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INDUSTRY REPORT # 71
Catching up with Public Image Ltd
A Conversation with Lu Edmonds
August 30th, 2026 by Traci Turner
The unmistakable, unapologetic, and defiant frontman of the Sex Pistols, John Lydon became a punk pioneer and music history legend. Post-Sex Pistols Lydon has continued to be a legendary pioneer – and still defiant – with Public Image Ltd (PiL), giving us solid tracks such as “Rise,” “Seattle,” “Disappointed,” “Don’t Ask Me,” “(This is Not a) Love Song,” and “Public Image.”
PiL released a new live album this year, appropriately titled “Alive,” which was recorded during last year’s tour. The band has also been in the studio recording an album of new material for release in early 2027.
With Lu Edmonds (guitar), Scott Firth (bass), and Mark Roberts (drums) by his side, the crew will undertake an extensive North American tour dubbed This Is Not… The Final PiL Tour. The trek begins September 3rd and closes out October 9th, but the gents have already mapped out another block of dates that kick off in February 2027.
We figured someone needed to clue us in on all things PiL and the man of many musical talents, Lu Edmonds was game to help us out.
Photo by Paul Heartfield
Traci: Hey Lu! Happy belated birthday! Did you do anything fun?
Lu: Well, it was fun! We were in Porto in Portugal and we’re finishing off the new album of Public Image Ltd. It is a lovely studio – it’s called Arda – and we just worked all day.
Traci: Oh, that’s awesome for us!
Lu: Cake in the evening, drinks, something nice to eat. All good.
Traci: Did you always want to be a musician, even from a young age?
Lu: I don’t think I ever wanted to. I didn’t know I did. It’s just what happened. I always wanted to play. I don’t know why. I don’t think I ever made a choice. I don’t know how it happened, but that’s all that I’ve ever done.
Traci: You play instruments that I’ve never heard of! I saw that they’re all kind of stringed, lute, guitar-ish shaped, so that made me wonder, is a guitar boring to you now?
Lu: No, no, nothing boring. No, you know, you have to look at guitars and think that the Fender Telecaster, which is a great instrument, is just the latest great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild of some other instruments that have come to us over millennia, really.
Traci: Do you remember the first song that you fell in love with?
Lu: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I grew up with The Beatles, but before that, we had all these Fats Domino records, like “My Blue Heaven,” you know, and all the Ray Charles, What’d I Say.” We had Fats Waller – all these great old jazz records. It was like jazz and I guess the more kind of commercial end of the blues, you know. Fats Domino, for me, I loved the sax and, you know, what’s not to like?
Traci: I love reading about your history, your variety of musical styles, your variety of bands. You can do so many things and you’re involved in so much, do you ever slow down? I mean, do you ever sit, still besides for interviews? (laughing)
Lu: Well, I don’t know. (laughing) Yeah, I mean, you know, the world is so interesting, it’s so fascinating, and music is the key. It’s like a little key that you can use to go and find, find so much about other shockingly different people and the way they live and the way they hear harmony and rhythm. It’s not that I deliberately go out and look for anything; it’s just that if you open your ears and open your eyes, it’s all around, especially these days in London.
Lu went on: I remember being in a taxi in 1982 and this Pakistani guy was driving and he had a cassette, but he didn’t have it going. I said, “Put the cassette,” and he went, “Are you sure?” I went, “Yeah.” He put it on. It was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the great qawwali singer. It just blew my head off because it’s punk, Sufi poetry. I’m not looking for it, or I’m just in the back of a cab, and you hear that stuff and that gets into you and you feel connected with the world. I think it’s a positive thing.
Traci: When you come to the US and North America, is there something in particular that you like to go see or like to do?
Lu: Well, to be honest, we really don’t get much time. I mean, just have a look at our tour and you know, play the gig and then we get something to eat. Then we get in the bus and we travel. We like to conserve our energy.
Traci: Do you guys all travel on one bus?
Lu: Yeah, yeah, just on one bus all together with John, everyone. He likes it. John is like me; he likes all kinds of music. And he’s got incredible taste in music. We’ve actually been talking a lot to him recently about the gigs that he went to see as a young child when he was 9 or 10 or even earlier. And then after he had the meningitis, his parents were like, “Look, John, anything that makes you reintegrate with society” – because he lost his memory – “is fine by us.”
