The Cassette Played Pop Tones

Public Image Ltd : Poptones

[Purchase]

On November 23, 1979 Public Image Ltd released Metal Box, an appropriate title for an album that arrived in record stores as three 12" 45 RPM singles inside a round metal canister. Though the packaging was innovative and relatively inexpensive, John Lydon writes the band had to pay for it, not Virgin Records, adding:

How the boxes themselves turned out was awkward in the extreme...They were hard to prise apart, and it was impossible to get the records out. It was appropriate, though , because what you were about to listen to could've been construed as distinctly unpleasant--it was made for those consumers who were prepared to put in a bit of effort.

The music inside is challenging: the tracks are longer, shambolic, challenging to listeners, inspired by dub and the music of Can. "Poptones" is the song that haunts Lydon to this day. I's inspired by the rape of a young girl who had been captured by two men, blindfolded, stashed in the trunk of a Japanese car where she could hear a Bee Gees song playing on the cassette deck, thus the line "And the cassette played poptones".

"Albatross" is about the man who haunts Lydon's nightmares, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. It runs 10:35. 

"It deserved that length," Lydon writes. "You let the song dictate the pace and the time rather than you trying to master it and control it and make it all note-perfect. I find those kinds of approaches to be  stifling, a contamination."

The reputation of Metal Box has grown. At the time, critics weren't sure what to make of it, though NME writers ranked it the second best album of the year after Talking Heads' Fear of Music.

Red Starr, writing for Smash Hits, gave the album a 6 out of 10 writing:

Scrawny, metallic guitar, steely, mechanical drumming, bumbling bass, JL wailing and sneering watery melodic themes ( no tunes) --rock n roll it ain't. 60 minutes of challenging but chilly music--the barest, most humorless, heartless and generally unfriendly sound since The Banshees. Brilliant or barren, breaking barriers or cornering themselves? You decide --I can't. Best tracks : "Albatross", "Radio 4".

From Chris Bohn, writing for Melody Maker, calls Metal Box a perfection of the debut album:

The basic thrust comes from a driving, single-minded drumbeat and (Jah) Wobble's wanderings to and from the forefront of the mix. Keith Levene alternately attacks and tacks on raggedly spiky guitar, which occasionally spirals excitedly around the sound, otet times dropping in and out. Ditto Lydon, whose voice and words have you straining to catch what he's saying.

  Robert Christgau had more time to digest his copy which came out on Island Records as Second Edition in 1980. He gave the album an A- writing:

In which former three-chord savage J. Lydon turns self-conscious primitivist, quite sophisticated in his rotten way. PIL complements Lydon's civilized bestiality by reorganizing the punk basics--ineluctable pulse, impermeable bass, attack guitar--into a full-bodied superaware white dub with disorienting European echoes. Much of the music on this double-LP version of the exorbitant three-disc, forty-five r.p.m. Metal Box is difficult; some of it fails. But the lyrics are both listenable and readable, and thanks to the bass parts even the artiest instrumentals have a leg up on, to choose a telling comparison, Brian Eno's. Don't say I didn't warn you, though--it may portend some really appalling bullshit. No matter what J. Lydon says, rock and roll doesn't deserve to die just because it's twenty-five years old. J. Lydon will be twenty-five years old himself before he knows it.