Chant. chant. chant. chant. chant. The Public Image Ltd. album-by-album thread.

Nice. Please do post about the sound when you listen. I have the old single CD tin and am wondering if I need to upgrade...

 

Here's a waveform of Memories... top is 2009 bottom is the old CD.



Click for full sized.

Not very happy with what they did with Swan Lake... instead of making it fade out at the end, it just ends cold. If anything, they should have reproduced the locked groove of the original release, instead of making it just end with "Words cannot express".

 

Thanks!

 

Those are some wonderful pictures of PIL, Jsayers. Thank you for posting!!!

 

Just put the first disc in my stereo and I'm about halfway through Albatross. I think the new remaster sounds good! I haven't listened to the old CD in a long time, so I can't really compare, but the bass is nice and loud and everything sounds very clear. While I wish that there were some bonus tracks or unreleased material on this set (considering they've split 60 minutes of material over three discs), I'm happy with what we've got.

 

not big on analysing sound visually by waveforms but that doesn't look like a huge difference, which bodes well. it's a very dynamic album.

 

Definitely. I'm really glad that this wasn't brickwalled. The bass still isn't as loud as I'd like it to be (in comparison to the monstrous original 3LP), but everything sounds very, very clear on this. I'll put some samples up in a bit.

Edit: Just moved onto disc two. Like I said in another post, the ending of Swan Lake is a bit jarring on this release... Unlike the other CD releases or Second Edition, it can't segue into Poptones, so the track just stops. It's like driving very very fast in a car and then just slamming the brakes.

 

Regarding Memories LP and 12" versions:

I just did a quick comparison of the Metal Box CD vs Memories 12". They are both around 5 minutes long, but different takes. The vocals are different, though it's the same set of lines just repeated in different order. I'll try to so a proper comparison of Memories 12" vs Metal Box vinyl at the weekend and report back.

 

Here's a six minute track that I just put together that has the first thirty seconds of each song from the new remaster: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?dtw2wqcuzm4

 

Excellent, thanks!

 

No problem... I think the new remaster sounds great! I can hear some stuff in the background that I could never hear before, so that's a good thing. It's probably the closest we'll ever get to an audiophile mastering.

Edit: Does anyone know who mastered it? There aren't any credits.

 

The Flowers of Romance



Released on 10 April 1981 in the UK on Virgin Records, and in America on Warner Bros. Records (!!!)
Lineup: I honestly do not know. Lydon, Levene, and Atkins for sure, but did Jeanette Lee play anything on it?
Produced by: Public Image Ltd.

Tracklisting:

A1 Four Enclosed Walls
A2 Track 8
A3 Phenagen
A4 The Flowers of Romance
A5 Under the House

B1 Hymie's Him
B2 Banging the Door
B3 Go Back
B4 Francis Massacre

A very different and very divisive followup to Metal Box, which is infamous for being one of the most uncommercial albums ever released. It took me a while to get into this one, and I like it quite a bit. While I'll listen to the entire album in full, I'll only really ever listen to the title track and Go Back on their own.

Related Videos:

The Flowers of Romance - On Top of the Pops (Great video)
Four Enclosed Walls - From the show in Birmingham just the other night.
The Flowers of Romance - From the show in Leeds just the other night.

 

Just a bump since this has already been buried.

Also, here are some photos:



From the famous Ritz 'show':

 

Hardest PiL album for anyone to like, at first it can seem boring. but if you give this album enough time it a masterpiece the space in the songs is amazing ! the songs actually get very catchy and you end up really enjoying listen too an album that was so difficult at first. It not my fav but it sure up there. Fav track most likely: Banging The Door or 12" Flowers Of Romance mix.

 

I think to start I'll just quote an earlier posting of mine on this album:

Yep, the album was a real formative experience, in that it showed how you could strip a piece of music right down to the bare bones of voice, drums, and spare guitar/noise/harmoniums/whatever and still produce compelling music. Some tracks took years to appeal, like "Phenagen" and "Francis Massacre", but others I dug right away - most notably "Banging The Door", "Track 8", and the title track.

I actually had a couple of friends who took to this album somewhat - not that they really liked it, but it kinda freaked them out! So, if they were over later in the evening, one of 'em would eventually say "hey, put on that weird album!", and soon we'd all be getting weirded out to "Four Enclosed Walls" and singing along to "Track 8"...

Anyway, this LP marks the beginning of the end of PiL as a challenging, innovative band IMHO. Later material sounds like they're trying to get in alignment with the popular music of the times rather than trying to change it, or being indifferent to it.

