Choking On a Bed

Public Image Limited : Death Disco

[Purchase]

On June 28, 1979 Public Image Ltd released "Death Disco",b/w "No Birds" the first single from the forthcoming Metal Box. Lydon wrote that the song was for his mother who was dying of cancer. 

"When I had to deal with my mother's death, which upset the fuck out of me, I did it partly through music. I had to watch her die slowly of cancer for a whole year. I wrote 'Death Disco' about that. I played it to her just before she died and she was very happy. That's the Irish in her, nothing drearily sympathetic or weak...She was tough, my mum. She asked me to write a disco song for her funeral. This was hardly happy stuff."

Not with lyrics like :

Watch her slowly die 

Saw it in her eyes 

Choking on a bed 

Flowers rotting dead

While Jah Wobble lays down a cool to cold bass line and David Humphrey plays something of a disco beat, Keith Levene plays some crazed guitar with traces of Edvard Grieg's "The Hall of the Mountain King". 

Two days after the single's release, John Lydon joined the panel of Jukebox Jury. Brutally honest, Lydon hated everything from Donna Summer ("I hate it. It's awful") to The Monks ("Patronizing rubbish") and clashed with Alan Freeman. Eventually he walked off the set.