{"id":750,"date":"2012-04-04T05:24:28","date_gmt":"2012-04-04T10:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=750"},"modified":"2012-04-04T05:24:28","modified_gmt":"2012-04-04T10:24:28","slug":"dvd-review-public-image-ltd-live-at-rockpalast-1983","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2012\/04\/04\/dvd-review-public-image-ltd-live-at-rockpalast-1983\/","title":{"rendered":"DVD Review: Public Image Ltd. – Live at Rockpalast 1983"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time really does change things. It was Halloween night 1983 when Public Image Ltd.<\/strong> took the stage at WDR’s television studios for a concert. But now, shy of three decades later, somehow John Lydon<\/strong>‘s atonal warbling has transformed into something almost \u2013 dare I say it \u2013 musical. Really: his vocals have a musicality all their own. Witness the performance on the new DVD Live at Rockpalast 1983<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The band on this night features longtime Lydon associate Martin Atkins<\/strong> on drums (I met him a few years back; really nice gent) and Tommy Zvoncheck*<\/strong> on \u2013 perhaps surprisingly \u2013 a stack of nearly a half-dozen keyboards. (Right around this same period, Zvoncheck provided similar auxiliary help to Steve Wynn<\/strong>‘s band The Dream Syndicate<\/strong><\/a>.) With a Yamaha CP70 electric piano and several Sequential Circuits synths onstage, PiL’s setup in 1983 might have looked<\/em> fairly standard for the time, but the music created was anything but ordinary.<\/p>\n

Anchored by Atkins’ ferocious, insistent drumming and the loudly-mixed, dub-influenced bass guitar of a Sting<\/strong>-mulleted Louis Bernardi<\/strong>, on this night PiL rocks pretty hard. From the moment that Lydon walks onstage with his cat-got-the-canary smirk, it’s clear that he’s there at least in part to bait the audience. He succeeds, in part: several members of the mostly-male crowd (most of whom look like guys I knew in college) oblige and do a bit of the old slam-dancing. And when the crowd applauds wildly after numbers like \u201cAnnalisa,\u201d Lydon politely shouts, \u201cShut up!\u201d and then grins mischievously. Always the charmer.<\/p>\n

Lydon and his associates pummel their way through a selection of tracks from First Issue<\/em>, Second Edition<\/em> (aka Metal Box<\/em>) and The Flowers of Romance<\/em>. And though Zvoncheck and guitarist Joseph Guida<\/strong> would be gone by the time PiL recorded This is What You Want…This is What You Get<\/em>, on this night they preview \u201cThis is Not a Love Song\u201d from the then-unreleased album. Perhaps running out of material, they finish their encore with a repeat of the opener, the uncharacteristically pop-toned \u201cPublic Image.\u201d Lydon delivers the same dance moves for both runs through the song.<\/p>\n

Barely four months earlier, this same lineup of PiL recorded the often poorly-regarded Live in Tokyo<\/em> album; most reviews criticize Bernardi’s playing on that show in particular. Setting aside the relative merits of that release, Live at Rockpalast 1983<\/em> shows a band that’s tight, compelling and formidable. The new keyboard introduction appended to First Issue<\/em>‘s \u201cReligion\u201d adds an ironic twist; the percussion-centric \u201cUnder the House\u201d is hypnotic and relentless. And a cover (I guess<\/em> you’d call it that) of Sex Pistols<\/strong>‘ \u201cAnarchy in the U.K.\u201d is given a relatively faithful reading. Taken as a whole, Live at Rockpalast 1983<\/em> is one PiL that’s relatively easy to swallow.<\/p>\n

* For reasons unknown, the DVD packaging bills the keyboard player as one Arthur Stead; the DVD’s end-credits roll identifies him as Zvoncheck.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on Twitter<\/a> and get notified
\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time really does change things. It was Halloween night 1983 when Public Image Ltd. took the stage at WDR’s television studios for a concert. But now, shy of three decades […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd","category-review","cat-25-id","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}