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Muriel Spark’s The Public Image, a novel about an unbearably egotistical actress. “Limited” initially signified keeping his persona under a tight leash, “not being as ‘out there’ as I was with the Sex Pistols.” Seemingly symbolizing this jettisoning of the swollen alter ego Johnny Rotten, the singer reverted to his real name, John Lydon. In fact, Malcolm McLaren had claimed ownership of “Johnny Rotten” and acquired an injunction against the singer’s using the stage name. At the time, almost nobody knew about this legal backstory, though, so the Rotten/Lydon shift seemed like a really powerful statement: the singer symbolically reclaiming his true identity and making a fresh start as part of a collective, Public Image Ltd.
    The idea of “Ltd” soon escalated to take on its business meaning, the limited company. PiL, proclaimed Lydon, was not a band in the traditional sense, but a communications company for which making records was just one front of activity. Enthused, Lydon and Levene talked about diversifying into movie soundtracks, graphics, making “video albums,” even designing music technology. To show they were serious, PiL recruited two nonmusician members. Dave Crowe, an old school friend of Lydon’s, acted as the band’s accountant. Jeannette Lee, a former girlfriend of Don Letts’s and his comanager at the clothing store Acme Attractions, was recruited to be PiL’s video maker. Lee also happened to be going out with Levene. “Jeannette was telling me how she’d had a lot to do with the editing of Don’s punk rock documentary, and the script for his next movie, Dread at the Controls, which never got made. I was into the idea of PiL not doing straightforward videos, and she basically talked me into her joining. Wobble was dead against it.”
    Part of the impetus behind PiL posing as a corporation was to continue punk’s project of demystifying the record business. While the Clash lamented the industry’s knack for “turning rebellion into money,” PiL reversed that syndrome, suggesting that money making was a potentially subversive strategy of working from within, a stealth campaign that was less spectacular than the Pistols’ revolt but more insidious. It was also more honest and less starry-eyed to present rock bands as the money-making enterprises they really were, as opposed to gangs of guitar-wielding guerrillas. Accordingly, Lydon and his colleagues overhauled their image, purging anything redolent of punk clichés and instead wearing tailored suits. This anti–rock ’n’ roll image culminated with Dennis Morris’s artwork for PiL’s debut album, fashion-magazine-style portraits of each member of the group, immaculately coutured and coiffed. Lydon appeared on the front under Italian Vogue lettering, while the reverse saw Wobble sporting a debonair 1920s lounge lizard mustache.
    Stridently opposed to all the standard rock routines and procedures, PiL had no manager and initially vowed that they would never tour. Above all, it was not the Johnny Rotten Band, but a genuine collective. This was a noble idea, but in reality the group’s privileged status—an experimental outfit funded by a major label—depended on Virgin’s belief that Lydon was their hottest property, the most charismatic and significant British front man to emerge since Bowie, and a potential superstar set to dominate the next decade of music. Thanks to the peculiarly indeterminate feel of the music scene in 1978—punk in its death throes, the future wide open—PiL found themselves in an unprecedented position of strength. Virgin was prepared to indulge Lydon’s artistic whims, believing that he would either come up with the goods, or come around eventually and embrace a more accessible sound.
    That’s the cynical way of looking at it. In truth, Virgin’s cofounder and main music man, Simon Draper, paid more than lip service to ideas about experimentation and innovation. During the early seventies,