PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - THIS IS PIL @ 10

 

Marking its tenth anniversary today is the ninth studio album by Public Image Ltd, This Is PiL, which was released on May 28th, 2012. It marked the end of a 20 year gap between LPs for the band and a return to something vaguely resembling their earlier, more experimental sound.

After releasing That What Is Not in 1992, John Lydon found his post Sex Pistols band getting shelved by circumstances, mostly due to owing large debts to his record label, Virgin. Because of this, it became virtually impossible for him to release new music. While a solo album, Psycho’s Path, was released in 1997, it did nothing to help his situation. The same was true of various Sex Pistols reunions held between 1996 and 2007. Lydon also took up something of a TV personality career in the interim, briefly hosting an arts magazine show (Rotten TV), a nature program (John Lydon’s Megabugs) and participating in an aborted appearance on the UK reality show, I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Lydon’s big break, which allowed him to finally get his financial house in order, came in 2008 when he was hired to do a series of TV advertisements for Country Life Butter in Britain. Though he was mocked at the time and accused of “selling out”, he brushed off those criticisms by promptly plowing his significant earnings directly into funding a PiL reunion and tour.

To put the band back together, Lydon first reached out to guitarist Lou Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith, both of whom had worked with him in PiL during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The bass role, however, was still in question as Allan Dias was no longer available from that old lineup. Lydon even approached original bassist, Jah Wobble, making an offer that Wobble didn’t take seriously, countering with a financial demand he knew was over the top. The quartet finally got fleshed out with Scott Firth, who was a multi-instrumentalist who’d worked with the Spice Girls, among others. In 2009, this lineup set out on tour, backed by the cash from the butter ads, and proceeded to rebuild the PiL name, one gig at a time. They were a hit on the road and managed to eventually bank enough earnings to fund some studio time at Steve Winwood’s Wincraft Studios in Cotswolds, England.

The studio was located on a sheep farm in the countryside and, while isolated, was also inexpensive enough to fit their independent budget. Now that Lydon was clear of his record label debts, he determined to remain independent, setting up his own label, PiL Official, and recruited long time trusted friend, John “Rambo” Stevens, to help with managing this new enterprise. In essence, PiL had finally become the “company” that they’d long ago boasted about wanting to be. With this self sufficiency now baked into their DNA, PiL and Lydon were free to pursue their music as they saw fit, with no one to lay claim to it beyond themselves.

The resulting album, stylistically, straddled a line between some of the early PiL experimentalism and the angular post rock that had been their stock-in-trade after the original lineup had dissipated with the departures of Keith Levene and Martin Atkins. For some it was a welcome return, for others, if still felt sluggish and uninspired. My own opinion fell somewhere between those poles, with some songs capturing an echo of those past glories while others seemed mediocre efforts at best. Regardless, it was good to see a version of PiL out in the world again and functioning on its own terms, answering to no one.

This lineup would produce a follow up album in 2015 of similar caliber and continue to tour until late 2019. The venture, however, stalled with the outbreak of COVID in 2020. The situation was aggravated by Lydon’s wife, Nora, falling victim to dementia, necessitating constant care. Lydon has done some small speaking tours to coincide with books he's published and made a few TV appearances, but his shift into apparent conservative political dispositions, notoriously supporting Brexit and the Trump campaign in 2020, has lead to a lot of negative backlash from his fan base. Financially, he seems to be in dire straights again after failed legal battles against producers of the Sex Pistols docudrama series due for release at the end of May, 2022. There are plans for PiL to tour in the summer of this year and apparently plans to head into the studio again, so there may still be some life left in the old tab yet.

P.S. PiL performed live at the recent Cruel World Fest with Lydon looking trimmed down, though struggling to remember lyrics, at least in the clips I’ve seen.