Public Image Ltd

London 100 Club

Anger re-energised in significant style. After 40 years, today’s PiL (following nine unprecedented years of stability) represent the band’s most intuitively attuned incarnation to date. And tonight, in this most intimate and historically significant of venues, the quartet are on fire.

They arrive on stage in high spirits. Steeped in them, according to a beaming John Lydon, inexplicably dressed in a griddle chef’s whites, checkerboard hat and apron, who admits they’ve been incautiously toasting their four-decade anniversary. They’ve got a glow on, but perform unimpeded by over-indugence; if anything, their dazzling ensemble interplay inhabits a brink even more intense than usual.

Lu Edmonds commands a massive pedal board of effects to corral an array of guitar tones, Scott Firth’s stand-up stick adds dub-deep bass elasticity to Bruce Smith’s groove-propelling syncopations. The trio improvise upon themes like accomplished jazzers as Lydon uses his voice like Miles Davis used his trumpet. He’s constantly looking for atonal pitches that don’t exist. He’s a hugely underrated and uncommonly inventive vocalist. The set’s awash with classics reinvented, and in the case of a tumultuous Death Disco, reinvented twice in a single recital. Memories, Rise, Flowers Of Romance, a roaring encore of their signature debut.

Finally, a PiL performance that makes more of an impression than John Lydon’s personality.

Ian Fortnam