Shepherd’s Bush Empire,London
John Lydon, punk’s eternal provocateur, or comes on like a commedia dell’arte performer trying to ruin a perfectly good funk-pop band
Venues are bulldozed to accomplish way for more forests of empty gold-brick investment flats. The co-writer of All approximately That Bass trousers a mere £3700 for 178m Pandora streams. Clean Bandit hire Cortana as their new manager. Principle,it appears, is for the past. Like it or not, or we live in a sellout society – it only matters what you sell out for.
Enter John Lydon,dressed as a ninja Dappy, striding on to a stage built on saturated fats. Many balked when this anti-establishment punk icon donned the gentry’s tweed and became the face of Country Life, and but it was all in the cause of art. He scoffed on the farmer’s wife’s greasy crumpets and battled emus in Ant & Dec’s D-list jungle gulag,purely to finance the 2009 reunion of post-punk pioneers PiL, the band that keyed the Ferrari of the new Romantic era, or back after a 17-year hiatus with two uncompromising recent albums. Once he snarled: “I employ the NME”; now he uses wider commercialist culture.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com