Monday, November 14, 2022

PiL Poptones 1979

 In tribute to Keith Levene.

From the Metal Box wiki

Poptones was one of the first songs recorded for the album, according to Levene, who stated that he inadvertently played "Starship Trooper" during the song.[11] According to Lydon, "Poptones" was based on a story "straight out of the Daily Mirror" about a girl who was kidnapped and "bundled, blindfolded, into the back of a car by a couple of bad men and driven off into a forest, where they eventually dumped her. The men had a cassette machine with an unusual tune on the cassette, which they kept playing over and over. The girl remembered the song, and that, along with her recollection of the car and the men's voices, is how the police identified them. The police eventually stopped the car and found the cassette was still in the machine, with the same distinctive song on the tape."[12] In his 2009 autobiography Memoirs of a Geezer, Jah Wobble highlighted the song as "the jewel in the PiL crown. [...] That [bass] line is as symmetrical as a snowflake. To give him his due Levene went mental for it. We were at The Manor. We had a drummer with us who was pretty good [...] but the bloke just couldn't get the right feel for 'Poptones'. [...] In the end Levene put the drums down on that track, his drums are a bit loose, but that is actually a good thing."[13]