Public Image Ltd.
There are moments when the new album by Public Image Ltd, What The World Needs Now … sounds like frontman John Lydon leaning on his old punk infamy and letting his résumé do the performing. Between the cute irony of the album’s title, with its amputated reference to Hal David, and the cheeky opener, “Double Trouble,” which skewers domestic drudgery, the erstwhile Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols fame is effectively mugging for the camera, as if to say, “I’m baa-aack.”
But the knowingness also works in Lydon’s favor. It’s funny, and he knows it, that this old slayer of queens and prime ministers can now be heard complaining — or at least mimicking complaints — about household maintenance. (He’s been married to the same woman since 1978.)
Staying angry is tough work, career-wise, in the arts, especially if the field keeps rewarding you for sticking around, but this Brit-punk godfather is still nursing enough spleen to sound off believably. The fury that is an expression of Lydon’s disappointed humanism continues to serve him pretty well as he nears 40 years (spitting) in the public eye.
Most of that stretch, he has spent in a conflicted relationship with his Pistols legacy and his early Rotten persona, all while he invested himself a great deal more in his prolific and varied if unavoidably less celebrated output as John Lydon.
Amazingly, in hindsight, it was in 1978 that Public Image: First Issue arrived, eleven months after the Pistols fell apart. What the World Needs Now … PiL’s tenth studio release. This latest is not on a par with 1986’s artful punk opus, Album, but is sharp and engaging enough overall to demand notice as Lydon and his terrific band grapple with modernity and make an appealing racket.
Where the one-album Pistols were practically built to burn and leave scorched earth, PiL has traveled the technological, informational age with its caustic bandleader holding up everything to questioning or mockery. His Rottenness endures, and in PiL his vocal arsenal of snarls, barks and warbles inhabits deep grooves and pooling synthesizer chords as well as bed-of-nails punk-band noise.
Public Image Ltd plays 8pm Thursday Nov. 5 at Culture Room, 3045 N. Federal Hwy., Fort Lauderdale. 954-564-1074 cultureroom.net. Tickets are $25
~ Sean Piccoli
