Punk rock was a scene I never bought into. Maybe part of that was because at its zenith I had yet to reach my teens. But I just don’t relate to the whole ethos of punk. While acknowledging the importance of this album to the development of punk music, I find it quite unappealing with one exception. The single “Public Image” is a great song. Maybe I like it because it is the least experimental, most accessible, most convincingly personal song in this collection. John Lydon distances himself from the Johnny Rotten character he created to great effect. The rest of the album has a couple of bright spots for me (“Low Life” and “Attack”), but the rest of it is too experimental for me. But tip of the hat to Lydon for trying to progress as an artist. My Rating:
English writer Simon Reynolds gives an interesting summary of the album:
Johnny Rotten, now going by his real name John Lydon, has a new band: Public Image Ltd. The inspiration comes from Muril Spark’s 1968 novel The Public Image, about a fil actress who - embroiled in scandal - can only escape ruin by leaving the business of image-production altogether. ‘I’m not interested in promoting an image, ‘Rotten tells journalist Vivien Goldman. ‘I’m not going to dress up in pantomime outfits to please the public.’ In the Pistols, Lydon tired of touring (‘just like thetre, repeaded night after night’), chafed as persona hardened into shtick and got sick of people trying to out-Rotten him (whether it was his friend turned cartoon psycho Sid Vicous, or hostile strangers looking to test him). In PiL’s debut single, ‘Public Image’, Lydon asserts both his ownership of ‘Johnny Rotten’ and his right to discard the suit of character armour - just like Bowie shed Ziggy. The persona was ‘my entrance’ onto the stage of pop culture, he sings grandly; now he’s staging ‘my grand finale’. The song starts with a ‘hello’ greeting his punk following and ends with ‘goodbye’. But alongside recriminations at those who only saw the surface (clothes, hair colour) there’s self0reproach: ‘somebody had to stop me’ - a confession that Lydon-as-Rotten had become an alter-ego-maniac. That’s whey the band’s called Public Image Ltd. ‘The limited applies to egos,’ Lydon tells Goldman. ‘It was egos that bust up the Pistols, mainly Malcolm’s…’ That ‘mainly’ is an admission: as King Punk, Rotten had become - as McLaren tauntingly accused - a spiky-haired Rod Stewart. Just another rock star.1
Wow.
AllMusic has a retrospective review of First Issue with specific examples of how it influenced other musicians.
Like it or not, Public Image Limited's First Issue (aka Public Image) was an album that helped set the pace for what eventually became known as post-punk.
Embracing elements of dub, progressive rock, noise, and atonality and driven by Lydon's lyrical egoism and predilection towards doom, death, and horror, First Issue was among a select few 1978 albums that had something lasting to say about the future of rock music. And not everyone in 1978 wanted to hear it; contemporary critical notices for First Issue were almost uniformly negative in the extreme.
Public Image Limited's debut single, "Public Image," was also included on First Issue, and Keith Levene's guitar part, with its tasty suspensions and held-over-the-bar syncopation, was an important departure from standard punk guitar language absorbed so quickly by others (the Pretenders, U2, the Smiths) that listeners and musicians alike forgot the source of the sound.
"Annalisa" is the hardest-kicking rocker on the album, with nosebleed-strength guitar from Levene; it is so good that Nirvana in all practical purposes purloined the whole number, with minor alterations, as "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" on In Utero.2
The piece has lots of good background info and other tidbits and is worth your time to read.
In 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Stevie Chick wrote:
…Public Image was more than just the post-Pistols project of punk’s totemic figurehead; (the band) sculpted a noise that pushed the primitivism of punk rock in an experimental direction, pointing new directions.
…Lydon’s unearthly howls and screams of “I wish I could die!” illuminating the bleakness of post-punk England, Leven’s guitar poisonously eloquent.
But while Public Image was certainly a dark, unwelcoming record, the vitality of its candor and its bloody-minded pursuit of a different future made it a highly influential - and still highly unsettling - album.3
Enjoy and listen without prejudice. Cheers!
