That way the listener can create their own melodies. It’s not what you leave in, it’s what you take out. We loved space – that was our big thing then, space. There was so much space within which you could sing, whereas in the Pistols the sound and production was always so dense. It wasn’t deliberate, it just happened that way.
Public Image singing was a completely different way of singing. “It was fantastic, and it opened up all manner of vocal patterns to me, which, if I’d tried to keep it in a Pistol-y format, wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t have developed myself. My biggest worry was that I was going to end up doing pieces on the piano that they’d then have to follow, but luckily we took PiL a completely different way. I didn’t know what was going to happen, really. I knew what each of my friends was capable of, but I didn’t know how that would blend together. The recording of Public Image, as the band’s debut single, marked the first time the self-produced line-up had worked together in a studio, so had Lydon already planned the sound that he wanted to capture on record?
I don’t like the word ‘manifesto’, I suppose.” If Public Image is a manifesto, it’s not deliberate. I moved as far away from the cosseted Johnny Rotten-isms as I could and made life very difficult for myself, working with unknown people on unknown music.
“They were accusing me of becoming a pop star, when the very thing I’d done was not become a pop star. The lyric was really apt too, because we were fighting off the Sex Pistols nonsense, with a lot of people telling me that I’d sold out and God-knows what. “It happens, not all the time, but sometimes, you’re putting a song together and words just pop out automatically, like they’re supposed to be there. “The words of Public Image just flowed,” says Lydon. It was always really exciting waiting for John to come up with the lyrics, because during that period, from 1975 when the Pistols started to about 1982, the stuff he was writing was really special.” I didn’t give a fuck what the words were really, I just wanted the song to come into being, but I actually really liked them. “I came up with a name for the band, the Carnivorous Butterflies, and wasn’t mad on Public Image,” says Wobble.
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