I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: October 2, 2026] Plague Vendor

I was torn about this show from the get go.  John Lydon has (possibly) become a right wing stooge like Morrissey (there are those who say he is mocking the MAGA camp, who the hell knows).  I didn’t really want to give him any money (although I did feel bad about his wife dying and all that).

And yet, I’ve loved most of PiL’s output (at least up through 9) and have never seen them live.  Reviews suggested that on their last tour, at least, they were still great live and so I grabbed a ticket.  There were many other shows that night that I was interested in.  Indeed, we almost went to Karina Rykman at the last minute.  And, boy oh boy do I wish that we had.

Public Image Limited was the worst show I have ever been to.

I’ve been reading other reviews of this tour in which people were blown away by this show and I can’t tell if they are all crazy or if John was just really off tonight.  And yet, people around me seemed to really enjoy it as well.  I’m not sure what rubbed me the wring way so badly.

Now, I know all about John and his antics–his utter disdain for the audience, the “did you ever get the feeling you’ve been swindled,” everything.  I was expecting a performative asshole.  I was actually worried that he might get in my face and give me shit for something I was or wasn’t doing.  But instead, what I got was an old fat guy who didn’t even sound like Lydon.  Lydon has the most distinctive (borderline irritating) high pitched voices in music.  And yet, when he sang (if you can call it that) his voice was deep and gravelly.  It’s hard to imagine that his voice can’t get high pitched and whiny anymore, but maybe he can’t?  And yet it’s not like singing where you have to hit the high notes, this is just a high whiny sound.  Can you really lose that ability?

I said that he was fat and that was a surprise.  I have nothing against anyone getting fat.  It’s part of getting older, sure.  But all the promo photos showed a skinny(er) John from days of old.  So when he came out I was surprised to be sure.  But who cares, right.  As long as he does he schtick, who cares what he looks like.  But, when he started with the low gravelly voice, and now having a much bigger head (and his head shaved on the sides) he looked like an old soccer coach yelling at his players.  There was nothing fun about it.  Especially when they opened with one of two songs from Album.

I was so excited to hear this song and the band were fantastic.  The guitars and other instruments from the wonderfully coiffed Lu Edmonds were great, the bass from Scott Firth was phenomenal–deep and wobbly and the drums (Mark Roberts) seemed to be doing more than drums back there.  But instead of his voices soaring “Now!  What does this mean?”  He barked it like a cranky coach.  And it didn’t have the same impact at all.  It was lifeless and uninterested.  The rest of the band sang the high pitched backing vocals perfectly.  But John stood there during the musical parts waving his hands back and forth looking like an unnamable jackass politician doing a stupid dance to YMCA.  Sometimes he waved his arms like he was doing the swim dance.  But he didn’t do anything else.

I don’t care that he had all the words on a lectern in front of him.  I care that the only time he left the lectern was to take a swig from the bottle of whatever he was drinking.  He didn’t engage with the audience at all–not to curse us out, not to tell us we weren’t loud enough, not even to tell people to stop filming.  He just didn’t do anything.

They played a new(ish) song Know Now which was fine.  Then they played the first of two covers.  Now, in fairness, Lydon did sing on both of these songs, but how weird to play two covers out of 10 songs when you have eleven albums out.  True, the musicians in the band didn’t play on any of the albums as far as I know, so they don’t care what they’re playing but, weird.  It was nice to hear World Domination, a song I haven’t thought about probably in 30 years, but it wasn’t especially inspired.

Then came a moment everyone was looking forward to.  This is Not a Love Song.  It seemed like he tried to bring some of his signature whine to the song, but he slowed the tempo of his singing so he wasn’t singing it the right way.  At this point in the show, I seriously considered walking out into the lobby to get tickets for Dinosaur Jr.  But I stayed, hoping that something would come out of it.  I mean, there was a huge garbage can in the middle of the stage, surely something was going to happen with it?  (Unless I missed it, nothing did).

Instead, we got performative angry old man stunts like John blowing snot from his nose onto the stage.  And proclaiming himself.

Poptones and Death Disco are trials.  On record they are weird, rambling songs that are interesting for inexplicable reasons.  John occasionally warbling “poptones!” over the groovy bassline is bizarre but somehow compelling.  But at this show, these two songs just kind of dragged out.  The things that 100% saved these songs for me were the fantastic sound of the bass and that guitarist was playing some kind of electrified.  saz that made really cool sounds.

I had been checking the setlist online to see what else was coming.  Warrior was next, a song I know quite well and yet I barely recognized it.  I mean at this point I was trying to figure out how this show was going to be another 45 minutes with only 3 songs left.

Up next was Shoom, a song I remembered hearing about when it came out because the whole song was just fuck you fuck that etc.  A review I read about it was so dismissive it has stuck with me all this time.  It did seem like an opportunity for him to berate the audience, but even hearing John Lydon shout Fuck at you over and over grows tiring.  They even the set with Leftfield song.  I was fairly certain I’d remember it, but I didn’t. And by then I was genuinely wondering if they were going to play this song for 30 minutes.

Instead, John said that were going to go for a 3 minute cigarette break.  He yelled at people to cheer louder than they had been (yawn) and I snuck out to get Dino Jr tickets.  I saw many people leaving at this point.  And, even worse, Plague Vendor had packed up all of their stuff and left already.

I had been right up front for the first part of the show, but after the break, I walked in the rear doors and hung out near the back.  John came out and said it was time for the PiL singalong and they started Rise, once of their best songs.  And it was like he didn’t know the song.  Again, I get that John Lydon does what he wants, but, man how depressing to have the guy who sang “anger is an energy” sing that line with no energy at all.  It was about 20 minutes until they were supposed to be done and this song was listed as Rise/Religion, so I assumed they’d jam it or something.  But no, John did the most pandering thing I’ve seen.

He started to shout “do you like the guitar” over and over.  And while he was shouting that, Edmonds came out and played a wild, noisy, chaotic solo for a time.  And then John said, “do you like the bass” over and over again.  You get the point.  What a weird and sad way to have your band show off their chops.  At some point he started saying something about Religion, and then there was a drum solo.  Several people near me left during the solos.

The thing that summed up the weirdness of the show happened at the end, when John came to the front of the stage and thanked us for waiting around since the last tour.  The earnestness was uncanny, even when he made a joke about dead people in their lives.  He then said that they would be back.  And I walked out as they started playing Bowie’s John, I’m only Dancing, which a previous show said was John singing over the tape.  But I left before I figured out if that actually happened.

If not for Plague Vendor, this would have been a totally lost night.  But even with them, I kept wondering if I could make it to one of the other three shows I blew off tonight to see this one.

1. Home ∞
2. Know Now ⇓
3. World Destruction (Time Zone cover) ©
4. This Is Not a Love Song ¶
5. Poptones Θ
   (Includes a snippet of “New York Mining Disaster 1941” by the Bee Gees)
6. Death Disco Θ
7. Warrior #
8. Shoom ⇓
9. Open Up (Leftfield cover) ⇐
   Encore:
10. Rise ∞ / Religion ¥
11. John, I’m Only Dancing (David Bowie song) (John lydon Vocals Over Pre-recorded Tape)