Teenage punk for Town Quarterly

My first person essay about my teenage obsession with Crass, animal rights and anarcho-punk appeared in the latest issue of Town Quarterly.£5, out now.

New issue of The Word

The new issue of Word is out this month. I've written their first person essay at the back, about my youthful infatuation with Crass and what makes people get into bands years after they cease to exist.

Niall O'Brien/Good Rats talk

I chaired an interview with Niall O'Brien at Bistroteque in Hackney to tie in with his ongoing Superheroes project and Good Rats exhibition. The video of it is here.

Some rare live Joy Division

Joy Division are such a fucking lazy reference point for bands/journalists that it's easy to forget how incredible they were. Basically, when any band nowadays get compared to them, what they or the writer means is 'the singer wears a tie and does a stupid version of that jerky dance.' That's it.What's almost certain is that any band who genuinely did sound like them nowadays wouldn't even get a record deal.

Bah. Anyway, press screenings start tonight of Control, Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis which had very favourable reviews from Cannes. I'm too late to catch tonight's screening, but will report back as soon as I've got a review.

In the meantime, enjoy this excellent Super-8-with-sound footage of them tearing through a couple of tracks in an Altrincham pub in 1979. Nice to see something other than the so-so clip of them on Somethin' Else that gets endlessly recycled…

P.S. You can also check Scott King's excellent artistic tribute to Joy Division here. It's a bit like Stella Vine - if she wasn't a talentless cunt and if she ever stopped sucking up to famous people and using obvious symbolism.

Crass live; heavy, chaotic etc

Another of those bands whose genius shouldn't really need explaining is Crass. Some ultra-rare footage of them playing live has recently shown up here. The person responsible claims that "This is the only known live footage" of the band. That seems strange, but other posters seem to confirm that little if any footage of Britain's finest anarcho-punk band exists. Presumably they were too busy plotting the downfall of Western society to pose for the cameras too much.

The footage seems to have been taken from a 1979 BBC documentary, with this clip showing the band playing 'Do They Owe Us A Living', possibly at the Conway Hall in London.

The First Post

This blog is all about the slightly grim, unpleasant seedy stuff that makes up the best in English culture. It'll roughly have a bias towards the Seventies and Eighties, but not exclusively.

Anyway, here's a classic bit of EFTE culture from New Year's Eve 1979. Difficult to imagine anything more thrilling than seeing Kenny Everett, Thin Lizzy and The Sex Pistols together, welcoming in 1980 in all its ominous glory. You can practically smell the rubbish piling up in the streets outside.

I like to think the conversation planning this issue went something like this:
"Ok. Why don't we have Kenny making a joke about everyone being on strike, and then some great video effects of him blowing up his bosses? Then Thin Lizzy and The Pistols can play, while the stage gets invaded by loads of fanny in suspenders, all the fatty Thames TV technicians who are off their heads on sherry and a black bloke in top hat and tails?"

It certainly knocks Jools Holland's bastard Hootenanny into a very large cocked hat.