This Is PIL

‘Right! Now!/I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist/Don’t know what I want/but I know how to get it!’ was the proclamation in 1976. Now Mr. & Mrs. Lydon’s boy wants you to know that, ‘I am John and I was born in London/I am no vulture, this is my culture.’
He may lay his hat these days in LA rather than Finsbury Park, but the 56-year-old still has plenty to say about his country of birth, which he appears to love and hate in equal measure.
The reaffirmation of his roots kicks off ‘One Drop’, This Is PiL’s dubby standout, which reminds us that all through the Pistols John was consuming the best Jamaica had to offer – both musically and pharmaceutically. It’s also got a persistent little bugger of a hook, which if there’s any justice should have him back on the airwaves.
Funded by the money he got for flogging Country Life butter – astonishingly, there wasn’t a label major or indie prepared to bankroll it – this 12-tracker is a remarkable return to form for a band that looked to have shot its creative load in 1992 with the extremely hard to love That What Is Not.
He’s never going to give Robert Plant sleepless nights – well, unless he’s up for a wee small hours torching of Percy’s mansion – but Lydon’s voice has never been in better nick and conveys real menace on the opening title-track, which sounds like the musical accompaniment to a very bad dream.
He also comprehensively nails it on ‘Fool’, which is perhaps the most soulful its author has ever been in the studio and the track inspired by youthful fishing trips with his grandfather in Ireland, ‘Deeper Water’. ‘Bastards… dash me to the shores, crush me to the rocks/I will not drown/I will head for deeper water,’ Lydon almost keens, persecution complex still very much intact.
David Cameron, Nick Clegg and their interchangeable style-over-political-substance buddies are the targets on ‘Human’, another malevolent beast of a song which declares, ‘If these are your leaders, they are not good enough for you.’
They weren’t on his radar when I spoke to him last year, but I’m sure if John knew Enda, Eamon, Michéal and Gerry like we do, he’d be happy to include them in his politicians are bad for you rant.
The closest the album gets to old school Public Image is ‘It Said That’, a nightmarish nursery rhyme that’ll slay ‘em down the death disco.
It’s not all doom, gloom and “fuck the fucking fuckers!” though, with ‘Lollipop Opera’ driven along by an oompa-loompa bassline that has to be on the soundtrack if they re-make Willy Wonka.
Such levity is dispensed with for the closing double-whammy of ‘Reggie Song’ – an ode to the late Mr. Bosanquet perhaps? – and ‘Out Of The Woods’, a slow-burning nine-minute epic, which continues the “if you’re not scared, you bloody well should be!” Brothers Grimm theme.
The Sex Pistols may have become a Carry On Spitting caricature of their punk selves, but when it comes to PiL, John Lydon really does still mean it, maaaan!