From the very first listens we completely fell in love with Béton Armé, a band from Montreal, Quebec, formed in 2018. Their Oi! sound is inspired by the Italian scene of the 1980s and the more recent French wave, also enriched with hardcore punk influences that give everything the right extra push. The result is a direct, raw, and savage sound that’s truly unique. In 2025 they released Renaissance via La Vida Es Un Mus, which we immediately included among our favorite records of the year!

• Radio Punk: Hi and thanks so much for being here on our webzine! Let’s start with the basics: we know you formed in 2018 and over the years you’ve consolidated the project through several splits and two releases. Where do Béton Armé come from? Do you have – or have you had – other projects besides this one (bands, collectives, anything else…)?

Béton Armé: Hi ! First, thanks for having us. It’s always great to contribute to zines from all over the world. It’s a really important part of the subculture and we’re always honored to be included in them. 

The idea of the band coalesced at the end of 2017 and we really started playing together in early 2018. It started when I (Oli, guitar) came back from France, after spending a year in Paris where I hung out with friends there while the scene was at its peak and really wanted to get back to playing music since it had been on the back burner for years because of perpetual back and forth between Canada and France which didn’t allow me to be in a band in any serious way. At the same time Dan (vocal) and Fabio (bass) had the idea to start a band with similar influences so we got introduced by a mutual friend and we went from there. We asked Remi (drums) to join because we had seen him play with other bands and thought the energy he brought was exactly what we needed. He realistically is the only one who already was in a band worth mentioning (haha). He indeed was already playing with Faze, a hardcore band from Montreal which solidified its status as one of the best in the city even more in recent years. As for the rest of us we all had punk and hardcore bands, but nothing anyone outside of our local scene would have ever heard of. 

• Radio Punk: Your latest record Renaissance, released by La Vida Es Un Mus, is a real gem. We know you draw inspiration both from French bands like Rixe and from Italian Oi! bands of the ’80s, and this really comes through on the record! We’re curious: what are your favorite Italian records? 

Béton Armé: That answer is really easy and quite straight forward. Nabat is obviously the one that comes to mind immediately and is one of the main influences for the band. We also really like Rough from Turin. It’s a classic for us, especially for Fabio. We also fuck with Basta. All great bands with the sort of energy we wanted to infuse our music with since the beginning. 

• Radio Punk: Can you share some cool details, curiosities, or anecdotes about the record? And more generally, is there something you’d like to say about the album or about yourselves that nobody has asked you yet?

Béton Armé: Here’s a fun fact : as Dan is often saying, we’re a dance band from Montreal. The idea is to get people moving and in order to do that some of our songs are heavily influenced (if not totally ripped off) by 90’s euro dance hits. I’ll let the readers figure out which ones! 

• Radio Punk: In Europe, and especially in Italy, the punk and skin scenes are closely connected to social and political struggles and themes such as antifascism, anticapitalism, and transfeminism. Is it the same within the Canadian scene?

Béton Armé: Yes. In Montreal especially, punk and oi! Scenes are very much intertwined and heavily leaning on the left. We try our best to keep it that way and that’s where our politics stand. 

• Radio Punk: You’re from Canada, specifically Montreal, and in an interview from some time ago (with Matt from Creases Like Knives) you talked about how gentrification is destroying your city – something we’re unfortunately seeing in many Italian cities as well. How do the punk and skin scenes resist all this? Are there any “free zones” or places, venues, squats that try to slow down the inevitable slide toward a yuppie-dominated world?

Béton Armé: It is very hard. DIY spaces are opening and closing all the time. People try to organize and build alternative communities, but the general phenomenon is hitting our scenes very directly. One such example is the death of LoudHouse, which was one of the most long standing DIY venue/squat in North America a few years ago. We have yet to find a new alternative to replace it and it’s becoming quite difficult. Katacombes also had to shut down. It was a venue co-owned and run by punks and it got tore apart to build condos. I guess the only glimmer of hope is the neighborhood I live in, Hochelaga, where a lot of the punks live. It always has been a left leaning/working classe part of the city and a lot of community based initiatives work together to fight – or at least slow down- the aggressive gentrification of our city. It works to an extent, but rent is still increasing and it is a never ending uphill battle.

