Tag Archives: Keith Levene

R.I.P. Keith Levene

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Yesterday we were very saddened to hear about the death of the great Keith Levene. It’s a massive loss, what more can we say? Here’s a couple of his magical musical moments that touched us over the years.

In the bootleg below from a very early Clash gig at The Roundhouse in 1976 that’s got to be him at 25.30 with that Spanish style guitar riff he used to brilliant use in PIL’s Memories years later (The version of this we used to own on cassette contained much more hiss than music).

He mentions that riff in an excellent interview here from years ago which is one well worth taking the time to read “There’s this normal Spanish guitar thing that goes dun-da-da-dun da-da-dun (quickly, imitating matador music)… It’s one of the first things I learned to play on guitar – very simple. I was very fond of that.”

There was a lot more output than just The Clash and Public Image. We remember going to a Meltdown at Royal Festival Hall years ago and seeing Keith performing with The Bug (with Warrior Queen providing vocals over the top) and you couldn’t miss that trade mark guitar sound. Rest in Peace Keith Levene.

(Pete) Murphy’s Law

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This week the above tune was discovered after a discussion at work about the band Bauhaus. It’s called Salahadeen by Jajouka Sound System which was a project by Dub Gabriel and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka plus one David J of Bauhaus.

I honestly never knew this at the time about Bauhaus and their love of Reggae: “How big an influence was reggae on the development of Bauhaus’s music? PM: Massive. We were listening to toasting music all the time, and David brought in a lot of bass lines that were very lead riffs. You can see how those basslines really formed the basis of the music, especially on Mask. We were more aligned to The Clash than anything else that was going around. We had no idea how to play reggae, but that was to our advantage because we expanded on that.” (from an interview with Pete Murphy here.)

And tonight on Youtube we found a lo-fi version of Salahadeen from Keith Levene which has a guitar hook around 0.51 for a minute or so (before it goes off on a tangent) that’s very very reminiscent of PIL’s “Poptones.”

Isn’t it funny what you find out through a discussion at work…