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Keith Levene, a founding member of the seminal British bands the Conflict and Public Picture Ltd. whose slashing but melodic fretwork helped outline the sound of post-punk guitar, died on Nov. 11 at his dwelling in Norfolk, England. He was 65.
His sister Jill Bennett stated the trigger was liver most cancers.
Thought of by rock cognoscenti to be a pioneering if usually ignored guitarist, Mr. Levene was greatest recognized for his six-year stint with Public Picture Ltd., the aggressively uncompromising quartet that John Lydon, a.okay.a. Johnny Rotten, fashioned in 1978 after his industry-tilting punk band, the Intercourse Pistols, imploded.
Public Picture Ltd., also referred to as PiL, didn’t scandalize well mannered society in Britain because the Intercourse Pistols had with their haute-guttersnipe vogue sense, obscenity-laced tv tirades and unceasing potshots on the queen. However musically, PiL’s early incarnation was hardly extra accommodating to mainstream tastes.
Propelled by Mr. Lydon’s braying vocals and Mr. Levene’s buzz-saw guitar, the band jumbled genres, together with noise rock, disco and reggae, a mode that Mr. Levene was desperate to carry to punk and post-punk music. Critics and audiences hailed the band’s clarion-call debut single, “Public Picture.”
The punk-inflected art-rock albums that adopted had been tougher, significantly 1979’s “Steel Field”: three 12-inch discs mastered at 45 r.p.m. and packaged in a metallic movie canister. That album nonetheless reached No. 18 on the British charts, and is now broadly thought to be a post-punk masterpiece.
“I at all times liken PiL in that interval to the Summary Expressionists of the ’50s,” John Wardle, recognized professionally as Jah Wobble, who was the group’s authentic bassist, stated in a cellphone interview. “We had been self-centered, mad nihilists self-destructing all over, making this loopy music.”
As a youth, Mr. Levene had honed his taking part in expertise finding out guitar gods like Jimmy Web page and Duane Allman. However he tended to downplay his virtuosity in his PiL days, describing his signature sound — made sharper and brasher by his use of guitars with aluminum necks or our bodies — in distinctly post-punk phrases.
“In a way, we’re nonmusicians,” he stated of the band in a 1981 interview with the music journal Sizzling Press. “Till only in the near past my complete factor with the guitar was, I hated it. I may play it, however I hated it, and that’s why I devised that new approach of taking part in guitar. I simply de-learnt guitar.”
Maybe he was too modest. Musically, “Keith very a lot had his personal intense language,” Mr. Wardle stated. “At one excessive, it was like shards of bloody glass, or icicles. There was a coldness to it, a bleakness to it. And on the different excessive, there was that actually wealthy sound, the place all of the notes merge into each other. It was like jazz gamers discovering their very own voice.”
Julian Keith Levene was born in London on July 18, 1957, the youngest of three youngsters of Harry Levene, a tailor who had a enterprise making plastic raincoats, and Might (Lovell) Levene, who ran a hairdressing store. Raised in Muswell Hill, a suburban district in north London that famously produced Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks, Mr. Levene was swept up by the rock of that period, particularly Beatlemania.
He took up guitar when he was about 13. “I bought a few my sisters’ boyfriends to show me just a few issues,” he recalled in a 2001 interview with the music website Excellent Sound Perpetually. “I realized in sooner or later.”
Coming of age within the early Seventies, Mr. Levene turned so passionate in regards to the progressive rock band Sure and its virtuosic guitarist, Steve Howe, that he was briefly a Sure roadie.
His choice for progressive rock didn’t final. By the mid-Seventies, Mr. Levene, who had left college at 15 and located a manufacturing facility job, was among the many cohort of British youngsters who felt pissed off by an absence of alternatives in a stagnant financial system and had began to channel their anger right into a stripped-down, do-it-yourself type of rock referred to as punk.
In 1976, when he was 19, Mr. Levene met two younger artwork college students — Mick Jones, a talented guitarist, and Paul Simonon, an aspiring bassist — and began a band. They quickly recruited John Mellor, higher referred to as Joe Strummer, from a rockabilly-inflected pub rock band, the 101ers, as lead singer and rhythm guitarist.
Mr. Strummer “couldn’t sing to avoid wasting his life,” Mr. Levene stated within the Excellent Sound Perpetually interview, “however gave off all this vitality and led to a complete sweat.”
Mr. Levene wouldn’t stay with the Conflict lengthy sufficient to play on the band’s first album, launched in April 1977. Amid disputes over the band’s politics and musical route, he issued an ultimatum: “It’s so simple as this — it’s both my band or Mick’s band.”
The Conflict went on to turn out to be one of the crucial acclaimed and influential bands of the period.
Mr. Levene’s tenure in PiL was extra creatively fulfilling, if tumultuous. He lasted lengthy sufficient to file the band’s greatest single, “This Is Not a Love Track,” which hit No. 5 on the British singles charts in 1983. However issues fell aside with Mr. Lydon because the group was making ready its fourth album, “This Is What You Need … This Is What You Get,” and Mr. Levene left in 1984.
His struggles with heroin and different medication might have exacerbated his mercurial character, stated Mr. Wardle, who acknowledged that he was additionally abusing medication at the moment: “Keith may very well be actually charming when he needed to be, however he may very well be actually spiky and smug.”
After leaving PiL, Mr. Levene recorded two EPs in 1987 — “2011: Again Too Black” and “Keith Levene’s Violent Opposition” — then largely receded from the general public eye for greater than a decade, feeling cheated by file labels and by former bandmates.
In 2012, he collaborated with Mr. Wardle on the critically acclaimed album “Yin & Yang,” which they promoted with performances earlier than enthusiastic audiences. Lately, Ms. Bennett stated, Mr. Levene was obsessed with new musical initiatives he was engaged on, in addition to a e book on the historical past of PiL.
Along with his sister Ms. Bennett, Mr. Levene is survived by his companion, Kate Ransford, and his son, Kirk, from his first marriage, to Lori Montana, an American musician, which led to divorce, as did his second marriage, to the author Shelly da Cunha. His sister Jacqui Levene died this 12 months.
Though he missed out on a business windfall from the bands he helped create, Mr. Levene by no means expressed any regrets about sidestepping rock-star fame.
“He had the sounds in his head and he knew what he needed,” Ms. Bennett stated. “That’s why he left bands — as a result of in the event that they had been getting too business or weren’t transferring ahead creatively, he would go on and do different issues.”
His official legacy with the Conflict has largely boiled all the way down to a partial songwriting credit score on one music, the searing “What’s My Title” from the band’s first album.
Whereas he didn’t really take part within the recording of that album, Mr. Levene informed Excellent Sound Perpetually that he felt he deserved extra credit score for his artistic contributions to it. Requested if he may hearken to the album objectively, his reply was curt.
“Sure I can,” he stated. “It’s a bit lame.”
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