The Flowers of Romance

The saga that led up to the recording of Public Image Ltd’s third studio album, 1981’s The Flowers of Romance, was as lurid as a telenovela. It was hailed as a defiant tour de force, a pivotal forerunner of techno and industrial music, one that set the bar for post-punk, and all of “uneasy listening” to come. Making the record was an exercise in alienation, more painful than getting and removing the same tattoo in one afternoon.

The sickly-sweet irony of The Flowers of Romance hid a time bomb. In its thunderous, distorted drums, hear PiL tick towards their own explosion. If you feel at odds with the world, know there’s a better way, but no one will listen to you—put The Flowers of Romance on repeat. It may not soothe your soul, but it will make you feel you’re not alone in your angst or your need to keep going.

Incidentally, Public Image Ltd were actually an incorporated company. This professionalism was a big fuck-off to punk’s chaos that had camouflaged how lead singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, the former lead singer of the Sex Pistols) was being ripped off by the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, financially and emotionally. PiL was to be a fresh concept, one based on trust, non-hierarchical, primed to supply the 360-degree needs of a music industry adjusting to videos and CDs.

Along with Lydon, PiL’s Directors included Dave Crowe, one of his old North London mates; the anguished, gaunt guitarist Keith Levene, who had helped start the Clash; and, in a brilliant stroke of Lydon’s, sparky Jeannette Lee as a non-specific band member. Witty and level-headed, Lee was the glue, the friendly face, responsible for just about everything except actually writing and playing, and even then, her savvy imprint was palpable. The petite heartthrob had previously run Acme Attractions, a progressive style and culture stall/salon in King’s Road, Chelsea’s Antiquarius market with her then-boyfriend, filmmaker Don Letts. She thought of re-purposing the name, The Flowers of Romance; Lydon had suggested it for a short-lived band of Sid Vicious, future Slits members Palmolive and Viviane Albertine. Lee would quit the band in 1982, while PiL goes on, still compelling today; but her tenure is immortalized on the LP cover. A red flower between her teeth à la Carmen, she appears to be about to bash the photographer with a blunt object—actually the pestle from then Vivienne Westwood stylist, Yvonne Gold’s kitchen. The hectic glamour that the über-stylish Lee projected stopped PiL from being perceived as all grumpy white boys—and never forget that even a pestle can hurt. Today, Lee is one of the music industry’s most powerful women, as co-owner of Rough Trade Records.

For two weeks in the fall of 1980, these hardcore Londoners were off to the exotic Oxfordshire countryside. The stately neo-Elizabethan 17th-century home that Virgin’s Richard Branson had converted into an unusually grand studio was a readymade stage for breakdown/breakthroughs both artistic and mystic; it came complete with a ghost, whose visitations were yet another good reason to put off recording. The cast of this musical mystery experience included myself for some days; drummer Martin Atkins, younger, less tormented than Lydon and Levene, his bouncing presence let some air in; and a slight charmer nicknamed Shooz, aka the late guitarist Steve New. Years later, Shooz said he had been hiding from his transvestism; but then he shared Levene’s career-stunting fondness for smack, contributing to the general tension.

The waking hours, which mostly happened at night, were a tug-of-war between everyone’s chosen stimulants or deadeners. In those times, cocaine was non-existent and weed had not yet been genetically modified into its current monster testosterone THC; so we can blame the paranoia on the speed. Among other things. Lydon was well known for being paranoid; but then, sometimes they are out to get you, as life had shown him. That uncomfortable knowledge crawls through every bar of The Flowers of Romance. Has any other LP been dragged from its makers so slowly? The album is a breech delivery that needed forceps to scream its way into the world, those indentations on the skull, that bruising—you can hear it all.

Lydon’s Pistols experience was always tainted by the contempt of coulda-been father figure McLaren. Naturally, Lydon had been impressed at first with the worldly older man’s naughty charisma. Convinced that he had not only assembled the group, (which, in fairness, he had), McLaren also thought he had invented Lydon’s creativity. Wrong answer! Actually, McLaren had lucked out but did not appreciate Lydon, who was a true untapped performer and poet with his own concept of sound. This dismissiveness had caused Lydon to retrench and seek to surround himself with those he knew and trusted, in the new, equitable PiL model.

The old Pistols construct had become its own sort of prison, one which Sid Vicious had not escaped alive. The loss of Sid, known as Beverley when he befriended Lydon at college, could never really heal. And now, another key figure was also missing— banished, in fact: amiable bass player Jah Wobble, another longtime friend, whom Lydon had talked into learning to play because he wanted him around. Who knows what was in Wobble’s mind, but he felt entitled to use some PiL tapes for his own recordings, without discussion. Off with his head!

There was a garrison mentality. You were pro-PiL or not. If punk meant a tabula rasa, a clean slate, Lydon now found it necessary to re-make the slate. Without Wobble, a solution had to be found, and the fewer people that were let into the besieged inner decision-making core, the better.

Frankly, I benefited from their creative scramble. As a rock scribe, I had often covered Lydon, but having been an original Flying Lizard, the early ’80s experimental new-wavers, I was now invited to use PiL “down time.” (In the hours when the studio was not in use, I recorded my own indie 45, “Launderette/Private Armies,” which Lydon and Levene co-produced with me.) Did Lydon already suspect that the studio would often lie idle?

Lydon and I had first bonded over a shared passion for reggae bass. Bob Marley called the rickety liaison between the music of two oppressed tribes, black youth and white punks, the Punky Reggae Party. With the Rastas’ numbering of corrupt, controlling capitalist systems as Babylon, and Jamaican dub remixes shattering predictable reality, reggae was our religion.

