Legendary actress, Fenella Fielding takes on John Lydon’s “Rise” and wins.

This is one of the many brilliant tracks from the recently re-released Savoy Sessions, a fabulous collaboration between Ms. Fielding and David Britton, owner of Savoy Books, author of the banned comic (and novel) Lord Horror and “the last man in the country to be jailed under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act”.

Britton approached Fielding in 2002 to record extracts from J. G. Ballrd’s novel Crash. At first, Ms. Fielding demurred, but Britton’s persistence paid-off and a thrilling creative partnership began.

Fielding recorded Britton’s La Squab, as well T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and selection of work by Collette - which Ms. Fielding had originally performed on stage in 1970.

Ms. Fielding is perhaps best known for her role as Valeria, the delightful, kooky vamp to Kenneth Williams’ Dr. Orlando Watt in Carry on Screaming, which tends to greatly over-shadow her legendary career in theater and revue. She was hailed by Noel Coward and Kenneth Tynan as one of theater’s greatest actresses, her performance as Hedda Gabler was described by The Times as “one of the experiences of a lifetime”. She was a versatile comedy actress and had performed in a series of successful comedy revues, including Pieces of Eight (co-starring Kenneth Williams, written by Peter Cook and Harold Pinter), and her celebrated one-woman show at Cook’s Establishment Club. Ms. Fielding also provided the announcer’s voice for The Village, in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. And if this weren’t enough, she was adored by Frederico Fellini.

In 2006, Britton invited Fenella to a studio in Rochdale, where she recorded a selection of popular hits - including PiL’s “Rise”, New Order’s “Blue Monday”, Kylie Minogue’s “I Can’t get You Out Of My Head”, and even Robbie Williams’ “Angels” - re-interpreting them through her own unique and distinct style, which Kim Fowley described in 2009:

Her Succulent/Velvet-Blue-Saloon vocal tones made me believe I was having Naked Lunch in a Berlin bubble-bath, next to Marlene Dietrich… Somewhere in Berlin, circa 1928–1932.
Hence, we have a message in an aural bottle, from a 21st Century, Axis Sally/Tokyo Rose: Fenella Fielding.

Bring on the smelling salts! Then give me the Silver-Spoon and Golden Needle, so I can blend into the Wonder-Word Void, where Ms Fielding must surely reside.

Fenella’s delivery of the following titles places me squarely at the foot of her bed, on my knees, in a position of worship!

Find your copy of Fenella Fielding’s The Savoy Sessions here.

Here then, for your delectation and delight is the beautiful Ms. Fenella Fielding and “Rise”.
 

 
Bonus video clip of Fenella in the Studio, plus taster clips, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Robert Conroy
 

 
Frustrated by the lack of activity in Public Image Ltd., the group’s original bassist Jah Wobble (apparently his stage name comes from a drunken pronunciation of his real name, John Wardle) decided to go into the studio that the band was paying for anyway and record a solo album. Re-purposing some rhythm tracks from the Metal Box sessions, Wobble made a trippy, dubby concoction out of the material—a common thing to do in reggae and PiL were all reggae fanatics—released in 1980 as The Legend Lives On…Jah Wobble in Betrayal!, and a 38-minute EP called Blueberry Hill. John Lydon and Keith Levene were thoroughly pissed off and Wobble was ejected from the group.

Betrayal provides as much insight into what Wobble creatively brought to the PiL sound, as the lack of his basslines would on PiL’s next album, the skeletal sounding Flowers of Romance. Listen to “Blueberry Hill” below, a cheerfully insane cover of the Fats Domino song, buoyed by Wobble’s ebullient bassline, the same one heard on Metal Box’s “The Suit.”
 

 
DJ Steve Lamacq premiered the new PIL song earlier today on BBC 6.
Our John may have lost his upper register, but it is nice to hear him strain at it in such a raw way over the type of back-to-basics reggae-rock bed that’s screaming for a remix/dub-out…

According to the alt-‘80s blog Slicing Up Eyeballs:

The song will be released on a vinyl EP as part of Record Store Day on April 21 in advance of the release of the full-length This Is PiL in May or June.

Enjoy…
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
PiL : Design
Public Image Ltd: The infamous riot at the Ritz gig

 
John Lydon must get fed up being asked the same olde questions year-after-year by interviewers who should know better. Just see how many interviews over the past thirty years have kicked-off with rumors of a Sex Pistols reunion, as if Lydon has done nothing since the summer of 1977, and then ask whether he’s still Punk and why isn’t PiL any good?

Understandable, therefore, that Lydon is often contemptuous of those who pose such dumb questions.

That said, I sometimes think Lydon’s aggressive behavior stems from a genuine shyness, as he displays a set of tics and mannerisms consistent form his first appearance on Bill Grundy’s infamous swearfest. You’ll recognize them - the mumbling, the staring, the dismissal of questions with the word “Next” - all used to deflect the more personal probing. Oo-er.

We can see examples of both here in this short interview with Jonathan Ross, from his chatshow The Last Resort in 1990.

It begins with Lydon antsy as Ross reels off cue card questions about The Sex Pistols. Lydon is dismissive, which is interesting in light of the Pistols reunion later in the decade.