Prime playlist: 158. First Issue by Public Image Limited
Charts
• Peak on Billboard 200 album chart: n/a
• Singles on Billboard Hot 100 chart: n/a
• RIAA certification: n/a
Released on December 8, 1978. Here’s what else was happening:
Pop Culture
• Number one song: “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” by Barbars Streisand & Neil Diamond4
• Number one album: 52nd Street by Billy Joel5
• Number one movie: Midnight Express by Alan Parker6
• Most watched TV programs: Three’s Company, Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days, 60 Minutes, Taxi, Circus of the Starts, Tribute to Jimmy Stewart, M*A*S*H, Little House on the Prairie, One Day at a Time, Pink Panther’s Christmas, Rudolph Special.7
• NYT bestseller, fiction: War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk8
• NYT bestseller, non-fiction: Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford9
Other albums released that month
• If You Knew Suzi... by Suzi Quatro
• Minute by Minute by The Doobie Brothers
• Quiet Riot II by Quiet Riot
• Here, My Dear by Marvin Gaye
• From the Inside by Alice Cooper
• Back to the Bars by Todd Rundgren
• Back to Earth by Cat Stevens
• Natural Act by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge
• United by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell10
Sport
• Dec 2 43rd Iron Bowl: Alabama beats Auburn 34-16 in Birmingham.
• Dec 5 Free agent Pete Rose signs 4-year, $32 million contract with Phillies becoming highest paid baseball player.
• Dec 9 1st game of Women's Pro Basketball League (WBL), Chicago Hustle vs Milwaukee Does.
• Dec 10 67th Davis Cup: USA beats Great Britain in Rancho Mirage (4-1).11
Notable Births
• Dec 2 Nelly Furtado, Portuguese-Canadian Juno and Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter (I'm Like a Bird; Maneater), born in Victoria, British Columbia.
• Dec 3 Trina [Katrina Laverne Taylor], American rapper (Glamorest Life), born in Miami, Florida.
• Dec 7 Shiri Appleby, American actress (Roswell), born in Los Angeles, California.
• Dec 8 Ian Somerhalder, American actor (Lost, Vampire Diaries), born in Covington, Louisiana.
• Dec 9 Jesse Metcalfe, American actor (Desperate Housewives; John Tucker Must Die), born in Carmel Valley, California.
• Dec 10 Summer Phoenix, American actress, born in Winter Park, Florida.12
Historical Events
• Dec 1 US President Jimmy Carter more than doubles national park system size.
• Dec 4 Dianne Feinstein is named as San Francisco's 1st female and Jewish mayor after the assassination of George Moscone, then elected for two full terms.
• Dec 4 Dutch war criminal Pieter Menten freed.
• Dec 4 Pioneer Venus 1 goes into orbit around Venus.
• Dec 6 Spain adopts constitution.
• Dec 10 Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel.
• Dec 11 6 masked men bound 10 employees at Lufthansa cargo area at NYC Kennedy Airport and made off with $5.8M in cash & jewelry; all of the participants and some associates were later killed on order of the alleged organized crime mastermind, loot never recovered.
• Dec 16 Cleveland, Ohio becomes the first post-Depression era city to default on its loans, owing $14,000,000 to local banks.
• Dec 16 Ronald Reagan denounces President Jimmy Carter's recognition of People's Republic of China.
• Dec 17 OPEC raises oil prices by 18% and agrees on a 14.5% petroleum price increase for 1979, to be implemented quarterly.
• Dec 19 Indira Gandhi arrested on corruption charges in India.
• Dec 20 H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's White House Chief of Staff released from jail after serving 18 months.
• Dec 21 Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrest John Wayne Gacy for murder.13
Notable Deaths
• Dec 3 William Grant Still, American composer ("Afro-American" Symphony), dies at 83.
• Dec 8 Golda Meir, Israeli teacher, stateswoman and 4th Prime Minister of Israel (1969-74) known as the "Iron Lady" of Israeli politics, dies in of lymphatic cancer at 80.
• Dec 10 Ed Wood, American filmmaker and director (Plan 9 from Outer Space), dies of heart failure at 54.
• Dec 12 Clifton Chenier, American blues singer (Bayou Blues), dies at 53.
• Dec 16 Blanche Calloway, American jazz vocalist, bandleader (Twelve Clouds of Joy), civil rights activist, and broadcaster, dies of breast cancer at 76.
• Dec 17 Don Ellis, American avant garde jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and Grammy Award-winning film score composer (The French Connection), dies of a heart attack at 44. 14
Reynolds, Simon, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and It's Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, p. 577-578.
Chick, Stevie, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Fifth printing, ed. by Robert Dimmery p. 406.
Ibid.