• Radio Punk: You’ve played a lot and in many different countries – the USA, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Germany, France… so when are you coming to Italy?! Jokes aside, with bands that tour as much as you do, we always like to ask for some trashy or grotesque tour anecdotes. Make us laugh!

Béton Armé: We’re gonna play at least a show in Italy in September. It’ll be announced soon. And obviously we would like to do more. It’s definitely coming in the next years.

As for anecdotes, I guess this one is our classic one : one member of the band – who shall remain nameless- had too much to drink one night in Milwaukee and ended up so drunk he pissed his pants… with his brand new passport in his pockets. This document has been nicknamed de PISSport ever since. And I might had that to cover our tracks, another member of the band left an empty bottle of beer on the couch where the deed happened to cover our tracks and the next time we saw the owner of the house he instantly came to us saying : “Nice try covering the stain on the couch, but don’t worry it’s not the first time someone pisses on it.’”

• Radio Punk: You’re a band that receives a lot of support, both live and online, and you’ve had a great response from the public – something we imagine makes you very happy! We also know that in your lyrics you really care about spreading the idea of unity within the scene, mutual support, and personal growth. How can these great values be put into practice in everyday life? And speaking of the scene, is there unity among the different subcultures where you’re from?

Béton Armé: There is obvious unity in Montreal. The support we got from every underground subcultures has been great. Even the more “mainstream” scene is starting to see us and support what we are doing, which is great. We try to practice what we preach, book new bands, support our friends and always be stoked for other bands’ success. We understand now the amount of work required to be in a touring band and it’s important for us to give back whenever possible. 

• Radio Punk: We’re at the end – thanks so much for answering our questions. We’ll close with one last, extra-spicy question: who are you in everyday life? What are your jobs and hobbies outside of music? Cheers!

Béton Armé: No worries, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having us! And as for our everyday lives, I am a historian, I did research and taught history at Unii for a while. Remi and Fabio work construction/renovation jobs and Dan is an electrician by trade. But at this point we’re on tour so much that we don’t really do any of this very often. Remi is a great skater and it’s a big part of his life. Personally I mostly like to read and watch football. And most of us like hockey because… you can’t escape that in Montreal haha. 

First photograph by Jesse Ramirez

L'articolo  Interview with Béton Armé proviene da Radio Punk.

On November 14th the Stiglitz released their new album titled “Quando Tutto Tace”, available on LP, CD, and digital. You can listen to it for free on Bandcamp and YouTube. The record was co-produced by us at Radio Punk, Flamingo Records, and Rumagna Sgroza, and features collaborations with Fabrizio Barile and Stefania Carbonara on the visual side, as well as Toni Cocks and Fabrizio Sferrazza on two tracks. Without further delay, let’s get to know the Genoese band better and dive into this new release.

• Radio Punk: Hi guys and thanks a lot for being here! We know that before being a band you’re a group of friends, people who’ve shared a lot together beyond music. Tell us how this musical project came about and how it’s evolved over the years.

Stiglitz: Oi Kids! First of all, thanks to you for the space you’re giving us and for the great questions!
So: the Stiglitz were born inside the rehearsal room of the occupied space L.S.O.A. BURIDDA in Genoa, toward the end of 2018 — a place that unfortunately no longer exists physically, but that thankfully still lives on in the everyday lives of all of us who passed through it. Right — the Stiglitz came out of a context that was definitely parallel to (and inside) what was going on in the whole network of squats and occupations in the Ligurian capital. But at some point you still need to find a common point, some kind of glue that holds everyone together. And that, clearly, was our scene: putting on shows, and wanting to put our backs into it, for the scene and within it.
That’s it. That’s the recipe for how the Stiglitz came together: five guys who run into each other at gigs, who already come from that world, and who feel the right spark between them to do something good together — for themselves, but above all for their community, the one that lives in “the city underneath,” far away from all the supposed spotlight glare. Add a whole lot of proletarian anger coming from all our personal stories, the desire to be able to say one day, “fuck it, at least we actually did something instead of just complaining on social media,” and there you have it: literally five Kids playing Oi!

