Public Image Ltd.

Public Image Ltd.
Public Image Ltd. 2013
General information
origin	London , England
Genre (s)	Post-punk , new wave , art-punk , dub , alternative rock , noise rock
founding	1978, 2009
resolution	1993
Website	www.pilofficial.com
Current occupation
singing	John Lydon (1978–1993, since 2009)
guitar	Robert "Lu" Edmonds (1986–1988, since 2009)
bass	Scott Firth (since 2009)
Drums	Bruce Smith (1986–1990, since 2009)
former members
guitar	Keith Levene (1978-1983)
guitar	Joseph Guida (1983)
guitar	Mark Schulz (1984–1985)
guitar	John McGeoch (1984-1992)
bass	Jah Wobble (1978-1980)
bass	Pete Jones (1982-1983)
bass	Louis Bernardi (1983)
bass	Bret Helm (1984–1985)
bass	Allan Dias (1985-1992)
Drums	Jim Walker (1978-1979)
Drums	David Humphrey (1979)
Drums	Richard Dudanski (1979)
Drums	Martin Atkins (1979–1985)
public relations	Jeannette Lee (1978-1982)

Public Image Ltd. (also Public Image Limited , abbreviated to PiL ) is a rock band founded in 1978 , which in the early years saw themselves as a media factory. Musically, the band, led by John Lydon , began with experimental rock music and post-punk , but also opened up to a wider audience during the 1980s.

Band name

Public Image Ltd. was officially registered on July 7, 1978 as a British private limited company (comparable to a German GmbH ). Intentions to realize extra-musical projects through this company were repeatedly expressed in interviews, but never realized. Public Image Ltd. remained a pure band name. The band split up in September 1992, the company of the same name was finally dissolved on January 13, 1998. John Lydon announced through his manager in May 1998 that he was withdrawing from the music business to focus on film and television work.

On October 15, 2009, Lydon registered a new company in the UK, PIL Twin Ltd. as a music publisher that licensed the republication of the PIL back catalog 2011/2012.

On November 30, 2011, PIL Official Limited was registered as the band's record label in Great Britain.

Band history

Poster from a concert in Los Angeles in 1980

Public Image Ltd. was founded in 1978 under the name Carnivorous Buttock Flies by the English musician John Lydon. He had previously been the singer of the legendary punk band Sex Pistols under the pseudonym Johnny Rotten , but had fallen out with their manager Malcolm McLaren .

After the end he decided with his old friend Jah Wobble (real name John Wardle) to form a new band. In addition to Lydon as singer and Wardle as bassist, the founders included guitarists Keith Levene from The Clash and drummer Jim Walker. They immediately got a recording deal from Virgin Records and released their debut single Public Image a few months after their founding in October 1978 . They immediately had a top 10 hit in Great Britain. The debut album First Issue followed before Christmas, and they only performed their first live performance on Christmas Day.

Even before the next single Disco Day , the constant line-up in the band began with the farewell to Walker. With Richard Dudanski as drummer, the second album Metal Box was created , which, as the name implies , was actually released in a tin can. It looked like a roll of film and contained 12 songs on three records. It was relatively successful commercially and received critical acclaim. After their first album had already sold well as an import album in the USA, it was decided to release it officially in the US, but shied away from the high production costs with the tin can. Therefore, the album appeared in the States as a double album with a normal cardboard cover under the name Second Edition . It placed in the official album charts . In 1980 a US tour followed and the first live album Paris au Printemps , recorded in France.

In the meantime Jah Wobble had left the band, Lydon and Levene continued with Martin Atkins as the three drummer. A year later, The Flowers of Romance , their commercially best-placed album, came out at number 11 in England. The extended band also included Dave Crowe, who was responsible for finances and, from 1979 to 1980, Nick Launay for technology and production, as well as the video artist Jeannette Lee, who designed the performances. In May 1981 they performed at the Ritz Club in New York, but only video screens and the band as a shadow behind a screen could be seen, which led to riots. The event got them some headlines in the music press.

