By 1985, John Lydon and Public Image Limited had reached an impasse. The exit of Keith Levene from the band in 1983 had been messy, with Levene releasing his own version of PIL’s fourth album before Lydon re-recorded its contents as This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get. Neither album did very well commercially and Lydon detected a lack of enthusiasm from Virgin Records regarding the promotion of his version.
“I didn’t know where I stood in the music industry,” Lydon told Sound On Sound in an interview from 2016. “The purse strings were being withheld and everything was difficult. PIL as a band was under real severe pressure and that pressure eventually cracked us and left me kind of stranded there. I didn’t know what really to do with myself.”
Now based in Los Angeles, a lifeline was thrown by producer Bill Laswell, who at that point was best known for producing Herbie Hancock’s electro crossover hit Rockit. This time Laswell was working with Afrika Bambaataa. The hip hop icon wanted to record a rock/ rap crossover track and was looking for a vocalist. A fan of PIL’s early albums, Laswell suggested Lydon.
“Bam had the basics of his song,” remembers Lydon, “but he had no hook and chorus and bam in I came with the ‘Time zooone’ bit. The whole thing came together relatively quickly.”
Credited to Time Zone, the track, now titled World Destruction, made Lydon relevant again. It might not have been a hit – it reached Number 44 in the UK charts in January 1985 – but it was praised as a groundbreaking single. It re-established Lydon as an open-minded, forward-thinking artist - remember this was eighteen months before Run DMC and Aerosmith’s link-up on Walk This Way.
Having worked successfully together on World Destruction, Lydon selected Laswell as his main collaborator for the next PIL album. The songs, including Rise, were worked out by Lydon and two members of his touring band – guitarist Mark Schulz and keyboard player Jebin Bruni – in the basement of Lydon’s house in Venice Beach.
Rise’s lyrics were inspired by the situation in South Africa, as Lydon explained in a contemporary interview in Smash Hits of all places: “I read this manual on South African interrogation techniques, and Rise is quotes from some of the victims. I put them together because I thought it fitted in aptly with my own feelings about daily existence.”
Also in the mix were the torture techniques that were then being used in Northern Ireland - hence the references to ‘They put a hotwire to my head/ Because of the things I did and said’. The Irish angle is made explicit in the chorus: ‘may the road rise with you’, a translation of an old Gaelic proverb "go n-éirí an bóthar leat" or ‘may the road rise up to meet you’, a phrase second-generation migrant Lydon would have doubtless heard in his family house as a nipper.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Laswell was assembling his own crack team for pre-production of the album. He hired drummer Tony Williams, who’d worked with Miles Davis, and guitarist Nicky Skopelitis. He and engineer Jason Corsaro, whom Laswell described in Sound On Sound in 2016 as “the beast of drum sounds. That’s the guy who kind of defined the ’80s.”
Corsaro had the inspired idea of recording Williams at the bottom of the elevator shaft at New York’s Power Station studio and you can hear the results on Rise, especially during the middle section. Williams, Skopelitis and Laswell himself on a fretless Wal bass cooked up the backing track. “We were using the Fairlight computer as a kind of click track,” remembers Laswell. “And on the piece that became Rise, Tony dropped a beat and we went back and dropped in this one beat.”
Eventually Lydon, Bruni and Schulz arrived from LA, which brought one issue to a head. “It was difficult,” says Lydon, “because the band I had in LA, they were very, very young chaps, and they couldn’t cope with the pressure of the New York studio. The whole thing tore them up really, and it was panicky fingers on strings, and time was of the essence. I think we’d given ourselves something like three weeks to make the whole album.”
Laswell and Lydon had to make a decision. Up against a tight deadline, they couldn’t afford to carry any passengers. “That night we went to a bar and I explained to the kids, ‘This is serious and we have to make something great and we’re gonna have to let you guys go.’,” says Laswell. “They were probably hurt, but they were not ready.”
“I missed them severely, Schulz and Jebin,” said Lydon. “But I had to very, very quickly make a difficult decision of sending them home and replacing them, if I was ever gonna meet the obligation of the three-week deadline. And so there it went.”
