punk
Music Reissues Weekly: Cock Sparrer - The Decca YearsSunday, 21 May 2023
“This is a record company’s idea of new wave. Clichéd heavy metal riffs and someone shouting in a cockney voice. This is a con and I hate it”.Notwithstanding that it would be a record company’s idea of things as just such an organisation was putting... Read more... |
The Great Escape Festival 2023, Brighton review - a long, hot, messy Day ThreeTuesday, 16 May 2023
“stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.” So said Charles Bukowski in his poem “how to be a great writer”. Who am I to argue. It’s a bright day and 11.50 AM. The sun isn’t past the yard-arm but the beer is cold and good.... Read more... |
The Great Escape Festival 2023, Brighton review - a vibrant dip into Day OneFriday, 12 May 2023
Brighton is writhing with music biz sorts. The Great Escape is here, the multi-venue festival that’s taken place here for over a decade-and-a-half, presenting bands from all over the world, most of them little known, at least in the UK. It takes... Read more... |
Jah Wobble, Brighton Festival 2023 review - Coronation bank hol Sunday marathonTuesday, 09 May 2023
Jah Jah Jah blah blah blah. We’ll get to that.I meet Everest at Worthing station at 3.20pm. He’s clad in a light brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He looks dapper. Like a Len Deighton spy. We board the train to Brighton. I hand him a chilled bottle... Read more... |
Die Verlierer, New River Studios review - Berlin punks instantly find an audience at their UK debutMonday, 08 May 2023
It’s flabbergasting. OK, there’s the power of the internet as a propagation tool but here’s a German band playing their first UK show to a jumping-up-and-down audience punching the air while shouting along with the chorus of “X-Ray Vision” – which,... Read more... |
Yard Act, Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow review - a transcendent victory lapSunday, 30 April 2023
Before even a note was struck, Yard Act’s singer James Smith was setting the bar high. “Over the past two days everyone we’ve met in Glasgow has been telling us this is the best gig we’ll ever play”, he declared, as soon as the Leeds band arrived... Read more... |
Album: The Damned - DarkadelicThursday, 27 April 2023
The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad... Read more... |
Album: The Selecter - Human AlgebraSaturday, 15 April 2023
To music-lovers of the era, The Selecter are known as part of the 2-Tone ska explosion which blew up as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. The Selecter were right in the middle of that, their eponymous song on the B-side of The Specials’ debut single... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Barracudas - Drop Out with the BarracudasSunday, 26 March 2023
From around July 1977, Jeremy Gluck began contributing to the UK music weekly Sounds. Amongst his pieces were features on The Lurkers, The Rezillos, 999 and his home country Canada’s punk band The Viletones. He’d also written about Generation X for... Read more... |
Album: 100 gecs - 10,000 gecsSaturday, 18 March 2023
If popular music is dead and done and there’s nowhere left to go, rising duo 100 gecs, from St Louis, Missouri, are here to prove there’s still deranged fun to be had cannibalising the corpse. The second album from the pair, both in their late... Read more... |
Album: Aksak Maboul - Une aventure de VV (Songspiel)Thursday, 02 March 2023
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to... Read more... |
Album: Gina Birch - I Play My Bass LoudThursday, 23 February 2023
The Raincoats are one of those revered names that I never believed I would witness live. (See also: Hole, Elastica and, until their last UK tour, extraterrestrial kooks the B52s). But in late 2019, there was a surge of activity from the godmothers... Read more... |
