JOHNNY doesn’t hate Pink Floyd, he hates the idea of Pink Floyd, so went Mr Lydon’s curious revelation the other day on 6 Music. He’s also partial to Ska, T. Rex and who’d have thought it, Dolly Parton – for two good reasons, he confesses. Butter too, it seems.

Lydon agreed to those adverts to fund This Is PiL, the penniless band’s first album in two decades and arguably the year’s most important release so far. Not that such an apparent sell-out should come as a surprise, nor the seeming contradictions in musical taste, because curmudgeonly Lydon is one of life’s most incomprehensible paradoxes – until he writes songs that is.

Once PiL led the post-punk way; now in a world of talent-free X-Factor, their razor-like, bile-sodden presence is even more vital. “We are the ageless, we are teenagers,” sneers Lydon, fully conscious of his musical immortality.

The album deals with council flat living, drug dependency and inept leaders, which makes it as relevant today as it was back in the late 1970s. More so thanks to oak-aged angst against the same guitar sound Edge ripped off all those years ago. The 20 years of wait have been worth it; PiL are back. Boy are they back; thank God for butter.