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It hadn't even been a year since the end of the Sex Pistols, brought about by a terrible concert at the Winterland in San Francisco, when Johnny Rotten, having reverted to his real surname Lydon, put together a new formation aimed at showcasing his private nightmares through music that was as distant as possible from the fury of Never Mind... Companions in this new adventure were John Wardle (nicknamed Jah Wobble for his love of reggae and initially contacted by Lydon himself to join the Pistols in place of Glen Matlock, hence before Vicious), Keith Levene, a hallucinated guitarist with a brief stint in the early Clash, fired shortly thereafter due to ideological differences with Strummer and Jones, and a young, solid drummer named Jim Walker.
The initial results were discouraging: the concerts still attracted hordes of punks who had no interest whatsoever in Lydon's new direction; they just wanted Anarchy in the UK... Naturally, the first record still had remnants of the Pistols, and it couldn't have been otherwise, even though the sound was more measured and profound, thanks to the contributions of Wobble and Levene. But it was the second side of the debut album that opened new scenarios in the music of PIL: long proto-dub litanies (Fodderstompf), lyrics about girls possessed by demons (Annalisa), and furious vitriolic attacks delivered by the demented voice of the now-former Johnny Rotten. To complete this transformation was an uncompromising NO, even with outrageous live performances featuring John Lydon provocatively turning his back to the audience, with Wobble sitting and toying with his booming bass and Keith Levene weaving essential plots with his ultra-minimal guitar that would become, over the years, one of the most imitated traits of PIL's music. All of this packaged in a cover that looks like one of the many glossy magazines like Vogue, featuring an immaculate John Lydon dressed to the nines and even groomed, whose only link with the past remains the demonic gaze, a mix of anger, resignation, and alienation that would earn millions of covers in the specialized press.
First Issue is just the first of a series of attempts by Lydon to exorcize his uncomfortable past as Johnny Rotten: he will not always succeed and will not always be consistent with the original intentions but, to quote Lydon's own words from an old interview, "I'm sure that you, too, in your life, have changed your mind a few times, haven't you?"
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