Public Image Ltd. - Second Edition / The Flowers Of Romance

As I've said many times before, this site is not about posting albums that are easily available or brand new or to be released in the near future. The Unheard Music is not a "leak blog", although we do feature lots of music that never came out, will never come out or is otherwise unavailable. With all that said, sometimes I will post things that are reasonably available officially because people may not have heard them before and it can only be helpful for artists and their music when they exist primarily in obscurity. I say this all because neither Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition or The Flowers Of Romance are terribly difficult to find officially, but I'm posting them here because they're great albums that, if you're unfamiliar with PiL, you may never hear otherwise. These songs NEVER get played on the radio or anywhere else and there is little about them that the average listener would probably consider instantly "catchy". The songs on both of these albums are dark, moody excursions that haunt the listener more than ensnare them with melody or sweetness, but they also reward the listener with repeated plays, revealing their immense details.

Second Edition, for the uninformed, has also been released as Metal Box, a triple vinyl set mastered at 45 RPM which came in a large metal canister very similar to that of a film reel container. It was PiL's second album and featured John Lydon, Keith Levene and Jah Wobble which also appeared on their first album, First Issue. The songs were written during jams and featured at least three different drummers as they had lost their initial drummer. The album features practically no mid-range with Levene's guitars cutting like razors and Wobble's bass thumping like a dub jackhammer. Lydon's vocals feature on nine of the album's twelve tracks and sound more like possessed chants than his lead vocals in the Sex Pistols. It reminds me of a nightmare and should be heard with the hiss from the master tapes intact. Lydon covers a lot of ground vocally, with songs like Swan Lake (aka Death Disco) which is a mournful shriek about his mother's then-recent death or Poptones, a song about being dragged to the countryside, raped and then shot, all the while recalling in a sarcastic tone that the car stereo was playing "poptones", more or less making a joke about the quality of radio while his character is bleeding to death and losing his body heat. If I didn't make it clear before, it's a dark album, but man is it rewarding.

The Flowers Of Romance was the follow-up to Second Edition/Metal Box but might as well be from a different band. By this point bassist Jah Wobble had left the group under accusations that he stole from them (these are rather unfounded accusations, primarily by Lydon, which he more or less took back years later) and Martin Atkins had become the permanent drummer, making this his first full-length appearance on a studio album (he only played on one track for Second Edition). The darkness is still there, but this album sounds more like the soundtrack to a Cronenberg film. Levene had a pretty bad heroin habit at this point and was more interested in keyboards than playing guitar which changed the sound of the group immensely, but the two things which really stand out are Atkins intense percussion, as he sounds like one hell of a powerful human drum machine, and Lydon's possessed vocals, as almost everything he sings sounds like a middle eastern chant. I think it's a beautiful album, but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of the populace thinks it's unlistenable. Even those who share my appreciation for the album like to point out that it is probably one of the most ridiculous releases by a major record label with the intention to have a successful pop record in history. While PiL may have been a bit more radio friendly later in their career, they're simply not a pop band and this is the furthest thing from a pop record you will find.

As I said earlier, these albums aren't terribly hard to find, at least digitally. They're both available at Amazon and iTunes for purchase digitally and you can probably find a used copy on eBay or a used record shop if you're lucky, and outside the US they may be a little easier to find as Metal Box was reissued last year in conjunction with PiL's "reunion" tour (I'm not saying it's not a reunion, but the only original member participating is Lydon and everyone else is from later line-ups. Still, I'd pay to see them live in a heartbeat!) and Flowers had been reissued on CD with bonus tracks several years earlier. The versions I'm posting here though are a little different as these are vinyl rips from last years reissues of both albums on the 4 Men With Beards label. There is no difference in the mix, I simply think these have a cleaner sound than the currently available editions and wanted to share these with anyone interested. If you enjoy these albums, you should purchase the vinyl reissues or whatever technological configuration you're satisfied with, but please purchase them. PiL, even if they're distributed by a major label, is basically an independent project and all parties involved would be thankful for continued royalties, so please support them. Enjoy!


UPDATE: Due to recent complaints I'm taking precautions and removing these links. Sorry. Regardless, if you like the music you can purchase both of these albums digitally. They're well worth it!

Public Image Ltd. - Second Edition

01 Albatross
02 Memories
03 Swan Lake
04 Poptones
05 Careering
06 Socialist
07 Graveyard
08 The Suit
09 Bad Baby
10 No Birds
11 Chant
12 Radio 4


Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers Of Romance

01 Four Enclosed Walls
02 Track 8
03 Phenagen
04 Flowers Of Romance
05 Under The House
06 Hymie's Him
07 Banging The Door
08 Go Back
09 Francis Massacre


NOTE: When I rip vinyl, I like to perform the declicking manually. That said, I found a lot of little clicks throughout Track 8 on Flowers and realized I probably couldn't remove them all myself, at least not in a timely manner, so I ran the track through iZotope RX, a program I'm really pleased with the results of and made a declicked version of the track, but I'm including the original rip of the track without any declicking in a folder labeled unprocessed track in case you want to compare.

ANOTHER NOTE: I was told by someone I shared this rip of Second Edition with that the second track, Memories, gave them an error when they decompressed the rar file. If you're using a Mac, you can try The Unarchiver and if you're a Windows user, I've included a repair archive in the rar which can be used with WinRAR, but I've also uploaded Memories separately just in case. Just click on that track and you can download it on it's own.

