PIL In Album you had Steve Vai playing. Why him? Do you think that it worked on the album? Was an idea of Bill Laswell to collaborate with him? Steve Vai,he is rather an absurd guitarist.A thousand notes a minute. But he was around and so there it goes. He changed his style a lot on Album. He’s featured very, very predominantly, and he came up with some wonderful twists. I think he learnt really how to play rhythm guitar on Album. My original band for the record, they were too young. It was a nice idea to work with them, but they couldn’t cope with the pressures of a recording studio, let alone the endurance course of having to rehearse the songs before you go into a project like that. It was lack of experience and I know they learnt from it.We’re still friends, by the way.All of us. Lately you have been doing also some spoken word tours,what can you please tell us about them? I love them. It’s like going to a strange pub where people sort of knowyou and they’re all inquisitive and they all have questions and you answer correctly, and it’s extremely good fun. It’s very chaotic, it’s disorganized,and everybody’s happy. I mean, sometimes I can break out in karaoke, and anything is possible. I have to be completely unscripted when I do it. And I love that knife edge of this could collapse and be terrible. It makes you work harder for other people. Just a wonderful thing to be able to do. Yes, I love it. It’s hilarious. Sometimes the public just break out in song themselves. It’s all unexpected. Nothing planned. Nothing scripted. Lovely. Human beings being human.The greatest gift. You have been drawing the covers of your albums, what´s your inspiration? I’ve had a finger in the artwork since the very beginning of my career because I like painting. You’ve got the element of sound and words, and that used to be enough for me, but not now. I think it’s nice to have a visual interpretation as well. The album cover is very much seriously a part of everything that’s inside. I’m using basically the colours and textures and schematics through colour to explain what the songs really mean, because colour does have an emotional effect on people just like words and just like sounds. It’s just another angle.Another thing we love to do now is our own videos, which are very much like your dad bought a new camera and he wants to film everything. It’s very home video. You got a lovely little baby there, and of course, you’re going to be filming it, right? Well, that’s the vibe. And that’s an approach I don’t think anyone in the music industry has ever thought about it. It’s where the real true emotions lay. We don’t need expensive productions. Everything is for real, no stagecraft. - 26 - Anything that you can tell us about the new album? At the time of the interview, we have known only three singles. It’s 13 songs. We got through it very, very fast, like two months at most. We had to use several different studios because after the Covid lockdown ended, everybody was running to recording studios. So that was difficult. But being Public Image, we liked the faults and the different sounds of the different places, so it all paid to our advantage. As I said, there were 19 ideas which we bounced down into 13 songs,enjoyed everything of it. I’ve dealt with my personal tragedy with Nora, but that’s not all of the universe, so I had to consider many other concepts too. There’s a song called “Car Chase”, that’s about a friend of ours. The authorities in Britain decided he was incapable of looking after himself.So, they put him in a home.And of course,he escaped,you know,verymuch like what I would do.And I love him very dear for that.And so “Car Chase” is a song and an adoration of his free spirit. That was one of the first singles, right? I don’t know.Any order you like.What we’ve done is issue snippets of songs so that people get an advance warning of just how varied this album is.“Penge” is, I think, the first sound bite we released. That’s about an imminent Viking raiding party that it’s going to slaughter and kill everyone in a seaside village. And the alternative the children are offered for safety is to follow a Druid priest off into another harbour where they’d be safe.But the Druid priest turns out to be a child molester. Just because position A is bad, don’t jump to position B. Look for C, D, etcetera. Find more than one alternative in life and make your own decisions.Otherwise, you won’t survive. www.pilofficial.com François Zappa © Published by the kind permission of El Garaje de Frank www.elgarajedefrank.es Read full interview on https://elgarajedefrank.es/en/interview-john-lydon/
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