What’s the greatest British disco album? With all respect to Heatwave and Hot Chocolate, the troubling answer might be Metal Box, Public Image Ltd.’s second album, a record of apocalyptic grooves that is twisted, darkened, metallic and despairing, like 1970s Britain reflected through a rotted disco ball.

Everything that was so remarkable in Public Image Ltd., all the promise that they showed on their debut single Public Image, crystallised on 1979’s Metal Box. This was an album that was unbelievably free, born out of improvisation, where Jah Wobble could play his deep dub bass lines, Keith Levene could tease his stannic guitar sounds and John Lydon could sing about his mother slowly succumbing to cancer and somehow the mix worked. 

Metal Box was an album that proved influential on everyone from U2 to The Slits, Radiohead to Massive Attack, LCD Soundsystem to pretty much anyone in New York in the early 2000s. And yet no band could ever really sound like Metal Box, because no other band could even dream of being this free. 

“Many people don't understand that it was improvisation,” Lydon told Classic Rock of the recording of Metal Box. “It had to be, because we'd spent most of the money on the container [the record’s distinctive metal box packaging, which gave the album its name] and so what we had to do was quite literally sneak into studios when bands had gone home for the night. And these were pretty rough monitor mixes - no actual production.” 

Albatross, the album’s 10-minute opening song, was recorded live, with the band making up their parts and Lydon free-forming over the top. It felt like Lydon, in particular, was breaking free, smashing out of the musical and cultural walls that Sex Pistols had built around themselves.

There’s something jazzy in the song’s almost total lack of structure, with verse - chorus - verse abandoned in favour of crawl and expansion, the song’s slowly evolving grooves almost like a modal form of disco. Albatross doesn’t really go anywhere - and yet it goes everywhere, a song of infinite ambition and scope.

That the band could do this is tribute to the perfect connection between the musicians, in particular Wobble and Levene, who seem to be telepathically linked, while David Humphrey, who played drums on Albatross and Swan Lake, locks into a perfectly elastic groove. (Five people played drums on Metal Box: Humphrey, Levene, Wobble, Richard Dudanski and Martin Atkins.)

Poptones, meanwhile, seemed to lurch in ever-more malevolent circles. Keith Levene’s drum pattern has the unconventional momentum of a non drummer, to which Wobble adds one of his best bass lines - he once called it “as symmetrical as a snowflake” - and Levene picks out a cascading shower of metallic guitar notes.

The absolute peak of Metal Box’s musical freedom, however, is Death Disco - the single that preceded the album, that was reprised in slightly different form on Metal Box as Swan Lake. It is a genuinely remarkable song with little precedent in pop history.

Lydon wrote the song for his mother, who had died of cancer not long before the album was released. "I watched her die," he told Select magazine in 1990. "She was tough, my mum. She asked me to write a disco song for her funeral. This was hardly happy stuff.” Lydon’s lyrics and delivery are among the most intensely traumatised expressions of pain ever put into record, a cry of agony that seems unfiltered by artistic expression.

To that, though, the group add a sprightly disco drum pattern - just as Lydon’s mum requested - a bass line that borrows from dub and disco, rising over the mix like a funeral director at a procession, and a guitar section that plunges the melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake into a metallic bath. It sounds, on paper, like a horrible, unworkable mixture of influences. But somehow the band make it not just work but prosper, creating one of the most desolate songs ever to fill a dance floor.

Swan Lake / Death Disco is Metal Box’s most obviously nod to the disco sound. But you can also find its influence in the album’s use of synths and drum machines, as well as its open-minded production techniques. On Careering Levene uses a Prophet synth to add drone and effect - allegedly an attempt to replicate the sounds heard from a downstairs toilet - and the song is dotted with drum machine effects, in a way that is reminiscent of Joy Division’s contemporaneous work.

Levene was at play again on the album’s closing track, Radio 4, using a Yamaha String Ensemble and wandering bass line to create a kind of ambient punk funk, the guitar player taking the canny decision late in the recording process to yank out the drums that Ken Lockie had laid down, the reduction allowing the song to breath. 

You could argue that punk, jazz and dub had a bigger influence on Metal Box than disco. But the fact is, I want Metal Box to be a disco record - and to be a British disco record at that, not in the jingoistic sense of the word, but rather in the way it reflects the grim political austerity of late 1970s UK through a disco prism.

For many people - particularly in the USA - disco was a way of escaping the grind of every-day life and if the music sounded slick and contented that was aspirational rather than actual. Disco was music to escape into, music that - for a few crucial hours on a Saturday night - gave you the illusion of a better life, more Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever than Andy Warhol at Studio 54.

And that’s great. I love slick disco. But that was never really a British thing. Britain at the end of the 1970s was broke and dirty and fractured; punk wallowed in it, The Sex Pistols reflected it; and Public Image Ltd. re-cast it as the most desolate disco sound you could ever imagine, an emotional break down on the dance floor. Metal Box sounds grim - but at least it was free, Lydon inching himself away from the constraints of both British public life and the increasingly tired punk sene, one grubby fingernail at a a time.

After Never Mind The Bollocks - and Lydon’s departure - the Sex Pistols became an instant self parody, covering My Way in a “punk” style that already sounded dated and working with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. 

The same could easily have happened to John Lydon, who left the Pistols in 1978 after a disastrous US tour. Rather than being boxed in by the success of the Sex Pistols, though, Lydon used his punk legitimacy to throw musical convention out the window, creating a band - and one near perfect record - that was unlike anything that anyone expected of him, a one-off fusion of punk, funk, dub, jazz, disco and more that many would try to copy, but no one would get close to.

And, yes, Lydon then became the archetypal angry old man, who voted for Trump, wore a MAGA shirt and opposed the BDS sanctions. But he also cared for his wife, Nora, as her Alzheimer’s slowly got worse and, in 2023, composed Hawaii for her, a stunning work of pure emotion that ranks among his very best work. 

I’m not saying this excuses his other behaviour. But, like him or not, Lydon is one of the most fascinating figures in modern music, a man who could have said it all with the Sex Pistols - a genuinely era-defining band - and cashed in on his notoriety, but who instead poured his soul into re-inventing music again, going farther out and freer.

And better, too. Ultimately The Sex Pistols were like a slap in the face - sharp, nasty and quickly overcome; but Public Image Ltd. were a kick to the groin, deep, dark, lingering and rarely forgotten.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest