Validity, that notion previously formally claimed for the deed of a property or the potential structure of a table, is today an attribute that is requested of rock legends. The music that globally accompanied daily life in the second half of the 20th century, and that is still alive in the 21st, has its greatest exponents in the logical biological decline of its physical present and its songbook and general work as an invaluable establishment.
John Lydonjust turned 70, is inside that snooping Olympus. Half a century ago, when he called himself Johnny Rotten in front of the Sex Pistolsit was widely believed that he was just a stray whose sole purpose was to point his index finger at the gentrification of those who preceded him on Planet Rock. But the central character of that outbreak known as punk had much more to give, and that’s what it’s all about. PIL, an exhaustive and multidirectional tour of its leader’s love for music.
Last night was the band’s third visit to Buenos Aires, this time with the added gesture of having passed through Rosario (Friday) and Mar del Plata (today Sunday). The previous ones occurred in 1992 (Obras) and 2016 (Vorterix), with repertoires that varied and a Lydon who was fitting in as best he could various shades of misfortunes around him, such as the deaths of his wife Nora Forster after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s, and that of his best friend and tour manager, John “Rambo” Stevens.
As in the case of your colleague Nick Caveseems to have assimilated them in a human way and approach to his audience, in tours where the approach to the audiences and the search for empathy function in a redemptive way, where creations and personalities that knew how to be sulfuric and nihilistic today pass through the sieve of the tender and liberating. For example, it allows us to discern in PIL’s music – at times abstract and cold in that kind of heavy dub that governs it – a very high emotional component.
The singer, planted in the center of CC Art Media, never stopped giving the impression of acting from a pulpit. A music stand in front of him defined the situation, while his three tour companions (the guitarist Lu Edmondsthe bassist Scott Firth and the drummer Mark Roberts) worked together for the same creed. A demanding, dense, lively music with a predominance of the bass of Firth’s bass (a guy so ductile as to have played with John Martyn, Elvis Costello and the Spice Girls).
Lydon’s voice, complete and discordant as always, with at least three expressive planes of present within what his flow offers, continued to be the central axis of the show, which was clearly the most rounded and compact of those he offered in Buenos Aires. The repertoire, too, was another success, like a subtle punctuation of their entire discography.
With magnetism and without ever becoming routine, he began his spectral recitation in Poptonesa topic included in the historical, decisive and influential metal box (1979). It is impossible to take attention away from that story, which rocks in a glacial guitar arpeggiate, where a kidnapped and raped girl recounts her last minutes of life on the side of a road, while remembering that in the car where they were taking her, a cassette was playing pop songs.
There was no sentimentality to present World Destructionthe vivid electro-rap song that he recorded in 1984 with the hip hop icon Afrika Bambaataadied this Friday, perhaps missing out on witnessing what can await us if the United States, Iran and Israel decide, any day now, to press all the buttons at once. Live, the song makes sense and as in so many PIL moments, it invited spontaneous and euphoric dancing, like the contagious (and contemporary) This is Not a Love Song.
Before the encores, and before the master of ceremonies announced that he needed a moment to rest and smoke a cigarette, they offered a euphoric version of one of the decisive songs in history, Public Image. The lucid declaration of principles of a 22-year-old boy who in 1978 decided to stop living in the public costume of the antichrist and refuse to be a regular punk to found this band that still exists. Everything that today is called post punk, a label so comprehensive and imprecise that it seems to be used to name any creative glimmer. Or the improbable retro, without context or form, of what was born as an infinitive.
In the final stretch, Open upthe techno-rock song he sang as a guest on Leftfield In the mid-’90s, the countdown began. In Risethe best-known theme of PIL, the two slogans that run through it gave meaning to the present: the patent “anger is an energy” (“the anger it is an energy“) and the traditional Irish phrase “may the road rise up to meet you” (“May the path rise to meet you“) covered with emotion a night that still lacked something more.
From the first album (1978) they extracted Annalisathe story of a girl with a mental disorder who was induced by her Catholic parents to undergo an exorcism and agonized as a purge of the supposed demons that tormented her. “Annalisa had no escape/ starved to death in a waiting room/ cheap worry and rosary beads/ didn’t solve pressing needs” is heard between the crossfire of the band. A while later, they said goodbye to the audience with an informal chat, with that transcendental bonhomie that Lydon decided to make use of at this stage of his life.
