Dark luminosity, p.13
Dark Luminosity, page 13
The Metal Container
The recording of Metal Box took about nine months or so to complete. The time came for discussions on the album sleeve. I was surprised to be included in the discussions, because by now there was a feeling of antipathy lying just under the surface between me and Lydon. To begin with it was John, Dennis Morris and myself discussing it, and the idea of a cardboard sleeve was kicked into touch very quickly, as was the bog-standard 33⅓ rpm album. We were unanimous that it had to be a completely different sort of presentation. One of the main reasons that we went for three 45s (although I seem to remember that the last side was 33⅓ rpm) was because we wanted to get the best bass response possible. The combination of wider groove space on the discs plus the increased rpm helps to give a good bass response.
Various materials were discussed, as was the potential cost of getting vinyl-sized containers made up. For reasons of an aesthetical, practical and financial nature, wood, plastic, glass and cloth were rejected. We kept coming back to metal. I’m pretty sure it was John who said that it should be called Metal Box. Dennis Morris kicked into gear. He had actually gone to school near one of the Metal Box Company’s sites in Clapton. What really clinched the final decision in favour of metal was the fact that the Metal Box Company already manufactured round metal canisters; mainly for use as cinefilm containers. Dennis knew that, and so he helped broker a deal.
Chris Drops By and Dennis Departs
It was around that time that we had a meeting with Chris Blackwell, the boss of Island Records. Dennis Morris set it up. As I recall there was a distinct possibility that the American rights for PiL would be available, and Chris was very interested in that. I remember that Chris had a glamour model in tow. Her name was Minah Bird; I think that she was the first black page-three girl. I must admit that she was a hell of a looker. We all had a beer and then we clambered into Chris’s Bentley and went to a restaurant in Notting Hill (when it was still Notting Hill). I was absolutely thrilled to meet Chris Blackwell; after all, this was the bloke who had ‘discovered’ Bob Marley. I was very excited that night because even I, the silly kid that I was, knew that to link up with Chris would be a very smart move. I was very impressed with the steadfast and intelligent way that he had worked on breaking Bob Marley to a wide audience without compromising him as an artist. He and his Island Records label were everything that Richard Branson and Virgin were not. At that point, and for the next few years, just about every release on Island made sense. It already had a great back catalogue. I didn’t by any means like it all, but I could see why, with the odd exception, everything on it had been given a release.
My pessimism about PiL’s future temporarily dissipated. I thought that if Chris Blackwell was going to be involved then surely it would work out OK. My feelings were similar to those that fans of ailing football clubs have when a go-ahead, progressive (and rich) chairman gets involved: they suddenly believe that the Messiah has turned up and all is saved. I probably did Chris’s (and everybody else’s) head in rabbiting on about production, and all that. I’d had a drink and a snort and was totally overexcited. I was very taken with the John Martyn album One World at that time. Chris had a production credit on that along with Lee Scratch Perry and I wanted to discuss it with him. I have to say that to this day he is the only record business tycoon that I have ever met and liked. He is far more down to earth than most of those types. You certainly don’t feel that he’s secretly looking down his nose at you.
Of course, at the end of the day, he’s a businessman like all the rest, as well as being a toff (with colonial overtones to boot, I might add); however, the bloke genuinely loves music, and in those days he relished a challenge like the one that PiL represented. After the restaurant we went back to Basing Street Studios to ‘hang out and chill’, as all you hipsters would now put it. We went up to the little apartment that Chris had lent Dennis on the top floor of the studio complex. There was a good feeling in the air, everybody seemed happy, and from what I remember a schedule was planned in regard to how we would proceed with the marketing of Metal Box in the States. Apparently Chris Blackwell had got Tommy Mottola, the famous American music business magnate, interested in the venture. Dennis had drawn up plans for a large Metal Box installation to be set up in Times Square that people could actually walk into. There were plans to make a massive promotion fund available. (Dennis told me that five million dollars was being set aside.) It was around that time that we were putting together the cover for Second Edition, the double-album version of Metal Box; Dennis, as well as hooking us up with Chris, continued to act as our art director. Yet again he came up with a truly winning idea: we had plates of very reflective foil spread out on an uneven service; we then put our faces (one at a time) against this foil. A photograph was then taken of our distorted reflections. It gave a very striking effect. (It was a bit like a Francis Bacon painting.) Nowadays, of course, you would probably use a computer software program to get the desired effect. Dennis did a layout of the cover, which was to be a gatefold design. However, Keith had a big problem being on the inside of the gatefold. He wanted to be on the outside; on the front cover no less! It was pretty obvious that Keith had a big problem with Dennis. I think the problem was that Dennis couldn’t be manipulated.