YET ANOTHER NOTE: Has anyone seen the Metal Box/Second Edition outtakes which are supposed to be circulating? I've been looking really hard for them and had no luck whatsoever. Anybody? PLEASE???

Public Image Limited - Commercial Zone

Public Image Limited is difficult to explain even when you know the facts. Started with John Lydon, after leaving the Sex Pistols, and his buddy Keith Levene, an early member of The Clash, PiL, as it was abbreviated, was said to be a company, not a band. Despite this statement, they nonetheless performed and toured as a band and wrote songs which were released for public consumption. Jah Wobble, a childhood friend of Lydon's, was brought on as the bass player despite lacking any knowledge of how to play the instrument, although he did rather well for himself. Martin Atkins later became the drummer and blew people away on a regular basis. Jeanette Lee was also a member of PiL, although she worked with visual aids rather than writing music or performing. Eventually, everyone got fired or left on their own volition leaving Lydon the sole active member. PiL went from being corporate minded to being what would generally be identified as a late-eighties and early-nineties alternative rock-band. The band, or company, or Lydon, depending on how you like to think of PiL, hasn't recorded or released any new material since the early nineties, leading many to believe that it is over and finished, although Lydon has went on record to state that PiL is on "hiatus" and may eventually return. Since said "hiatus", he has released one solo album, in which he played just about every instrument and wrote every song, and is working on a second one when he's not doing whatever he normally does.

I hope I didn't come off rough about Lydon in my brief history of PiL as I actually like the guy. I think he's genuinely creative, interesting and intelligent, despite what many people say or what his "public image" says about him. That said, as obvious as it may be that PiL would never have existed without him, the participation of ex-members Keith Levene, Jah Wobble and Martin Atkins is just as important and should not be discounted. Keith is just as essential, if not more so, to the origins of PiL than Lydon, and his playing and use of then-new technologies like samplers inspired a lot of the post-punk and post-rock sounds coming out of the early eighties. He is also the party responsible for the existence of "Commercial Zone" as we know it.

In 1981 and 1982, PiL had reconvened to begin recording a new album. Lydon had a role in a film called "Copkiller" starring Harvey Keitel and began writing a piece named "The Slab" which was later renamed "The Order Of Death" to possibly be used in the film, or at least that's what is commonly accepted at the truth. During this period, Lydon and Atkins were doing more of the writing and production on the new recordings, leaving Levene out or removing his contributions. Levene, understandably, was not happy with this and decided to leave the band, but not before making off with a copy of the masters for the then unfinished album. He tried to get Richard Branson, head of Virgin Records, to release the material as the new PiL album, but Lydon intervened and Branson refused, leading Levene to move back to the US and release it there as "Commercial Zone". Lydon and Atkins were furious, claiming they owned the rights to the recordings which they probably did. Levene didn't seem too bothered by it and, when the then-current PiL lineup decided to release their new album, "This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get" in 1984, Levene reissued "Commercial Zone" as a limited edition release with a slightly altered track order and at least one song shortened. PiL successfully forced "Commercial Zone" out of print permanently shortly after it's reissue, but it became fodder for bootleggers and mythical to anyone interested in the band, Lydon or Levene.

What I'm posting here today is a copy of the original issued version of the "Commercial Zone" album. I quite enjoy this album and feel it's a shame it most likely won't ever see an official release, but there are high quality copies floating around so at least we have those. I am also posting a collection of unreleased recordings from this same period of time that showed up online in 2006. Initially, this collection consisted of a live show from an unknown date, a rehearsal for the 1983 lineup's tour, and the aforementioned unreleased recordings which are clearly from the same era as the recording of the "Commercial Zone" album. Some of the tracks are alternate versions of the CZ tracks, many of them are untitled instrumentals. There has been speculation that these CZ tracks and instrumentals may have been intended for the "Copkiller" film, but this has never been verified. There is an alternate version of the "This Is What You Want..." track "1981" and the full "Flowers Of Romance" single despite it having been officially released. I've also included a track generally identified by fans as "Vampire", an instrumental featuring Martin Atkins' percussion with sound effects described by him as sounding like "dinosaurs". These sounds were achieved by Atkins recording the sound of him drinking bottled water and then slowing it down significantly. Also, this track was, for reasons unclear, included on the rehearsal recording, but is definitely a studio recording and actually dates from the "Flowers Of Romance" sessions. So calling this second collection "Commercial Zone Demos" or outtakes isn't quite accurate, since while the majority of them are from that period, several of them have nothing to do with that album, but the name sticks since that is what it is commonly referred to as online.

If you want to learn more about Public Image Limited, Lydon, Levene, Atkins, Wobble and anything else related to the PiL universe, I suggest you visit the astoundingly detailed Fodderstompf site. I'm sure you will find their details of the "Commercial Zone" debacle far more detailed than my own, but as I'm not running a PiL-specific site I think I can be forgiven. Enjoy!

Public Image Limited - Commercial Zone

01 Love Song
02 Mad Max
03 Bad Night
04 Solitaire
05 The Slab
06 Lou Reed Pt. 1
07 Lou Reed Pt. 2
08 Blue Water
09 Miller Hi-Life


Public Image Limited - Commercial Zone Demos and Outtakes

01 The Slab
02 Instrumental #1
03 Instrumental #2
04 Bad Night
05 Instrumental #3
06 Instrumental #4
07 Bad Night/Love Song
08 Instrumental #5
09 Instrumental #6
10 Instrumental #7
11 1981
12 Flowers Of Romance (Single Version)
13 Flowers Of Romance (Instrumental)
14 Vampire