"Keith was one of the most talented fucking guitar players I've ever known.
He made a guitar do things that were not supposed to be possible"
(John Lydon speaks to Keith Cameron, 2004)
"When I first heard The Sex Pistols I was shocked. I didn't like what I
heard, but at the same time, I was fascinated... I found Public Image to be
very interesting. I like 'Metal Box' very much."
(Can's Holger Czukay speaking with Mick Sinclair, 1982)
| People still talk a lot about 'Metal Box' -- at the time we were recording
that album, I spent a lot of my time talking to sound engineers at all the
studios we recorded in -- John Lydon didn't get it, he used to say, "why are
you talking to these beardy weirdies Keith? What the fuck is it? Is it
drugs? What is it?" The point is, it was nothing to do with drugs.
These engineer geeks knew stuff years ahead of their time, and I used
to learn so much from them. I loved talking with those guys. They
really knew their stuff. The track "Bad Baby" had an intensity --
those lyrics are about me! Let me tell you about the guitar and
keyboard patterns -- there is a lot of anguish, a lot of longing in
those sounds. A lot of real, real longing in those sounds,
specifically in the coldness of the keyboard structures. I just
|
PIL circa 79. Lydon, Levene and Jeanette Lee |
|
wanted to record everything. Sometimes John didn't know the tapes were
rolling, and you can hear him saying, "Alright, stop", but of course,
I'd told the engineers to just let the tapes roll. You can't believe
how difficult it was to hold back on those tracks on 'Metal Box', to
keep the sound sparse, to not crowd anything -- it takes a real
discipline to actually subtract from the spaces rather than add all
the time. |
| I remember doing 'Socialist' -- I'd just bought these cheap synths, so me
and Wobble were really having fun fucking around with these things, whilst
submerged in the mix was this huge soaring sound, rising upwards from the
drum and the bass, like a whale's cry. Richard Dudanksi (ex-101'ers drummer)
was so nervous he was going to lose time, so I had to keep nodding to him to
let him know he was keeping the groove ok. Later on I dubbed up the cymbals,
so you have that spiralling metallic sound. Dubwise! In a way, it was so
excellent working with Wobble because he had no preconceptions of what music
should be, preconceptions a trained musician would have -- I just used to
tune the bass for him, and we'd play. Plus he'd work really fast, and I
liked that -- if I didn't like something, he'd just go, 'yeah ok, how's this
then?' and come up with another wicked bass line from the top of his head.
It was great. With 'Radio Four', I was just alone in the studio one night, and I was
overwhelmed with the sense of space-- I just took everything out of the
studio, moved the drum kit out, and played everything myself, reproducing
this sense of cold spaciousness I felt around me. That was me playing the
bass -- I played what I thought people would identify as a Wobble bass line,
but it was my pattern. |
 |
| On 'The Suit' whilst it fades out you can hear John fucking around on the
piano. Could he play piano? No, of course not, he used to do it to annoy us,
but the fact that he couldn't play didn't matter -- it was the same on
'Flowers of Romance' when John plays sax; I knew I could use John's sounds
in an impressionistic sense to good effect, whether he could play or not.
His sounds and noises became an art in their own right in a way, whether he
was a musician or not. So whether John was a musician or not just wasn't the
point. Not at all. |
 |
The influence of intense bass was always there -- I remember when we used to
go to the Virgin head offices, there was this PR guy called Jumbo, who had
done a lot of work organising the Front Line deals with artists like Jah
Youth and Far I. He had this office deep in the basement somewhere, and me,
John and Wobble used to wonder exactly what he did! Every time we went
there, he would open his door, and this cloud of smoke would emerge from the
darkness, and he used to pull us in there, with these huge fucking speakers
pounding out the latest bass lines from these JA sound system dub plates and
pre release tunes. There's Jumbo saying, "Keith, just listen to this fucking
bass line!" Then there were tunes like I Jah Man Levi's 'Heavy Load': Now
that was a serious tune. The version I've heard on the album bears no
resemblance to the massive bass line and drum space on the 12" cut. I really
miss my 12" dub discoplate collection -- I lost so many tunes in the earth
tremors in LA a few years later.
