PIL

Am walking down Sarandi, the peatonal. A cyclone is blowing. The palm trees double back on themselves. It’s quarter past eight. Birdland has started on time and the world as we know it is forty five minutes from ending.

I first encountered PIL as a thirteen year old. Jason had this strange metal box, and contained within it was even stranger music. I didn’t know much about music. The Sex Pistols had been no more than a noise offstage. Like the Silver Jubilee. Like Vietnam. Like the Oil Crisis and the Six Day Week. Jason played the strange music in the big hall which was known as Toyes. It got under my skin. More than I knew.

I check my phone as I try to avoid the squalls of rain. I don’t want the world to end. It ended once a few years ago and when the world ends I find myself trapped in the safest corner of the universe. Montevideo. With its bocas, (crack houses), its street beggars, its pasteros (crack addicts). With its desolate, empty streets and its tiny theatres full of pecunious creativity. I’ll be fine in Montevideo if the world ends but I’d prefer it not to.

The world hasn’t ended. There’s a ceasefire.

In the bar de los viejos, corner of Washington and Colon, (could there be a more american corner?), the tv isn’t showing the football for once. It’s showing someone talking about the fact that the world hasn’t ended. Without a great deal of clarity. Leo and I share a beer. Outside the cyclone is gathering force. Inside there’s just us and one old guy with a beard down to his toes.

John Lydon is already on stage when we get to the Museo de Carnival. He’s a punctual Englishman. His band is a bassist, a guitarist who sometimes plays mandolin and a drummer. They’re tight. Lydon stands in front of a lectern with a folder containing the lyrics of the songs. He’s seventy years old. He doesn’t need to fuck around with remembering his lines.

My dad was into Simon and Garfunkel and French chanson. Jason used to play PIL, Augustus Pablo, Lennon, Stravinsky. He educated me in the possibilities of the aural world. My brain opened and flexed under his influence. Music as an energy, music as a weapon, music as mystery.

“Drive to the forest in a Japanese Car” - the songs come back from the undergrowth of my teenage years. They’re there in my brain, waiting to be activated. Lydon gobs, Lydon speaks very bad Spanish, Lydon stares at us like he’s a lunatic or we’re all lunatics. Lydon, you can’t help thinking, wouldn’t mind welcoming in the end of the world. He’s a dirty, foul-mouthed shaman, who sings for his supper. Like some kind of warrior king from the annals of Lévi-Strauss, belonging to a tribe which both fears him and rejects him. He’s on the edge of being unhinged - menos mal that he doesn’t have his finger hovering over the nuclear button, sooner or later he would have pressed it. And we wouldn’t be here tonight, waiting for the end of the world.

As the gig steers towards its end, PIL steers its ship towards the rocks. Old man Lydon asks the question: what is anger? We reply, on cue: Anger is an Energy. It’s a chant, an invocation. Anger is an Energy. Anger is an Energy. Lydon looks on approvingly. He gobs. But he doesn’t look angry. He looks like someone who knows that if he wanted to, he could shepherd us all out into the cyclone night to riot, to burn down the whole damned world.

But he’s not going to. He’s going to go back to the hotel and go to bed early.

We return to the bar for a whisky after the show. The TV is showing the football. Boston River playing a team from Brazil in the rain. Boston River are losing. All’s well with the world. 

yo la tengo @ museo de carnaval

There’s a healthy crowd in at the Museo de Carneval which is keen, buzzy, eager to breathe the rarified air of the Yankee muses. It feels like the kind of occasion that might have been banned under Cromwell and might not be encouraged by other authoritarian regimes. Fittingly, perhaps, when I get home I learn that Mudami has won the NY mayoral race. Yo La Tengo seem to represent the good profile of North America. Free thinking musos who don’t look like they’d ever wear designer clothes.

I saw Yo La Tengo at Somerset House about 25 years ago, when I was another person living another life. Ira Kaplan makes much play of the fact that many of their songs were written before much of the audience was born. It suggests a deserved pride in their longevity. Perhaps I have been reborn in the interim. I don’t know what got me into them. Their Hispanic name is a red herring: they’re from New Jersey and as evidenced by the brief comments, they’re not Spanish speakers. (Wikipedia offers the origin story of the band’s name.) They look pretty much the same now as they did back then. They also seem to take the same enjoyment out of playing. Their set is subtly constructed, ranging from feedback heavy rocking out to delicate ballads. The range is as impressive as the way the audience’s sensory journey is curated. They restore the faith on many levels, not least when they invite Eduardo, a young local guitarist on stage to play a song with them.

The set ends with a cover of I Do Believe by the Velvets. The song, sung a cappella, is moving. It offers a flavour of what it might have been like to watch the Velvets, veering from the melodic to the deranged. Fellow emissaries of the right kind of North American freedom.