During this time Lydon and Levene argued more and more often about the music direction, which was also due to Levene's increasing drug problems. He finally left the band, took the original tapes of the new album recordings with him and released them on his own. Lydon and Atkins had to re-record the next PiL album This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get again. Previously they released This Is Not a Love Song , the band's most successful single. It reached number 5 in Great Britain and number 10 in the German charts . However, the album was the most unsuccessful in the band's history and did not go beyond number 56. There were a few newcomers for the following tour, but after Atkins left in 1985 to pursue his own projects, a new band core formed with guitarist John McGeoch from Siouxsie and the Banshees and bassist Allan Dias, which lasted into the 1990s should have.

The next studio album with the cover imprinted album (the CD version was printed with a compact disc and the cassette version with a cassette ) not only had this unusual title, the guest musicians were also an unusual combination. In addition to Bill Laswell , who was also involved as a producer, Zappa guitarist Steve Vai , avant-garde musician Ryūichi Sakamoto and blues rock drummer Ginger Baker were among the contributors. The success of the album followed in 1986 with the penultimate album The Flowers of Romance .

Bruce Smith from The Pop Group and Lu Edmonds from The Damned were part of the cast on the album Happy? which appeared just a year later. Edmonds withdrew a little later because of a tinnitus illness and the album 9 - two live albums including the ninth album release by Public Image Ltd. - confirmed the band's unchanged popularity two years later. In the US it barely missed the top 100 of the album charts and was placed for 23 weeks. In 1990 the first compilation album was released with the title Greatest Hits, So Far . It reached number 20 in the UK and was awarded silver . Then Smith left and when after the less successful next studio album That What Is Not also Dias withdrew because of drug problems, the band came to a standstill. In addition, the band lost their long-standing record deal and John Lydon was forced to break up the group in 1993. He was so deeply in debt that it was made impossible for him to continue, as all funds would have been seized immediately, from paying the musicians to depositing the room rent at live concerts.

He started a solo career, touring again several times with the old Sex Pistols and working on television projects. Only in 2008 did he feel like doing Publich Image Ltd. to revive and with Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and Scott Firth as new bassists, they toured the UK again the following year. A live album was released and touring expanded to Europe and North America in the following years. After another live album from their performance at the Isle of Wight Festival , they decided to make another studio album. This Is PiL was released in 2012, 20 years after their last studio album, and put them back on the charts. Three years later the equally successful What the World Needs Now… was released , although for the first time in the band's history the line-up remained unchanged on two studio albums. In addition to other appearances in the following years, the documentary The Public Image Is Rotten about the history of the band was released in 2017 . A corresponding box with 5 CDs and 2 DVDs appeared the following year.

music

The sound of the early albums is often irritating - even for listeners who are used to weird tones. For the second album Metal Box , however, they were critically acclaimed; the album was included in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 best albums of all time in 2003 . Over time, however, the style gave way to a background noise in which ethnic sounds and chants were interwoven. With the single This Is Not a Love Song PiL had in 1983 also on the Independent - scene beyond commercial success.

John Lydon with PiL 2012 in Manchester

Logo of the band

minimalist cover This is not a love song

Discography

Albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)			Remarks
		DE	UK	US
1978	Public Image: First Issue	-	UK22nd silver (11 weeks)UK	-
1979	Metal box	-	UK18 (8 weeks) UK	-	published on three records in a metal film roll box position 469 of the Rolling Stone 500 (2003)
	Second edition	-	UK46 (2 weeks) UK	US171 (3 weeks) US	same content as Metal Box originally a US release with a different presentation (material, cover)
1980	Paris au Printemps / Paris in the Spring	-	UK61 (2 weeks) UK	-	Live album, recorded 17./18. January 1980 in France
1981	The Flowers of Romance	-	UK11 (5 weeks) UK	US114 (4 weeks) US
1983	Live in Tokyo	-	UK28 (6 weeks) UK	-	Live album
1984	This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get	-	UK56 (2 weeks) UK	-
1986	album	-	UK14 (6 weeks) UK	US115 (16 weeks) US	depending on the format, the sound carrier was entitled album , compact disc or cassette
1987	Happy?	-	UK40 (2 weeks) UK	US169 (10 weeks) US
1989	9	-	UK36 (2 weeks) UK	US106 (23 weeks) US
1990	Greatest Hits, So Far	-	UK20th silver (3 weeks)UK	-	Best of album
1992	That What Is Not	-	UK46 (2 weeks) UK	-
2012	This Is PiL	-	UK35 (2 weeks) UK	-
2015	What the World Needs Now ...	-	UK29 (2 weeks) UK	-

More albums

• Plastic Box (1999, 4-CD box)
• PIL Alife (2009, live album)
• One Drop (2012, EP )
• The Public Image Is Rotten (Songs from the Heart) (2018, 5-CD box)

Singles

year	Title album	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes)			Remarks
		DE	UK	US
1978	Public Image Public Image	-	UK9 (8 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Wardle , Jim Walker, John Lydon , Keith Levene
1979	Death disco	-	UK20 (7 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Wardle, John Lydon, Keith Levene
	Memories metal box	-	UK60 (2 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Wardle, John Lydon, Keith Levene
1981	The Flowers of Romance The Flowers of Romance	-	UK24 (7 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Lydon, Keith Levene
1983	This Is Not a Love Song This Is What You Want ... This Is What You Get	DE10 (16 weeks) DE	UK5 (10 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Lydon, Keith Levene, Martin Atkins
1984	Bad Life This Is What You Want ... This Is What You Get	-	UK71 (2 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Lydon, Keith Levene, Martin Atkins
1986	Rise album	-	UK11 (10 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Lydon, Bill Laswell
	Home album	-	UK75 (2 weeks) UK	-	Authors: John Lydon, Bill Laswell
1987	Seattle Happy?	-	UK47 (4 weeks) UK	-	Authors: Allan Dias, Robert Edmonds, John Lydon, John McGeoch, Bruce Smith
	The Body Happy?	-	UK100 (1 week) UK	-	Authors: Allan Dias, Robert Edmonds, John Lydon, John McGeoch, Bruce Smith
1989	Disappointed 9	-	UK38 (5 weeks) UK	-	Authors: Allan Dias, Robert Edmonds, John Lydon, John McGeoch, Bruce Smith, Stephen Hague No. 1 in the USA in the alternative songs charts
	Warrior 9	-	UK89 (2 weeks) UK	-	Authors: Allan Dias, Robert Edmonds, John Lydon, John McGeoch, Bruce Smith also ran in the film Slaves of New York (Slaves of New York)
1990	Don't Ask Me The Greatest Hits, So Far	-	UK22 (5 weeks) UK	-	Authors: Allan Dias, John Lydon, John McGeoch
1992	Cruel That What Is Not	-	UK49 (2 weeks) UK	-	Authors: Allan Dias, John Lydon, John McGeoch

More singles

• Acid Drops (1992)
• Covered (1992)
• One Drop (2012)
• Out of the woods
• Reggie Song (2012)
• Double Trouble (2015)
• The One (2015)

literature

• Clinton Heylin: Public Image Ltd. - Rise / Fall . Omnibus Press, 1989.
• Tony Scrivener: Agents Of Anarchy . Kingsfleet Publications, 1992.
• Ben Myers: John Lydon - The Sex Pistols, PIL & Anti-Celebrity . Independent Music Press, 2004.
• Phil Strongman: John Lydon's Metal Box - The Story Of Public Image Ltd . Helter Skelter, 2007.
• Andreas Rauscher: More radical than the Sex Pistols? The story of Public Image Limited . testcard # 16, 2007.
• David Roberts (Ed.): The Chronicle of Rock Music . Librero, 2015. Page 398 f.

Web links

• Official website
• Public Image Ltd. at Allmusic (English)
• Public Image Ltd. at Music VF
• Public Image Ltd. at Discogs (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ PIL Twin Limited (20 Jesmond Way, Stanmore, Middlesex, HA7 4QR), registered on the CompaniesHouse.co.uk website
2. ↑ PIL Official Limited (20 Jesmond Way, Stanmore, Middlesex, HA7 4QR), registered on the CompaniesHouse.co.uk website
3. ↑ ^{a b} Chart sources: Germany / UK: Public Image Ltd - Public Image Limited - PiL / USA
4. ^ The Billboard Albums by Joel Whitburn , 6th Edition, Record Research 2006, ISBN 0-89820-166-7
5. ↑ Gold / platinum awards in the BPI database (Great Britain)