There was another meeting with Chris Blackwell a few days later at the Island headquarters at St Peter’s Square. I left once the essential points had been discussed. I’m told that Keith then raised the subject of Dennis’s involvement in the project. He raised concerns about Dennis having too much power in the situation. He was also critical of Dennis being cut into the deal, and threatened to leave the band if indeed that happened. I’m told that Dennis told John that he had to make a decision over who he would back: either himself or Keith. John backed Keith, and in so doing he backed the wrong horse. That as well as the shenanigans involving the Second Edition cover was more than enough for Dennis, and he walked, and from what I remember somebody else had to complete the cover’s layout. I thought that Dennis going was a crying shame. It was my first real taste of music business callousness. Just about everybody in and around the band had appeared to be Dennis’s pal, but of course when he was gone that was that; he was never referred to again.
Funnily enough, me and Dennis had clashed when we had first met, just as PiL was forming; we were virtually at each other’s throats. However, we quickly came to respect each other and became friendly. There were similarities between us: we were both from east London, and the two of us were quite independently minded. We had both started doing our respective ‘jobs’ at a young age (Dennis was only fourteen when, as a fledgling photographer, he had gone on the road with Bob Marley). When we both chose, individually, to walk away from PiL, it was with our heads up. There was no whinging or public recrimination from either of us. We were geezers. I have a lot of respect for the bloke. We still occasionally talk nowadays.
Chris Blackwell considered Dennis to be the ‘key man’ in any possible deal, so now that Dennis was gone he dropped us like a hot potato. Keith got his way and got on the front cover. Funnily enough I wasn’t even bothered about that. For all Keith’s confident, often arrogant, veneer, I could tell that just under the surface he had all sorts of insecurities and doubts, and if putting him on the front cover shut him up (temporarily), and was cool with John, then fine, whatever. But what did upset me was losing a possible deal with Chris Blackwell. The same dark shitty vibe descended.
As fate would have it I ended up signed to Island as a solo artist within a couple of years. I went on to have five different periods of being signed to Island. The last Island-related record was a peach. I made it in 2002 with Bill Laswell, it’s called Radio Axiom: A Dub Transmission for Palm Pictures, the label that Chris started after he sold Island, so the connection is still there, even in this century.
In one of my earlier sojourns with Island in the early eighties, we sometimes used Basing Street Studios. Lucky Gordon (of the ‘Profumo affair’) was the cook at Basing Street at that time. He was a good cook (of Jamaican stuff), but was a pretty glum and taciturn bloke most of the time. Then again, I’ve found quite a few cooks to be like that. Once they get to know you, and you let them know that you appreciate their food, they are OK. They don’t come on all friendly, but they will tend towards giving you a little half-smile and a larger portion than everyone else, and that’s OK by me.
Metal Box was released in the UK towards the end of 1979. I think it was around that time that we did The Old Grey Whistle Test. During 1979 we only did three shows, two in Manchester and one in Leeds. The second of the Manchester shows was booked by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson. I got on well with Tony and his partners Alan Erasmus and Rob Gretton. Tony was a great help to me when the time came to extricate myself legally from the shambles that PiL was fast becoming. I was very impressed by the Factory set-up. It was everything that we should have been doing with PiL, in terms of setting up our own label, and having our own power base. They had a great spirit; I felt very ‘at home’ with them. Could you imagine that other possible world? PiL run with a Factory Records ethos. Now that would have been good.
