Thursday, 22 July 2010
Rotten was a persona... this is Lydon the person. This what you want, this is what you get.
As John Lydon will keenly tell you, The Sex Pistols may be his body and soul, but PiL are his heart and mind. And PiL, reformed – of a sort – returned to London for their second visit after a seventeen year absence.
It’s admittedly hard to ‘reform’ a band that seems to have had more lineup changes than The Fall – with 27 members passing through the band in their initial thirteen year lifespan, and a new lineup with each album, including five guitarists, seven drummers, seven bassists, and a multitude of other players, the idea of PiL being anything as stable as a set of people, instead of an identity, an attitude, a way of thinking is woefully antiquated. Which is good. Because PiL now isn’t a band, as such, but a collective of musicians with a shared repertoire.
And, as my ears tell me, PiL are far better than The Pistols : a wider texture and palette, more material, and more currency. The Pistols were always lightning caught in a bottle ; here, PiL are a much more valid, current proposition. And, since it’s been 13 years since Lydon last released a new album, Lydon needs to bring back his muse and make it flame. On stage, there’s no moment where this band are anything less than a muscular, committed, and vital entity.
In the Pistols, Lydon narrated. He occupied a persona, played a role. In PiL, Lydon emotes. Lydon is a person, being himself. The pantomime gestures and overwrought, objectionable identity is tamed down ; albeit only slightly. Because PiL is, more than anything, Lydon being honest artistically, aided and abetted by a cohesive band that is a continuation of a previous entity.
Hyperbole aside, PiL open with a quadruple whammy of “This Is Not A Love Song” that swiftly melds into “Poptones”/”Memories”/”Albatross” : songs that maybe history would’ve forgotten, but a handful of people in each town haven’t. The records have dated, the production cheap, tinny, promising something that only a big set of speakers can deliver.
“This one is for all the ex-PiL members who aren’t here because they wanted more money”, Lydon sneers before a relentless “Tie Me To The Length Of That”. Sure, it’s about money. Every time you are paid for anything – it’s about money. But PiL, here, were a band abandoned by a frustrated record company, and now resurrected through butter adverts. It is, like many such bands, a cottage industry, a self-sufficient enterprise free of the obsolete model. Here and now, PiL are both retrospective and forward thinking ; the packaged and tamed nostalgia of the Pistols End-Of-The-Pier kneesup relegated to the history.
With PiL, Lydon took away the narration of the Sex Pistols, and reveals the non-secret that whilst the Pistols were a great rock band, that’s also all they ever were. And PiL were a rare, weird, and difficult thing of beauty : I haven’t heard anything quite as challenging or atonal as the fiercely delivered “Four Enclosed Walls”. Nor has Lydon ever seemed quite so engaged onstage to my eyes – face scrunched up, eyes closed, hands outstretched, lost utterly in a moment, a cacophony. Songs cease to exist, but become blocks of noise, as they rolls effortlessly into each other in 20 or 30 minute barrages as songs turn in a bar into a different number.
The line up, Bruce Smith on drums, Lu Edmonds on guitar, both from the mid Eighties incarnation of the band, are joined by ex Spice Girls bassist Scott Firth. With the huge sound coming from the stage, and the array of technology on display, it reminds me of latter U2 – where the guitar pedal triggers a cavalcade of sound – and there’s an enormous noise that simply cannot come from just guitar, bass, and drums, and also, shows just how much U2 have been influenced by, and made palatable, the unique PiL attack.
And, even without the focused emoting of John Lydon, the band are a sonic battery. On record, the thin guitar sound and sparse drums can sound hollow. Here, with the volume tuned up louder than any gig I have ever heard barring The Stooges, what sounds thin on record is wiry and tense, an oppressive open space instead of an emptiness. Bass rolls and thumps and rumbles. Guitar slices the air.
Lu Edmonds, visually a replica of ‘Joshua Tree’ period Edge, guitar, hat, and checked shirt in all, doesn’t perform a single song he both wrote and recorded for the band in his three year tenure tonight, though he toured and wrote three albums with the band. That said, he played these songs so many times in the Eighties, he practically owns them now : What feels important is not who is playing the songs, but what is being played, and how. Whilst most of the material is taken from the first three albums, the bands long and varied journey is fully represented : whilst there is nothing from 1987’s “Happy?” or 1992’s “That What Is Not”, but plenty that covers the wide range. The hollow howl of Lydon surrounded by pounding drums, intoning “I’ll take the furniture and start all over again” is worth more than a million songs from a trillion imitators.
Nonetheless, here and now, PiL are intense, powerful, and challenging. Latter period tracks, where the band almost – but not quite – became the world’s weirdest stadium rock band – with songs such as “Warrior”, “Disappointed”, and “Rise” – sound more fluid, more angry, more vibrant than ever, as Lu coaxes out of his multitude of pedals strange squeals and roars, and the rest of the band seem almost obliviously lost in their own, singular worlds. Lydon is still an angry ringmaster, lambasting the catholic church, fans who sit down, and anything else comes to mind.
In the meantime, there are many that maybe should realise that this is not 1977 anymore, nor 1981, but 2010. There is no space in this world for sheep with bike locks around their necks, nor fat old men who think that because a band is playing it’s a justification to fight, throw drinks over people, and push spectators over. Leave that for Friday Night outside The Docker’s Fist. This isn’t just music, or art, but the very currency that raises man from animal, culture, words, songs – these are the cultural resistance.
And then the bassline roars up to “Public Image” and a song I’ve wanted to see with my own eyes for two decades becomes real. For the final song PiL take the classic Leftfield / Lydon song “Open Up”, and transform it into some kind of roaring, furious, martial art set to rhythms. At 54, Lydon is matched only by a handful of artists for a consistency of vision, and an achievhement, that he made it this far without losing sight of the energy that drove him, and many others, forward in life : a battle against complacency. With guitars. This is not a love song, but an artist that loves the way the world could be and how we have all been betrayed by the world made for us. Or something. If nothing else, PiL have a validity and a relevancy to today that The Pistols haven’t had for a long time. This band are the muscled realisation of everything they ever promised to be. This is what you want, this is what you get.
set:
this is not a love song / poptones / memories / annalisa / length / albatross / 4 enclosed walls / flowers of romance / psychopath / warrior / usls1 / death disco / disappointed / bags / chant / religion / public image / rise / open upOnly registered users can write comments.
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