SHU Concert Review: Public Image Ltd., Providence, RI, May 9, 2010
David Shasha
Concert Review: Public Image Ltd., Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, Providence, Rhode Island, May 9, 2010
It is common knowledge that 1977 changed the face of British Pop music in a dramatic way. That year we witnessed the emergence of groups under the rubric of the label “Punk-Rock” which energized Rock music at a time when it had become bloated and sterile. Harking back to the simplicity of the basic three-chord template that had been central to the very roots of the music, groups like The Clash, The Jam, and Sex Pistols upped the ante by drawing from the militant socio-cultural critique of late-60s American bands like the MC5, New York Dolls, and Stooges. The British groups were deeply indebted to New York’s Ramones, but they took the three-chord format and widened it to encompass a whole bunch of socio-political issues. With their country facing massive unemployment and cultural decay, the British Punks warmly embraced radical political ideas and new multicultural influences; most importantly Jamaican reggae which acted as a form of political protest and an expression of deep personal values.
While Punk-Rock is acknowledged as a seminal moment in Pop culture, the immediate aftermath of 1977 is not as well-known. The Sex Pistols famously self-immolated after a short US tour of the Bible-thumping South; the idiotic actions of its bass player, the notorious Sid Vicious, leading to the destruction of the vision of the group by forcing it to degenerate into nihilistic barbarism and incompetence. But groups like The Clash, Wire, The Jam and Buzzcocks continued to record and tour and make very un-Punk-like music.
Therefore, 1979 was a very important year for the class of 1977. The Clash released their extraordinary “London Calling”; a brilliant collection of songs that aimed to reclaim the entire Rock and Roll legacy in one fell swoop, throwing in the Reggae template for good measure. “London Calling” eventually became a huge hit in America and turned them into big Rock stars.
Not so for groups like The Jam, Wire, and Buzzcocks who continued to remain under the American music radar. But each of those groups also expanded their musical reach and released very important work in that year.
The Jam reached their maturity with their 1978 album “All Mod Cons” which was a record that looked back to the great late 1960s masterpieces of The Kinks by examining humanity and society in a sensitive and insightful manner. The record’s highlight was the epic “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” which described the mugging of a young man by racist thugs in chilling detail. In 1979 they released “Setting Sons,” an even more ambitious thematic work that addressed the socio-cultural collapse in post-Imperial Great Britain.
Wire’s third album “154” was a densely layered production that incorporated electronics in a subtle but effective manner. It should be remembered that 1979 saw David Bowie completing what has become known as his “Berlin Trilogy”; a series of albums that were recorded in collaboration with former Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno. The “Berlin Trilogy” would go on to have an immense influence on the music of the 1980s and beyond. Its combination of Art music traditions, particularly that of the German experimental groups Can and Neu, and a strikingly post-modern sensibility. Wire’s “154” took the jagged and angular Rock of their first two records and deepened the focus to include new innovations that would also have an immense impact on future Pop music.
The Buzzcocks mastered the art of the three-minute Pop single and on their compilation “Singles Going Steady,” which grouped their A-sides and B-sides, they set a new standard for the Pop song in the Post-Punk world. Razor-sharp and aggressive, the Buzzcocks’ singles heralded a new era for the love song and was a harbinger of what would be called “New Wave.”
“New Wave” is now best known as the synthetic music of the 1980s and for its skinny ties and weird haircuts. It was a movement that was alternately seen as depressive and mopey or insipid and superficial in comparison with the supercharged and highly politicized Punk-Rock.
Less known is the direction taken by a number of artists who refused the commercial strategies of New Wave and began to explore different territories; terrain deeper, more cerebral, and infinitely more complicated than the facile platitudes of the New Wavers. Without attempting any comprehensive recounting of this new musical culture, we can point to two records that definitively mark the movement.
Joy Division, a young group from Manchester, released their debut album “Unknown Pleasures” in that same year of 1979 and astonished those who would enter its strange and dark world of intense claustrophobia and psychic pain and torment.
Led by their lyricist and lead singer Ian Curtis, who would tragically take his own life on the eve of their 1980 US tour, Joy Division’s music was a complex web of literary allusions and musical innovation. With their extraordinary producer Martin Hannett, Joy Division explored the deepest corners of the human experience. Their musical catalog stands to this day as an excellent example of primal, naked human emotion.
Exploring the inner recesses of our humanity, Joy Division did not garner a mass audience and because, unlike their peers U2, they never conquered the American market, they were not associated with the shiny new toys that became emblematic of New Wave. Over the course of time Joy Division has been acknowledged as a critically important group in Rock music, but they are still not a household word.