Miles, Om Kalsoum and Apocalypse Now
I can recall doing a promotional video for the track ‘Death Disco’. Acklam Hall in west London was hired for the day. I think that it was a straightforward ‘live performance’ video; there was no storyboard or anything, at least not that I remember. It was pretty poor, very amateurish, even for those early days of promo videos. When I finally saw the finished cut I remember thinking, ‘Well, come on, can’t our umbrella organisation do better than this?’ I also recall a Top of the Pops appearance. I couldn’t wait to go to ‘make-up’ so I could get a tooth blacked out. The make-up department was a bit flummoxed with my request. I then sat in the dentist’s chair grinning like a man possessed. Our handful of TV appearances were far more impressive than the videos, because when appearing on TV far more opportunity was afforded for the personalities of the band to be spontaneous. There was certainly more exuberance demonstrated when we did TV performances.
However, 1979 wasn’t all bad. We did an interview with a bloke called Angus MacKinnon for the NME. Angus was one of the very few journalists who gave Metal Box a good review. He really ‘got’ it. Angus became a good friend of mine from the day of the interview onwards. He told me about a new film that was about to come out called Apocalypse Now. Angus had seen a preview of it in his role as a film reviewer. As he had with Metal Box, I think that he was just about the only journalist in the UK to give the movie a rave review. Coppola held up Angus’s review at his UK press conference and cited Angus as the only British journalist who had the brains to understand the film. I went to see it a week or two later. My world was absolutely rocked. It is still my favourite movie of all time.
Angus introduced me, over the course of time, to Miles Davis’s entire back catalogue. Angus felt that there were some aesthetic similarities between Metal Box and Miles’s late sixties/early seventies period. It was a connection that a bloke called Kenny MacDonald, who was to all intents and purposes the PiL tailor, had made a few weeks previously. Kenny was into a lot of very far-out leftfield jazz stuff, and when he heard tracks from Metal Box he insisted on sitting us all down to listen to the first side of Dark Magus (which became my favourite Miles Davis album). Like Angus, Kenny reckoned that Metal Box was not a million miles away from Electric Period Miles in spirit, and I think that he was correct. It sounded fantastic on John’s big system. To be honest, the others were pretty underwhelmed, and we only got through one of the four sides before the others in the room, apart from me and Kenny, deemed it ‘unlistenable’ and took it off. However, I was absolutely captivated; it was really wild and primal. Similar to my introduction to dub, it was a cathartic moment. It really got me thinking. We are still in contact. He has reopened his shop Marx, which was on the King’s Road, online. And I am back wearing his threads again.
Within a week or two of that first blast of Miles I was fed a huge amount of the Miles Davis back catalogue by Angus. In fact, Angus turned me on to some great music over the next few years, most of it jazz. People like Arthur Blythe, John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Pharoah Sanders (who I had already heard by way of Lonnie Liston-Smith), Lester Young and all the usual suspects. However, it was the electric-period Miles that had the biggest impact on my imagination.
I was continuing to check out my short-wave radio. I would tune into, among others, Radio Cairo and Radio Tehran. The singer I kept hearing via Radio Cairo was Om Kalsoum. They used to play her non-stop. I suppose that was because she had passed away only a few years before. Her state funeral was even bigger than Nasser’s and was attended by several million mourners. It took me ages to find out who the singer was, because the programmes were in Arabic and I couldn’t understand what the announcers were saying. I got used to hearing Om Kalsoum with a continuous slow oscillation (similar to phasing), as the short-wave signal bounced up into the stratosphere and then back down again. Most of those broadcasts featured recordings of live performances, so the first sound that you would hear was those wonderful yearning Egyptian string parts. That would go on for a few minutes, and a little bit of a groove would develop with the rest of the orchestra, then it would die down and there would be a flurry of furious clapping, and I knew that this great diva had entered the stage. You could sense the tingling anticipation running through the audience. A hush descended that was charged with electricity – and suddenly there was her voice, immediately full of warmth and yearning. I eventually found out the name of her main composer, Mohamed Abdel Wahab. I avidly collected cassette-only releases of his solo stuff, which was pretty hard to find, but if you scoured around Edgware Road you could get lucky. It was highly innovative, utilising Western styles and instruments with traditional Egyptian ones. So you would, for instance, have a Fender electric bassist swapping rhythmic patterns with a darbuka player, to produce some of the most playful and innovative music that you could ever hear. It was very ahead of its time.
