Anarchy from the UK: Crapfest 2022 in Liverpool and War on Women in Manchester

Reports and videos from Liverpool’s underground punk festival and Manchester’s Factory 251

At a time of intense strikes and protests that are sweeping through many cities in the UK, most notably
Manchester, the notorious anarchy in the UK is reviving and proliferating again (or perhaps it always has), although more covertly and with less hype on mainstream circuits. This is the case of Liverpool’s annual punk festival, Crapfest, an event that right from its name promises belligerent, unpretentious music, hosted and organised by the local band Crapsons (a line-up born out of the festival) on 28 August 2022. The different bands performed in three of the many venues on Seel Street, the EBGBS, the Jacaranda Club and the Kazimier Stockroom, in a non-stop succession of punk, hardcore, thrash metal, but also folk and acoustic punk. Indeed, the characteristic feature of this festival was to not offer merely one musical genre, as is often the case in other contexts, but to present a wide range of musical styles, with punk-rock and protest songs as common denominators.

It was not possible to record all the bands, but from what could be filmed, the offering was indeed very
varied and interesting: ranging from the acoustic songs of Kieron Dyson, who jeers at the omnipresent
Tories with Downing Street Christmas Party and Priti Vacant (dedicated to the current Home Secretary Priti Patel), to the more visceral punk of Spam Javeling, Crapsons, Pat Butcher and the more ironic Leech Bleeders who also dedicate a song to swiping unattended pints of beer (“dregs of a pint”) when broke.

The band Piss Kitty appeared on the small EBGBS stage with the right attitude and audacity, but for the
entire first song the bassist forgot to plug in the cable to the pedal and the first video will go down in
history in my hard disk for my private entertainment. The band recovered well, being it a punk festival
where things like that are not uncommon and went on to perform a very good show.

The Healthy Junkies, perhaps the best-known band of the festival, performed as an acoustic duo and
capitalising on the French singer produced an acoustic punk version of La Vie En Rose, as well as a very nice rendition of their song Copycat. A touch of thrash metal was supplied by the Emissaries of Syn on the narrow stage of the Jacaranda, while special mention must be reserved for Thunder and the Giants, a band with a more singer-songwriter oriented punk and references to Pulp and The Cure (akin to the sound of the Rome-based band I Fuoricorso). And yes, the more you move around, the more you realise that from across the Channel music is not so different from what we see in our “Belpaese” and in other countries. The whole world is but one country (as we say in Italy…) and so is punk.

In a different way, Manchester’s musical journey goes back to the re-evocation of the well-known club The Haçienda, now a simple housing estate, but made more and more legendary over the years thanks also to the recent book by Peter Hook, bassist of Joy Division and New Order, entitled ‘How Not To Run A Club’. In recent years the old venue has had a new incarnation, not far from the former building, with the name of Factory 251, which obviously refers to Tony Wilson’s Factory Records, the record label that together with New Order (or rather with the profits of their tours..) tried to run the old club amidst unbearable losses.

The American band War on Women performed at the new venue on 20 August 2022, with the female duo Deux Furieuses as the opening act. The band from Baltimore, Maryland, offers a mix of punk and hardcore with a strong sonic and visual impact and feminist and anti-establishment themes, with frontwoman Shawna Potter making no secret of her disgust at the recent disgraceful anti-abortion turn in the US.

Marginalisation, racial discrimination and misogyny emerge in the lyrics and in the aggressive sound of the 3/5 female band, with the singer seeking new ‘recruits’ to oppose the ‘War on Women’, the ever-present attack on women’s rights. Definitely a solid live performance by a very interesting riot-girl band, not always very easy to manage acoustically (with a singer, however, extremely good at not letting the guitars drown her out).

A much simpler volume affair, however, for the opening duo: Deux Furieuses are Scottish Ros Cairney (vocals and guitar) and Greek drummer Vas Antoniadou, who propose PJ Harvey-style post-punk, and it is no coincidence that their first album was indeed produced by Rob Ellis. Their song ‘Bring Down The Government’ seems to be the perfect mantra for whichever government is coming down on us. Are we better off without it? Probably. And from the ‘land of anarchy’ this is all (for now).

Report and videos by Emiliano Liberatori

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