You can listen to the new album below. To order a copy of the vinyl or CD, please email us at info@radiopunk.it

• Radio Punk: On November 14th your latest LP “Quando Tutto Tace” came out, presented live with a show at Zapata in Genoa. Tell us some juicy curiosities about this insane record!

Stiglitz: Heheheh, alright, let’s get into the juicy stuff then! First off, this record really marks a turning point for us as a band. It includes songs we’ve been playing in the practice room for at least two years now, so in a way this album feels like a sort of summary of the time that’s passed since our previous release (Deja Vu came out in 2022) up to today.
Looking back, it’s clear we’ve come a long way — from tracks like “Non Affonda” and “Garassino,” all the way to all the people, stories, and places that we’ve passed through, and that have passed through us. What matters most to us, though, is that all these “traces” of our passage are still there, even if with a few bruises and aches along the way (because hardcore punk is also that). You can see them in the way we do things, in the thoughts of the people who shared this path with us, and in the grooves of this latest record. So yeah, this record saw us grow, and it saw grow the people who’ve been listening to us since day one. Our hope is that it leaves something behind even for those who’ve just discovered us. It wasn’t an easy record to make — this time there were a lot of emotions and stories that needed to come out.
Gian (the singer) lived in Bologna for almost the entire writing phase and came down when he could; the rest of us were in Genoa, all with other projects and a thousand hassles (without getting into our personal lives, which like everyone else’s are there and wonderfully complicated). And let’s not forget we’re human beings: we mess up, we lose our house keys, and sometimes we don’t find them again. So yes, making music like this, in this way, isn’t easy — but refusing to compromise definitely helped keep us together.
All our love goes to the people who’ve always been there behind the scenes. From Fabrizio “Fritz” Barile, whose photos managed to shape the imagery we’ve always had in mind when writing our songs (curiosity no. 1: every Stiglitz release has a Fritz photo on the cover!), to the Flaminghi crew — Emi, Albe, and Maso (curiosity no. 2: without them, Genoa, the underground, and more simply our music wouldn’t be what they are). Stefania Carbonara, who is basically the entire scaffolding holding up the layout of this record, and who’s a truly special person to us. And then there’s Sferrazza (curiosity no. 3: Fabri played sax on “SENZA CHIODI”; he was the saxophonist for Meganoidi, and for those of us born in Genoa and raised in certain circles, he’s a solid point of reference). To wrap it up: the Radio Punk crew and Rumagna Sgroza (curiosities no. 4 and 5 — you guys are our heart Ginis, and Rumagna Sgroza are without a doubt a driving force behind self-production and the Romagna underground), the whole turbo Oi! family (curiosity no. 6: the track S.T.O. was written by Lobo of TIGRE, who gets our devoted wishes for a truly respectable turbo Oi!), and Anto from COCKS (curiosity no. 7: he’s the photonic voice you hear in the second verse of “MA SE CI PENSO”), a real piece of our hearts and an irreplaceable “fifth” Stiglitz.

• Radio Punk: Genoa is a city with a strong personality, and it’s easy to see why for Genoese people it’s a fundamental part of their identity — almost an obsession, something that comes through strongly on your latest record.

Stiglitz: We’ll answer this one with a piece of advice. Come to Genoa in December. At Caricamento, take the number One bus, around 3:00 pm — that way you can chase the sunset heading west. Sit on the side by the window facing the sea, look straight out toward the horizon over the port, and really take it all in. Get lost between the concrete and the lives painted in people’s eyes in Sampierdarena, and in the reflections off the piers in Prá. Then, once you reach the Voltri terminus around 4:00 pm, walk down to Villa Azzurra beach. When you’re there, watching the sun die behind Savona, tell us if you don’t feel like writing a record about this city.

• Radio Punk: Your lyrics are introspective but also very direct — they get inside the listener and hit deep. What or who inspires you? (books, writers, bands, films…) What do you want people to feel when they listen to you?

