Public Image Limited - 1978 live ...

1979 - tripping around the fields of what was my first Glastonbury Festival experience, with girlfriend of the time Sue - not many there that year perhaps a couple of thousand at most - just having witnessed Mark Stewart and his Pop Group terrorists completly lay waste to anything approaching a peacful afternoon - and escaping the stage area before Steve Hillage (remember him?) tried to kill us all with his blend of gnome-like-soft-rock-classics (other noize makers that year included : The Only Ones, Sky, Peter Gabriel, Tom Robinson - as you can see a real mixed-bag man !!) ........ anyways ..... we made our way to the stall holders in the hope of scoring some weed (as ya do) - no chance there of-course - remember this is 1979 - skunk did not even exist - and if it did - there was precious chance a yokal from zummerzit would ever lay hands on anything even related to a bud - so we made do with the normal mellow-yellow-slate-bar and stumbled around tokin-it (as ya do at festivals) ....

sitting there on the ground - with a box of dodgy looking C90 cassettes - was Bootleg-Cassette-Dude - first time I ever saw one of these types before - so stop we did - and before you can say - "what an incredible discordant din that guitar player makes - man wish I could play like that" - I was the proud owner of the following piece of pure audio excellence ......



This turned out to be (as Bootleg Cassette Dude was only too happy to explain) - a live tape from the second ever PIL gig - performed only 6 months previously in Paris on 22.12.78 ... and as it turned out - a slice of sheer throbbing-bass and thrashing guitars (topped by shamanic wailing) - pleasure ... well - off we trotted to the trusty Hilman Imp (I had style in my cars even back then) - plugged it into the customized-mega-watt tape-deck (bass speakers mounted under front-bucket-seats turned to 11) - reclined the chairs - smoked-da-spliffs - and basically had our socks-clear-blown-off...

the sound of that man Keith Levine and his twanging (at times completly out-of-tune-sounding guitar) slicing through the rock-solid dub-bass of Jah Wobble with slabs of synth squelches nigh on slicing yer damned head off, (well maybe by this point the drugs were impairing my judgement - but you get the picture) - this was cool-shit-bro - AND I WANTED MY GUITAR TO SING JUZ LIKE THAT !!! - of course at that time I was playing a Shergold Modulator through a 1960s fucked-Vox-AC30 - with minimal skills on board - so that to this day it remains a dream - but I did rush out and buy a Wem-Copycat tape-delay (still have tha baby - as I do the guitar and amp - if a certain Brendan W ever gets round to returning them that is ! note: 10 years all ready Bren - HINT HINT) ... but anyways - I digress ......

bottom line is Levine plays like no-one else I had heard before - forget all those bar-chords and structured changes man, and the tone - sounded more like he was strangling the instrument than strumming it - lovely stuff to these ears then (just as it is now) - and this is a couple of years before they ever attempted anything Metal Box-ish ... raw-power - never better executed !!

boy ... I played this tape to death - always fearing the thing would get eaten by the various crap-players I had - or snapped through repeated rewinds - back and forwards - back and forwards... - but nope - it never did - and yep - I just found the thang in the BIG BOX OF CASSETTES - in the cupboard-never-before-ventured ....

soooo .... a digital-copy and subtle-mastering lick later .... and here it is ..... the first track from the second ever PIL gig - crank it LOUD BABY - turn up the sub-woofer - this one KICKS (in an audiance recording lofi way of course ....) ..... enjoy :::

Public Image Limited - Theme (live in Paris - 1978)