punk
Live is Alive!, Brighton Festival 2021 review - local talent makes for snappy return to gig-landSaturday, 22 May 2021
The idea live music is back is worth shouting about. Indeed, the BBC News has been doing just that about this gig. In reality, though, while it’s a joy to be out (this is my first major venue concert for a year-and-a-half), Live is Alive is a... Read more... |
We Are Lady Parts, Channel 4 review - female Muslim punk band rocks the houseFriday, 21 May 2021
It’s crazy, but could it possibly work? Writer Nida Manzoor (a veteran of Doctor Who and BBC Three’s sitcom Enterprice) grew up in a Muslim family, but that didn’t stop her being a fan of punk rock, Blackadder and This Is Spinal Tap. She also writes... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Outsiders - Count For SomethingSunday, 16 May 2021
With the Spiral Scratch EP, Buzzcocks became the first British band of the punk rock era to issue a do-it-yourself seven-inch. Everything was organised and paid for by the band: the recording session, the manufacture of the record and its sleeve,... Read more... |
Album: Dinosaur Jr - Sweep It Into SpaceWednesday, 21 April 2021
When Laurence Binyon wrote: “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn…” he was, of course, talking about the fallen soldiers of World War One, not Amherst’s premier hardcore grunge punks. However, on hearing Sweep It... Read more... |
Album: Alan Vega - MutatorSaturday, 10 April 2021
If there’s someone who could claim to have proved Arnold Schoenberg’s pithy phrase “If it is art, it is not for all” it was Alan Vega. His and Martin Rev’s abrasive synth-punk duo, Suicide were famously detested by fans of the Clash, one of whom... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Jon Savage's 1972-1976 - All Our Times Have ComeSunday, 28 March 2021
Close to the back of Jon Savage’s 1991 book England’s Dreaming, there’s a section titled “Discography.” In this, he goes through the records which fed into and were spawned by punk rock and the Sex Pistols, the book’s subject. The wide-ranging... Read more... |
Album: LOUISAHHH - The Practice of Freedom (HE.SHE.THEY.)Thursday, 11 March 2021
Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but... Read more... |
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche review - memorialising her motherSaturday, 06 March 2021
There was always something a little diffident about teenage Marion Elliott-Said, who created her on-stage persona Poly Styrene after putting together her band X-Ray Spex from a small ad in the back pages of the NME in 1977. Male fans and the music... Read more... |
Album: Genesis Owusu - Smiling With No TeethSaturday, 06 March 2021
The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple... Read more... |
Album: Alice Cooper - Detroit StoriesThursday, 25 February 2021
A decade ago, Alice Cooper reconnected with his roots. He created a sequel to his 1975 album Welcome to my Nightmare with Bob Ezrin, the producer whose vision crystallized Alice Cooper, the band, and shot them to stardom in the early-Seventies. The... Read more... |
Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: the level playing fieldFriday, 19 February 2021
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Disco Zombies - South London StinksSunday, 14 February 2021
“Witless punk” was the weekly music paper Sounds assessment of Disco Zombies’s first single “Drums Over London”. NME’s Paul Morley was more measured, declaring it “ill-disciplined slackly structured new pop but the chorus alone makes up for it.”... Read more... |
