New album
PiL’s comeback: between sarcasm and pain
The band Public Image Ltd. presents a new album. photo
© —/CZ! Promotions/dpa
After eight years, Public Image Ltd. back with a studio album. Shortly before publication, John Lydon has to cope with a stroke of fate. With an unusually soulful song, he remembers his late wife Nora.
“Nora loved the album,” writes Lydon (67) in the text accompanying the album. “She wouldn’t have wanted us to postpone it or change our plans.” The singer wrote the wonderful ballad “Hawaii” while she was still alive. When Lydon – even before Forster’s death – spoke about it on the TV show “This Morning”, he fought back tears. “Remember me, I remember you” – it is a touching declaration of love and a look back at happy times together. The song is “dedicated to everyone who is going through difficult times in their life, along with the person they care about most,” he said now.
A wild musical tour de force
public image ltd had taken part in the Irish preliminary round for the Eurovision Song Contest with “Hawaii”, but the audience chose the U2 imitation Wild Youth, which didn’t even make it past the ESC semi-finals. PiL had been given a chance with the moving song. But the fact that Lydon spoke slightly contemptuously about the ESC and its audience before the show was not well received and may have had a negative impact on the vote for his band.
Soft tones are the exception with the post-punk veterans anyway. Like each of their previous albums, “End Of The World” is a wild musical tour de force. It starts off with “Penge”, a dark, pounding monster of a song that almost invades gothic rock territory. Penge is also a borough in London. Lydon, who was born to Irish immigrants in the London Borough of Holloway, calls it “a sort of medieval Viking epic.”
Classic New Wave guitar riffs thunder in the title track. Another highlight of the album is “Car Chase”. With dominant synthesizers, fat guitars, massive drums and Lydon’s distinctive vocals, it’s “typically PiL”, as the frontman himself thinks. “It’s a heist of a song,” he describes the vibrant number, which deals with “a spooky scenario.” The song is told from the point of view of a mental patient who breaks out of a mental institution every night, sneaking around the city watching others without anyone noticing.
John Lydon is as usual sarcastic
At 67, the pugnacious and often misunderstood punk pioneer has lost none of his unpredictable charm on the microphone. He sings his way through the twelve songs sarcastically, slightly aggressively and with a good pinch of his provocative humor. In “Being Stupid Again” he seems to be targeting exaggerated political correctness. In “Pretty Awful” he swears about lazy grooves and rolls the R with pleasure and mood. In comparison, “Dirty Murky Delight” and “The Do That” don’t really want to ignite.
It’s been around 45 years since the Sex Pistols broke up after a botched US tour. Just one year later, Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon founded his band Public Image Ltd., which has followed its own musical rules ever since. Mixing pop, rock, dance, folk and more, PiL has had UK Top 20 hits “Public Image”, “This Is Not a Love Song” and “Rise”. However, that was a different cast.
The lineup, which includes guitarist Lu Edmonds, Scott Firth and drummer Bruce Smith, was formed in 2009 and recorded “This Is PiL” (2012) and “What the World Needs Now…” (2015). After eight years, John Lydon and Co. are now impressively back with their third joint album. “End Of The World” is a largely convincing late work by Public Image Ltd., who are going on an extensive European tour with it. In October the band comes to Germany for several concerts.