Still got all the gubbins that came with it,& even the NME review cutting i saved. ‘Careering’ still sounds menacing!
I played it in the car to someone who'd never heard of it before (I do that, subject passengers to music they probably don't like lol) and asked them to guess the year it was made. They said 'I dunno, this year?' - They weren't having it was the 70s for a second. It doesn't age.
Death Disco is the most moving, frightening, searing, honest, soul baring, beautiful exotic piece of music I've ever heard. Ol' Rotten Johnny is such a chameleon, clown and contrarian and yet those times when he's just an artist, pure, simple and vulnerable are breathtaking.
I can take or leave a lot of the post Wobble/Levine stuff, there's some good stuff but that original line up is just breathtaking - afterwards, it feels a bit too much like Lydon's band and he doesn't get reigned in enough or challenged enough. The good stuff is much more thinly spread - I love the claustrophobia of Flowers of Romance as you can virtually hear the simmering tension and paranoia between them, but that's what draws each one of them out and pushes (in particular Metal Box and Flowers of Romance) into such strange and exotic waters. It's mind blowing in a way - Lydon was kind of a boy band singer (in a round about way) and Wobble hadn't played the bass very long and yet, it's one of the single most original and compelling line ups in music. It doesn't sound like anyone else. Pistols were great, but they were just reheated pub rock. What Johnny did next is turn everything upside down and make entirely original music. It's got that thrill to it, where you can hear them subsumed in the journey of the sound. It's like Levine is just guiding the guitar, chopping it, stroking it, shaking it, like Wobble is locked into some other wavelength in a trance and the drumming is not so much keeping time as doing something ritualistic with Lydon the shaman lost in his own spell.
I think it might be evident I like it a lot lol.
Went to see Wobble do a talk about playing the bass and stuff - I don't play bass, but it was fascinating. He just talked about life with his bass on his lap then every ten minutes or so played one of the PiL bass lines and went on another ramble about this and that.
medium.com
Mines a bit rustier than this! but always easy to find in my album collection.
