“I think he altered his perspective after working with us. He did some wonderful stuff after that. He got out of just heavy metal, and that's a good, good thing": John Lydon and Bill Laswell remember the making of Rise - with a little help from Steve Vai

John Lydon and Steve Vai composite image.

By 1985, John Lydon and Public Image Limited had reached an impasse. The exit of Keith Levene from the band in 1983 had been messy, with Levene releasing his own version of PIL’s fourth album before Lydon re-recorded its contents as This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get. Neither album did very well commercially and Lydon detected a lack of enthusiasm from Virgin Records regarding the promotion of his version.

“I didn’t know where I stood in the music industry,” Lydon told Sound On Sound in an interview from 2016. “The purse strings were being withheld and everything was difficult. PIL as a band was under real severe pressure and that pressure eventually cracked us and left me kind of stranded there. I didn’t know what really to do with myself.”