classic - took me ages to figure out what that song was when I kept hearing it on KROQ as a teen

oh not you too, Dan

wtf, no not me too, I'm just saying it's kind of crazy to assume everyone loves a song (unless that song is "Wanna Be Starting Something")

I could be wrong but I think Alfred was referring to your Bieber diss.

That's not even a diss (even though it's true I intensely dislike Bieber), it's more an acknowledgement of the existence of Venn diagrams

so.....should I check out their show on Friday?

it could be good, it could be bad

it could be wrong, it could be right

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maxe3u9vhF1qa6myvo1_250.jpg

Yeah, but.

"The parts on 'Memories' where the track completely changes sonically as a result of two different mixes of the same track being edited together is such a genius production decision."

Lester Bangs mentioned that in his review of the album:
https://www.fodderstompf.com/ARCHIVES/REVIEWS/MBox_Bangs.html

"I read in NME that (Memories) was directed at the "Mod Revival" in England but then I don't believe anything I read in NME anymore. Whether or not it applies to "Happy Days", Grease, all the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call "the fifties" or "the sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix I for one will still be listening to Lydon: "You make me feel ashamed / Enacting attitudes / Remember ridicule? / It should be clear by now / Your words are useless, full of excuses, false confidence / Someone has used you well / Used you well."

Then, on the album version, the whole sound shifts, into a new and hotter realm. It's something I have never in my life heard anyone do in the middle of a track, and as the grooves begin to burn themselves away he resumes: "I could be wrong / It could be hate / As far as I can see clinging desperately / No personality dragging on and on and on and on / I think you're slightly late / Slightly late...""

It's striking - the whole mix goes through a phaser, or something like that. I remember hearing "Careering" somewhere, so I picked up The Greatest Hits, So Far, which is in chronological order, with "Don't Ask Me" at the end. And then gradually the first few albums. The debut is a throwaway with one classic single, Metal Box is excellent, Flowers of Romance sounds like an ancestor of some of the stuff on Peter Gabriel's Real World Records, and then the discography gets very bitty. About the only thing I remember of "Warrior" is that it was in Wild Orchid.

I remember "Order of Death" from Hardware. The rest of This is What You Want isn't very good. I haven't heard anything from 1990 onwards, apart from "Acid Drops", which didn't enthuse me. Given Lydon's willingness to work with top studio talent on Album it's fascinating to imagine him collaborating with Peter Gabriel. It might have worked! There's a muezzin-esque aspect to his vocal delivery at times, as if he was delivering a call to prayer. I can imagine the soundtrack of Last Temptation of Christ with John Lydon warbling all over it.

I can't tell if he decided at some point in the 1990s that PiL was a joke novelty band, or not. Or if he was ever serious about making it a going concern. He had no trouble generating publicity but it never seemed to benefit the band. And yet Rise was obviously intended to sell a lot of records.

this thread revive has sent me down a pil 1983-1990 rabbit hole

some stray observations

the 1983/4 “cabaret” band were probably better than their reputation - and maybe the neutered sound of Live In Tokyo isn’t a fair indication of their sound - like, there is a bit of rockin’ overplaying but they generally do a decent take on the material - this footage is pretty great and i would totally have loved to see this show, Pistols cover and all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr5SBwMfmZA

the interviews here are very good reading if (as i do) you enjoy philosophical reflections and/or score settling by musicians who had a minor part in a major band

i had no idea Robert Poss was almost in PiL!

i knew Alan Dias wrote Don’t Ask Me but that doesn’t make it a good single?! i was a very unlikely rabid teenage PiL fan in 1989 who was totally into the current line-up - when it came out I couldn’t understand how it was the same band. Dias says he hates how soft it sounded in the interviews linked, would be keen to hear his demo.

John McGeoch absolutely lifts all the material he contributed to in PiL but he also got up to some slightly surprising stuff in the late 1980s, lots of little whammy bar semi-metal peacocking - i guess he was kinda replacing Steve Vai so it kinda makes sense that he’d go a bit in that direction - still love him heaps

(the interview - via link in post above - with Nick Launay about Flowers of Romance is fantastic)

had no idea that Malachi Favors played on album!

I remember when "Disappointed" was on 120 Minutes a lot, and that may have been the first I knew of the band, tbh. I would have been ... 14 or so? Never bought that record, though. Weirdly, I do remember the New Order/PiL/Sugarcubes tour that summer (didn't go), and def. got into New Order and Sugarcubes, but again, not PiL. A couple of years later I finally got Second Edition and liked that a lot, but found myself gravitating more toward whatever Wobble and Atkins were doing elsewhere. Invaders of the Heart, Ministry, Killing Joke, etc. Not sure I ever bought a PiL album besides Second Edition, come to think of it, though I did like the odd song or two. I also saw the band on its reunion tour in 2010 but was not feeling it at all.

Funny enough, I did see the documentary, which has some incredible footage and good interviews but is still pretty boilerplate. The thing about Lydon is that he by his very nature sucks all the focus onto himself, always, which can be a bit exhausting. The end credits feature, for some reason, him hanging out with John Waters and meeting Ian MacKaye, and those fleeting moments made me wish for a movie that wasn't just another long episode of the Johnny Lydon show. He's always going on about how difficult this or that situation was, or this or that person was, but as if it wasn't totally obvious decades ago, *he's* clearly the difficult one. Again, by design. He might mock Malcolm McLaren's love of situationism, but Lydon embodies that more than almost anyone else, on an epic scale, all by himself.

What a strange recurrence - a song for Nora, who's on a journey into Alzheimer's, offered as a potential Eurovision entry for Ireland.
A beautiful sentiment but I find almost nothing in the song to enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc5v7FHx5Do

it doesn’t really feel like it belongs under the PiL banner, but given that my answer to the poll question is “1989”, i wish him all the best with wherever he wants to drive the bus

Love Hawaii, have been coming back to it every week or so.

this new album is better than I was expecting.

I keep meaning to give it a listen