According to John Lydon, "Many people don't understand that it was
improvisation [...] It had to be, because we'd spent most of the money on the container – and so what we had to do was quite literally sneak into studios when bands had gone home for the night. And these were pretty rough
monitor mixes – no actual production." "Albatross'" was recorded live at
The Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, with Lydon 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." PiL recorded the song at an empty hall in
Brixton to test a three-bass sound system and worked with drummer
Jim Walker but did not record with him. 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 her recollection of the car and the men's voices, is how the police identified them. The police eventually stopped the car and found the cassette was still in the machine, with the same distinctive song on the tape." In his 2009 autobiography
Memoirs of a Geezer, Jah Wobble says that Poptones refers to "a journey we took in
Joe the roadie's Japanese car [..] and Joe had one of his dodgy cassettes playing.". He highlighted the song as "the jewel in the PiL crown. [...] That [bass] line is as symmetrical as a snowflake. [..] We had a drummer with us who was pretty good [...] but the bloke just couldn't get the right feel for 'Poptones'. [...] In the end Levene put the drums down on that track, his drums are a bit loose, but that is actually a good thing." Wobble cited "Careering" as his "second-favourite track from
Metal Box, and probably my favourite John Lydon vocal performance." Lyrically, the song is "basically about a gunman [in Northern Ireland] who is careering as a professional businessman in London." The song was recorded at the Townhouse during a quick nighttime session led by Wobble; he told journalist
Simon Reynolds in an interview: "If you listen to the drum rhythm it is very similar to the sort of rhythm a
drum and fife band would create. [...] By now Keith had got hold of a
Prophet synth, he used that on 'Careering'." Levene said, "It was never one of my favourite pieces because of what it was really about. [...] There was this guy that was an old mate of John's who lived in this apartment. At some point John decided he hated his guts. He just wrote this really nasty, finger-pointing, over-exaggerated, ripping parody of what the guy was – 'Society boy.' [...] This guy, [fashion designer] Kenny MacDonald, made his suit and all of ours and it made him look good to have the guys from PiL wearing his stuff. We'd wear it wrong and it looked even better, we didn't want the black leather jacket look like these punk bands. So John just decided to hate this guy, that's what happens and there's nothing you can do. He wouldn't be his lapdog and John thought he was a star and wanted that." Drummer Richard Dudanski cited it as one of his favourites. Album closer "Radio 4" was named after the
BBC radio station. "I called it 'Radio 4' because in England, you got
Radio 1,
2,
3...," said Levene. "Radio 1 played pop tunes. Before that, the BBC was so boring! It took until about 1985 before we had FM radio." "Radio 4" was recorded and performed by Levene, initially with
Ken Lockie from
Cowboys International on drums, at
Advision Studios. Levene played the bassline "as if it was Wobble playing," and played a
Yamaha String Ensemble to create the layered synth sounds. "I was using this thing and I start building it up, all I'm doing is taking different sounds from this thing and layering it. When I heard it, I pulled the drums out. I got on the idea of trying to make it sound orchestrated with the long chords played shorter. To get round the other stuff, I just used what was at hand. I played bass like I imagined Wobble would play bass to it, I wanted a Wobble feel to it. But basically, it's all me – that's when I realised I can completely do everything. You just hear the drums at the end. [...] With 'Radio 4', I was just alone in the studio one night, and I was overwhelmed with the sense of space. I just took everything out of the studio, moved the drum kit out and played everything myself, reproducing this sense of cold spaciousness I felt around me." ==Metal box packaging==