By no means remotely resembling a pop star, Keith Levene was famend for his work as a difficult and groundbreaking guitarist, and for his all-round inventive enter into Public Picture Ltd (PiL), which he shaped with John Lydon when the latter cut up from the Intercourse Pistols in 1978.
Andy Bell, guitarist with Experience, commented that Levene had “a guitar tone like ground-up diamonds fired at you thru a excessive stress hose”. Anybody aware of Levene’s scalding, coruscating enjoying on PiL’s debut single Public Picture will know precisely what he meant.
Levene, who has died aged 65, having suffered from liver most cancers, additionally performed a formative position within the creation of the Conflict, of which he was an authentic member for a number of months in 1976 earlier than quitting. But it surely was some measure of the way in which that Levene ploughed his personal inventive furrow that he by no means felt outlined by phrases comparable to punk or new wave. “I revered my influences sufficient to by no means imitate them,” he mentioned. “That was at all times vital to me.”
So immune was Levene to the fickle tides of style that he would converse proudly of his first immersion within the music business as a 15-year-old roadie for Sure. A lot of the punk herd would have fainted with shock on the point out of Sure, who have been seen as prime exemplars of early-Seventies prog-rock, supposedly symbolic of all the things punk was making an attempt to comb away.
Levene, nonetheless, declared Sure’s Steve Howe to be the world’s biggest guitarist, and excitedly recalled how he was employed to take care of Alan White’s drumkit. It was after the band’s keyboards participant, Rick Wakeman, shrewdly noticed that what Levene actually wished to do was play their devices that he went away and made a decided effort to study guitar.
Born in Muswell Hill, north London, Keith was the son of Harry Levene, a tailor, and his spouse, Could. He recalled how, as an eight-year-old, he would pester the tailors in Petticoat Lane for odd jobs.
After leaving college at 15 he grew to become a manufacturing unit employee “on this bleak darkish place which was like some Victorian [building] from a Charles Dickens story”, becoming in roadie work with Sure throughout his spare time.
He was 19 when he first met the guitarist Mick Jones (whom he known as “Rock’n’roll Mick”), and along with the aspiring bass participant Paul Simonon they shaped the core of the Conflict. It was Levene and the band’s then-manager Bernie Rhodes who recruited the vocalist Joe Strummer from one other London band, the 101’ers.
However by the spring of 1977, when the Conflict’s debut album was launched, Levene was lengthy gone, his sensibilities maybe too avant garde for the extra traditionalist Jones and Strummer.
He was given a co-writing credit score on the track What’s My Name, however complained that “I wrote greater than I obtained credited for on the document. It was me and Mick that wrote these tunes. Mick is unquestionably extra liable for the inception of most of them than I’m, however it was me who put any bollocks there have been into them.”
Marcus Grey, in his Conflict biography Final Gang in City, described a dwell recording of Levene’s final efficiency with the band, on the Roundhouse in September 1976: “Keith’s guitar model is revealed to be inventively harsh and metallic, [creating] the form of industrial noise that was to typify the experimentation of the interval instantly post-punk, together with that of Keith’s personal subsequent band, Public Image Ltd.”
Levene’s stepping stone in the direction of PiL was a band known as the Flowers of Romance, alongside Sid Vicious and future Slits members Palmolive and Viv Albertine. Nonetheless, Vicious’s departure to interchange Glen Matlock within the Intercourse Pistols put paid to the group with out it having launched any recordings. Levene had been vastly impressed by seeing the Intercourse Pistols on the Nashville pub in London, and he and Lydon had pledged to type a band collectively.
When the Pistols broke up in 1978 they have been true to their phrase, and assembled PiL with the bassist Jah Wobble and the drummer Jim Walker. By the tip of the yr that they had launched the epochal Public Image single, which obtained to No 9 within the UK singles chart, and the High 30 debut album Public Picture: First Concern.
With Lydon yowling painfully over Levene’s slash-and-burn guitar and Wobble’s glutinous, floor-shaking bass strains, it was not straightforward listening, however it positioned PiL within the vanguard of an intensely inventive post-punk part alongside bands comparable to Gang of 4, Journal and the Pop Group.
PiL’s second album, Steel Field (1979), which obtained to No 18 within the UK charts, can be acclaimed as a post-punk traditional and the group’s best hour. Levene performed drums, bass and synthesiser, in addition to guitar, on tracks that explored dub, electronica and atonalism. There had been nothing fairly prefer it earlier than, and its boundary-breaking ripples unfold far and extensive. Rolling Stone journal wrote that it inhabited “a fractured house between demented abstraction and cranky freedom”.
The follow-up album, The Flowers of Romance (1981), largely the handiwork of Levene and Lydon after Wobble had left the band, once more examined the crucial lexicon to destruction with its overwhelming percussiveness and uncompromising sound processing experiments. Levene thought-about that they had created “the least business document ever delivered to a [record] firm”. But someway it reached No 11 on the UK album chart.
In 1983 PiL scored their largest hit with This Is Not a Love Music, which reached No 5 on the UK singles chart. Nonetheless, Levene, who had been within the grip of heroin habit, fell out with Lydon over their upcoming fourth album. He had assembled most of it whereas Lydon was away filming Copkiller (1983, often known as Order of Dying), and delivered it to Virgin Information.
However Lydon was sad with Levene’s efforts and determined to re-record the album with a brand new group of musicians, excluding Levene. It was launched as This Is What You Need… This Is What You Get (1984). Roughly in parallel, Levene launched the unique tracks as his personal album, titled Business Zone (1984), on a brand new label, Pil Information Inc, which he had created for the aim.
Round this time he moved to Los Angeles together with his second spouse, the author Shelly da Cunha (they subsequently separated), and did manufacturing work for the Crimson Scorching Chili Peppers, in addition to for the rappers Tone Loc and Ice-T, earlier than releasing his first solo album, Violent Opposition, in 1989.
An additional 4 solo albums adopted, the latest being Business Zone 2014 (2014). He additionally printed three limited-edition books, I WaS a Teenage Guitarist 4 the ClasH, Assembly Joe: Joe Strummer, the Conflict & Me, and The Publish Punk Years. On the time of his demise he was engaged on a historical past of PiL with the author Adam Hammond.
He’s survived by his accomplice, Kate Ransford, his son, Kirk, from his first marriage, to the American musician Lori Montana, which led to divorce, and his sister Jill.