Stiglitz: Honestly, we’re inspired by the days as they go by. We look for something in the stories of the people around us, in the everyday reality of our lives, that we can use collectively as an antibody against the nothingness that keeps advancing around us. For us, writing songs is a big responsibility. Being able to give space to lived stories, experiences, traumas, joys, and pain is a huge privilege. And probably one of the main gears driving the Stiglitz machine is knowing that what we write, people actually live — they see themselves in it, and they feel it as their own. We believe there’s only one real rule when writing a song: don’t lie to the Kids. A song might come to you while you’re hopping on a scooter, or in twenty minutes on a train ride home after years. That’s the magical part of this world. As long as you respect that rule, everything else works.

PS: and obviously, smiling and having fun — belin — life’s already a mess. If after eight hours of work you still have to get pissed off, it just makes no sense.

• Radio Punk: Besides Stiglitz, have you been or are you part of other bands or collectives? In some cities we’ve seen a strong generational shift and a lot of energy from younger people. Is something happening in Genoa? (bands, music collectives, political collectives)

Stiglitz: So, yeah — all of us have passed through pretty much every social center in Genoa, some more deeply than others, sometimes as part of the collective itself. As for other bands, the Stiglitz come from a lot of different experiences. Only Gian is on his first band; technically, though, Stiglitz includes members of COCKS, PIOVONO PIETRE, L.E.I.S.F.A., GOONIES, RISACCA, GAZED, SATANIC YOUTH, MEGADRIVE, and so on. Tying back to earlier questions, the way we write probably comes straight from all those genres we’ve played — and that we still play.

THANK GOD YES, IN GENOA THINGS ARE MOVING — BIG TIME.

The city and the nights are slowly filling back up with Kids, capable people taking their first steps toward DIY and self-management, organizing themselves and self-determining their paths. Even outside the music world, in political activity too, there’s a solid movement growing. We’ve seen it across Italy as well. We hope the long-awaited generational shift is really happening — who knows, maybe we’ll be back to fly-posting with bucket and glue at 11 at night. Better to say it quietly, though, for luck.

Radio Punk: With this record out, do you already have live shows planned or maybe a mini tour abroad? Spam the upcoming dates!

Stiglitz: Alright!! heheheh
Here are the dates confirmed so far — come find us:

24 gennaio – Bertinoro (IT)
21 febbraio – Imperia (IT)
7 marzo – Torino (IT)
13 marzo – Marsiglia (FR)
28 marzo – Treviso (IT)
2 maggio – Locarno (CH)
6 giugno – Modena (IT)

We’re also working on a bunch of shows outside Italy. One step at a time — posters in hand, we’ll keep you posted, definitely also through the Radio Punk website (curiosity no. who knows: GO CHECK THEIR SITE, THEY’RE INCREDIBLE, TALENTED, AND BEAUTIFUL).

• Radio Punk: Alright, we’ve known each other for a while now — tell the readers who the Stiglitz are in everyday life.

Stiglitz: Honestly, we’re really simple people. We like dark beer and doing Turbo Oi!

L'articolo Interview with Stiglitz proviene da Radio Punk.

Another year has passed, bringing us lots of albums, demos, and EPs, and making a selection is never easy. As you may have guessed, our crew is quite heterogeneous. However, having different tastes has never been an obstacle for us, but rather a virtue. In fact, this allows us to share with you a wide range of releases with the most varied nuances of punk.

As always, our choice regarding the best albums of the year is not to make charts, but simply to offer listening recommendations, a collection of our favorites. So below you will find our preferences sorted by subgenre, in alphabetical order. At the bottom, you will find the albums we have co-produced. We wanted to highlight albums that we are very fond of and that, by virtue of the fact that we have released them, we consider to be valid. However, we did not want to create a conflict of interest, which is why they have been separated from the rest.

Last but not least, here you can find all the 2025 Diyno Mixtapes, featuring lots of great albums that have been a pleasant soundtrack to our year.

