In 1996, at their 20-year reunion, the Sex Pistols came up with the ruse of playing Abba’s Dancing Queen over the P.A. system before they appeared on stage. The rationale was simple. The reformed group would come on halfway through a record that embodied the sorry state of pop at the time of the Pistols’ ascent, thus reminding the throng just how sorely they had been needed. The problem was that, with the tribal divisions of punk long forgotten, the plan backfired somewhat. On hearing the Abba song, everyone started dancing.

Eleven years later - this time celebrating the 30th anniversary of their landmark album Never Mind the Bollocks . . . – the group’s original lineup, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and John Lydon, took no such chances. After an hour of relentlessly dull rave music a chorus of jeers turned into cheers as Lydon, dressed as some sort of deranged gamekeeper, paced the stage seemingly inspecting the mostly male, mostly middle-aged crowd. Before jetting in from their base in Los Angeles, Lydon claimed that the group had accrued a mere three hours of rehearsal time. If the titanic opening detonation of Pretty Vacant was anything to go by, three hours was about right for a band who, even at their brief, nihilistic zenith, sounded like they might fall apart at any minute.

That they’re all way better musicians than they were back then meant that the garage cacophony of Liar and I’m a Lazy Sod placed them closer to, say, Metallica than their old selves. But as the evening progressed, Lydon’s beady-eyed persona seemed like the only thing that distinguished middling tracks such as No Feelings and Did You No Wrong from each other.

Inevitably, he couldn’t resist having a pop at his archenemy – the Pistols’ ex-manager Malcolm McLaren. Hours after it was announced that McLaren would be featuring on the new series of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! Lydon declared, “See? Didn’t I tell you about that arsehole?” Quite how McLaren’s involvement in the show differed from Lydon’s two years previously wasn’t explained.

But neither was it a point that the legions of ex-punks felt compelled to dwell on. The more blithely Lydon paraded, the more bored Jones seemed to look. The latter briefly amused himself by segueing from (I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone to Eye of the Tiger – a set text to a seasoned L.A. sessioneer such as him – before the show climaxed with the inevitable duo of insurrectionary jukebox perennials. For God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK, a surge of energy from the stage was more than matched by a surge of balding, beery humanity from the back. No surprises there – which was more than you could say for a concluding rendition of Belsen Was a Gas – one of two postLydon Pistols tunes that originally featured the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs on vocals. Lydon performed it the only way he knew how. In a splenetic, spitting drizzle of gurning invective. It made you wonder how they had had the temerity to replace him.

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