Night Beat (27 page)

A FOLLOW-UP on PiL and New Order: I saw Public Image Ltd. on three occasions in the years surrounding the time I wrote the above stories (which was in 1980 and 1981). On each occasion, it became increasingly evident how hard—if not impossible—it would be for John Lydon to outdistance his past with the Sex Pistols. In truth, the audience simply wouldn’t allow it.

At PiL’s 1980 Los Angeles debut—at the city’s downtown Olympic Auditorium—the band played terrifically and Lydon was plain transfixing, but the audience that assembled to celebrate the band’s appearance, a crowd of thuggish-looking jar-head punks who eventually became dubbed the area’s “hardcore” subculture, very nearly upstaged the show. It was the first time this audience had made its identity felt in such a large, collective, and forcible way. And though its members perhaps couldn’t relate to the abstract rhythms and forms at the heart of PiL’s music, they knew Johnny Rotten was still a punk icon, and that was cause enough to turn the whole show into one long skirmish.

Lydon would remain stuck with that same crowd of punk holdouts who didn’t care much for his changing ideas of music, but instead exalted the event (or myth) of his personality. When PiL played at the Pasadena Civic Center in 1982, members of the audience attempted to overrun or command the stage, and some scaled the towering speakers only to leap back onto the crowd below. Seeing PiL with that audience was both a tiresome and reckless experience. I spoke with many fans who vowed they would never see the band again.

I felt the same way, though not because of the audience so much as simply that, as good as PiL were, all their aspirations to innovation had begun to seem as tired and dated as the old rock & roll styles they had once set out to subvert. But when they played the Hollywood Palladium in June 1983, the main draw (at least for me) was the news that Keith Levene (who had written much of PiL’s best music but had become increasingly undisciplined in the studio, and was a boor to boot) had quit the group. This forced Lydon to see if he could still rise to the task of leading a band.

Of course, the punk contingent in the audience didn’t care much about Lydon’s personal growth: They merely wanted to thrash in the spectacle of his presence. And though Lydon’s manner still proved fearsomely charismatic, he seemed in many ways a much changed performer. He chatted, joked, and flirted with the audience. (When one excitable girl jumped onstage to give him a kiss, Lydon kissed her back, then gushed “Guess I must be a sex symbol!”) At times, Lydon’s easy manner had the effect of poking fun at his own myth (“How many Johnny Rottens have we got out there?” he inquired of the massed punks), but it was also meant to assure the audience, if not himself, that this new version of PiL still aimed to put music above mystique. And indeed, it turned out to be the most impressive performing version of PiL that I would see. Lydon had assembled an all new, tuxedo-clad group (he didn’t mention their names) that not only did an exemplary job of replicating the former PiL’s adventurous sound, but who added a new sense of sharpness and resiliency to it.

But as involving as the new PiL were, they still couldn’t match the temerity of their audience. Throughout the group’s near hour-long show, punk after punk would scrabble onstage from out of the pressed mass down front, and dance and flail around Lydon or try to pat his red-tufted head, until some beefy security hack would heft them off their feet and toss them over the heads of the audience. At times it would resemble a melee, but in truth it wasn’t: It was a carefully orchestrated ritual (though the punks possessed a good deal more grace, and sometimes restraint, than the guards), and though the punks’ behavior may have seemed an unnecessarily stupid, ruffian activity, it also made for a great spectator sport (probably a great participant sport too, if you prefer bowling from the ball’s perspective).

But all the audience’s excitement, and the pleasure that some of us took in PiL’s musical growth, seemed secondary to one generous, surprising, and revealing gesture by Lydon at the show’s end. “We’re going to do an oldie for ya,” he said in his familiar mocking tone, as the band returned for their first encore. “Sing along—you know the words.” With that, PiL vaulted into a roaring version of the Sex Pistols’ greatest moment, “Anarchy in the U.K.” It didn’t have quite the startling, shearing effect that the Pistols’ rendition of the song did at Winterland in 1978, in their final performance, but it was still damn exciting, and the audience responded by thrashing in near-religious fervor.

In 1996, Rotten made a career out of that moment. He and the original Sex Pistols—guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and the band’s first bassist, Glen Matlock—re-formed for a tour of Europe and America. In one way, it meant nothing, not even nostalgia, since they were simply playing their old songs again but without the context of daring and risk that they brought to every stage they mounted from 1976 to 1978. In another way, it meant a great deal: The late-1990s Sex Pistols showed they were still up to the job of assaulting rock & roll with as much venom and intelligence as anybody, and more important, their shows were reminders of what a damn fine, indelible, and
perfect
body of rock & roll songwriting (matchlessly inventive anthems) they wrought in their brief, world-changing season twenty years prior. For those few nights in 1996, John Lydon was undeniably Johnny Rotten again, and it seemed wonderfully possible that rock & roll might still be the fiercest, most frightening popular art on earth.

NEW ORDER’S STORY also continued—in fact, still continues. More or less.

At first it was obvious that the band couldn’t immediately surmount the loss of Ian Curtis, who had pretty much shaped and dominated Joy Division’s thematic image. Some fans, in fact, felt his presence was so overpowering that it held the band back onstage. But for all of Curtis’ deadly excesses, he also had a clear-cut point of view: Curtis knew that damnation was what he stood for, and he didn’t flinch from what that entailed.