The career of the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, who after the group’s 1978 demise jettisoned the fake name and went back to calling himself by his real name Lydon, fits into this larger Post-Punk paradigm that I have been sketching out. His first recording after the collapse of the Pistols was a single called “Public Image” that attempted to break from his past. In the song he derides the manufactured image of Punk and seeks to reclaim his individuality from the “machine.”
The sound of “Public Image” was a short step from the Punk catchiness of the Sex Pistols; a bit more angular and lean, but still replete with the old energy and melodic hooks. It was the single’s B-side, “The Cowboy Song,” where the changes could be seen more clearly. “The Cowboy Song” embraced a true musical anarchy with its atonal riffs and primal screams. It was a record that many would find unlistenable; a situation that did not change much when Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. (PiL) released their debut LP “First Issue.”
“First Issue,” never officially released in the US, was a bizarre amalgamation of incantatory rants and jagged guitar parts over plodding drums. The album’s centerpiece was a bitter attack on religion that was delivered both acapella and with band accompaniment. Lydon was developing his own personal vision and growing into a new, more adult identity; an identity that did not make much sense to many at the time. The music was harsh and discordant – even by the standards of Punk-Rock. He was screaming because he was agitated about everything. He was a young artist looking for his voice and would soon find it.
A throwaway track which closed off the album in order to bring it to the agreed-upon length demanded by the group’s contract with Virgin Records, pointed the way to the future direction of the band. “Fodderstompf” was a disco song unlike any other. In a few short minutes, the track etched an insistent and hypnotic beat that caught the attention of the Downtown DJs of New York. The recording was remixed, expanded, and reissued as “1/2 Mix Megamix” that inaugurated the genre of Punk-Funk; an aggressive and combustible mixture of Punk attitude and bravado with the basic elements of Funk music. This genre would be adopted by groups like the Gang of Four, A Certain Ratio, and, later, by New Order – the group that emerged out of the ashes of Joy Division. Punk-Funk became a crucial new template for the New Wave movement and in today’s 80s revivalism.
But “Fodderstompf” was only a taste of the masterpiece that was to come the following year. With the release of a very strange package called “Metal Box,” PiL solidified its importance as a significant artistic force in Rock music. “Metal Box,” originally issued in a shiny silver film canister filled with three 12-inch records (later reissued in a conventional package and renamed “Second Edition”), embraced the new sounds of Bowie’s Berlin that came out of the band Can, as it rekindled Lydon’s relationship with Reggae and its derivative Dub music. Dub was the production technique used to remix Reggae tracks in a way that used spacey effects like reverb to change the spatial range of the recording. The Dub technique was the one that PiL adopted on “Metal Box.”
Songs like “Death Disco,” a harrowing song written to mark the passing of Lydon’s mother, “Memories,” and the album’s extended opener “Albatross,” ushered the listener into a wondrously mad world of clashing musical traditions that were marked by intensely personal lyrical meditations that could not be further from the Sex Pistols’ “anarchy.”
The songs on “Metal Box” were lyrically demanding and musically challenging. It was not a record for the faint of heart. But with repeated listening the record began to open up and display its true riches. Here was, in a very short period of time, the emergence of a major Rock voice. With the expert backing of Keith Levene on guitar and Jah Wobble on bass, PiL’s noise was both inviting and alienating. As the idea embodied in the title “Death Disco” indicates, this was music designed both for the dance-floor as well as the intimacy of headphones and private meditation.
Almost immediately, PiL found itself stymied in the commercial arena because of its lyrical complexity and musical density. The Rock scene was transformed by the release of U2’s “Boy” and their subsequent mega-success using many of the same angular techniques as PiL, but framing them in a commercially welcoming manner more amenable to the mass audience. It can be argued that U2 – still a massively successful group to this very day – toned down the new Post-Punk sound that was exemplified in Joy Division and PiL and made it palatable to the masses. This left the originals without the commercial base needed to maintain their careers.
Needless to say, the original PiL imploded just as the Sex Pistols did; but this time Lydon continued to anchor what was now his own ship. After a disastrous American tour in 1980, climaxed by a bizarre performance at New York’s Palladium where the group could not seem to get it together, Jah Wobble was booted from the group, depriving it of its signature bass-heavy sound.
The follow-up to “Metal Box,” “The Flowers of Romance,” drifted into even more avant-garde territory, but this time with less artistic success. The inability of the group’s members to remain united on the same page was fatal to the continued artistic success of the project. Soon Lydon would remake the group and release an uneven series of albums that were but a pale shadow of the epic “Metal Box.” He experimented with different musicians, sounds, and producers, but was never able to recapture the genius of “Metal Box.”
