Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (43 page)

This was the beginnings of
Album
. By then Howard Thompson had signed me to Elektra in the US and was under pressure to deliver my first record for them, not to mention keeping Virgin
quiet back home, when I got a call from Bill Laswell offering himself as a producer.

I’d first hooked up with Laswell through that chap Roger Trilling, who’d also introduced me to the avant-garde label ECM. I met Roger on the club scene in New York. He’d
overheard me saying, ‘I hate jazz! I can’t get to grips with it at all!’ He went, ‘Well, you would if you came to see my records . . .’ That’s a very tempting
line to someone like me. There wasn’t no fairy dust going on here, he meant the music, and I loved going round his apartment and just listening to all these different heavyweight jazz
records. We formed a very good friendship, and that led to Laswell, who I think he was managing at the time.

It was Bill who was connected to Afrika Bambaataa, who’d wanted to put a record together with me a year or two earlier. That resulted in ‘World Destruction’, under our joint
alias Time Zone. This was 1984, early rap time. To me, it was almost like Jamaican toasting was what he was after from me, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to go into that world at all. But Time
Zone more or less kicked rap into the universe. It was a huge record in the clubs, opened people up, like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, new and different.’

Afrika, what a sweetheart! His ‘nation’, his whole peace idea – it was all glorious and wonderful. I’ve got to say, the words were all his – which annoyed the hell
out of me! – but I came up with the chorus, ‘Tiiiime zooone!’ I thought it needed a pivotal point
in the song. In the silly cheap-arse video we did, I come
across a bit bug-eyed but I’m trying, rightly or wrongly, to emphasize the thrill and excitement of putting the record together.

I learned a lot doing that track: there was a backing singer there, Bernard Fowler from the Peach Boys, who taught me how to hold a tone – technically, how to hold a note and not let it
waver, for emphasis and power. I also did another song with Laswell with a band called the Golden Palominos, but that was their song, and I felt I was rushed into it a bit. But it was work, and it
got me to think about myself again outside of the box. This was what I was crying out for.

So there it was – bingo! Bill’s the bloke to work with for the new PiL album. Elektra were more than happy, so I called Laswell back and said, ‘Yeah, fine, ooooh,
whoopee!’ Bill had a world of respect wrapped around him, from the industry and from other musicians, and he seemed dangerously big-league to me. It wasn’t an easy relationship. With
someone as big as Roger Trilling looking after him, I was aware that Laswell’s sensibility could become a contentious point in direction later.

Bill’s vibe was, he had the beret and the beard, and a propensity towards black leather jackets. I don’t mean short ones, like biker jackets, I mean like a suit jacket, which was
very much part of the gangster look in New York – the Irish gangs, in particular, and some of the slicker mafia mobs.

He was affiliated with that big-arse studio, The Power Station, where we started working in August ’85. I brought my young band with me from LA – minus a drummer, of course –
and it really didn’t work. My little whippersnappers fell apart under the pressure. They couldn’t cope with flying to New York, hotel rooms, rehearsal rooms, other bands walking in and
out, as indeed happens in New York – everybody’s involved in rehearsal studios, everybody is your friend – and they panicked.

By the time it came to actually laying down the backing track in the studio, they just couldn’t get it right. It was very hard for them,
for instance, to understand
‘Rise’. I realized that they simply weren’t at that level. It was driving me and Laswell crazy, so we just said, ‘Look, we have to replace them, it’s not gonna work.
We’re gonna run out of money, taking far too long trying to repair it in the tapes.’ I panicked at that point, but Bill Laswell went: ‘Oh my God, it’s getting late,
let’s start ringing people up and see if they’ll work with you’ – because neither of us thought anybody would want to.

Then we were presented with the dilemma of, ‘Oh shit, we need to get some people in, and unfortunately they’re all going to be “names”.’ My attitude was,
instantaneously – and everybody involved agreed to this – that we
wouldn’t
name names, nobody would be credited – it’s not about ego, this would just be to the
benefit of the record, so it would be judged on its own merits. Hence, on release, the generic approach in the artwork.

