This is the first part of Keith Levene‘s personal recollection of Public Image Ltd’s infamous Ritz riot show. The view from the eye of the hurricane, so to speak. Keith’s newest release is the wonderful and sprawling Commercial Zone 2014. His website is www.teenageguitarist76.com/

The atmosphere was intense. An event put together with the best of intentions in real time. Real time meaning no set list, no rehashes of Pistols numbers, potential audience participation, no real idea of how the event would pan out and certainly no idea it was going to turn into a hybrid of an old school R&R riot.

There was no plan, that was the plan. The potential was immense. There was no MTV and I was using one of largest video displays in existence at the time. There was one other similar screen this size in Tokyo. We had a fantastic control room that was capable of being a TV channel.

Cable was the big buzz of the time and this! Live video just seemed so exciting and yet to me, so obvious. When I agreed to do this with the powers that be at the Ritz the question was “Can we use and integrate all the video equipment and the screen into the show? Stanley London, and Jerry Brandt, the club’s owners, as I remember said “Sure.”

I said “We’ll have to bill this as something special, a video event with Public Image Ltd. Its key we do this for a myriad of reasons.” They agreed. The guys at the Ritz were fantastically helpful and enthusiastic. Jerry Brandt as I remember was involved in The Electric Circus in the 60s and had a good idea of what was going on and therefore had a special eye on what I was doing as this was coming together. (He definitely thought he’d seen this before in the 60s. I could feel that.)

I had such high hopes for what was coming together. I’d envisioned a live video event with audience participation or an interactive event on a personal level which to my mind would have been quite innovative and quite interesting for those days. This might not seem like such a big deal in these advanced technological times but back then it was. Plus even then “interactive only really meant an electronic experience, nothing this close up and personal.
 

 
In May 1981 there was no World Wide Web, YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, no instant global communication anywhere, anytime at the touch of a button. People didn’t have access to personal computers, cell phones, or the Internet except under really geeky circumstances. MTV didn’t exist as of yet though it was on the table. Cable was the biggest and most interesting or exciting thing happening.

In those days PiL would get lots of offers many of which were turned down. I happened to be in Manhattan and was getting a good deal of attention when an offer from the Ritz came up. They’d had an unexpected cancellation from none other than Malcolm’s Bow Wow Wow and they needed something with proper impact to fill the gap. Impromptu? Whatever.

The Ritz was a Victorian place that was used for pretty damn classy gigs. A fantastic venue with balconies, an old school wooden ballroom floor and the perfect size for name bands to do their stuff. A great stage and crew. I imagine the likes of Madness, Squeeze or Talking Heads and bands of that ilk would’ve used this as a prefered prestige place in New York.

The Ritz had recently acquired one of just two (in the entire world) massive video screens for the venue with a General Electric video projection system. The highest resolution imagery anyone was going to get for those times. The projection certainly wasn’t “Hi Def” as we know it these days but no one knew the difference then and essentially it looked like a giant movie screen and was very clear (The only other screen like the one there was in Tokyo. HD was a dream concept at the time only Sony were working on). This all really knocked my socks off and fired my imagination like a Gatling machine gun on speed. Suffice to say the Ritz was well interesting due to the toys inside.
 

 
I had to go to the Ritz to work out the deal and what we were going to do with them. I’d heard about all this amazing gear in there and now i was getting to see and inspect this remarkable set up and my mind immediately started working. I already knew how to use it and what it could do ‘cause I’m a bit geeky and was already very enthusiastic about video. Hence recruiting Jeannette Lee into PiL on video and possible scripting. That didn’t go anywhere but it was an outlook at the time. A PiL thing. Doing the show it was a no brainer luckily Primarily I thought PiL finally had an opportunity to fulfill an agenda we had consistently promised. Something different, something exciting something new. We could live up to the potential we were espousing realizing an innovative standard I’d dreamt about around the time when I approached John Lydon back in 1976 when he was a disgruntled member of the Sex Pistols and I was a member of the Clash who knew it was time to move out and forward. I suggested we might work together at some point in the future. An idea John welcomed and agreed to. It happened, quicker than I imagined. The Pistols were soon history and PiL was established in 1978.

