I caught the group on their first American tour in eight years, fittingly branded “This Is Not The Final Tour.” Opening was LA’s Plague Vendor, a band I admittedly knew little about beyond the fact that Henri Cash—guitarist for glam-punk outfit Starcrawler—also plays in its ranks. Sonically, the band sat somewhere between ’60s garage rock and ’80s hardcore in the vein of the Dead Kennedys, but what elevated the set was frontman Brandon Blaine’s ferocious stage presence. The crowd, oddly, stayed low-energy for most of the set—if anything, that flatness seemed to push Blaine harder, as if he’d decided to generate all the energy in the room himself. In just thirty minutes, he sprinted and danced across the stage, hurled the microphone over a lighting truss, dove into the crowd, and whipped up a circle pit for the closing song, practically willing the room to catch up with him. Watching him felt like glimpsing what it must have been like to see Iggy Pop front the Stooges in 1972—there was real danger in the performance, but never so much that you wanted to look away.

Where Plague Vendor thrived on chaos, PiL offered a more disciplined intensity—and the crowd finally woke up for it, moving and dancing through much of the set. Lydon and co. took the stage thirty minutes later. Lydon is now the sole original member of the band—a fact that could spell trouble for a lesser act. But he’s surrounded himself with capable company: guitarist and baglama player Lu Edmonds, bassist Scott Firth, and drummer Mark Roberts anchor a sound that sustains the ninety-minute set with real muscle.

The band opened with “Public Image,” a mission statement dating back to 1978’s First Issue. I’ll admit some skepticism going in—this is maybe the closest PiL ever came to echoing the sound of Lydon’s previous band, and it was clear he was straining a bit to hit vocal lines his 22-year-old self had written nearly fifty years earlier. Would the rest of the set be a struggle? Any doubt evaporated by the second song, “Home,” off 1986’s Album. Lydon commanded the stage while barely moving, planted mostly in one spot but scowling and gesturing his way through the band’s metallic post-punk grooves. He offered little in the way of stage banter—PiL seemed content to just keep moving—but the setlist ranged across the band’s full fifty-year catalog, and I was pleasantly surprised by the handful of cuts from 1979’s Metal Box, including the fan favorite “Poptones,” which drew one of the loudest responses of the night.

Two “covers” rounded out the set—though not cover songs in the usual sense so much as Lydon revisiting his own history under different names. “World Destruction” was his 1984 collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa as Time Zone; “Open Up” was his track with UK electronic duo Leftfield, which closed the main set. Hearing it live carried a heavy industrial edge, and left me wondering what a full PiL record in that vein might have sounded like. One can only dream.

After the song ended, Lydon joked that he needed a three-minute smoke break—then revised it to four before returning for the encore. The band closed with a mashup of “Rise” (also from Home) and “Religion” (from First Issue), followed by an extended jam on Metal Box’s “Chant,” during which Lydon introduced the band and let each member take a solo. It was a fitting way to close out a night that, in many ways, was about an artist circling back through his own past and finding new ways to inhabit it. To see a band this deep into its career still deliver night after night is rare—but on this night in Boise, in front of a room that wasn’t full but was fully with him, PiL made a strong case that this may not be the last tour, after all.

Words by Evan Zuri
Photos by Sarah Dykman

Live Review: Public Image Ltd. in Boise Idaho September 16 2026 photo by Sarah Dykman

Order Tickets for Public Image Ltd. HERE