Back then, I was a music journalist, often covering reggae. My interviews with artists like Big Youth and Dennis Brown sometimes happened at Lydon’s terrace house in Fulham’s Gunter Grove, where dub pumped through giant speakers and the session never stopped, a playground run on vampire hours. Apart from work, and even then, people mostly stirred when day bled into night. I doubt any of us had ever had that much space to cavort in before. For a while, we took over the asylum.

Hence my presence at The Manor. We lived in a topsy-turvy twilight zone. Rather than milking every precious moment of studio time, there was a lot of sulking and/or deep thinking going on with everyone alone in their bedrooms. Result being, for me anyway, that the glorious moment when I laid down my vocals for “Private Armies,” (on which both Levene and Shooz play,) was somewhat marred by the engineers’ annoyance. Having waited for hours—days?—for PiL, they were underwhelmed at Lydon thrusting me upon them. (It all worked out OK in the end!)

But bit by bit, The Flowers of Romance’s confrontational, epic tracks assembled, despite it all. A musician would wander in, play a riff, amble off, and another would show up, add another dimension to the fragment and so on. Lydon had reams of notes and could scribble down and deliver a new song fast, if the track moved him. Thus, the nine songs were assembled, a bit like a big communal jigsaw left out in the living-room. But two weeks at The Manor only produced one finished track: the ambient instrumental, “Hymie’s Him.” The rest of the rhythms were taken back to the city and molded at Virgin’s Townhouse Studios, in a somewhat more disciplined fashion

Yet even while PiL members were brooding alone in their rooms at The Manor, subconscious work had been done, wrestling with a metaphysical question: when your entire aesthetic has been rooted in bass culture, how to even make sound without it? Those still newfangled synthesizers were part of the answer when the album was completed. Levene almost invented the jagged, jangly post-punk guitar sound. Now he was testing digitized music, with his cumbersome Prophet synthesizer. When it came to music, Levene was fervent, obsessive. The key to The Flowers of Romance lies in his anguished cry, so loud I could hear it in the early hours in my bedroom next door, “I only want to make music like no-one has ever heard before! Or I can’t be fucked.”

Of course, that epic ambition has always meant tempting the gods, and Greek-wise, Levene—who left the band in 1983—was Sisyphus, doomed to keep pushing, not a boulder up a mountain, but a guitar or synthesizer’s sound, till the new is no longer novel and the cycle starts again.

Doom and how to deal with it is the message of The Flowers of Romance, which unsettles from the start: an itchy insect sound is swatted down with a harsh swipe of one drum, making the listener the mosquito, followed by Lydon’s startling muezzin-like wail. Disillusion and rejection infuse the title track, caught in this exquisite banality: “I sent you flowers/You wanted chocolates instead.” Attraction keeps tussling with repulsion, especially at women’s bodies in the primal scream of “Track 8.” Repulsion wins on “Go Back,” when PiL tackles the Babylon system that tries to make us all trot down one narrow track forever, led by debt and doubt :”Left/Right/Left/Right/Don’t look back/Take second best/Number one, protect self-interest/Here every day is a Monday…”

But the overall effect is not rage or despair. The music is on the attack. This was PiL fighting for existence, collective back against the wall. No wonder they felt almost paralyzed. How to top yourself, if your first band had become a global, culture-busting sensation; your own band’s first two studio albums—1978’s Public Image: First Issue and 1979’s Metal Box—were hailed as game-changers, crashing through the primitivism of punk to deepen the template for post-punk’s angular experimentation. Then the live official bootleg album from 1980, Paris Au Printemps, album got a severe backlashing from the press. PiL had to get its groove back.

The Flowers of Romance spat at their critics with intensity and twisted clarity. In “Phenagen,” Lydon stubbornly intones, “Empty promises help to forget/No more, no more/Repair the damages you made/Amen, amen, amen, amen.” He massacres the Mass as only a Catholic can, and the record’s pain might be a form of expiation, cathartic confession of damage done.

It’s an album that itches in its skin, restless for oblivion. Rather like punk’s perverse mode of communication—insult your best mates the most—Lydon’s lyrics at first appear misanthropic, certainly suspicious of other humanoids. But a doubly perverse flash of humanism nonetheless illuminates the work. To mess with our heads, Lydon offers us just enough light.

The remorseless “Banging the Door” shows this duality. It starts out curmudgeonly: “What do you want? You’re irritating, go away/It’s not my fault that you’re lonely.” Then Lydon bracingly concludes, “Why worry now? You’re not dead yet/You’ve got a whole lifetime to correct it/You’re wasting, admiring hating…”

The track reads more autobiographical than the rest. Against the world, PiL and cohorts would often ignore people pounding. With no security cameras or minders, they were wary. Lydon had often been beaten up in the street. More than once, he came home to find his apartment ransacked by the police Special Branch. He was a subversive rabble-rouser with Irish roots; IRA bombs were a regular menace; perhaps inevitably, some people and authorities projected their racism and/or security fears onto Lydon’s anti-leadership.

But for those that were there, “Banging the Door” will always be associated with the tempestuous early courtship between Lydon and his wife, the striking blonde German scene-maker, Nora Forster, mother of the late Ari Up, singer of the Slits. In retrospect, Lydon, who was quite a shy guy, might not have wanted to be seen as slushy in front of our fiercely cynical, free-thinking coterie. After all, “This Is Not a Love Song,” would be one of the band’s biggest hits two years later, in 1983. Yet the barbed bouquet of their stormy young relationship has lasted for almost half a century.

Which is a metaphor for the continued meaning of The Flowers of Romance today, for the mood of survival despite betrayal that it has bequeathed us. Come to that, it captures where we find ourselves now: all lurching through dark Babylon towards an uncertain future. But there is some light ahead, if we keep banging away.