Unfortunately the Ritz show had apparently been promoted as something other than the live interactive video event starring PiL I mean how were they going to bill that? How could they put across what I had in mind. I think they always knew how they were going to do this. Their audience were principally composed of the “bridge and tunnel” (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey) crowd who were alien to me and PiL’s concepts but apparently they were the Ritz’s bread and butter. This was the mob they were used to and to make sure the place was well filled this is who they reached out to and had billed the show for. They were the people who had patiently waited a long time on the day of the show lined up in the rain for far too long to see… what? Johnny Rotten and the “ex-Pistols” maybe? Maybe The Sex Pistols, but not this. This kind of thing marred PiL at the beginning. People simply trying to exploit the “Johnny Rotten factor.” The Pistols had had such profile and a lot people would take the obvious route to get what “they” wanted or what they thought would work. It often didn’t occur to people PiL were way better and way more exciting than the Pistols in every way. No way were they expecting Public Image Ltd. in their best situation to date. The show was billed incorrectly. This was all an alien concept to this lot.
 

John Lydon, Jeanette Lee and Keith Levene at the Ritz. Photo Laura Levine

On the night of the show PiL were comprised of myself, John Lydon, Jeannette Lee and Sam Ulano—a 60-year-old drummer who I’d hired on sight at Sam Ash’s (or one of the NY’s other music stores) a few days before.  But we weren’t directly in front of the audience. It wasn’t a “gig.” This was not and had never been intended to be a traditional gig.

We were behind the giant video screen. The audience could hear us. They could see shadows of us. We could be projected live onto the screen and were at certain times. The whole thing had been put together so quickly we had no choice but to be “impromptu.” Lydon actually rose to the occasion. We had cameras ready to do the same with the crowd or anyone that wanted to interact. It was a big ask and a shame because we had a mob rather than an interested, possibly “understanding” audience that could appreciate the idea.

An art crowd would have probably appreciated what PiL were trying to pull off here but many of the people who’d turned up that night didn’t.

At a certain point during the evening’s “festivities” one of the guys with headphones on who was helping us turned to me and said “Keith you gotta hear what they’re saying about you in the booth. It’s insane!”

He seemed a bit excited. Still I couldn’t take too much notice of him ‘cause at that particular moment I was trying to do a song with Sam—a guy who’d never heard a PiL tune in his life.

Meantime these menacing choruses of “BOOOOOOO… BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” with a peppering of “FUCK YOOUUUUUUU” continued to rise up from the audience.

John was taunting the crowd akinging “Do you feel like you’ve been cheated? Didn’t you get your money’s worth?”

Then all of a sudden I noticed it, or rather I heard it.

“CRASH!”

WTF?

“BANG!”

Huh?

I looked up from my Prophet V synth and tried to figure out what those sinister sounds were amongst all these other sinister sounds. 

I listened closely. I hoped I hadn’t just heard what I thought I had heard. Then I heard it again. Only louder.

All the sounds of these hurled bottles (and chairs!) were muffled because of the screen…

Oh no! FUCK!
 

 
First it was one object at a time. Then five.  Now there’s this simultaneous cascade of stuff striking the screen.

I wasn’t scared of all the bottles and chairs. By then I was really pissed off with what was going on and went into a different mode. First thing was to get Sammy the fuck out of there. The only proper stand up guy I’d ever worked with and this was not his bag, baby. It wasn’t what he’d signed up for. The next thing was to get in front of the stage and stop these fucking assholes! Sammy was escorted to safety and I’m hatching a plot in my head to still make something of this.