By contrast, New Order didn’t seem to have much of an idea of
what
they stood for, except outliving the grim shadow of their past. Just when an audience was finally eager to hear what this band had to say, they lost the personality who had made them notable in the first place. And while nobody in New Order seemed to want to imitate Curtis, nobody in the band seemed up to replacing him either.

In such early singles as “Everything’s Gone Green,” and their disappointing debut album,
Movement,
New Order didn’t offer much more than a synthesized reworking of their once thick, surging sound. It was prettier and more disciplined than Joy Division’s sound, to be sure, but also less exciting and involving. Whatever was being said about their new life—that of a band that had to live with an ineradicable loss—was never clear. The words, and even the vocals themselves—delivered by guitarist Bernie Albrecht—got lost in tricky mixes that reduced lyrics to a kind of atmospheric filler. As a result,
Movement
didn’t matter as much as Joy Division’s music or myth had. As the U.K. scene shifted to a more rhythmic aesthetic, Joy Division’s influence diminished, and with it, perhaps, New Order’s best chance for preeminence.

And then in 1983, New Order rebounded with
Power, Corruption and Lies—
one of the most compelling albums of that year, and nearly the equal to their former achievements with Joy Division. Still, it was pretty much impossible to say what
Power, Corruption and Lies
was “about” in the way that one could say what Joy Division’s music was about. If anything, New Order seemed to be a band
about
form. Their version of postpunk sound was a clean, taut, swirling lacework of interlocking guitar and synthesizer motifs, buttressed by a massive, uniform dance pulse—a sound that overshadowed the emotions and meanings within it, to the degree that sound became the sole medium and object of those emotions. This idea first came across in the group’s wondrous 1982 single “Temptation,” but it came into its own fully with
Power, Corruption and Lies.

The collective elements of sound on that album (still New Order’s best)
feel
as if they’re about a great deal indeed. The sharp-edged arpeggiated guitar lines and swathed synthesizer webs on “Your Silent Face,” “Leave Me Alone,” and “Age of Consent” interweave over pulsating dance patterns as though the sound were meant to put across a vital meaning—yet as if that feeling and meaning were simply the expression of the sound itself. By comparison, the vocals aren’t much more than a fine touch of emotional embellishment, putting forth some surprisingly axiomatic notions of romantic desperation as if it was finally time to acknowledge the truth of Ian Curtis’ dissolution. Yet the words aren’t what carry
Power, Corruption and Lies’
substance. Even the best vocals and lyrics on the album pale beside the eloquence of the guitars and synthesizers which surround and overwhelm them.

Power, Corruption and Lies
was a synthesis of rhythm, texture, and emotion, existing for its own pleasure. In 1983, it sounded like rhapsodic, impassioned pop: music with a force of human heart that counted all the more for the hard truths it had to withstand to find its own confidence and soul. But New Order never really surpassed that moment. They went on to make several more albums, some rapturous-sounding, some forgettable, and none that ever helped make up for what they lost on that fatal day in May 1980.

WHAT WOULD HAVE happened if a group dared to resurrect or reinvent punk in Britain with the same mix of arrogance and vision that the Sex Pistols once flourished? No doubt that group would have been condemned and resented as Johnny Rotten’s band was—which is just what befell the most controversial and perhaps most important British band of the mid-1980s, a ragged-looking, glorious-sounding quartet called the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Like the Pistols, the Jesus and Mary Chain played music that was immediately a shock, music that demanded you come to terms with its perspective, if only to reject or fight it. The group’s early singles, “Never Understand” and “Upside Down,” pitted lovely tunes and dreamy vocals against screeching feedback and relentless pandemonium—a mix that, as one British writer put it, suggested a plausible teaming of the Beach Boys and Cleveland, Ohio’s, late 1970s great avant-garde pre-punk band, Pere Ubu. This approach was both acclaimed and derided in England, where the Jesus and Mary Chain, much like the Sex Pistols, largely had to be seen to be heard. (The band’s early concerts reportedly incited strong reactions—sometimes outright crowd convulsions—just like early punk.)

While the group’s 1985 debut album,
Psychocandy,
didn’t win over many detractors or break through the hegemony that ruled that period’s British and American radio, the album nonetheless showed that the Jesus and Mary Chain’s musical conceptions probably had both substance and mileage. The band’s mix of mellifluence and noise held up beautifully over
Psychocandy
’s forty-minute-plus length. Every track on the album had a life and magnetism of its own, and they all sounded affecting, galvanizing, and inventive.

But for all the brave new territory
Psychocandy
staked out, at times it seemed to summarize or refashion pop-punk style instead of breaking with it. Between the album’s wailing dissonance and lovely melodies, one could find allusions to many musical parents, not merely the Pistols (while the Jesus and Mary Chain caught that band’s howling guitar sound, they preferred patient rhythms to galloping ones), but also hints of the Beatles (Jesus’ “Just like Honey” took “Love Me Do” and fused it with “Helter Skelter”), elements of mid-1960s pop styles (imagine Motown as it might have sounded played by the Seeds and produced by Phil Spector), and, of course, strong echoes of such earlier trailblazers as the Velvet Underground and Joy Division.

Psychocandy
proved among the finest, most provoking British albums of the mid-1980s. By balancing sweet melodies and raw cacophonies so powerfully, the Jesus and Mary Chain were saying that dreams and anguish, hope and fear, are necessary counterparts in both life and music. By asserting that obvious truth, the group reinvented (if only briefly) punk’s original courage and vision, on the band’s own terms.