Fast forward to 2009 when Lydon, having reunited the Sex Pistols a number of times for some very profitable tours – it must be remembered that the Pistols were designed by the recently-deceased Malcolm McLaren who did not ensure for the financial well-being of the young men – was best known in England for his participation in a celebrity reality show and for a butter commercial. His music career had been sporadic. He had not recorded or toured with PiL since 1993 and made a solo album in 1997. In 1999 the group’s recordings were repackaged in a set called “Plastic Box” that made the case for the continuity of the project and reframed our understanding of the arc of the thing.
So a decade later, Lydon takes the money he made from the celebrity reality show and the butter commercial and makes the shocking announcement that PiL will be touring the UK at the end of 2009.
The initial reports from the tour – and from video clips posted on-line – show that Lydon means business. He brings back previous band members Lu Edmonds (guitar) and Bruce Smith (drums), and adds session player Scott Firth – who notoriously played live with the Spice Girls! – to round out the line-up. Lydon did media interviews which showed him to still be feisty but now quite circumspect. He did not bemoan the Pistols’ reunion tours, but he claimed that his real interest and his heart lay in PiL – PiL was the place where he felt he could truly be himself and express who he really was.
After many years in the 1990s of uneven albums and little critical or public interest, Lydon and PiL could come back to the stage with the slate wiped clean, able to reignite their music in a way that would be able to reclaim their legacy.
The UK tour was critically acclaimed and a hit with the public. An American tour was soon to follow.
Now my memories of PiL live come from that 1980 Palladium show which, as I said earlier, was a fiasco. The group did not really communicate with one another on-stage and the audience was restless. Lydon had maintained a stand-offish posture and frequently taunted the audience. His music had dramatically changed and his artistic vision had matured, but on-stage he was still as petulant and ornery as he was with the Sex Pistols. The combination, as I said, doomed the group and forced Lydon to continually shift his line-up.
The version of the group that I saw in 1989 as part of a package tour with New Order and the Sugarcubes featured John McGeoch of Siouxsie and the Banshees and was what might be called PiL “lite”; a more Pop-flavored confection that was more “New Wave” than “Metal Box.” Lydon by then had lost the thread of the project even as bits and pieces of it could still surface on songs like “Rise” and “Warrior.”
The 2009 PIL reunion was Lydon’s chance to prove his many critics wrong. Having been written off by some in the media as a fraud and a carpetbagger, Lydon had much to prove to both the critics and to his audience.
PiL’s performance at Lupo’s in Providence promised to test Lydon’s mettle. A small venue in a sleepy college town was not exactly Madison Square Garden. As Lydon said after the first song of the set, “It doesn’t matter if we play in front of two people or two million.”
And in truth, the show was the opposite of the one I saw in 1980. This time Lydon was out to prove something and it did not matter what he needed to do to get it accomplished. The band was tight and well-rehearsed and flawlessly performed the songs on the set-list. They were so good that they could have played any song from the PiL canon and made it work. Most impressive were the performances of less-than-stellar PiL tracks like “Tie Me to the Length of That” and “Bags”; the latter dovetailing into a brutally intense version of the “Metal Box” classic “Chant.”
Edmonds’ guitar playing was not only technically superior to Levene’s, but spun a magical web of innovation and energy that elevated each song. Similarly, Firth’s heavy bass rocked every crevice of the hall with Dub authority. Bruce Smith, a veteran of Post-Punk groups like Rip, Rig, and Panic is consistently reliable, but the guitar and bass combination is the one upon which the success of the music depends. In lesser hands, the PiL songs could be reduced to ashes; mere shadows of their former selves.
Now it is true that the PiL sound was first created by Levene and Wobble. They should get the credit for the innovative musical aspects of “Metal Box.” But innovation and consistent execution are not always the same things. For PiL to sustain its artistic legacy it is absolutely imperative that the sound be reproduced precisely and intelligently with discipline and focus. There is little doubt that Lydon wrote many brilliant songs, but without the mechanism to deliver them, they remain dead letters which are consigned to the old recordings. To breathe life into them requires the sort of restraint and competence that the group displayed in this concert.
Lydon crafted the set-list in a very interesting way. He mixed songs from all phases of his post-Pistols career, including a bunch of tracks from his solo album. The show got off to a shaky start with “This is Not a Love Song” because of the lack of energy of the small crowd. A number of dates on the US tour have amazingly not been sold out and the tour has shamefully not garnered the advance media interest it so deserves. We could probably chalk this up to the sorry state of music these days and the lack of intelligence and discernment in the US music press. This was certainly not the case in England where PiL’s reunion was hailed as return of the conquering hero. The situation in America has been decidedly different.
But, contrary to my apprehensiveness, Lydon worked the crowd relentlessly and earned every bit of his well-deserved success this evening. Not alienating the audience as he did in 1980, Lydon was a completely changed man. Unlike 1986, this did not mean that he was adopting a facile, cartoonish persona. He understood as an artist what was at stake and he gave the two-hour show his all. His use of a lectern to hold a book of lyrics reminded of Frank Sinatra doing the same thing at his late-era concerts.