With all this going on the tech director in the booth still had all the camera feeds running and videotape playing so you had all this interrelated nonsense running on the screen that was even more annoying to the mob in the audience. The other guy in our crew on camera behind the screen in the midst of it, kept zooming in on Jeannette Lee’s shoes. These little black patent leather shiny dolls shoes. It was really annoying in a punk kind of way, but funny too. All this was magnified and was being projected on the big screen. She was very small and kind of looked like a little girl and I think Ariel (that was his name) the guy with the camera behind the screen may have had a little fetish going there. Someone reviewed the show and said you couldn’t see what was going on on the big screen because there were too many “gig” lights on but I fancy the reviewer wasn’t there because the screen was crystal clear and you could see anything that showed up on it that night.

Next I go out in front of the screen to announce “If you destroy that screen we have the power here to destroy you.” I really meant it, too. I don’t know how, but not one thing hit me. There was a barrage of bottles and chairs, I mean fucking chairs and god knows what else but I knew nothing was going to touch me and it didn’t. Possibly delusional, but that’s where I was coming from. I really believed I could calm the crowd down if I wanted to, one way or another and I fancied some ELF (extra low frequency) I had programmed into my Prophet 5 and could generate was the way to go. I always reinforced our sound systems for way low frequency output but I never got the chance to use it and I was probably lucky too as I saw this side of beef coming my way being grazed by bottles. It was all in slow motion. He worked for the Ritz. He grabbed me by the legs, raised me up and effortlessly ran me up the spiral staircase to the dressing rooms. He wasn’t too happy either. So that was it for me. Then in no time it all died down and was over.

The next thing I knew, there was John in his orange and black stripey knitted medieval suit Celia Perry had handmade for him and there was Jeannette all alive and well in her little girl black patent leather shoes. These morons were throwing bottles and chairs at this friggin’ screen and I’ve got Ed Carabello from the booth saying “I’d better raise it, Keith” and I say through our com system “DO NOT RAISE THAT FUCKIN’ SCREEN, EDDIE!”

From backstage you could see all these shadows of things hitting the screen. Bottles. Bar glasses. Furniture and whatever other random non-living things that were lying about were now hitting—correction POUNDING—the big white screen.

I closed my eyes for a moment. I took a deep breath and tried to collect myself.

Oh my God. No. Not the screen.

As I was saying before, I was never even a bit concerned that I’d be struck by a stray bottle or glass. No, not at all. Similarly the idea that the audience might at any moment begin jumping onto the stage in droves and attack us didn’t bother me in the least, either

My main concern (other than Sammy’s safety) that night was for the well-being of the very expensive white screen that loomed above us. The one that separated us from the enraged audience of more than a thousand irate New Yorkers.

Was I crazy?  No. Not really. 

What you have to understand is while we were making arrangements for that night’s PiL show I’d been told in no uncertain terms by a very scary certain someone, the following:

“Do whatever you like. BUT whatever happens—KEITH ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? DON’T DAMAGE THE SCREEN. THE VIDEO SCREEN CANNOT BE DAMAGED.”

Then he added my name again for good measure: “KEITH!”

His tone and manner and demeanor conveyed to me that I would be the one held personally accountable BY HIM should anything whatsoever in the world happen to that amazing and rare-by-1981-standards big white video screen.

There were a few of us gathered for that meeting but this guy was looking directly at me. And pointing!

He meant business and this was not the sort of individual to be toyed with. Oh I understood him. Loud and clear. No problemo in that department.

As I looked on and helplessly watched all these objects illuminated by white lights hit that giant expensive white screen, the guy’s words played back in my mind.

“THE VIDEO SCREEN CANNOT BE DAMAGED!”

“THE VIDEO SCREEN CANNOT BE DAMAGED!

KEITH!!!”

I closed my eyes… Oh fuck.

Read more at Keith Levene’s website:
Behind the Big White Screen (Ritz Riot Part II)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Riot at the Ritz: The infamous Public Image Ltd. ‘riot show’

A contemporary account of PiL’s Ritz riot from Trouser Press