The Clash’s Mick Jones and the band’s manager Bernie Rhodes were also both Jewish.
In 1978, Keith Levene teamed up with Johnny Rotten, who had now reverted to his birth name John Lydon, to form Public Image Ltd (PiL)
Rhodes was the protégé of Malcolm McLaren who took what he saw as the Jewish energy of New York and transplanted it into London, managing the Sex Pistols. Rhodes, meanwhile, took his intense interest in leftist politics and used it to encourage the Clash to start writing “political songs”.
They signed to the record label, Rough Trade, founded by Geoff Travis whose communal ethos was inspired by his time spent living on a kibbutz.
However, Levene left before they had even played live and before their first album was released. It has been speculated that if Levene had never left the Clash, their music could have been much more interesting and their message more politically effective. In his own words, he “put any bollocks there were into them.”
Levene was then recruited by Johnny Rotten for his band Flowers of Romance. By February 1977, the band had split having never performed live or recorded. However, the band’s Sid Vicious had written three songs including Belsen Was a Gas with hits lyrics directly referring to the Holocaust which, when the Sex Pistols were formed, they started performing in late 1977.
In 1978, Keith Levene teamed up with Johnny Rotten, who had now reverted to his birth name John Lydon, to form Public Image Ltd (PiL).
Despite their music not being easy on the ears, the band went on to score a UK top-ten hit with their debut single Public Image that same year.
The opening track on their second album, Flowers of Romance in 1981, Four Enclosed Walls has a very Middle Eastern sound, compounded by the lyrics, Allah/Allah/Doom sits in gloom in his room/Destroy the infidel/In a mosque/In a ghost/Is a sword/Is a Saracen/Allah/Joan of Arc was a sorcerer/The trilogy, the desert sand/Scriptures in the tower of Babel/Allah.
Another of the album’s tracks, Phenagen”, included the words, You are an Ostrich/Bury your head/Personal Austwich. Austwich is an alternate spelling for Auschwitz, which is how it is rendered on some websites. Another track, credited to Lydon and Levene, was called Hymie’s Him. Lydon admitted that the title was his idea “to insult [Keith]”.
Julian Keith Levene was born in Muswell Hill, north London, the youngest child of May née Lovell, who ran a hairdressing shop, and Harry, a Jewish tailor who had a raincoat business. Levene had two older sisters. When he was three years old his mother consulted a doctor because of his obsession with staring at the vinyl records as they went round and around.
As a child, Levene pestered other tailors in Petticoat Lane for odd jobs.
After prep school, he won a place at grammar school, where his headmaster told him that his absorption in music made him “antisocial”.
He left school at 15 to work in a factory, which he described as Dickensian, but his initial immersion in the music industry came as a roadie for the early-1970s prog-rock band Yes.
It was in his late teens and early 20s that he formed the Clash, Flowers of Romance and then PiL.
After a promising beginning – Flowers of Romance which Levene described as “the least commercial record ever delivered to a [record] company” - reached No 11 on the UK album chart, Levene and Lydon fell out over creative differences. By 1983, Levene was suffering from a heroin addiction and assembled most of their fourth album on his own.
Unhappy with Levene’s efforts, Lydon re-recorded the album without him. It was released as This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get in 1984. Simultaneously, Levene released the original tracks as Commercial Zone.
In later years, Levene collaborated with a variety of performers across a range of genres, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jah Wobble (who had also been in PiL) and rappers Ice T and Tone Loc. In 1989, he released his first solo release, Violent Opposition. Four further solo albums followed, culminating in Commercial Zone 2014. He also published three books about his early musical experiences.
Levene’s first wife was the American musician Lori Montana, with whom he had a son named Kirk. They later divorced.
He then moved to Los Angeles with his second wife, Shelly da Cunha, but they also divorced. He later lived with his partner Kate Ransford.
Levene died from complications of liver cancer at his home in Norfolk. He is survived by his partner, Kate Ransford, his son Kirk, and his sister Jill.
Julian Keith Levene: born July 18, 1957. Died November 11, 2022