Thus it became a serious five-star catalogue of people – amongst them, Ginger Baker from Cream, and American’s latest heavy-rock guitar whizzkid, Steve Vai. It absolutely shocked me
that people of their status had respect for me. I didn’t think I was respected in the world of music, so it was a real eye-opener for me that they actually liked what I was getting up to.

From there, it was like starting from scratch. The one thing it wasn’t going to be was a jam session. The songs were already there, and these fellas were there to work on them. The only
real guidance was the vocal track in my head, as I never got to lay one down with the young whippersnappers, so a lot of work was done a cappella, just singing alone, so Bill could get some vague
idea of the songs. I found a tambourine, and I’d batter out a loose kind of chorus and verse, and we’d base a song on that.

God, was I happy to have those musos! It was fantastic! There again, everyone I’d recorded with before had been a novice. I’d never been in a room with this kind of frightener. It
was an unbelievable pressure, and I understood how my young band couldn’t cope with it, but there was no way I was gonna back down. I really
had to sing this one.
There weren’t no fart-arsing about, blaming it on duff notes from the lead guitarist! I had to get it right, and I did.

Nobody could believe that I was working with Ginger Baker. A few years before, the
NME
had run a news story that we were working together – as an April Fool! ‘Hello, me
derogatories, careful what you wish for, you just might get it!’

Ginger, I loved. What a nutter. People might’ve imagined that as two such strong personalities we wouldn’t get along, but I know what he comes from. I know the working-class approach
in his life, and I understand it instinctively. And that’s where we hit it off, bang on the money. We’d be the first, if you put the pair of us in a room, to absolutely slag each other
off, because that’s our nature, because what we’re doing is consistently challenging each other to do better, and not to rest on our laurels. I don’t like achievers because they
tend to hang onto what they’ve achieved. I like the struggle, and once you’ve reached that level, then there’s the next struggle, on and on and on and on. That’s the fun of
it for me, and I can see that in people like Ginger.

Look what that fella did with drumming! That’s from the bombed-out part of London, that one, right? And in the ’70s he’s off to Africa to live with Fela Kuti before anybody
even knew what that place was offering! He was straight into it, because he loved his drumming, and he wanted to advance himself and challenge himself. Isn’t that what we’re all really
doing this for?

Listen, he might say he’s not playing fast but you can hardly keep scope of the movement and the instinctiveness that he’s taught himself on his instrument. I’ll never forget
the visuals of making
Album
, just watching him in that studio, breaking drum skins, and bass drums falling apart, and cymbals being cracked and fucked. Can you imagine, walking into the room
when Ginger’s going off on one, and going, ‘Oi! What about my chorus?’ That’s how it was. He and I have
totally
different approaches to music – he’s
studious in his particular way, but I am in mine. And the two worked, we
just gelled. He’s a monster-raging-crazy-loony, but he gets it and he plays it, and he laid
down the patterns that I so desperately required. The rigidity yet flexibility inside those beats allowed me to put the words into their proper perspective. At the same time I had the open spaces
of Steve Vai, he’s twiddling a thousand notes a second, but he’s creating open spaces by flooding the area. It was a fantastic combination of events.

Steve Vai, again, was absolutely open. You don’t get musical snobbery from these people, what you get is, ‘Ah, what you’re doing is possible, and different.’
They’re interested and open-minded to helping you to shape-shift yourself properly,
without over-educating you
. Steve’s name was a bit of a dirty word at the time –
amazing, isn’t it, what punk created? The very antithesis of what I was trying to explain to the universe!

There was another drummer on that album too: Tony Williams, who’s now sadly passed away. What a sweet fella. He’d played with Miles Davis right through the 1960s. Again – wow,
I would’ve presumed he was
waaay
out of my range, leagues above me in terms of experience and quality, but the longer I live, the more I learn, the better I get. It’s not an age
thing, it’s an experience thing, and what you’ve learned from these amalgamations can only make you a better person ultimately.

There were others who dropped by, like Ryuichi Sakamoto, to tinkle some keyboards, but the biggest mindfuck was when this new fella showed up, all dressed up in his finest threads, like any good
working-class scallywag on his Saturday night out. For years I’ve been saying it was Miles Davis, but I recently heard it may have been Ornette Coleman. It was hard to keep track, people were
coming and going all the time. He played on one track, but we couldn’t find space for him. The only words from the fella were, ‘
Eeeerrrr
, I play on my instrument the same things
you’re doing vocally.’ Me and him were hitting the same patterns, and that was an incredible compliment.

