Keith Levene
July 18, 1957 – November 11, 2022
The GUITARIST who was a founding member of both The Clash and Public Image Ltd has died from complications of liver cancer at the age of 65. The news was broken by the author Adam Hammond.
In a statement, Hammond described Keith Levene as “among the most innovative, audacious and influential guitarists of all time. He sought to create a new paradigm in music and with willing collaborators John Lydon and Jah Wobble, succeeded in doing just that. His guitar work over the nine minutes of Theme, the first track on the first PiL album, defined what alternative music should be.
“As well as helping to make PiL the most important band of the age, Keith also founded The Clash with Mick Jones and had a major influence on their early sound,” Hammond continued. “So much of what we listen to today owes much to Keith’s work, some of it acknowledged, most of it not. The world is a darker place without his genius. Mine will be darker without my mate.”
Levene was born in North London in 1957. As a youth he became obsessed with Yes guitarist Steve Howe. At the age of 15 he eventually worked for the band, as a member of the road crew for the Close To
The Edge tour.
In 1976 Levene hooked up with Mick Jones to form The Clash, but was a member for just eight months and never recorded with them. He did, however, play a significant role in the group’s history, after approaching Joe Strummer at a 101’ers gig and convincing him to join the band.
“[We] talked Joe into coming over to my squat in Shepherd’s Bush,” Levene told Perfect Sound Forever in 2001. “I was playing guitar with him and playing some 101’ers tunes. He went: ‘Hey man, I just love you and I love the way you play guitar.’ So I said: ‘Will you do it?’ And we got him in The Clash.”
In ’78 Levene joined former Sex Pistol John Lydon, bassist Jah Wobble and drummer Jim Walker in the founding line-up of Public Image Limited. He played on their first three albums – Public Image: First Issue in 1978, Metal Box the following year, and The Flowers of Romance in 1981 – and during the recording of their fourth album, 1984’s This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get.
Post-PiL, Levene’s career became more low key, but his angular, razor-edged playing continued to influence a generation of post-punk musicians, from Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, who said Levene “explored the possibilities of what you can do with the guitar”, to Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, who said he “reinvented rock guitar playing”.
Levene told the What Bitcoin Did podcast in 2020: “Did I want to be Page or Hendrix or any of those kind of things? No way. Not because it was hard, because I could play like that. I chose not to do that as a letter of intent. We don’t copy.”
Levene also worked on the demos for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ The Uplift Mofo Party Plan – the album the band made immediately prior to Frusciante joining – and collaborated with rappers Ice T and Tone Loc. He was part of industrial music supergroup Pigface, and also released five solo albums.
Mike Scott of The Waterboys also paid homage to Levene, tweeting: “Travel on well, Keith Levene. You innovated, you chimed, you Clashed, you soundtracked Johnny Rotten’s last great moments and you once trounced me at Space Invaders.”