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gobsmacked.”
    Wobble had grown up in an East London housing project located at the junction of Jamaica Street and Stepney Way, which neatly symbolized the collision of West Indies and East End that would define him. Wobble met Lydon at Kingsway College and the two became part of a misfit crew known as the Four Johns (the others being John Grey and John Ritchie, aka Sid Vicious). In those days, Wobble had a reputation for being something of a thug. “I think we were all emotional cripples back then,” he says with a hint of regret. But when he picked up Vicious’s bass guitar, something was released in him. “I immediately felt bonded to the instrument. It was very therapeutic, although I didn’t understand that at the time.” Drawing on his gut understanding of the Jamaican music he adored, and fueled by speed, Wobble taught himself to play reggae bass, in which a simple recurring phrase works simultaneously as a melodic motif and a steady rhythmic pulse. Picking up reggae tricks like using old strings (they have no twang), he learned how to “play soft, not in a percussive way. You caress the string. Pure vibration.” Wobble’s basslines became the human heartbeat in PiL’s music, the roller coaster that simultaneously cocooned you and transported you through the terror ride.
    With Wobble’s bass supplying the melodic element of any given PiL song, Keith Levene’s guitar was freed up to freak out. One of PiL’s most curious features is that, for an avowedly antirock band, they had a guitar hero at their core, the Jimi Hendrix of postpunk. Unlike most of his peers, Levene had serious chops. Before punk, he’d done what guitarists were supposed to do in the days of prog-rock virtuosity: practice, practice, practice. As a teenager growing up in North London, he’d spend days on end jamming at a friend’s house, with sessions lasting as long as eight hours. Even more blasphemous, in punk terms, was the fact that young Keith’s favorite guitar hero was Steve Howe of Yes. At age fifteen, Levene even roadied for Yes for a while.
    Punks were supposed to purge their collections of King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, or at least hide them in the cupboard. “There’s a lot of people in punk who could play guitar much better than they made out,” says Levene. “But I never pretended I couldn’t play lead.” Despite all the prog skeletons in his closet, Levene hurled himself into the early punk fray and became one of the founding members of the Clash. But his harsh, discordant style became increasingly at odds with that group’s anthemic rock ’n’ roll. Even then he was developing the style that would become his PiL trademark, an improvisatory mode of playing that deliberately incorporated “errors.” When Levene hit a wrong note, he’d immediately repeat the mistake to see if the wrongness could become a new kind of rightness. “The idea was to break through conditioning, take yourself out of one channel and into another space.” It wasn’t “creative differences” that led to his exit from the Clash, though. Levene was expelled because of his negative attitude toward the band, which his colleagues attributed to amphetamine-fueled mood swings.
    Levene and Lydon first bonded in a Sheffield pub after a joint Clash/Pistols gig in July 1976. The singer and the guitarist were both sitting apart from their respective groups and looking miserable. Levene approached Lydon and during their conversation suggested that they work together if their bands ever fell apart. Eighteen months later, PiL was shaped by Levene’s and Lydon’s disgust with their previous bands’ relapses into American hard-rock tradition. “To me the Pistols were the last rock ’n’ roll band, they weren’t the beginning of anything,” says Levene. “Whereas PiL really felt like the start of something new.”
    The name Public Image Ltd was ripe with meaning. The phrase first caught Lydon’s imagination when he read