POP REVIEW : Jones, Lydon Ignore Punk Pasts

Mick Jones and John Lydon may be summa cum laude graduates from Britain’s fabled punk rock class of ‘76, but their performances Thursday at UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall ignored their punk pasts.

Instead, they pursued their more recent chosen roles: Lydon, the ex-Sex Pistol, as amiably dyspeptic clown/curmudgeon of Public Image Ltd., and Jones, the Clash alum now fronting Big Audio Dynamite II, as emcee at a multicultural dance club. On recent albums, including the new “That What Is Not,” Lydon has been able to rail and rock convincingly against such germane targets as censors and militarists. But on stage, with his four-man band going through routine Culti-ish hard-rock paces, he was a caricature of himself, concerned with entertaining, but not driving home songs. Lydon went as far as tossing crumpled greenbacks to the stage-side multitudes and mooning the audience--twice.

Top-billed B.A.D. II motivated half the crowd half the time. The other half simply left due either to the inconsistency of the performance or the lateness of the hour (sponsored by MTV’s “120 Minutes,” the four-band show lasted 297 minutes). B.A.D. came off as a potentially good live guitar-rock band lost in a chaotic supermarket stocked with too many canned musical goods.

Just when Jones and his three new cohorts in the revamped band would start to kick hard in real time, prerecorded keyboard textures and riffs, rhythm parts and muffled audio bites generated by an adjunct deejay/sound mixer would hog the musical space.

Live, a band of 20-year-olds from York, Pa., turned in a honed, intense 35 minutes full of driving drums and slashing guitar a la U2, a pliant, funk-informed bass, and singer Edward Kowalczyk, whose husky, high-impact voice sounded like Michael Stipe on steroids.

Opening act Blind Melon got little help from singer Shannon Hoon, who sounded hoarse and wan. But it compensated with an guitar-led mix that incorporated the loose rhythms and improvisational feel of the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead (and, in less engaging heavy passages, Humble Pie).