Sex Pistols

Today it's Wire and Sex Pistols, next week everyone's off to see Siouxsie: no, this isn't London in 1977, this is Turin, it's 2008, and a punk revival is underway. At Parco della Pellerina, the generous Traffic Festival brings in the band that was the icon of that youth uprising, and of an era that in many ways resembles our own. The passing of time, however, is plain to see in the musicians' worn appearance: singer Johnny "Rotten" Lydon with his gaunt face, guitarist Steve Jones visibly overweight, and the slight bassist Matlock who, having been pushed out of the band back then to make room for the diabolical Sid Vicious despite co-writing every song, has returned to play at the twenty- and thirty-years-on reunions, in a genuinely singular personal journey.

As the opening notes of "Pretty Vacant" ring out, the first thing that becomes clear is that, if you want to enjoy the show, you need to set aside all the ideological baggage attached to the band. What we have here are men in their fifties running through their old hits in an enjoyable, convincing way: it might not be thrilling, but the same could be said of countless other rock acts. It's not fair to condemn the Sex Pistols for having lost the danger and fury of their heyday, because that's the fate of almost anyone who's still playing rock past the age of thirty.

The other problem is that - whether it's the low volume, or the fact that Glen Matlock actually knows how to play his instrument, or the minimalism of it all - the band sounds far too "clean". The balance between volume and distortion matters enormously for rock guitar; just ask Kevin Shields or J Mascis if you have any doubts. Unfortunately, that magic either comes to you instinctively (and the Sex Pistols of "Never Mind The Bollocks" had it), or you have to reconstruct it scientifically.

The 2008 version of Steve Jones can do neither, so what we're left with is an honest, but almost "ordinary", rock'n'roll outfit, whose set list is nonetheless made up entirely of classics: "Liar", "No Feelings", "I Did You No Wrong"...

These are songs embedded in the adolescence of everyone in the crowd, and in this version they're enjoyed almost playfully, like punk nursery rhymes - which, in part, they always were. The best moments are the same ones that stood out on the record: "Submission", "Holidays In The Sun", "Problems". The one jarring surprise is a "Belsen Was A Gas" reworked into something about Baghdad and the ongoing war, with Johnny Rotten chanting invocations to Allah. Setting aside the political stunt, the song mostly serves to make you miss the singer's other band, Pil, who seem to be explicitly evoked here.

The two undeniable highlights, however, are an "Anarchy In The U.K." turned into mass karaoke, and a "God Save The Queen" whose refrain "no future for you" - by now shifted from provocation to a bleak statement of fact - tragicomically unites the younger generation with the former hooligans and proles standing on stage. What's most striking is the number of very young people in the crowd, people to whom '77 (and its rhetoric) means nothing, who look at the Sex Pistols the way they'd look at Green Day (perhaps finding them less exciting), for whom "future" is still just a word: by the end of the show, they seem to have found just the right dose of fun.

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