Album Review: PiL, "End of the World"

Most reviews of this album have a tendency to bang on about how many years it's been since John Lydon (aka "Johnny Rotten") first broke the musical mold, not once but twice with the SEX PISTOLS and then "avant-noise-terrorists" or "contrarian noiseniks" PUBLIC IMAGE Ltd and their once ever-revolving line up (Keith Levene, Jah Wobble, John McGeoch et al).

The unspoken subtext here is all about 'how can an old geezer with a beer gut and a dead wife keep being cutting edge without being taken for the pub bore?'

This framing means that the "kind reviews" are just as damning as the negative ones:

Yeh, the old git’s still got it (but it’s an echo of the early anarchy and edging into atrophy)'.

In other words, its like a skull shining through skin.

Dude’s still raging against the dying of the light and not going gently into that good night, blah blah blah.

This is totally the wrong way to frame this album and, in fact, the whole career of John Lydon, age 67. A more pertinent way to view this is to consider the well-known quote by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai:

"All I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before."

OK that’s probably going too far in the other direction -- and, sorry, this is supposed to be a music review! Obviously what we want is something in the middle, but the point here is that Lydon’s career has been a struggle to (a) stay edgy, which came naturally to him (fiery Irish kid, working-class London lad, rubbed up the wrong way by a fucked up Britain, the music industry, and political correctness) and (b) being musical and pleasing on the ear, which obviously didn’t.

In the past there were snatches where PiL was actually pretty easy and fun to listen to (I'm thinking more mid-to-late 80s songs like "Rise," "The Body," etc. than the sub-YOKO ONO noise experiments like Metal Box and Flowers of Romance). All too often PiL was the discordant cacophony that told us what we already knew - i.e. Johnny’s pissed off with [fill in blank] or sneering at [fill in blank]. It was something to sit in your record collection generating “cred” but little listened to.

In recent years, however, since the launch of the latest line-up with 2012's This is PiL, what has been emerging is a much more listenable PiL.

This has been achieved with the tremendous musicality of, especially, Lu Edmonds (who could probably get a note out of a lump of rock), and has been done without compromising one iota on the acerbic bile and biting wit of Mr. Lydon, who has always been a more incensed version of Morrissey (also Irish) with just as much Oscar Wilde in him (ooh er, missus!).

In short, The End of the World is a culmination of a long, positive process, rather than a struggle to maintain an early relevance and the fickle affections of pretentious music critics, many of whom misspent their youths at uni rather than being gobbed on at the London Forum.

Just listen to the brutal wit, backlash energy, and sonorous menace of "Being Stupid Again" for clarification.



A+

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
17th August, 2023  

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