Venues are bulldozed to make way for more forests of empty gold-brick investment flats. The co-writer of All About That Bass trousers a mere £3,700 for 178m Pandora streams. Clean Bandit hire Cortana as their new manager. Principle, it appears, is for the past. Like it or not, we live in a sellout society – it only matters what you sell out for.
Enter John Lydon, dressed as a ninja Dappy, striding on to a stage built on saturated fats. Many balked when this anti-establishment punk icon donned the gentry’s tweed and became the face of Country Life, but it was all in the cause of art. He scoffed on the farmer’s wife’s greasy crumpets and battled emus in Ant & Dec’s D-list jungle gulag, purely to finance the 2009 reunion of post-punk pioneers PiL, the band that keyed the Ferrari of the new Romantic era, back after a 17-year hiatus with two uncompromising recent albums. Once he snarled: “I use the NME”; now he uses wider commercialist culture.
Pausing only to spit in a bin and swear affectionately at the crowd – he blames “that fucking internet porn” for his poor eyesight – Lydon is as confrontational as ever. Over his band’s cranky, grindhouse funk, he emits shrill, atonal whine-song like a dalek singing disco. Choruses and melodies – such as on This Is Not a Love Song, a noir rewrite of Squeeze’s Take Me I’m Yours – happen to him, he doesn’t get too involved. Throwing poses such as scary bears and harlequins, he comes on like a commedia dell’arte performer trying to ruin a perfectly good funk-pop band.
Yet, married to the wiry squalls of guitarist Lu Edmonds – a man who answers the question “what if Abraham Lincoln rocked?” – Lydon’s unrefined invective makes PiL an engrossing experience. Whether growling over the hypocrisies of the church in Religion (“the priests are coming … all down my leg!”), barking “Mob! War! Kill! Hate!” on the imposing Chant, or ranting about blocked toilets on Double Trouble, his petulant poetry confronts, amuses, disturbs and enlightens. Berating big business as “murderers!” on Corporate, from PiL’s most recent album What the World Needs Now, proves his fangs still sparkle – even if he conveniently ignores the buttery blood on his own hands.
A final Rise is his sop to pop, but at core Lydon is the eternal provocateur, still disrupting rock like a brick lobbed in a pond. And it’s tough to condemn his methods, considering Nasa is probably, at this very moment, flogging the Martian water reserves to Nestlé.
