Dysfunctional music for dysfunctional people: The Public Image is Rotten reviewed

A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and announces his intention to destroy the establishment via the medium of rock records. But who is it? Is it Bob Geldof or John Lydon?

Citizens of Boomtown: The Story of the Boomtown Rats — another in the ongoing trend of the BBC screening films that are fundamentally ads for a band’s new album — made the case for Geldof, suggesting he and his bandmates singlehandedly dragged Ireland into the modern age (the Daily Telegraph’s chief rock critic popped up to say they were the first roar of the Celtic Tiger). The Public Image is Rotten, which was shown in a few cinemas in 2018 but is now streaming on Vimeo, traced Lydon’s path from the Pistols through Public Image Ltd.

As one former PiL band member notes: ‘It just became a drip, drip, drip of shit’

Both films suffered some of the same shortcomings. Who really needs to have the story of punk summarised for them yet again? Do brief clips of starry talking heads really add anything (though I was disconcerted, as I took notes during the Boomtown Rats film, to hear what sounded like a minor aristocrat and to discover that it was Sting, the 14th Earl of Wallsend)? And, both films being made with the full co-operation (and financial involvement) of their subjects, they rather glossed over the fact that the two bands had made a lot of music that wasn’t awfully good (the Lydon one was a little more upfront about this but not much). In the Rats film, for instance, Paul Gambaccini suggested that the brevity of their golden period was pure historical inevitability, the result of the continual forward motion of pop, which might come as a surprise to one of the film’s talking heads, Bono, who could have pointed out that he’s managed more than three years at the top.