When questioned about the rumors of a reunion for £6million, Lydon says he wishes such offers would be given to him direct. Even so, he wouldn’t reform the Sex Pistols at any price.

“I would never repeat myself. And I think everybody knows that about me. You may not like me, but at least I am damned honest.”

He is harsh on Sid Vicious, defending his comments as honesty.

“When you start messing with heroin, you’re kissing goodbye to your life, and good riddance too.”

Fair commnent, but I tend to agree with Oscar Wilde that sometimes honesty is not the best policy, and the truth is never simple.

As for Malcolm McLaren he is dissmissed as “an imitation alcoholic”.

He lightens up about his brief acting career in the Harvey Keitel film Order of Death, going on to tell how he was offered “the ratty little git” in Drugstore Cowboy, a part he would have taken but couldn’t because of commitments. Shame for it would have been interesting casting.

The end cuts off just as Lydon gives a 4-word summing up:

“Life first. Money second.”

A nice thought, which reminded me of Picasso’s line about wealth: how it was always best to be rich enough to live poor. O, that we should be so lucky.
 

 
Bonus clip of Lydon interviewed by Margenta Devine from Network 7, from 1987, where the same questions about Sex Pistols, Punk and what he’s been up to all come to the fore. Lydon sticks to his honesty and having fun routine.
 

 
Bonus interview with Lydon from ‘Network 7’ in 1987, after the jump…
 

 
Fascinating unedited raw footage of a 1982 JJ Jackson interview of Public Image Ltd’s John Lydon and Keith Levene at MTV’s studio. Jackson’s questions are a lot better than you might expect them to be. I’ve never seen Keith Levene more loquacious in a vintage interview. He even talks briefly about his tenure in the Clash during the second part of the interview. Lydon had just come off filming Corrupt with Harvey Keitel in Rome. At the beginning, and near the end, after a few minutes of silence, you can hear what they were talking about off-camera.
 

 
Part II is here.

 
As some of you reading this well know, and others will not, Keith Levene, later of Public Image Ltd., was an early member of The Clash. So why did he leave “the only band that matters”?

Taken from an Interview with Keith Levene on the Punk77 website:

“Anyway, my heart wasn’t in The Clash sound at all—I remember going to rehearsals and just being so depressed about their sound. They got it so wrong man, they thought I was depressed because I was having a bad amphetamine come down. So it happened like this :one day, I get to the rehearsal room which is this dark, damp room—the band are sitting around, playing tunes from The Stooges and The MC5 and King Tubby’s Hi Fi on their little cassette machine, waiting for me to arrive cos I’m late as usual. We plug in and start playing, and I remember Joe Strummer poking me in the arm and going, “Look Keith, just what is wrong with you man, are you into this or not”. I’m not into it, so I just leave my guitar up against the amp, feedback howling back like mad, like white noise, and I just walk out. I can still hear that feedback whine as I leave the studio and walk onto the street. Fuck them. And they thought it was a bad speed come down. You wanna know the truth? The truth is I hated their sound. Even though I wrote some of their first album, I can’t listen to it. That’s the truth. There is the printed version of what happened, and then there is the real version of what happened. It didn’t bother me when I left The Clash, not at all. I mean, how could I be in a band which played songs like ‘White Riot’! Fuck off! What did we have to riot about? Then there were the fucking stupid lyrics like “No Elvis, no Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” Fuck off! I didn’t want anything to do with it. Then there was some bullshit like Mick Jones told me he predicted the death of Elvis. Bullshit.”

Tell us how you really feel, Keith!

Below, Levene with PiL performing “Chant” on a TV show called Check It Out before the group storms out of the interview.
 

 
I’ve seen and heard of some pretty out there tribute bands in my day. For instance, there was a lisping Elvis impersonator who (literally) sang for his supper in a fast food place. He was quite good, but when he sang “Suspicious Minds” the folks eating at the tables near him got their food sprayed with spittle. (As we watched him sing, Lux and Ivy from the Cramps walked past the place and waved to him).

Then there were the fake Beatles I tried to hire for an event who came with their own Linda and Yoko in tow, who fawned all over their personal “Lennon” and “McCartney”—they even had a manager named Brian whose only qualification seemed to be that he was from Liverpool. And named “Brian.” They kept asking me if I knew of any labels that might want to give them a record contract (“No” I told them, honestly). 

I also saw a Velvet Underground tribute band in Tokyo, complete with Nico (although Moe Tucker was played by a boy!).

But one band that seemed immune to the tribute band treatment was John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. Until now, that is! A group formerly making the rounds in the UK doing a Sex Pistols tribute act decided to think outside the (metal) box and do a PiL panto as well, morphing in the process from The Sex Pistols Experience to Public Imitation Ltd.!!!