Oh, and: Amazing cover, too. That makes it a hat trick in terms of cool packaging concepts/images. Next time PiL did anything interesting in this area, they'd stolen the "generic packaging" concept from SF hardcore grinders Flipper.

 

Jeanette Lee never played anything. Levene, in fact, played very little (although he did have something to do with some of the percussion.)

The UK CD version adds:

Flowers Of Romance (instrumental)
Home Is Where The Heart Is
Another


"Another" uses Jah Wobble's backing track for "Tales From Outer Space" and was the b-side of "Memories." The other two tracks were found on the "Flowers Of Romance" 12".

No one's mentioned the otherwise unobtainable "Pied Piper" from Virgin Records' "Machines" vinyl compilation, which came out before "Flowers Of Romance."

 

Isn't "Another" just "Graveyard" from "Metal Box", but with vocals?

If Lee and Levene didn't play much or anything, and Martin Atkins only drummed on a few tracks, then who did everything on the album? Lydon?

 

Isn't "Another" just "Graveyard" from "Metal Box", but with vocals?

Well . . . it started as a solo Jah Wobble track. Then it became "Another." Then it was "Graveyard." In that order. PiL "borrowed" the backing track from Wobble, though they later accused *him* of stealing it (which some people believed, since his use of it was released last!)

If Lee and Levene didn't play much or anything, and Martin Atkins only drummed on a few tracks, then who did everything on the album? Lydon?

Well Jeanette wasn't a musician really. She might have added some percussive noise in the studio - this was a kind of communal thing (if you saw PiL live, they all played percussion on the rare "Flowers Of Romance" stuff they did, even Lydon.) Atkins on a few tracks? He's all over it, it's probably more his album than anyone's, musically speaking. By saying Levene played little, I mean guitar. He did a lot of the drummy stuff, too. The producer, Nick Launay, played stuff too.

 

I will - I bought that "Machines" comp lp when it came out for this track - got it home, put it on, and, you guessed it - HATED it. :thumbsdn:

I just listened to this again <it's on Plastic Box> and I stand by my original impression. And to think it was originally 10 minutes long.....

 

'Live In Tokyo' (just the LP, not the videocassette) was released by Elektra here in Canada. But just as a single 33 LP, not as the cool 2x12" 45 edition as the Japanese original.

 

Just something I just found - on his recent 2009 publicity jaunt promoting his new autobiography, Wobble posed for some pictures after an interview, and had this funny present day version of his infamous back cover portrait of PIL's "First Issue". I wonder if they asked him or he just thought it up, any way i love it! Here's the before and after pics:

 

I thought Jeanette Lee was credited with Accounting (or something like that)? She definitely didn't ever play anything. It was part of the idea that Public Image Limited was a company/corporation or what have you rather than a band?

I might be totally off, but that's the impression I always got, and I thought I read it somewhere (but I could totally be misremembering, if anyone can confirm/deny...)

 

Jeanette Lee was the videographer and Dave Crowe was the accountant, but Lee did play live with them during that period. She's in that Top of the Pops video and was on stage during the Ritz riot.

 

I duuno about her, but I gave a good listen to the tracks on "Plastic Box" tonight from "Flowers Of Romance". Almost all of it is on there, and my initial thoughts were, as they were back when this came out: where's the guitar? I know Wobble's gone, but where's the bass? "Banging The Door" isn't too shabby, but this album is a bust, just as I called it back in the day. Just my humble opinion, naturally, but that's what this thread is about, after all.
That being said, I'm starting to warm up quite nicely to latter-period PIL thanks to the Plastic Box set.

A question - "Home Is Where The Heart Is". It was a b-side to the FOR single, and it's partly credited to Wobble, and it has a bass part that sounds like him. Yet I read somewhere that Levene or someone looped a bass line that was not Wobble and worked it into the mix. At any rate, that was one hell of a b-side, and the reason I kept my 7" of that single and ditched the lp proper back in the day.
Anyone have any info on this?

 

Metal Box is, in my mind, a tremendous landmark in adventurous music. Flowers Of Romance goes even further in a different and daunting direction. I remember thinking 'wow this is challenging' and yet wound up developing fondness for it.

I haven't listened to it much in years but I love the absolute balls and audacity of this career move. It's amazing to me that they scraped the slate clean and came up with a new and consistent style. It's no small thing for an artist/band to abandon a proven working style in favor of something else.