Putting together ‘Rise’, we had Ginger going mad all on his own
in a room, bashing the hell out of them skins – he broke everything! I’ve never
known a drummer to play that hard and severe. Though, I’m not sure if he actually played on the final version of ‘Rise’ – I think it might be Tony. And then you’ve got
Steve Vai coming in there, and then you’ve got some bass rumbling in from this guy Jonas Hellborg, and then it’s like, ‘Wow, you know, we need the folky vibe,’ and along
came an Indian fella called Shankar, and he played Indian-type violin in there, and it just pieced it together very nicely. It brought the groove and the sway and the lilt to it, and the song took
on almost what I would call a South African Zulu vibe – but also at the same time it’s a song that would bode well on any Irish jukebox.

I’m so proud of that single more than anything really. It was such a confidence booster in the light of the slaggings I’d always had. How are you going to knock a record like that?
Come on. Look at the work we put in, and look at the result. It’s an anthem of freedom and, through all of it, I hit upon my ultimate one-liner: ‘Anger is an energy’.

After Mark, Jebin and Bret were off the case, we’d had to have really serious discussions about what the direction of this album would be. And we went for
hardcore
. Bill had a good
background there with bands like Alcatrazz, in that heavy metal world, which is really how Steve Vai crept, and how we could push boundaries. It was a thrilling record to make; every single thing
we did had to be tough, tough, tough. So that was my guiding light every time I walked up to that microphone. I would vibe myself up to be the most rigidly hardcore heavy metal singer in the world,
but without any of the clichés of what that universe had to offer.

We went powerhouse on everything, full-on ferocious, and the way I delivered the vocals there was no doubt about it, this
wasn’t
going to be soft ballads. We were all on the same
planet, the same palette. That’s how a record really, really works, it’s when you’re all there together in it.

I mean, hello! The ‘Love Song’ era was over! What I’d done was,
I’d indulged myself in power singing and learning to control the notes and deliver
them in a particularly aggressive style that was not in any way an imitation of what I was doing in the Pistols. That’s a completely different approach, and I didn’t know I could do
that until I did it. What a great experiment.

The songs were structured, but again, not at all in a Pistols-y way. Listen to the complications and the tonal changes of ‘FFF’ – my farewell to all my fleeting collaborators
of yesteryear! That song’s up and down and around the roundabouts; it shape-shifts and manoeuvres around the beats and the structures.

Because nobody was being credited we decided to take a generic approach to the artwork – Album, Cassette, Compact Disc, whatever. It was all inspired by the generic lines I’d seen in
supermarkets, when I first came to America. Beans would be just ‘Beans’, there didn’t need to be anything else written on the tin. I really liked it. I thought it was a great
approach to dealing with commerciality. Not branding. Tell it as it is, and that’s it.

I also raised the money, out of my own bloody wallet, to put together a gift for the first fifty purchasers of the record, where they’d get a paint can with ‘Can’ written on
it, and a little PiL logo in the generic light blue and dark blue, and inside of that would be ‘Cup’, ‘Pen’, etc. It was a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, the only example I
had of that tin myself got burnt in a fire years later – that still makes me sad.

On every level,
Album
is the all-time toughest record I’ve ever made – hard, in terms of, like a smack in your face. So it’s kind of hilarious that, when it came out, it
got a rave review by that culture vulture, Melvyn Bragg, on his show on British telly. Also, apparently Sting wrote a favourable review of it somewhere! What on earth’s he taking time out to
do that for?

There were some silly billies back in England who reviewed it, saying it was my effort to ‘engage with American culture’. No, man alive,
no!
Lest we forget, boys and girls,
heavy metal absolutely is an English thing – from Deep Purple to Zeppelin! Their music was
the hardest of this universe, and the most influential, so there
wasn’t much I was gonna open my mind to from Americans on that score. You can’t teach the British bulldog those dumb tricks. I’m not a heavy metal singer, yet I’m using that
genre, turning it upside down on its head, and showing an advancement of the theory, shall we say.