That meant making the album with session musicians and Laswell and Lydon brought in some, well, unexpected names. Ginger Baker, the irascible ex-Cream drummer, came in and though he didn’t play on Rise contributed to a number of tracks. Incredibly, he and Lydon got on: “My kind of bloke, y’know. Great fun in the studio. The amount of drum kits he destroyed was amazing. I think that was the biggest part of the budget.”
Then there was Steve Vai, the virtuoso guitarist known for his shredding technique. “People think that I wouldn't be listening to stuff like that, but I listen to everything,” said Lydon in a 2012 interview with Music Radar. “I was into the likes of people that were really willing to work with me. It astounded me at the time to see that I was respected. I wasn't aware of that.”
“I think he kind of altered his perspective after working with us. He did some wonderful stuff after that. You know, his mind… He got out of just heavy metal, and that's a good, good thing. To this day, I rate the man very, very highly. Very highly!"
Whilst Vai didn’t shred on the record, Laswell did coax a searing solo out of him on Rise. “Before he would play a solo, I would say, ‘Here, quickly listen to this.’ And I would play him, like, North African trance music for five minutes, or Indian music or Irish stuff,” explained Laswell. “And it totally took him into another space. So when he soloed, it wasn’t the normal ‘here’s the big rock solo’. I was conscious not to do clichéd rock stuff.”
To add to this mix, Laswell and Lydon decided to recruit another virtuoso from an entirely different field. They hired L Shankar, whose electric violin gives Rise a shuffly undercarriage and contrasts beautifully with Williams and Vai’s contributions. “We sort of referenced this idea of drones from the Indian music and the Irish fiddle music,” says Laswell.
“Oh, gorgeous tones,” says Lydon of Shankar’s violin. “I love tones. Just loads of inflections sort of buried in the background, so when you close your eyes those inflections will creep out and spur all kinds of delicious thoughts. Shankar was just marvellous. An eye opener.
"I knew his stuff, but I didn’t think he’d be quite in this mould. It completely worked and it made Rise stunning. Rise became a tour de force on that album.”
By the time the track was finished it sounded huge, a towering edifice of sound. The last thing to be added were the vocals and, as is his wont, Lydon’s lead was captured quickly.
“I rev myself up and usually my first or second or third performance is the best,” he said. “It doesn’t usually change beyond there except gets rougher. ‘Cause I put so much energy into it. I wanted the words to come over like sharp knife cuts. Every single word well pronounced and deliberately in their place.”
For the actual chorus, Lydon had some assistance. Bernard Fowler – who these days is best known for his long association with the Stones - helped with ‘may the road rise with you’ refrain. “Ah yes, Bernard was great,” Lydon recalls. “Bernard taught me vocal techniques that were simplistic, but for me were very challenging at the time. Just to get the harmonies right on Rise. It was an approach that I hadn’t involved myself with and I’ve got to say ever since then I became more and more involved in my craft as a singer.”
Released as the lead single from the album, which was bluntly-titled ‘Album’ (or ‘Compact Disc’ or ‘Cassette’ depending on your choice of format), Rise was a formidable statement. The line ‘anger is an energy’ reminded record-buyers just who this was – the one-time angry young man of rock who, a decade back, had changed the direction of music. But musically Rise was a completely original mix of all sorts of influences, which showed that Public Image were still capable of taking their music into intriguing places.
It would be one of the last times the band bagged themselves a mainstream hit. Rise reached Number 11 in February 1986, Lydon and co went on Top of the Pops to promote it (with Don Letts on keyboards moonlighting from Big Audio Dynamite) and even found himself on the cover of Smash Hits around this time.
“My message is there’s no political cause worthy enough that people should die for it,” said Lydon in a 2016 interview in Mojo looking back at the track. “Once you start murdering your fellow human beings it’s over.
"Rise is about the stop of that. I related it to my own background. I’ve got Protestant and Catholic relatives in the north of Ireland, why were they killing each other?
"I think it’s one of my best pop songs.”
