Keith Levene (born Julian Keith Levene, 18 July 1957 in Wood Green, Middlesex) is an English songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He was an early member of The Clash, and a founder member of Public Image Limited, along with John Lydon.
Keith Levene was an early member of The Clash and The Flowers of Romance (most notable for also featuring a pre-Sex Pistols Sid Vicious). Although he never recorded with The Clash, he co-wrote "What's My Name", featured on their first album. Levene has often claimed that he co-wrote several songs on The Clash's first album.
According to Simon Reynolds in his book Rip It Up and Start Again, Levene was an avid progressive rock fan who had served at age fifteen as a roadie for Yes on their Close to the Edge tour.
After the Sex Pistols disintegrated, Levene co-founded Public Image Ltd (PiL) with John Lydon. His guitar work was much imitated by several punk rockers and others, including The Edge of U2. On later PiL recordings, Levene would often forgo his guitar for synthesizer. He left PiL acrimoniously in 1983 just before shows which would later form the Live In Tokyo album. PiL had been working on what would become the album This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get. He released the original versions of the songs on his own label under the title Commercial Zone which was the original working title of the album. In 1985 he moved to Los Angeles where he formed a company with his second wife, journalist Shelly da Cunha. In mid-1986, Levene tried to produce demos for the album The Uplift Mofo Party Plan by the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Master Control in Burbank with engineers Steve Catania and Dan Nebenzal, but the band split up over drug money. Also in 1986, Levene worked together with DJ Matt Dike, experimenting with sampling techniques and hip-hop for Ice T and Tone Loc on their early recordings for Delicious.
Jah Wobble (born John Joseph Wardle, 11 August 1958 in Stepney, London) is an English bass guitarist, singer, poet and composer. He became known to a wider audience as the original bass player in Public Image Ltd (PiL) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but left the band after two albums. Following his departure from PiL, he went on to a successful solo career, continuing to the present. Jah Wobble has four children; two daughters, actress Hayley Angel Wardle and Natalie Wardle from his first marriage, and two sons with his second wife, the Chinese-born guzheng player and harpist Zi Lan Liao. In 2009, he published his autobiography, Memoirs of a Geezer.
His father, Harry Eugene Wardle, was a tea clerk with the East India Company and worked later in life as a postman, while his mother, Kathleen Bridget (née Fitzgibbon), was a school and County Hall secretary. Wobble grew up with his family in Whitechapel's Clichy Estate in London’s East End, and is a long-time friend of John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) whom he had met in the 1970s along with John Simon Ritchie (later known as Sid Vicious) at London's Kingsway College (now Westminster Kingsway College). Along with John Gray they were known as "The Four Johns". Jah Wobble acquired his stage name through the drunken, mumbled version of Wardle's name by Sid Vicious, which Wobble kept because "people would never forget it". According to Rotten's autobiography, Wobble was once on the short list of replacements for original Pistols bassist Glen Matlock.
A low-life or lowlife is a term for a person who is considered morally unacceptable by their community, especially those who exploit others for their own selfish purposes. Examples of people who are often called "lowlifes" are the dregs of society: drug dealers, drug users, alcoholics, those with bad hygiene, thieves, liars, thugs, hustlers, con artists, griefers, pimps and spammers.
Often, the term is used as an indication of disapproval of antisocial or destructive behaviors, usually bearing a connotation of contempt and derision. This usage of the word dates to 1911.
John Joseph Lydon (born 31 January 1956), also known by the former stage name Johnny Rotten, is a singer-songwriter and television presenter, best known as the lead singer of punk rock band the Sex Pistols from 1975 until 1978, and again for various revivals during the 1990s and 2000s. He is the lead singer of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd, which he founded and fronted from 1978 until 1993, and again from 2009. Throughout his career, Lydon has made controversial or dismissive comments about the royal family and other subjects. There has been a recent revival of a 1980s movement to have Lydon knighted for his achievements with the Sex Pistols. Q Magazine remarked that "somehow he's assumed the status of national treasure."
Lydon's personally crafted image and fashion style led to him being asked to become the singer of the Sex Pistols by their manager, Malcolm McLaren. With the Pistols, he penned singles including "Anarchy in the U.K.", "God Save the Queen" and "Holidays in the Sun", the content of which precipitated the "last and greatest outbreak of pop-based moral pandemonium" in Britain. The band caused nationwide uproar in much of the media, who objected to the content of Lydon’s lyrics, and their antics, which included swearing on live television, in which Steve Jones called Bill Grundy a "fucking rotter". Due to the band's appearance in the media, Lydon was largely seen as the figurehead of the punk movement in the public image although this idea was not widely supported amongst the punk movement itself. Despite the negative reaction that they provoked, they are now regarded as one of the most influential acts in the history of popular music.
Thomas James "Tom" Snyder (May 12, 1936 – July 29, 2007) was an American television personality, news anchor and radio personality best known for his late night talk shows The Tomorrow Show, on the NBC television network in the 1970s and 1980s, and The Late Late Show, on the CBS Television Network in the 1990s. Snyder was also the pioneer anchor of the primetime NBC News Update, in the 1970s and early 1980s, which was a one-minute capsule of news updates in primetime.
Snyder was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to parents Frank and Marie Snyder. He received a Catholic upbringing and attended St. Agnes Elementary School and graduated from Jesuit-run Marquette University High School. He attended Marquette University, after which he had originally planned to study medicine and become a doctor.
Snyder had loved radio since he was a child and at some point changed his field of study from pre-med to journalism. He once told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Tim Cuprisin that broadcasting became more important to him than attending classes, and he skipped a lot of them. Snyder began his career as a radio reporter at WRIT (unrelated to the present-day FM station) in Milwaukee and at WKZO in Kalamazoo (where he was fired by John Fetzer) in the 1950s. For a time he worked at Savannah, Georgia AM station WSAV (now WBMQ).