Lu continued: So he had this incredible life prior to the Sex Pistols. The stories he tells us, they’re 10 times more interesting than anything that you see in “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.” That’s all just pretty much manufactured. We’re trying to get him to write that up, about his stuff and all that. But he just loves traveling. He’s like staring out the windows. You go across the Rockies and the Salt Lake City. We’re all together, we got quite a small crew, just the four people in the band, and then we have really good crew who’ve been with us now, some of them over 16 years.
L to R: Lu Edmonds (guitar), Scott Firth (bass), Mark Roberts (drums), & John Lydon (vocals)
Photo by Paul Heartfield
Traci: What can we expect with the show? I know you have “Alive,” the live album that is available now, and you’re recording that new one.
Lu: We’ve recorded it. It’s all really fun. Yeah.
Traci: Are you going to share some of those on this tour?
Lu: Well, probably not the songs. We might, as they say, deploy some of the bits of the things that were used to help record it. We got this funny Russian drum machine. It’s just totally bonkers, and it’s not digital in any shape or form, but it makes noises we don’t understand. We might use that a bit on a couple of tracks. And, you know, we improvise quite a lot…
Traci: When the song is done and you’ve released it, are you still wanting to tweak it, “I wish we had done this or that?”
Lu: That’s the problem, it’s never done! Whatever you hear on a record is a freeze frame of the point at which the manager came and said, “Right guys, that’s it, you’ve had enough time, stop it.” I have to say, John is absolute master, or he’s a genius improvisation of pulling things out of thin air, you know. He just hears things. It’s so interesting working with him because he’s so quick as well.
Lu paused and went on: On the new record, we went to the studio and he got ill very quickly, had like a cough, so he didn’t come in for a couple of days, by which time we’d laid down 12 tracks already, just stuff we made up. He came in and he had a mic in front of him, at the back of the studio with, you know, you’re hearing all on the speakers, and then he had a button that he could press if he wanted to record himself as we were listening back, and we secretly pressed it and he immediately started singing these things. And that’s mainly first take, first time he ever heard anything. Half the album is just his first reaction, having never heard anything that we did, and it’s fantastic! He’d make up the words on the spot.
Traci: Is it a spring 2027 release? Or no date yet?
Lu: I think that’s the idea. I think that’s what we’re aiming at, but we’re so busy. John is so busy; I think John’s probably done 160, 170 shows in the last year. We’ve done like 85, 90. The band is pretty well-oiled, if you like, but well-oiled in a way that we’re not afraid to peel off and start doing different things. It’s not the same every night. I mean, there’s some things we play, you know, because people want to hear certain songs.
Lu went on: But then increasingly we’re beginning to sort of branch out and do new things. We’re trying to integrate some of this new gear and then hopefully by next year when we come back to the States, we’ll have quite a few songs. We just played the songs that we think fit nicely, like a narrative or something, a telling story. We play stuff from new albums and the old albums. So we’ll see, there’ll be a lot of the oldies and goldies and newies. You have to keep yourself, otherwise if you fall to bits. I’m nearly 70, so I can’t deal with that.
Traci: You have this busy fall tour, then in 2027, Australia and Japan…
Lu: Then we come back to the States and there’s going to be a whole bunch more dates coming up all the way through ‘27. We do a lot of festivals and then there’s a lot of other things afoot going all the way into 2028. There’s a lot of stuff planned!
We are going to have plenty of PiL for the near future and that is absolutely fine by me. Thank you to Lu for the incredible chat!
The tour kicks off September 3rd in Pioneertown at Pappy & Harriet’s, hits Santa Ana and The Observatory on September 8th, jets up to LA on September 10th for a show at The Belasco, drops back down to San Diego on September 11th for a House of Blues show, then travels North America until the closer October 9th in Nashville. Another leg will launch in February 2027. Special guests Plague Vendor are slated on all dates and tickets are running low at many venues, so you better act fast – you don’t want to miss these legends live!
TO FOLLOW
SID 260821 | JIMMY ALVAREZ | EDITOR
