Public Image Limited, Heaven, review The irony of it surely can't have escaped that arch provocateur John Lydon. Thirty five years after disrupting the Queen's Silver Jubilee as lead singer of the Sex Pistols with an incendiary version of God Save the Queen, punk's most mesmeric figure has returned with his band Public Image Limited just in time for her Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Much has changed in the interim. The man who began his recording career with the words, "I am an antichrist" formed PiL after leaving the Pistols in 1978, intending to rid himself of his Johnny Rotten persona forever. His new band went on to create some of the most uncompromisingly confrontational and oddly brilliant music of the late 1970s and early "80s - most notably the Metal Box album - before making a nakedly cynical bid for commercial success, with singles such as This Is Not A Love Song. There's been no new material for 20 years, but that's about to change, with an EP later this month to be followed by an album in May. The question, though, as PiL took the stage at London's bunker-like Heaven nightclub, was not whether their return would be causing sleepless nights at Buckingham Palace, but whether Lydon, who has spent the intervening years consciously presenting himself as rock's ultimate sell-out - butter adverts, an appearance on I'm A Celebrity... - has anything left to say as an artist. In fact, the man who was once Johnny Rotten appeared on stage looking almost avuncular, peering over a lectern, and pausing to hook thin spectacles over his ears. "I'm blind as a bat," he mugged, "but I can see you're all fucking ugly." It can't have been a pretty sight. I saw one ageing punk saunter past with green hair, but for the most part, where there were follicles, they were likely to be grey. Lydon himself, now in his fifties, danced mannered, comedy disco steps, his voice all yelps, shrieks and echoing trills, as the band built solid layers of sound behind him. "We are the ageless, we are teenagers," he sang in a track from the new album, but the evidence suggested otherwise. The two-hour set flitted between early glories, mid-period rock dirges and new tracks, but all risked stretching the audience's patience. Songs would reach false endings, sometimes more than once, then start all over again. PiL became compelling only when Lydon came to life, declaiming his anti-Christian bile in Religion, growling over a drum 'n' double-bass finale to Flowers of Romance. Death Disco was a rare highlight, with its thudding rhythms and singing, ringing Swan Lake guitar figure. "Never really know, until it's gone away," whined Lydon above it all. Words cannot express. "Some of these songs hurt me," he said after it, simply and eloquently. It was hard to think he wasn't recalling an earlier John Lydon, who appears to be long vanished.