| Regarding Wobble? Wobble misunderstood me -- I have nothing against him at
all. In fact, I'd like to work with him again, because when Wobble gets a
bass line right, he fucking gets it right, you know what I mean? And I like
the way he works. Wobble thinks I had something to do with his exit from PIL,
but he's wrong. That was something between him, John Lydon and Dave Crowe. I
had nothing to do with it. I remember all kinds of petty jealousies going on
at our flat in Gunther Grove -- intense, weird vibes that had nothing to do
with me. I remember when the shit blew up about Wobble using the 'Metal Box'
backing tracks for his own album, and how angry John was, but I just
thought, 'so what? Isn't that what PIL is about, to be out there, working as
a collective but with individual autonomy within that umbrella structure?'
I'd have been very happy for Wobble to release his versions, but as I said,
under the PIL umbrella. John was really furious, but I didn't care --
I remember when we started recording 'Flowers of Romance', I was there
at the studio, tuning the bass |
Jeannette Lee, circa 78 |
| just
like I knew Wobble liked me to do, when John comes in -- "Where's
Wobble?" I said, and John just replies, "He's been sacked", just like
that. And there's me, I know nothing about this, and I'm shocked.
Nothing was discussed with me. |
Once I tried to get Wobble some royalities he was owed: I was doing him a
favour, and he rings me up in the middle of the night, threatening me, 'I'm
going to cut your fucking head off' and all this heavy shit, and this is
someone I was trying to help. I was looking over my shoulder for a few weeks
after that -- Wobble has done some stupid things in the past. I was told
later, 'Wobble didn't mean it, he'd been up all night taking some drug he's
not used to anymore.' He'd been down the underground all nigh -- that was
the time Wobble worked for London Underground. The truth is, I've never had
anything against Wobble, and after PIL split up I really enjoyed our days
together working at ONU Sound studios on those Dub Syndicate tunes. Adrian
Sherwood used to say stuff like, "I'll make sure you and Wobble never have
to work in the same room together" and I'd say, "Why?" I feel there has been
so much misunderstanding between me and Wobble which I'd really like to
clear up: When me and Wobble played with the Sugarhill Gang/ Tackhead sound
system down at the Town and Country Club, we hugged each other afterwards,
and Wobble said he was so happy we were playing together again.
| That was an intense gig, let me tell you -- this huge aural assault, with
Doug Wimbish playing the bass like a lead instrument; using bass lines that
followed lead patterns over Keith "Sugarhill" Le Blanc's deconstructed
snares. Overlaying this, Adrian Sherwood plays his cut up tape loops of
monks chanting -- all this noise, with me and Wobble playing what we usually
do over this exploding surface! Intense.
Jah Wobble circa 78 >> |
 |
"PIL seem to feel most secure when they are poised over the live wire in the
Underground, checking out the noise of the onrushing train....Beyond that,
it's Levene's extraordinary relationship to music; an obsessive
perfectionism that leads him to loathe sounds that do not extend the known
boundaries of contemporary Western music... He's either trying to strangle
his guitar or hack at it with a razor, or smother it in deadly flowers of
romance. Levene's synthesizer work, exemplified by "Careering" oddly
parallels Jah Shaka's live dub at a sound system, though neither of them's
aware of the fact. Only Shaka conjures those abstract waves and shapes of
texture. The molten core means that music flows through the player like
blood." (Vivien Goldman, 1980)
 |
"The truth of it is, I didn't know how much I loathed rock and roll, how
much I deeply resented it -- that was part of the motivation behind PIL --
that deep resentment, and a longing for new forms"
(Keith Levene) <<
Wobble and Lydon, circa 1978 |
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