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Some records come out and utterly confound the public, their true worth not realized until after years pass. 1979 saw one of those events, when it was a pretty big shift from Never Mind The Bollocks to the first self-titled Public Image Limited record, but when Metal Box came out, it was a huge leap forward. The snotty and provocative yet erudite presentation of John Lydon was intact, but the music was propelled by the creative energies of guitarist Keith Levene, a trio of different drummers which included Martin Atkins on a track, and especially the bass lines of Jah Wobble.
Wobble went on to lead his Invaders of the Heart ensemble and collaborate with loads of people including Can members Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit but for most people, his work with PiL put him on the map and he decided to not exactly play around with his legacy but put a different spin on it. Re-recording a record can be fraught with peril, like in the case of this utter fiasco. Sometimes it’s to dodge onerous contracts, and Taylor Swift did this to success while not futzing too much with the originals.
Wobble chose a different path when Metal Box: Rebuilt In Dub came out a few years ago and he chose a careful path of adding accents and flair and accentuating parts without pulling so many threads that the weave fell apart. Rebuilt in dub is a bit misleading as Wobble has always had more than a solid grounding in the history of reggae and dub, and took the work of giants like “Family Man” Barrett and Robbie Shakespeare to create his own vision of what a bass guitar can do, both in service to the song and to the moods it can create within the listener.
Sited in one of my least favorite clubs in the city, City Winery’s tables were reasonably full and most of the audience etiher arrived having eaten or got here early enough so that the noise of tableware and glassware being delivered or cleared wasn’t a constant nuisance. The layout has the stage at the far of a rather deep room, so if you’re sitting halfway or farther back, you definitely lose a connection to what’s happening on stage. That said, the sound was pretty good throughout, but definitely improved at the very end when Wobble asked for a bit more oomph to his bass, a piece that had been lacking a teeny bit previously.
The throbbing lines that open “Albatross” set the mood perfectly, Wobble’s crack band of two guitarists, keyboardist and drummer very much in sync with the material. Famously Lydon was abhorrently against prog rock, so I wonder if Levene ever let it slip that the guitar forms in “Poptones” was inspired by Yes’s “Starship Trooper,” as Wobble’s bass line scurries about, playing hide and seek with the rest of the song. It wasn’t a straight run through the record, with some songs skipped, an oration of Shakespeare’s “Henry III” (“Now is the winter of our discontent”, prefaced by Wobble telling us “You came here for high culture and by god you’re going to get it”), occasional percussion from Wobble, and at one point an unlikely segue into Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” I wonder if John McVie has been made aware of this!
“Graveyard” came towards the end of the set and was a song that I never really rated highly but in the live context it really shone. The entire night really underscored how incredibly important this record was to a bunch of bands who came later, not only more contemporary ones from the mid to late 80s but also pointing directly at the current wave of post-punk bands, especially the UK crowd. Music this good never has an expiration date.
