Public Image Limited at Tripod on June 10th 2011
Review: Liam Cagney
Photos: Sean Conroy
The current PiL reunion marks the comeback John Lydon must have hoped for. When PiL appeared at last year’s Electric Picnic, in contrast to the tepid reception the Sex Pistols had received two years earlier, there was a triumphant feeling in the air. And so it was again here.
Despite the high asking price for tickets, the venue bustled – a mixture of old punks, young hipsters, and everyone in between. The set opened in lukewarm fashion with ‘Public Image’, the band’s signature tune. The pace was sluggish – a middle-aged rather than a youthful tempo, the guitar lines self-consciously approximate, Lydon at the front looking nervous – and it didn’t bode well.
Thankfully most of what followed was much better. ‘Home is where the Heart is’ segued into a dense, leviathan ‘Albatross’, the night’s highlight. Scott Firth hammered out the relentlessly looping dubby bassline while Lydon rapped out lyrics fragmented like broken glass. Here as elsewhere he looked like an expressionist version of Samuel Beckett. Hearing this tune live confirmed PiL’s proximity to contemporary UK bass music such as Shackleton.
During ‘This is not a Love Song’ somebody threw a shoe at Scott Firth, who spun around with his bass and scolded the stage-hand. Lydon ran through the song with the help of lyrics placed on a stand as an aide-memoire.
The highlights of the set were the tunes off PiL’s first three albums. ‘Poptones’ appeared from nowhere; its horrible carousel spiral could have gone on forever. ‘Deathdisco’ flashed by like a car past a red traffic light. Again, it was interesting to hear this music performed live – the song with its sped-up dub quality, and its consequent closeness to recent dub-influenced dance music.
Lydon has assembled excellent personnel for this current line-up of PiL. Looking like a rustic folkie, Lu Edmonds commanded a violent squall from his guitar, also using an electric mandola. For ‘The Flowers of Romance,’ one of the night’s other highlights, he produced an electric banjo, whose strings he resonated with a violin bow, while Firth used an electric double-bass.
Always courting controversy, after ‘Chant’ Lydon let us know that ‘only football hooligans understand anarchy.’ ‘Religion’ was appropriately intense, Lydon dripping with malice at the microphone, and making the sound man turn the bass up to an absurd, bowel-threatening level.
Encores were a bopping ‘Memories’, which sounded like techno antedating techno, and ‘Open Up’, which is techno, and which Lydon let loop and loop until the audience had exhausted itself.
Though there will be the detractors and haters, and though there were occasional moments when a dad-rock feel reared its head, this was an excellent gig and a welcome return to the fray.