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Virgin was one of the key “progressive” labels, home to Henry Cow, Faust, Can, Tangerine Dream, and Robert Wyatt, among others. The label cannily adapted to punk, trimming its roster, shifting focus from albums to singles, and, not least, signing the movement’s most important group, the Sex Pistols. By 1978, Virgin had repositioned itself as the leading major label for “modern music,” with a strong postpunk roster including XTC, Devo, Magazine, and the Human League. “They weren’t such a big label in those days, still living off the luck of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, ” recalls Levene. “Branson was like a superhippie, a hippie with no qualms about making money. He didn’t mind trying a few crazy things.” Branson may have been a “superhippie,” but Virgin did subsidize three of the most extreme albums ever released by a major label: Public Image, Metal Box, and Flowers of Romance .
    Given Lydon’s initial talk of PiL as antimusic and antimelody, the group’s debut single, “Public Image,” was a massive relief for all concerned—the record company, Pistols fans, and critics. It’s a searing, soaring statement of intent. The glorious, chiming minimalism of Wobble’s bassline and Levene’s plangent, ringing chords mirror Lydon’s quest for purity as he jettisons not just the Rotten alter ego (“somebody had to stop me/…I will not be treated as property”) but rock ’n’ roll itself. “That song was the first proper bassline I ever came up with,” says Wobble. “Very simple, a beautiful interval from E to B. Just the joy of vibration. And incredible guitar from Keith, this great burst of energy.” “Public Image” is like a blueprint for the reborn, purified rock of the 1980s. One can hear the Edge from U2 in its radiant surge. “It’s so clean, so tingly, like a cold shower,” says Levene. “It could be really thin glass penetrating you but you don’t know until you start bleeding internally.”
    Wrapped in a fake newspaper with tabloid headlines, “Public Image” shot to number nine on the U.K. chart in October 1978. While the single was greeted with universal rapture, Public Image the album got a more mixed reception. Sounds voiced the widespread sense held by punk diehards that Lydon had lost it, abandoning both the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in being the punk figurehead and instead wallowing in arty self-indulgence. The album was uncompromising, throwing the listener in at the deep end with the nine-minute death wish dirge “Theme,” a near cacophony of suicidal despair and Catholic guilt, with Lydon howling about masturbation as mortal sin. Next up was the anticlerical doggerel of “Religion I”/“Religion II” (a blasphemous ditty written for the Pistols and originally titled “Sod in Heaven”), followed by the hacking thrash funk of “Annalisa,” the true story of a German girl who starved to death because her parents believed she was possessed by the devil and turned to the church rather than psychiatrists for help. If side one of Public Image was loosely themed around religion, the more accessible second side was largely concerned with the tribulations of being the punk messiah. In “Public Image,” Lydon reasserted his rights over “Johnny Rotten”—“Public image belongs to me/It’s my entrance, my own creation, my grand finale”—only to end the song by shedding the persona with an echo chamber yell of “goodbye!” “Low Life” fingered McLaren as the “egomaniac trainer/traitor” who “never did understand,” while the foaming paranoia of “Attack” showed that the mental scars from summer 1977, when Lydon was U.K. Public Enemy Number One, were still livid.
    What’s striking in retrospect about PiL’s debut is that, for all the rhetoric about being antirock, a hefty proportion of Public Image actually rocks hard . Combining raw power and uncanny dubspace, “Low Life” and “Attack” sound like Never Mind the