Public Image Limited @ Webster Hall, New York, NY 9/28/26

 

Bill: Public Image Limited/Plague Vendor

Venue: Webster Hall, 125 E 11 St., New York, NY

Date: Monday 9/28/26

Ticket: $48 (via Ticketmaster last March)

9pm Public Image Limited

Active: 1978 (London, UK)

Affiliated: John Lydon, Sex Pistols

Latest Release: Alive (A Way With Media, 2026), End Of World (PiL Official, 2023)

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This was the first time I've seen John Lydon in the flesh since the first Sex Pistols reunion in 1996, so a good 30 years. Much and nothing has happened in that time period.  PiL reconstituted itself in 2009 after some time off and played a couple times in NYC.  I remember other people going.  I may very well have missed it this time, but a friend of mine was buying tickets for this roughly 1,500 venue show last March, so I figured what the hell, I'll have in on it.  It seemed so far away at the time, it was almost as ridiculous as John Lydon himself, but it indeed sold out.

I thought the quality was high.  The guitarist from Album and beyond, Lu Edmonds, is a great one and he remains from the mid-80's post Levine/Wobble pro session fest that record was.  Scott Firth has been on bass since 2012 for their more recent albums and the drummer Mark Roberts is "the new guy" that fits right in.  The constant, of course, is Lydon.  It's his showcase to berate or embrace the audience as he pleases.

He might complain that New York City is dead, but times change and so has his audience.  This one was more "old guard grey" than the Sex Pistols one the kids went to 30 years ago which of course was radically different than who would show up 20 years prior.  You can't put your arms around a memory as the old song goes.  

The life was in the material and it was evident, even as Lydon has become poster boy for the emerging right (even as he is firmly on record as a non-Trumper),  his body of work withstands any political stamp.  Revolt is the constant whether in the closing "Religion" or the hit "Rise" he did right before it for the encore.  The duet with the recently departed NYC rap forefather Afrika Bambaata, "World Destruction" was done early and seems to be a reoccuring theme with the last studio album entitled End of World.  Just because there was seemingly anarchy in the music---what the guitarist doesn't do said Lydon--doesn't mean the quality and variety of approach isn't there even as Lydon's caustic poetic bellow remains the constant.  11 songs in 90 minutes is not a band for television even if Lydon played that medium to a fiddle from the Pistols to Poptones.

Is it prog rock for the anti-prog after all?