JOE Strummer and The Clash, The Damned, Elvis Costello, Bob Geldof, UK Subs, The Buzzcocks, protagonists from the punk pantheon, have all played York.

It has taken the arch antagonist, John Lydon, to reach his Harold Steptoe years to do likewise, but here he was on a Tuesday night, playing Fibbers at 59 to those of a similar butter-enhanced build and age.

It was hot, it was sweaty, and very, very full, like punk gigs of old, and Lydon was soon removing his pink and blue jacket and round glasses, reaching for a bottle and clearing snot from his nose as the heat challenged his breathing.

"My body and mind is the Sex Pistols but my heart and soul is PiL," Lydon has said, and if the Pistols have become a heritage cash cow for his pantomimic Johnny Rotten, the re-formed Public Image Ltd have sparked him into two cussed albums in four years.

Ostensibly, he was promoting the new anti-religious one, What The World Needs Now, and while he never mentioned it by name, nor its song titles, he gave it a good working-over with a three-piece band heavy on the bass, repetitive guitar and thudding drums that exposed the songs' limitations, built around his familiar sneering sloganeering.

A superlative This Is Not A Love Song and the singalong Disappointed were rare raids on the PiL back catalogue; elsewhere it was more of the bitter new PiL to swallow, with the dub and dance elements of PiL's past left at the door.

After a breather, Lydon and co closed out the gnarly night with an encore trio of a splenetic, if overlong Religion, a wayward,woolly Public Image and a rousing Rise, where he used up every last ounce of angry energy till breathing his last: "Goodnight York, I'm about ******* dead."