Johnny Rotten has lived in Los Angeles for the last two decades, and for a time considered his post-Sex Pistols project Public Image Ltd to be an L.A. band, he told The Times recently when he loaded into the passenger side of an old Volvo to get ferried to a video interview downtown. If any of that information is news to you, the video above will perhaps serve you well. In it, Lydon, whose work with the aforementioned two bands transformed rock music in myriad ways over the course of the 1970s and '80s, is his typically acerbic self.

The punk archetype, who turns 55 on Monday, pulled no punches over the course of two hours in the car and at The Times building, especially when the subject of the current breed of punk bands came up. Specifically, Green Day, whose music Rotten apparently dislikes.

Said Lydon when asked about his inheritors: "Many of the punk bands are cop-outs and imitators and have made it easy for the likes of Green Peace -- Green Day, who I hate. I really ... I can’t stand them. To me, they’re like coat hangers, and haven’t earned the right, they haven’t earned the wings, to be wearing the mantle of punk. They haven’t had to go through the violence, and the hate, and the animosity that us chaps way back when had to put up with. We had to fight for every single footstep."

For those few not in an Empire State of Mind at Friday's small-hour sets, two equally spooky punims awaited you at Public Image Ltd. and Fever Ray at far corners of the field.

Which was more terrifying? Well, one was a death-gripped grimace with acrobatic head adornments that suggested a pagan god-beast. The other was Fever Ray in makeup.

We jest though, Mr. Lydon. Public Image’s reunion-of-sorts set was actually a surprisingly eager traipse through the foundations of post-punk. For kids who have never known a nightclub without the Rapture or Bloc Party on repeat, it’s strange to imagine a time when disco beats and punk venom seemed an antithetical and radical pair. But cuts like “This Is Not a Love Song” and “Tie Me to the Length of That” had all the snarl of Lydon’s pioneering punk act the Sex Pistols, but atop a still-ambitious and spacious take on disco, dub and avant-garde effects. Lydon’s aging ungracefully in all the right ways – like the picture of Dorian Gray, his music in PiL feels ever more vital, while he makes Keith Richards look like Taylor Lautner onstage.

Fever Ray is one of very few bands that didn’t benefit from Coachella’s pastoral setting. The Nordic-noir Swedish electronic act (helmed by the Knife’s Karin Andersson) needs a pitch-black, claustrophobic space for her stunning stage sets to work their spatial magic. Indio’s palm trees kind of broke the spell, even if her tunes were as spectral and spine-chilling as ever, and a perfectly immersive nightcap to a long day.

But in the end, there was a clear winner in the battle of Coachella’s most haunting complexion. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous comment about drunkenness, when the bands hit the showers afterward, Fever Ray scrubs hers off.

-August Brown

Photo: Johnny Rotten of the band Public Image Ltd. (PiL) performs at Coachella on Friday. Credit: Karl Walter/Getty Images