As someone who saw the original PiL line-up (post Jah Wobble, but with Keith Levene and Martin Adkins) in 1983—a life-changing experience for me as a teen (I decided then and there to not go to college)—I was expecting the worst, but this guy can actually do a better Lydon in 2010 than Lydon himself can, take a look:
 

 
Although I was told by the guy who actually shot it himself that there was, in fact, a videotape of the legendary Public Image Ltd. “riot” show at New York’s Ritz nightclub in 1981, I’ve never seen it bootlegged anywhere. However there were at least a couple of different audio bootlegs of the show. The one I have is like the one pictured above, a 45 rpm record that came inside of a clear plastic sleeve. It’s chaotic, noisy and difficult to tell what’s going on, yet still really interesting. You can download it via what is probably the best punk blog on the entire Internet, Kill Your Puppy.

The set up was simply that PiL were brought in to hastily replace Bow Wow Wow, who’d screwed over the promoters at the last minute. PiL, having no time to rehearse, offered to do a “video performance” using the club’s state of the art video projector, standing behind a screen mixing video, DJing with some live playing. The following is a description of what actually happened that night, as told by Ed Carabello, who arranged the gig. The full article is at Perfect Sound Forever.

“So now it was PIL’s turn to go on. The crowd was really cranky and pissed by then, chanting ‘PIL, PIL, PIL!’ I was in the control booth with my headphones, nice and snug in there in the back of the club with a beautiful view of the audience and the stage: I felt like I was manning the Starship Enterprise. We felt that it would be appropriate to have a video of Lisa Yipp interviewing Keith and John in the trashcan she used for the show. Lisa gets on the headphones and says ‘I’m not going out there- they’re rowdy, they’re screaming!’ I told her ‘you’re a professional, go out there and do it.’ So one of the stage crew drags out the trash can she used for her show with her inside and with the lid on top. The audience looked at it like ‘what the hell’ and she pops out like Oscar the Grouch and says ‘HI, I’M LISA YAPP! I’M HERE TO TALK ABOUT PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!’ So now the crowd’s really pissed and they start chanting louder. She starts to give an introduction about the band and we play this interview she did with Keith. In the interview, he’s saying ‘Rock and roll is dead. This is a new age of performance.’ The crowd had it by then. They turned on Lisa for everything that happened. They pelted her with beer bottles but Lisa was such a trooper that she kept going with her introduction. She fended off the bottles with the lid of the trash can like a gladiator shield. Then she says ‘AND HERE’S PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!’

The whole band’s behind the screen and Keith starts playing and the drummer’s playing this celtic rhythm to start the show. Then Keith starts playing the record ‘Flowers of Romance.’ He cranked it up and took all the equalization out of it- it sounded so cacaphonous. I started pulsating the parcan lights. It was really eerie and screechy. The crowd just loved it- they fell silent. You just saw the glow and the lights flashing. Keith’s guitar was feeding back, playing off the record that was on and John was just silent throughout this whole thing. He just stood next to Keith. You could only see the silhouettes of them and the projections of them on the screen. The crowd is just loving this, thinking ‘what a great introduction.’

The first song ends and John starts to talk to the audience for the first time. He says ‘sil-ly fuck-ing aud-ience, sil-ly fuck-ing aud-i-ence…’ He’s slowly taunting the audience. Now the crowd’s not quiet anymore. They start chanting ‘raise the screen, raise the screen, raise the screen!’ John’s never been one who likes to be told what to do so he’s chiding the audience. He says what fuckers they were to pay 12 dollars to see this, just taunting the audience. The more they say ‘raise the screen,’ he says ‘we’re not going to raise the fucking screen!’

So the band goes into another song that was this kind of improvisational kind of thing. It seemed to be directed by the drummer! John and Keith were just doing their thing. John made those sounds with his voice, almost like a yodelling type of thing. Keith is doing this screechy, primal sounding thing with his guitar, almost like a jazz number. They go through this and it’s a ten minute number. The crowd is kind of liking it but you could hear them add their two cents by syncopating the rhythm with ‘raise the screen! raise the screen!’ At the end of this, John is really being abusive. So the audience starts pelting the screen with beer bottles. Even in the balconies, they were throwing bottles and some of it was hitting the audience down below. The more that they threw bottles, the more that John would chide them.

The manager of the Ritz comes to me then as I’m the only member of the band that was accessible- everyone else is behind the screen. Jerry says ‘you gotta raise the screen! There’s a riot happening right before our eyes!’ I felt like Nero watching Rome burn, seeing these bottles all over and I never realized how abusive John was to his audience. So I tell Jerry ‘No, I’m not raising it. You should have advertised and said that this wasn’t a concert. It’s a performance art show. That is what it is, that’s what they paid for and that’s what we’re putting on.’ I was guarding the remote control switch, not letting anyone touch it. Jerry kept yelling at me to raise it and I’d yell at him that I wasn’t going to do it.

Then Jerry turns to the crowd and sees something going on as they let out a collective ‘aaah.’ The front of the crowd started pulling on the tarp and I start getting scared because the instruments and amplifier were moving forward like they were going to go into the audience. So Jerry says ‘Are you crazy? Look at that!’ I said ‘you’re probably right.’ So I raised the screen just a little bit, enough to put on the parcans full blast so that we’re blinding the audience with light. For a minute, they shrink back from this huge flash of light. It looked like the screen from ‘Wizard of Oz’ where everyone sees the magical workings of the Wizard, like ‘pay no attention to the PIL behind the screen!’