Poptones

Can I go on record here and just say that Public Image Ltd's Poptones is the best thing that John Lydon a.k.a. Rotten ever has or will record.

The standard objections listed and rebutted here:

1. It's not by the Sex Pistols. No. It's not. The Sex Pistols weren't even a real band -- they were a situationist prank pulled on a naïve public by the inscrutably unscrupulous Malcolm MacLaren, ably assisted by Rotten -- and they were also rubbish.

2. Ok so it's PiL but it's no Death Disco. No. It's not. I think it's better. I will certainly dance to Death Disco, but this is a better song.

3. It's not on (annoying-critics' perennial PiL album pick) Flowers of Romance (gahn on -- pick the difficult one, whyntcha). No. It's not. Flowers of Romance is a fine album, to be sure, but let's be frank -- they'd lost a Wobble, Keith Levene had dropped his guitar and flipped his wig over synthesizers, and they'd gained a Martin Atkins. That's a bum deal in anyone's language.

4. The best thing John Lydon (wikipedia) has ever recorded was the episode of Judge Judy where he appeared as the defendant in a suit regarding some former band-member's claim that he was owed money after being kicked out of PiL. You are right, that is a superlative moment in his recorded and media history, right up there with the time PiL fucked shit up on the Dick Clarke show, and -- of course -- Lydon's own TV show. But Poptones tops that.

So yeah. Best. Ever. You can listen to a live version if you like, taken from a concert recording in France, 1980:

Image Publique S.A. - Timbres de Pop (live) (4.11 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using player below)

What a simply magnificent track; the insistent bass-line which runs up and down and all around the scale, the live drums slathered all over with colossal sloppy Lee "Scratch" Perry reverb, the plaintive guitar figure which loops-de-loop over and over (in the live version it suffers somewhat from sloppy execution by an -- I imagine -- worse-for-wear Keith Levene), and the intriguing lyric delivered in the characteristic Lydon extendo-quaver-rant:

Drive to the forest in a japanese car
The smell of rubber on concrete tar
Hindsight done me no good
Standing naked in the back of the woods
The cassette played poptones

I can't forget the impression you made
You left a hole in the back of my head
I don't like hiding in this foliage and peat
It's wet and I'm losing my body heat
The cassette played poptones

This bleeding heart / Looking for bodies / Nearly injured my pride
Praise picnicking in the British countryside
Poptones

What's that all about, then? Eh?

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You can download the whole Image Publique S.A. - Paris Au Printemps album at dorfdisco braunsfeld. Since its all like out-of-print and shit.