The only reason I didn’t buy the tour T-shirt was that they were unremarkable, if not ugly. I wish they had been as good as this show was.
My brother and I have made a point of going to see concerts since he’s been here in Western Mass. We’ve seen some good shows, and not a single stinker among them. We’ve been to mostly prog rock, since that’s my current interest – as stated before, it’s music I feel no urge to pick up an instrument and try to play but it still excites me about the aspect of music that has always motivated me most, which is… how do I put this… ensembleness? Is that the best term? I dunno, but it will do for now – and Michael is cool with it, but this year we’ve tried some non-prog options. We saw Gang of Four on their “goodbye” tour, Beth Orton in September, and on Saturday night we saw PiL, and finally learned that it actually is pronounced “pill.”
This was one of the rare occasions of late where there was an opening band, in this case a high-energy quartet operating under the name “Plague Vendors” who were mixed horribly but managed to thrive on their own determination. Lead singer guy did a creditable job: charismatic, athletic, channelling the band’s megawatt energy like a kyber crystal. The music was uptempo, loud and raucous, and muddily mixed. Couldn’t really pick out the bass sound at all from the muddy morass that included it, the kick pedal, and the general low-frequency moan the room has naturally. What’s with all of these terrible, terrible venues of late? People think you can just put up a stage inside of a cavernous garage and a good sound man will be able to sort it all out. Not really true, unfortunately. After the show I went online to hear some of what their music really sounds like, and I’d class them somewhere between the MC5 and the Brian James era of The Damned with a faint frisson of psychobilly mixed in. All in all a good set despite the disadvantages.
As we were driving home from Boston after seeing this show, we listened to Can’s Tago Mago, with the understanding that it’s one of Lydon’s favorite records. In the aftermath of the previous night’s set, one can easily identify it as a major influence on PiL. While the two musical experiences are quite different, the a focus on groove and trance ties the two together. My brother commented during the PiL show about “march after march” referring to the rock-steadiness of the beat from song to song, and I clearly hear a kind of hup-two-three-four-ness in Jaki Leibezeit’s drumming (accents on the two and four, of course!)
One of the main aspect of hearing PiL live that I looked forward to getting was the overall feeling of them as a working unit. So much of the band’s recorded output seems disparate, with different lineups and seemingly entirely different compositional approaches that I wondered how they were going to build a cohesive sound out of all of the seeming chaos. They managed it quite well. Recent material sat quite comfortably alongside a two-song sequence from Metal Box, “Rise” from Album merging seamlessly into an extended improv bit that touched on other of their songs and bits from outside their own ouvre. All told, it was a deeply layered soundscape built into a dub and post-punk framework that was both contextually related to the music that existed through the band’s formative years and an explorational quilt of impulses and unexpected influences.
And over and above everything else, there was John Lydon. My comment to Michael at the time was “Shatner vibes,” which I came to because there’s a huge amount of commitment and confidence there, driving through the limitations and the quirks to make a whole personna that is both iconic and… him. There was a related feeling between the two stylistically, and some important differences, too. At the same time you could see them both working within the Shakespearian hero framework, Shatner has more of a “man in the grey flannel suit” mainstreamness, where Lydon is reaching for something shamanic.
In discussing the show afterwards, I stated that Lydon is the best-ever lead singer who can’t carry a tune, and I think that’s right. He works in the groove, he reaches for moments of connection, and he gestures into the infinite. He was absolutely the focus of the entire experience and he took us someplace magical. He doesn’t sing so much as he chants and encants.
In sum, this was a fabulous evening, and a singular experience. At the end, standing on stage in a line with the rest of the band, John said something I never would have expected to hear from him. He called the other members of the band “his best mates.” That felt true and I found it touching, coming from a guy who has spent so much of his life at war with the world. It made me happy for him.
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