Once “This is Not a Love Song” faded out and the first notes of “Poptones” began, it was clear that nothing was going to stop Lydon from laying out his visionary genius. The band behind him, unlike the initial PiL, was fully under his command and did all that was necessary to make these songs come to life. The music quite literally exploded out of the three instruments. The meditative picked guitar arpeggios of “Poptones” were anchored in the Dub effect pioneered by Wobble which wisely remained the standard template for the performance of all the songs in the concert. With the band in brilliant form, Lydon was free to go off into his incantatory mode. The music was finally finding its proper channel of articulation in spite of the fact that it has never become part of the common currency of the Rock audience and thus unfamiliar to some in the crowd.
Unlike the aforementioned U2 and groups like The Cure, PiL is an acquired taste; its music, as I have argued, being much more complex and nuanced. PiL is not a Pop act whose music acts as a comforting analgesic or balm. It is purposely designed in combative ways as an irritant. “Poptones,” “Memories,” and “Death Disco” are all harrowing examinations of our naked humanity; songs that do not make allowances for ignorance and apathy. They force the listener to seriously engage their ideas and feelings.
For those who could appreciate that vision, Lydon warmly responded. He gave everything of himself. He was part showman, part shaman, and part teacher. His vision touched on death, birth, love, joy, hate, fear, madness, and human pain and struggle. In other words, Lydon was bringing his audience to the very essence of what it means to be a person.
His vision is both touchingly profound but also forbiddingly intimidating. He asks his listener to look at what most frightens us as human beings. In exhorting the crowd during the performance of “Death Disco,” the song written about the death of his mother, he enacted a shamanistic death dance as if there was nothing else left in the world but the articulation of the pain and the torment. “Memories” examined the tension between past and future and the way that we process who we are in our minds and bodies. “Albatross” is a modified version of the song “Public Image” that looks to break free of what holds us back and to get beyond what oppresses us. The celebratory songs “Warrior,” “Rise,” and “Open Up” lift us up from our pain and travail into a celebratory optimism that is earned from years of pain and struggle.
All in all, Lydon was clearly attempting to reclaim his artistic legacy and there is absolutely no doubt that he succeeded in doing so with flying colors. After years in the wilderness of vapid celebrity life, Lydon came back to the public stage and presented his audience with a brilliant body of work, played with precision, intensity, and passion. The set flowed seamlessly from one song to another, unifying the disparate parts of Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols’ career.
In many ways, as shocking as it may be to say this, he convincingly made the case that PiL is far more important in an artistic sense than the Sex Pistols were. Mature, focused, and deeply meditative, PiL is a group that has had an immensely important role to play in the history of Rock music. In the process of reclaiming that legacy, John Lydon and the current members of the group are to be congratulated with the highest praise we can muster. In age of vapidity and fatuousness, PiL is that rare thing: a truly authentic group of musicians who mount the concert stage to deliver oracles of wisdom and musical genius. The awesome sound of the group has been enthusiastically described by the many fans who have been posting their positive reviews of the US tour on the PiL website; and while we can be somewhat skeptical of the gushing of fans, in this case, I can honestly say that their over-the-top comments are no exaggeration; the concert was that good.
The current PiL concerts are some of the most important and epochal in the history of Rock music. Having gotten it horribly wrong the first time around, Lydon has understood what is at stake for his legacy and the place of PiL in the artistic pantheon. Every aspect of PiL’s performance was charged with dramatic meaning, as if the world depended on it.
And in the end this is all we can ask of our artists; to provide us with a trenchant vision of life and the world. This is precisely what John Lydon has given us since he left the Sex Pistols. He has frequently been a few steps ahead of the crowd and plays to his own drummer. Like the late Ian Curtis, he is unafraid to go to the deepest and darkest places of our humanity and like Joy Division he is quite prepared to tie together his mad lyrical visions to the most otherworldly sounds.
PiL’s music is some of the most meaningful and powerful in the history of Rock and Roll and its sound is one of a furious intelligence. Experiencing the concert was like entering into the belly of the beast, only to emerge wiser and infinitely more human.
On a chilly Spring evening in Providence, Rhode Island I had the rare opportunity to witness one of the greatest concert performances I have ever seen in my life.
Concert note: The PiL US tour continues tonight, May 11th, in Baltimore and travels to Pittsburgh (5/14), Atlantic City (5/15), and Northampton, Mass. (5/16). For our local area readers, the tour ends with two shows in New York City next week. Performances are scheduled at Terminal 5 in Manhattan on May 18th and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn on May 19th. For more PiL information see their website: www.pilofficial.com
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