Music
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PIL HAVE REMAINED EXPECTATION-CONFOUNDING AWKWARD SODS Hitlist THE BEST ROCK, POP, JAZZ & FOLK*
✽✽ Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Low whip out some classics alongside tracks from newest album Yes as they bring the epic Pandemonium tour to Glasgow. Support comes from Joy Divider and New Orderer Bernard Sumner and his new musical endeavour, Bad Lieutenant. SECC, Glasgow, Thu 17 Dec. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Public Image Ltd See preview, left. O2 Academy, Glasgow, Fri 18 Dec. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Babyshambles Drug addict, novelist, blood-artist, supermodel-seducer and sometime solo musician Peter Doherty brings the ‘Shambles back to the Barras. Head down to appreciate the music while tabloid journos wait around for something controversial to happen. Barrowland, Glasgow, Fri 18 Dec. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Big Ned Glaswegian ‘Doom‘n’Roll’ five-piece get set to rock, off the back of their successful stint supporting Electric Six. Dress code of cowboy hats and dark sunglasses applies. To them, not you. Although you’re welcome to give it a go. Green Door Studio, Glasgow, Fri 18 Dec. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Elvis Shakespeare Christmas Show St Jude’s Infirmary, My Electric Love Affair and Blue Wicked Spasm Band join the 11-strong line-up populating the Leith Walk music-and-book store’s Christmas celebrations. Elvis Shakespeare, Edinburgh, Sat 19 Dec. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ ballboy Having John Peel as a fan still counts as a pretty big accolade, even five years after his death. Go see one of his favourites fill the Cab Vol with their lyrical wit and melodious tunes. Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, Sun 20 Dec. (Rock & Pop) 17 Dec 2009–7 Jan 2010 THE LIST 71
Here’s Johnny
When The Sex Pistols split, John Lydon’s next project was the ever-morphing body of artists known as Public Image Ltd. Neil Cooper traces the band’s history
‘E ver get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Those were John Lydon’s last words as Johnny Rotten at the close of The Sex Pistols’ chaotic 1978 San Francisco swansong. It was a sentiment echoed this September when the first live dates in 17 years by Lydon’s next (and infinitely more maverick project) Public Image Ltd, were announced. Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of PiL’s second album, Metal Box, first released, dub-plate style, as a trio of 12”s contained in film canister packaging, anticipation was high that the ‘classic’ line-up of Lydon, guitarist Keith Levene, bassist Jah Wobble and one of many drummers behind it would reunite in much the same way as surviving Pistols had before.
As sole constant between PiL’s Christmas day 1978 debut and the extended hiatus begun in 1992, however, Lydon called on late period members, multi- instrumentalist Lu Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith, to join bassist Scott Firth, whose credits include The Spice Girls. Punk Rock? Almost certainly not.
Because, far from playing to type, PiL have remained expectation-confounding awkward sods from the day they exposed rock‘n’roll rebellion as a sham when they revealed they weren’t anything so old-fashioned as a band, but a company. PiL were named after a Muriel Spark novel and served up an angrily contrary stew of free noise and dub dirge repetition – part Can, part King Tubby, part performance art. PiL looked like they could fall apart any minute, and often did. They took ‘Death Disco’, an anguished howl provoked by Lydon’s mother’s
death, onto Top of the Pops. In New York they played behind a screen and rioting ensued. Their Dadaist music hall provocations pushed boundaries between audience and performer in a way dance culture embraced later. In TV interviews they remained bloody-mindedly misunderstood.
Thirty-seven members passed through PiL, and on joining in 1986, both Edmonds and Smith had form that binds them to a broader post-punk family tree. Edmonds played with The Damned, and then The Mekons. He formed bogus Balkan ensemble 3 Mustaphas 3 with Ben Mandelson, who briefly joined Magazine, whose original guitarist John McGeogh also played in late-period PiL. Smith’s roots in PiL are even closer to home. He drummed with The Pop Group, whose avant-funk- noise was similarly incendiary. Smith also played with The Slits, whose manager Nora Forster, mother of Slits vocalist Ari Up, is Lydon’s wife.
As for Firth, who’s played with John Martyn and Elvis Costello, bear in mind that everyone from Miles Davis to ex Cream drummer Ginger Baker have contributed to PiL’s strange brew. Wobble was asked to join the tour, but said no for artistic and financial reasons. How the shows turn out is anybody’s guess. Like the panto season they run in tandem with, however, there’ll be heroes to cheer and villains to boo. Both will probably go by the name of Lydon. Which perhaps ain’t so Rotten, after all.
Public Image Ltd, O2 Academy, Glasgow, Fri 18 Dec.