John Lydon's post-Pistols band Public Image Ltd (PiL) had just released second album Metal Box as three 12-inch singles in a metal canister - an innovation that was deemed a step too far by record label Virgin, which demanded PiL return 35,000 of its advance to fund the packaging.
If the comment was everything the press had come to expect from the acid-tongued carrot top, the 60 minutes of music pressed into the trio of platters was not.
Metal Box completed the process of skin-shedding that Lydon had begun on PiL debut First Issue (1978), enabling him to roam free in his new guise as post-punk poet, unfettered by the verse/chorus/verse structures of rock.
Together with bass player Jah Wobble, guitarist-synth player Keith Levine and a clutch of ring-in drummers, he forged a brutal new form of dance music that would later be echoed in the sounds of industrial dub, trip-hop and electronica.
The album (or "tin of material" as Lydon describes it) manifests a wonderfully contradictory spirit. It's as if the frivolous heart of disco has been torn from its chest; the damaged body reliant on muscle memory as it shuffles to Wobble's spleen-rumbling, cyclical bass lines, dodging the shards of splintered ice that stream from Levine's aluminium-necked guitar.
Lydon experiments, voicing each track according to whim. He chants, he warbles, he whines nothing that can be properly defined as singing, all the while seeming to draw his inspiration from the belly of the musical jam rather than from a lyric sheet.
In every sense, there is no middle ground here. Even the mid-range frequencies that would normally round out an album are stripped from the mix. Rock is dead, and the thing that has replaced it is utterly uncompromising.
