gave us, that the American public needed John Lydon to make a tough heavy metal album. The material that we had written for '9' was written on computers, as was the new stuff, and he said 'This is just disco!' He wanted to throw out Allan and Bruce and use his own musicians.” “When we recorded '9', the engineer Dave Meegan recorded a lot of it digitally, but then went and used my noisy old washing machine rack to master it, to get that analogue feel.” Lu Edmonds (1999): “I think Virgin always wanted Bill Laswell to get involved again, the second time for '9' there was this complete fiasco [...] Virgin negotiated with Laswell on a very flimsy basis to record '9', and Laswell was saying 'Well, the only way I ever record an album is with my own musicians,' and Virgin would go 'Don't worry, we'll send the band anyway, and if you like them you can use them,' and Laswell's going 'It's up to you if you want to take the risk, but if I don't like the band I'm not going to use them!' We went into the studio on the first day, and he made Bruce so nervous by being so cool, he's Mr Cool, and Bruce did all the songs at kind of double speed, he was so nervous. And that night Laswell turned to John and said 'The band won't do!' We'd been there a week – we were committed to be there for three – and Virgin said 'Well, we did think that might happen.' And suddenly the band are $80,000 in the hole, John was absolutely livid! [...] After this time when we were in New York with Laswell, we did the Estonian date [...] then after that gig I suddenly realised my ears were just – I'd had a little tinnitus. Then it got really bad and I went to see a doctor, and he said 'You've got to stop playing.' [...] And I just fell into a huge pit of depression, everything in my life just collapsed. I had to get out and I thought it was better I got out before I was on the album [...] I didn't take any advances for '9' but John gave me the royalties [...] They ended up with Stephen Hague, who also is a great producer, but again, '9' was completely