Keith Levene re-imagined and re-recorded PiL’s unreleased fourth album in 1984 as the mainly instrumental Commercial Zone.

Arguably the greatest guitarist to emerge from the post-punk scene, Keith Levene extracted a unique sound from his instrument.

A metallic, jagged noise, all tension and texture, it hovers in the space between melody and dissonance; like all the greatest guitarists, he sounds like no one else.

When Levene left PiL after three landmark albums in 1983, following bass guitarist Jah Wobble out of the door, for me that was the end of PiL; at least the end of my interest in them.

Forty years after recording a fourth PiL album, only for Lydon to reject it and start again, Levene re-recorded it without Lydon or the rest of the band – and released it as Commercial Zone 2014.

It began life back in 1982 in New York when Lydon and Levene, drummer Martin Atkins and bass guitarist Pete Jones were recording songs for a fourth album in New York, having relocated there from London.

But after the release of a solitary single, This Is Not A Love Song / Blue Water, Levene and Jones left the band and Lydon abandoned the album.

He re-recorded five of the songs (and a couple of new ones) with Atkins and some session musicians and, as owner of the band name, released it as PiL’s fourth album – This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get – on Virgin Records.

Levene also released his own version at his own expense on his own label (PIL Records Inc) in direct competition with the official PiL album but Virgin took legal action to stop distribution after the first 40,000 copies were pressed and distributed.

Forty years later Levene crowdsourced funds to re-record his own reimagined version and went to Prague to complete the mostly instrumental album that would become Commercial Zone 2014.

And this beautiful instrumental, SFAZ, captures everything magical about the late Keith Levene, who taught himself the guitar at the age of 12.

This icon of post-punk – the original guitarist in The Clash – regarded an idol of prog, Steve Howe of Yes, as “the greatest guitarist in the world”, having watched him up close while working as a roadie for the band’s drummer Alan White.

His influence stretches far beyond postpunk, where he had fellow travellers in Banshees guitarists John McKay and John McGeoch and Killing Joke’s Geordie Walker, with The Edge acknowledging him as a source of his sound with U2.

I was lucky enough to see him just the once, when he came onstage with his old PiL comrade Jah Wobble a few years ago to play a couple of songs from their classic album Metal Box, not long before his death in 2022.