punk
caspar.gomez
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.Quarter of an hour later, the singer Luna Roja (pictured left) takes to the small indoor stage. She tells the small crowd that she wants her music to “connect South America and spaghetti westerns”. With long straight black hair, she’s clad in a powder blue fringed jacket, pale jeans and a cowboy hat. Her guitar adds the Morricone twang but the songs mostly Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
According to PUP lead singer Stefan Babcock, the Toronto foursome practiced together a grand total of twice before embarking on their current UK and European tour.Given the band’s well-known habit for disagreements and teetering on the edge of imploding, that might have been a wise decision. It didn’t affect the show itself, for while the group’s history is littered with chaos, this was a lively but controlled display. There was little fuss or frills here, instead around 20 tracks being hammered through with a consistent bounce, inside SWG3’s pillar strewn concrete bunker of a Glasgow Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sixes and Sevens is a surprise. A big one. Since leaving Siouxsie and the Banshees in September 1979, John McKay has largely been a mystery. On record, the only suggestion this influential guitarist had continued with music was the EP his post-Banshees band Zor Gabor issued in 1987. Otherwise – nothing.Sixes and Sevens collects 11 tracks excavated by McKay from his personal archive. It is not an unreleased album. Three tracks are from 1980, three are from 1983, and there is one apiece from 1985, 1986 and 1987, and two from 1989. One of the 1983 tracks is titled “Zor Gabor” and, as well as Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s always been a goofy charm about Billy Idol. As an implausibly chiselled Adonis shining out from the deliberate ugliness of the original London punk scene, he was a misfit among misfits. As a pop star through the ‘80s, he was visibly so spectacularly high almost all the time that he somehow made everything pantomime-ish around him. Latterly he’s been such a perfect encapsulation of the Brit rock star in LA archetype he could quite plausibly be starring in a Spinal Tap spinoff.Along the way, though, he’s made quite a few really great records and remained absolutely, in every possible Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Sweden’s most gloriously unhinged export is back, and Viagr Aboys might just be Viagra Boys at their most fun, feral and fully realised. This album doesn’t try to out-clever the world; it grabs it by the collar, shakes it around, and laughs in its face.From the opening notes, you can tell this isn’t the band trying to reinvent the wheel. They’ve set the wheel on fire and are using it to roast marshmallows. Sebastian Murphy howls and rambles through songs that feel like the soundtrack to a party thrown by nihilistic philosophers and drunk uncles. It’s chaotic, weird, and totally locked in.“Man Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2025 is tomorrow (Saturday 12th April 2025)! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been sent a selection of exclusive RSD goodies. Check the reviews. Then check your local record shop! See you amongst it.THEARTSDESK ON VINYL CHOICE CUT FOR RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2025Marianne Faithfull Burning Moonlight EP (Decca)A fitting and thoughtfully put together final release from an icon. Marianne Faithfull, who died in January this year, aged 78, was a one-off singer and creative, also a proper 1960s countercultural heavyweight, a woman who lived the best and worst of bright, fast hedonism. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Resurrecting the origins of old rock stars is becoming quite the thing, After cinema’s Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan and upcoming Bruce Springsteen films, theatreland has staged Tina, A Night with Janis Joplin and MJ, and the Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon is touring again soon. On a more intimate scale, now there's Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n'Roll, about the Dr Feelgood co-founder and rock guitarist extraordinaire who outflanked cancer and became a star of Game of Thrones.Wilko comes with a script full of Wilko zingers by Jonathan Maitland and a star turn from the actor/musician Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show. Nonetheless, The Courettes’ Flávia Couri knows higher levels of excitement are there to be tapped, that it’s possible to get the crowd to liberate themselves from any restraint they may have left. Limits are there to be pushed.She calls out. They respond. She sings. They sing along. She gestures, beckoning for more. They howl. It’s not enough though. Then, boom. She’s off the stage, burrowing through onlookers and on the bar, holding-up her guitar to Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Bowling For Soup are celebrating their iconic album, A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, on a fun-filled, energetic tour for its 20th anniversary. Their sold out stop at Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall was a joy to experience from start to finish, the light-hearted essence of the band evident from the minute we walked in. From comical merch to on-stage banter, the fun was infectious and made for a special evening executed by clear well-seasoned professionals. DJ Jon Mahon rallied the waiting crowd in the name of 2000s emo music, ramping up the excitement with his energy and perfect song choices. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On its own, the second session The Lurkers recorded for the BBC’s John Peel show on 18 April 1978 is arguably a curio, a footnote. Four tracks of bracingly straight-ahead Brit-punk with a headstrong freshness undiminished by time. But whatever the impact, The Lurkers were never a main-agenda band, and the Peel session was an adjunct to their discography.The Peel session has resurfaced on a 12-inch, clear-vinyl EP as part of the Beggars Arkive series of releases: an archive exercise digging into Beggars Banquet, the label The Lurkers were on. Available as a stand-alone release, the record is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We live in tragic times given over to cataclysmic events that require outsized emotions in return. That may be one reason to account for the uptick, therefore, in Greek drama, which includes not one but two Oedipi, various adaptations of Antigone, and the arrival on the commercial West End of the obvious companion piece to Oedipus, namely Elektra – the K in the title perhaps nodding to a landscape in which people exist to kill. The star attraction is Oscar winner Brie Larson, who certainly deserves credit for taking on this part in the harsh glare of the commercial theatre, not least in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHBuñuel Mansuetude (Skin Graft/Overdrive)This is a balls-out punk rock’n’roll mess, grunge that’s eaten the hash-cake then swigged a pint of Bourbon at high speed. Buñuel is Eugene S Robinson of San Francisco noiseniks Oxbow, accompanied by a trio of Italian musicians. Across this two-record set, which comes on gatefold double on vinyl that looks like a neon green alien has thrown up breakfast, the quartet are having a ball. Robinson leads the charge, his shrieking vocals whirlpooling around a caterwauling riff assault that’s psychedelicized in the manner of bands such as Read more ...