PiL

27/07/2010

Nothing to see here @ 02ABC, Glasgow

 PiL
02 ABC, Glasgow
1/5

When John Lydon announced last year that PiL were to reform and tour, many hoped that it would be the shuddering, propulsive unit that produced PiL’s first two albums; First Edition and Metal Box. With bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levine, Lydon quickly shed his Johnny Rotten persona and produced two peerless slabs of abrasive rock that would form the blueprint for the post-punk era. A further album, The Flowers of Romance, (minus Wobble) cemented PiL’s reputation as a restless, fearlessly inventive project before it all imploded under the weight of Lydon’s ego.

‘Gutted’ barely does justice to the sense one felt upon realising that it would not be that PiL that was to be reformed but the other PiL – Lydon’s subsequent vanity project where his Rotten persona was allowed to creep back in and the experimentalism was ousted in favour of a formulaic rock which foregrounded his increasingly clichéd lyricism.

‘This is not a Love Song’ was built on the most fragile of working relationships with Levene (who left shortly before it was recorded) and it subsequently became Lydon’s imprimatur to forge PiL in his own image – minus the deathless rhythms of his former colleagues. To choose it as an opener tonight essentially lets everyone know where Lydon’s sentiments lie and the artless, chugging undertow of the verse and its release into the titular chorus merely reminds the listener that (oh, yeah!) Simple Minds were doing something similar at the same time. And nobody likes to be reminded of that.

‘Albatross’ should have been a killer, though. On the album on which it originally appears (Metal Box), Levine, Lydon and Wobble constructed an inner world of frantic paranoia that paid its dues to their forebears while influencing countless others but tonight it is leaden and interminable.‘Poptones’ and ‘Chant’ from the same record are rendered as toothless as the later material; indeed, ‘Disappointed’ (from 1989’s 9) segues so seamlessly into ‘Chant’ that you would be forgiven for thinking that they were from the same record.

‘Flowers of Romance’ at least has a groove; something beyond the tame and considered replicas that precede it but Lydon merely blows it by including ‘Psychopath’ (from his cringingly-titled solo album ‘Psycho’s Path’) on the set-list; a pantomime insurrection that only highlights how fast and loose he is playing with the PiL legacy. Worst of all is an updated version of atheist clarion call, ‘Religion I’ from First Edition. While the original’s assault on organized religion was genuinely potent in 1979, today, rants about Nazi popes and paedophile priests are as much the preserve of middle-class garden parties as they are the hectoring iconoclast.

PiL’s musical legacy, it seems, may now only exist on disc and in memories but certainly not in the atrocity exhibition on show tonight. It’s time to move on; there’s nothing to see here.

Derek Kennedy