“We were just all closed in on each other. And your friends and loved ones come in, and where do you go with that? ‘Cos you’re bringing bits of your other life into this private world. If Wobble, for instance, was rowing with his girlfriend, that would affect everybody. We’d all get dragged into it. And Keith and Jeanette would always be rowing with each other. And Dave would be rowing with them. (Deep breath). I’d be rowing with Dave! Wobble’s s rowing with everyone! We’re just rowing! Hahahaha!”
As the tour progressed, Wobble’s yeoman instincts began to chafe against the pervasive metabolic vibe. Halfway through the gig at the New York Pallidium, Levene walked off-stage, apparently disgruntled with the sound, to be followed by Lydon. Wobble and drummer Martin Atkins jammed for half an hour, vainly waiting for the others to return.
Wobble: “Maybe if we’d given Levene a good slap at the time - he should have been given a very good slap and kept in order. I think it’s difficult for 
John, after McLaren, to ever be able to trust anyone. But I felt we were a group, we should release albums and play gigs. Finally enough. We went to America, we’re sat in a hotel suite, no one talking to each other, we’d only been going two years. We’re supposed to be having fun! I was like, Do we wanna be here? Well give me my fucking passport then, I don’t owe you anything now.”
Wobble provided PiL with a traditional form of work ethic. And when he left the band in July 1980, he took it with him. What he had also taken, in the eyes of Lydon and Levene, were tapes of Metal Box backing tracks which subsequently appeared on his solo album “The Legend Lives on… Jah Wobble in Betr” released by Virgin while PiL were tearing themselves apart in the States. Wobble doesn’t dispute that he used the tracks, but that they were his to use. His disgruntlement with the group’s business set-up was such that he didn’t particularly care what anyone else thought.
“I felt very disrespected towards the end. I’m helping make the sound of something and I’m on 60 pounds a week, intermittently. This is no good. It was down to John really to keep a handle on that situation, which he never did. And it really isn’t like I’m saying I’m really fucking angry about it, because I’m not. It took me 16 years to see money from Public Image Ltd. And all I got was some publishing deals. But that’s perfect for PiL. Everything was fucked up. I’m gonna go, and I’d rather do it without a great big row. And he said ‘No, no, that’s right, this is the you should do it.’ I look back, and I’ve got no regrets with PiL, because without PiL I don’t see any other way I’d have started playing music, It was the making of me. And also, if I’d have had all the money I shouldn’t done then, I may well have killed myself!”
“Wobble’s his own man,” says Lydon. “It was always clear he was goanna have his own world , one way or another. Quite fucking right an’ all. I wanted that for Keith, and me, for all of us. Things happen. People fall apart. Wobble’s sneakiness over the tapes, though that hurt. That really hurt for a long time, upset me. It made working with him at that time not possible. Regardless of the risks, or whatever - fuck, we lost the bass layer. Well no, we didn’t he lost himself. I didn’t lose a friend, I just lost working with him.”
Levene, for his part, claims he didn’t even know Wobble had left. “I was told one day. Where’s Wobble? ‘Oh, he’s not in the band anymore.’ I knew there was shit going on. I just thought, Oh this is stupid, and thought it was going to blow over. And then it didn’t.”
Minus Wobble, PiL continued, but in a markedly different sort. Out of the bass free adversity came the fine “Flowers of Romance.” album, but the questing ardoer that characterized the group’s first 30 months were gone. IN January 1082, PiL were dropped by Warner Bros. Relocated to New York, Lydon and Levene drifted on and apart. Sessions for a fourth album at South Park studios in Manhattan dragged, and eventually , during the spring of 1983, the group’s sole remaining founders fell out fatally over arguments about a mix of This Is Not a Love Song.
In an echo of the Wobble tape incident, Levene released a boot-leg of the sessions, “Commercial Zone”, Lydon, meanwhile, toured Japan with a Holiday Inn house - band he had met in New Jersey. He began playing Sex Pistols songs. Released in August 1984, the fourth PiL album, featuring re-recorded versions of five songs originally recorded with Levene, was titles “This is What you Want… This is What you Get.”
“It would have been so easy for John to go out and reinvent the Pistols and have it on such a large scale. Get a big American manager and go and sell 10 million records.
“But instead he chose to take this really eclectic avant-garde route. “Metal Box” really stands up against almost any kind of music John re-formed the wrong band! If he reformed Public Image, could make the peace with Levene and Wobble, I mean arguably he’d be doing 10,000 people a night! In every major city in the world! ‘Cos, like, that’s what people want!”
But as long-time observers of John Lydon are aware, what you want and what you get are two different things. It seems very apt that when confronted
with the re-formation question each of the founding trio agrees that it won’t happen, but for different and contradictory reasons. Levene says he could work with Wobble (“If he wants to he’s welcome to”) but not Lydon. “I don’t like John any more. Not that I don’t like him as a person, I just don’t rate him that much as an artist.”
Wobble, for his part, doesn’t have a problem with Lydon, but says that if he saw Levene walking down the street he’d hid in a shop doorway. “He is one slippery individual. I’ve got great memories of his as one of the great musicians of his generation, but what a fucking waste. Instead, he becomes a professional fucking nuisance. Me and John don’t exchange Christmas cards, but then we never fucking did. Whenever I see Withnail And I, I think of John and I could almost have a tear in my eye. John is a mixture of Withnail and Kenneth Williams! He’s a cunt, but I love him to bits.”
John Lydon, meanwhile, arches a dubious eyebrow at the whole notion. In his mind, PiL has never stopped, so there’d be no point in going back. He’s got things to do, a solo record to make, there’s a film of his autobiography in the works. He drains his mug, hurls a gobbet into the plastic bag, and declares himself proud of his mistakes. “Our motivations as people are so solidly set in different directions now it would be fake to try that, I think, a little fake. ‘Cos it’s not quite like the Pistols, which has a regime in it. This is something else, something in the soul, I couldn’t put a word on it. But if it doesn’t click right between us , that’s it, it won’t work. And I don’t know if I’d click right or wrong with Keith. I don’t have a clue. The bits I hear are all scathing and nonsensical. And pretty self-pities too. And I find that dangerous, I don’t need to be near it