“This is a fucking amazing band,” says John Lydon of his bandmates in Public Image Ltd., or PiL, toward the end of Monday’s show.
Well, yes, they are actually, so let’s take a quick look at them before we talk about Lydon himself and the Monday night concert.
Drawn largely from a PiL lineup in the late 1980s, the modern incarnation of the band plays funky post-punk. They are well coordinated as a unit in a way few bands are and they sound great. Drummer Bruce Smith thunders and snaps through the show. New guy Scott Firth on bass is a key ingredient in the consistency of the post-punk sound. And guitarist Lu Edmonds? On one song, the man is playing a saz, a kind of long-necked lute. The next, he’s on a big guitar. Before you know it, he’s fiddling (literally) with a banjo.
And the three bandmates provide a key part of a pattern to many PiL songs vocally — if PiL can be said to have any sort of pattern. They occasionally sing a repeating chant, usually consisting of a song’s title or subtitle, building a harmonious chorus as a backdrop to Lydon’s wails, yelps and croaks.