How John Lydon Escaped the Impasse: From “World Destruction” to “Rise”

By mid-decade, Public Image Ltd were running on broken ground. Keith Levene’s acrimonious 1983 exit had split the band’s fourth album into two competing versions, neither of which landed. Virgin’s promotional appetite cooled, and Lydon, now in Los Angeles, felt stranded. “I didn’t know where I stood in the music industry,” he later recalled. “The purse strings were being withheld.”

A way out arrived from an unexpected angle. Producer Bill Laswell, fresh from Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” was working with Afrika Bambaataa on a rap‑rock crossover. He needed a vocalist and remembered PIL’s early records. The result, Time Zone’s “World Destruction,” gave Lydon a sharp piece of relevance eighteen months before Run‑DMC met Aerosmith. The single only reached No. 44, but its status as a blueprint earned Lydon new cultural credit.

When it came to the next PIL album, Lydon stuck with Laswell. Together with touring band members Mark Schulz and Jebin Bruni, he worked out songs in the basement of his Venice Beach house. “Rise” took shape from unsettling material: a South African interrogation manual and the torture methods then in use in Northern Ireland. “Rise is quotes from some of the victims,” Lydon told Smash Hits. “I put them together because I thought it fitted aptly with my own feelings about daily existence.” The Gaelic‑inflected chorus — “may the road rise with you” — cut the menace with an undertow of inheritance.

Laswell assembled the track in New York, bringing in guitarist Steve Vai for a lead line that pushed the song’s tension upward