6 America
America
In the spring of 1980 we went off to tour America. It was to be my first time in the States so I was very excited. Martin Atkins had joined the band by that point and, to be honest, he was the only person on that tour that I got on with. At that time Martin was a young, ambitious drummer on the make, but he was OK. I auditioned him for the band and within a few minutes it was obvious that he could handle the gig. He was a dependable drummer, and someone to have a beer with. We started out in Boston (well, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be exact), and then flew down to New York. It was there that we got picked up by two limos at the airport. Yet again, in those days that was a big deal: the limo had a telly and a bar and all that, but I remember just sitting there in the back wondering, ‘Is this it, then?’ I just felt empty, but I remember laughing and thinking, ‘Well, that gets that out of the way, then, I know that this is bollocks.’ The general vibe in the band contributed to me feeling that way. I would rather have been picked up in a Morris Minor and been with people that I was getting on with.
The first of our two New York shows was a big deal. We were playing a place called the Palladium, which was considered a prestigious venue. I seem to remember that James Blood Ulmer supported us. I think that John and/or Keith had sorted that, and credit where it’s due, that was a good call. All the New York faces such as Iggy Pop and Martin Scorsese were out in force, and there was a great atmosphere. We went on and got on with the set. It was going really well. Then John crouched down behind the bass amp, we had eye contact, and he looked absolutely terrified: more than just stage fright, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. I think that I went and crouched down near him and I think we briefly exchanged smiles. I believe I even lay down on the floor while playing (although I may have all that confused with another gig on that tour, it’s a long time ago, but I reckon that all that happened in New York). After about twenty-five minutes John walked off. Keith looked a bit hesitant and then he scuttled after him. There was a big audience, all seated. I can remember looking out at them all gazing up at the stage. I can’t remember what tune we were playing at the time. I remember Martin looking at me quizzically; I think I looked back at him and sort of shrugged and we just carried on. I started improvising bass lines, quite funky ones, yet they still had ‘weight’. Martin kept the groove going with a hip (for the time) disco groove. I recall me and Martin smiling at each other; it was quite a moment for a rookie rhythm section, to play as a duo to such a large crowd. All the punters piled down the front going mental, there was a great vibe and we rocked them for another twenty minutes or so. I remember thinking, ‘Let’s not push our luck,’ so I gave Martin a nod to say, ‘Come on, let’s finish,’ and we left the stage. I can remember people calling out and chanting my name, but was I happy? No, not in the slightest: I wanted to murder John and Keith. What they had done was tantamount to going AWOL in the middle of a battle. I thought that they were a complete and utter pair of bottle jobs. When I got in the dressing room I found out that they had gone back to the hotel already. I couldn’t believe that! I was enraged. Jeanette displayed her ability to read both people and situations, and had stayed in the dressing room. For the first time that I could ever remember she wasn’t umbilically attached to John or Keith. She knew that I would go mental, and that it might possibly be a deal breaker, that I would want to return to Albion forthwith. And she was right. Within a few seconds I was demanding my passport. She worked on placating me (I don’t think that I had even talked to her up to that point on the tour), and all the time people were coming in the dressing room to congratulate us on a great show. It was mental. I vaguely remember Martin sitting in the corner with a towel wrapped around his head looking shell-shocked. In only his second gig with the band he had been left alone with just the bass player for company and no script, and he had stood his ground without hesitation.
