at The Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, with the singer free-forming his lyrics. Guitarist Keith Levene, bassist Jah Wobble, and drummer David Humphrey made the song up as they went along, and recorded the song in one take. PiL also recorded at Townhouse Studios in West London with session drummer Richard Dudanski and produced the songs "Memories", "No Birds", "Socialist", and "Chant"; Levene recalls that "Memories" features him playing "this normal Spanish guitar thing that goes dun-da-da-dun da-da-dun... it's one of the first things I learned to play on guitar, very simple. I was very fond of that [...] I just had the guitar going through an Electric Mistress." "Death Disco" – released as a single in late June 1979 – was remixed and retitled "Swan Lake" for Metal Box. "I realised," said Levene, "that this tune that I was bastardising by mistake was 'Swan Lake', so I started playing it on purpose but I was doing it from memory. You can hear that I'm not playing it exactly right. It just worked. [...] There's a few versions of that. The one on Metal Box is version two, which is very different from the simpler, original 12-inch version." The lyrics are based on Lydon's mother dying of cancer: "When I had to deal with my mother's death, which upset the fuck out of me, I did it partly through music. I had to watch her die slowly of cancer for a whole year. I wrote 'Death Disco' about that. I played it to her just before she died and she was very happy. That's the Irish in her, nothing drearily sympathetic or weak." PiL recorded the song at an empty hall in Brixton to test a three-bass sound system and worked with drummer Jim Walker but didn't record with him. "Poptones" was one of the first songs recorded for the album, according to Levene, who stated that he inadvertently played "Starship Trooper" during the song. According to Lydon, "Poptones" was based on a story "straight out of the Daily Mirror" about a girl who was kidnapped and "bundled, blindfolded, into the back of a car by a couple of bad men and driven off into a forest, where they eventually dumped her. The men had a cassette machine with an unusual tune on the cassette, which they kept playing over and over. The girl remembered the song, and that, along with