After the trauma and commodified chaos of the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd. was intended as John Lydon's new beginning- a chance to sweep away all that had gone before. What followed was a tale of turmoil, dissatisfaction, psychosis and revolutionary music. Keith Cameron speaks to the three men who lived through it.
certainly members of the audience at the New York Ritz on Friday May 15, 1981 who felt they had been.
They were gathered to witness a monumentous sketch: the first gig in over 12 months by Public Image Ltd. Formed three years earlier by John Lydon after the ignominious demise of the Sex Pistols at Winterland in San Fransisco, by this point PiL had become, both in their musical output and personal actions, a thoroughly (un)dependable resource for anarchy and chaos.
It's very apt that PiL only appeared at The Ritz because the band originally booked to play that night cancelled at the last minute. It's hugely ironic that the band happened to be Bow Wow Wow, the latest proteges of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, with whom John Lydon had been embroiled in a legal dispute since quitting the band. And it was entirely typical of PiL, the band that weren't a band at all but a self proclaimed limited company, an umbrella orginisation comprising equal partners - by 1981 it's membership included Jeannette Lee, whose role was defined chiefly by what she didn't do: music - that their first gig in a year was never intended to be a 'proper' gig at all but an experimental video performance, prompted by guitarist Keith Levene's friendship with 18-year-old visual technician Ed Caraballo.
As soon as The Ritz management had secured a commitment from Levene that PiL could fill the breach - two nights, $12,000 - they eagerly began advertising the event. But what they didn't realise, or chose to overlook, was that PiL 
really weren't a band in the conventional sense, and in no way set up to deliver a conventional performance. For a start, they didn't have a drummer. Actually, this wasn't such an unusual situation: PiL went through six drummers during the first 18 months of the groups existence. There was also no bassist; indeed, there hadn't been a bassist in the ranks since the departure of founding member Jah Wobble the previous summer, a situation through which PiL had successfully navigated the making of their third album, Flowers Of Romance.
Nor, until Levene persuaded him to fly over from London, was there a John Lydon. Following his return to the UK from the Sex Pistols' final US tour, Lydon was ostensibly bereft of financial wherewithal. But had been able to fund 
the purchase of 45 Gunter Grove, a house just off the 'wrong' end of the Kings Road in south-west London, against the value of which he was able to raise money to start PiL. For three years Lydon holed up in Gunter Grove, escaping his past and plotting his future, his legendary weekend-long parties the magnet for droves of like-minded lost souls, including the cream of Jamaican reggae talent, notably Dr Alimantado, as well as punk misfits like Poly Styrene and less predictable house guests like John Barry. But the narcotic-fuelled social circle inevitably drew unwanted attention to itself. Now, wearied of constant harassment from the authorities, the man who would forever be "Johnny Rotten from evil punk rockers the Sex Pistols" fled to the other side of the pond.
So it was that Lydon joined Levene, Lee and the wide-eyed Caraballo for PiL's assault on The Ritz. Having recruited a drummer - 65-year-old jazzman Sam 
Ulano - at a drum shop off Broadway, the scheme was laid: PiL would play along to their own records on the business side of The Ritz's giant video wall. A battery of bright white lights would blaze behind them, casting their shadows onto the transparent screen towards the spectators. Caraballo would project a live feed of video footage of the band as they performed onto the front of the screen. Also, the volume would be serious.
The effect on the already testy punters, who'd been kept waiting outside in the pouring rain for an hour after the advertised showtime, proved instantaneous. After a short period of calm, they began to demand for the screen to be raised. When this request was denied by Lydon - "silly fucking audience, silly fucking audience" - bottles started to fly, smashing against the screen and showering glass on those below. As PiL meandered through a 10-minute improvisatory jam, the barrage intensified. "You're not throwing enough," Lydon taunted. The crowd began dragging forward the white canvas mats upon which the band were standing, pulling the performers over and causing equipment to collapse. At the insistence of The Ritz's manager, fearing for his venue's safety, the screen was raised slightly, but this only exposed the mob to the unconstrained disorientating glare of the lights. The riot was in flow, and the gig was aborted after 25 minutes. "New York, New York, it's a helluva town," yodelled Lydon into the mike. "If you destroy that screen, we will destroy you," offered Levene. At a press conference three days later, he declared the event a success: "The impact was immaculate."
Over 22 years later, both principals recall the night fondly.
"That basically saved us doing gigs for a year!" laughs Levene. "It was so big and it was so good. It wasn't a trick, we set out to do a live video gig 
like we were inside the telly. It was a big deal then. And it all went fine. It didn't go according to plan, but it went fine."
Lydon: "It was chaotically wonderful. For us it wasn't about the music piece, it was about the filming. I imagined it to look f*g great, it was a piece of art, but no, everybody was going, 'Boooo!' They over-advertised it and put too much expectation on it, but it ended up that the little riot was an excellent PiL gig. That's entertainment. You have police running all over the place with truncheons, but what do I do? I go in the crowd and go, You like it? Many people would run away. You f*g go through it. That is the good side of PiL."
The second night at The Ritz was cancelled. PiL would make no live appearances for the next 16 months.
depends on which member is doing the telling. This befits the singular trio of turbulent characters around which the group formed, each of whom would subsequently dissent from the others in spectacular style. John Lydon's history was only too well known, not least to Keith Levene and Jah Wobble. The latter, born John Wardle in 1958 in London's East End, was a long time friend of Lydon's, having met him as a 16-year-old at Kingsway College of Further Education in King's Cross. Also attending this finishing school for problematic children was one John Beverley, soon to become better known as Sid Vicious, in whose company Wobble would cause regular havoc around the nascent punk scene. Eighteen months Lydon's junior and from the same North London locale of Finsbury Park, Julian Keith Levene meanwhile had played guitar in the original line-up of The Clash whith whom he'd supported the Sex Pistols during 1976 and discussed with Lydon the prospect of forming a band once (it wasn't a question of 'if') their current outfits disintegrated.
"The first PiL was through desperate necessity!" laughs Lydon today.
Meeting him at his unprepossessing front door just off a quiet backstreet near Venice Beach, a half-hour drive from Hollywood, MOJO sees a 47-year-old man possibly as happy as he could be given his brutal treatment from such a tender age by the entertainment industry, as well as a battery of personal issues, prominent among which being his contraction of meningitis, with consequent memory loss, at the age of eight. He bemoans feeling peaky on 
account of a belligerent two-week flu, then proceeds to drink tea, hawk phlegm into a plastic bag and spiel vividly for over three hours. "I mean, there was a legend of Johnny Rotten and his Sex Pistols'. And it's like - Yeah, well says who? 'Cos I didn't feel that. I didn't feel that was a burden to me at all, but I wanted to do something else. And I'd already known Keith for a long time. And Wobble I've known for much longer. And so it kinda made sense. The three of us were wanting to do something but didn't know what. The anger in us, different kinds of anger, kinda formed something really all right. And, then a collection of drummers. Hahaha! Who more or less couldn't bear that way of working."
The first PiL drummer, and probably the best, in purely technical terms...