Public Image Limited
The Ritz, Manchester
28th December 2025
All photos by Helen Millington
There he is the most difficult man in pop culture.
The imperious emperor and pied piper of punk singing his heart out like a manic, distorted, intense opera singer who refuses to be pigeonholed and takes great pleasure in telling you to ‘fuck off’ whoever you are and whatever you think. Yet live, he is still a compelling spectacle, turning a strange left field music into giant slabs of neo pop as he spits out the lyrics and catarrh all over the stage. His face stretched around the very vowels, and his body doing his scarecrow dance and it’s all oddly effective despite all the internal arguments that run through your head.
(in March 2026 Louder Than War are putting in their first festival in 2026 – you must come! tickets and details here)
PiL were one of the great saving graces in the post-punk meltdown, creating remarkable records that danced along the boundaries of convention. The initial holy triad of Rotten, Wobble and Levene created genius and when the other two abandoned ship, Lydon turned the mothership into a weird and wonderful pop music from another planet.
Decades later, reviewing PiL always comes with a lot of baggage and contradictions. I guess that’s the way Rotten likes it. Antagonism is an energy as much as anger and the constant prodding against any status quo has become his whole raison d’etre, which is a shame as PiL themselves have never sounded better, and the debate about the debate about the Sex Pistols and Trump often clouds the music. I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree on most other stuff, and that’s how he wants it, but when it comes to the music, it’s a very different story.
In the past year, they seem to have had a revamp. There is an urgency about the band now. Alan Mcgee is now managing and yet again his magic dust seems to have added something to a long-term operation. The band have never sounded this hot for a long time. Of course, Lu Edmonds was always a wonderful player who could somehow handle those brilliant Keith Levene guitar lines and reshape them into his own liquid gold and then add his own twisted angular genius that matches his body shape as he breathes a new life into old shapes. Scott Firth is a rock solid bass player who pins it down, and Mark Roberts is a brilliant addition on the drums, stepping into the very big shoes of Bruce Smith (who has just delivered great drums on the new Daniel Ash album). Roberts adds a power to the groove and PiL have never sounded more relentless and heavy. The band build those battering ram songs and hypnotic grooves like ‘Poptones’ for Lydon to emote over. Sometimes he sticks to the script, and sometimes he goes off at tangents with his remarkable and hypnotically odd voice. There is so much invention and instinctive intelligence at play with an embrace of so much music and culture beyond the white rock narrative that you often wonder who the Lydon that turns up to do the interviews actually is.
Tonight is a career spanning set that takes in those glorious restless early PiL years of the Wobble dub tectonics, then the heavy Martin Atkins drums of the Flowers of Romance period before the crossing the divide into the ‘big business is very wise, I’m inside free enterprise’ of the big hits like ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ and then ‘Rise’ whilst taking diversions into the hip hop post punk crosspover of ‘World Destruction’ and the ever captivating Leftfield/Lydon ‘Open Up’.
It’s a reminder of just how good the good ship PiL has been over the years, with a great crew of varying collaborators constructing soundscapes for Lydon to emote over. His vocals are key to these musical multicultural multi-musical mash-ups. He never stuck to the script; he was never trapped by verse/chorus and always just went on instinct and broke all the rules, but somehow made it all sound right.
All the best pop music is weird and beyond the rules and works on this golden instinct and the beyond the creative narrative mavericks like Lydon.
That version of the complex man on the stage is the one that changed lives and changed music and changed the world. That version is the eccentric, free-form pop natural who just danced to his own tune and let the art pour out of him and made the world a better place and when he revisits it on stage, it’s thrilling. Is it too much to hope for one more album of this eclectic free spirit? The band certainly have the precision and the power and have lived inside the PiL sound long enough to build the music and the singer, when he is not so, ahem, rotten is a complex, sensitive individual who shape shifts depending on the mood, yet the most fascinating person is actually Lydon himself stripped away of all his history. This is the one you often hear in these wonderful songs that break all the rules but still sounds fresh and vibrant, and tonight was a celebration of that free spirit and innate genius for great wild pop and hypnotic art groove.
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