Thanks to everyone who has read our articles throughout 2025 and to those who will read this article. We hope we have helped you discover new music. Enjoy listening and reading!

• Post Punk
• Punk Rock
• Ska Punk
• Hardcore Punk
• Crust Punk
• Oi!
• Coproductions

Our favorite albums: the best punk albums of 2025 in the opinion of Radio Punk crew

Post Punk

Lightinf. – All Conditions Gear (Hellnation Records | 12″ LP)

This splendid LP arrives at our headquarters with a cover that is as beautiful as it is evocative, which in the meantime brings us back to the band’s geographical origin, namely Bologna, and then to the sound and style, the British/Casual style that in fact rages throughout the record. In the wake of bands such as High Vis, the Bologna-based band offers us 8 tracks sung in English including a cover of Elliott Smith. Theirs is a potion formed by post-punk, britpop, new wave and punk rock, a perfect soundtrack to stroll through the chaotic urban marasmus trying to forget this drifting world. Super! “It’s a matter of class, it’s a matter of style”

Nyx Division – Midnight Lights (12” LP Black Water Records, Agipunk Records | Tape Transylvanian Recordings)

It’s nighttime and the temperature has dropped a little; summer is finally over. A light rain falls on the car windscreen, the lights filtering through the raindrops. We turn on the stereo and play Midnight Lights, perfect for driving throughout the city. This album is wonderful, with its post-punk sound, meticulously crafted and never banal. One song, after another, will stick in your head for days thanks to the guitar riffs and Domino Monet’s incredible voice. The deep bass gives it a more punk feel, while the drums remind us of the typical sounds of the 80s. An incredibly successful album in every respect, we’re hooked!

Rancœur – Fatalité (Contra Records, Longshot Music, Kanal Hystérik, Tough Ain’t Enough Records | 12″ LP / Dispear Records | Tape / DIY | CD)

After a year and a half of silence, these guys from Nancy make a really nice comeback. The album opens with an intro that slowly captures us in the cold and sharp sounds of the band, not by chance they call their genre ‘cold oi!’. After the intro the pace picks up, and we immediately enter the heart of the record with the title track: Fatalité. Rhythmic bass, pounding drums, sharp vocals and off they go… Rancœur prove to be a guarantee. On first listening, the album may seem quieter than their previous works, generally it seems that the bpm are lower, but the more you listen to it, the more convincing it becomes, and each time you listen to the record you discover some new details.
Also, the lyrics are always interesting, and as usual if you don’t know French on BandCamp you will find translated lyrics! This is absolutely not to be taken for granted. Nothing else to add, except have a good listen!

Punk Rock

Alarmsignal – Insomnia (Aggressive Punk Produktionen | CD/12” LP)

The night amplifies thoughts and worries, and sometimes it happens that we can’t sleep a wink. The common thread of this album by the veteran band of the German scene is precisely everything that takes our sleep away in these difficult times, both personally and globally: the hatred that is increasingly widespread and normalized by the language of the far right, a harbinger of racism, nationalism, sexism and homophobia. But the night is also a source of inspiration, and this is where the poetry of the 14 tracks comes from, punk rock that is solid but also has a strong emotional impact, with the contribution of numerous illustrious features, from Sebastian Madsen to Fucking Angry. And the night always gives way to light and a message of hope in which humanity can triumph over hatred, like the true story, tragic but with a happy ending, told in “Rest Your Eyes”: a visually impaired boy who fled Syria manages to land to safety thanks to his sister’s words of encouragement, “You will be safe to rest your eyes.”

Corbillard – Amour, Délice & Morgue (Guerilla Asso, Bearded Punk Records, AEM Project, Panda Records | CD/12” LP)

An ode to death, a hymn to life. The Belgian band, already active for 15 years, calls its music “punk rock from beyond the grave,” and, beginning with its name (French for “hearse”), makes decadent imagery its trademark. Yet, this constant winking at death overflows with a love of life, of the hope of dancing on the ashes of the world, if we know how to multiply despite their attempts to divide us, if we know how to fight for our rights, the right to live, and the right to die with dignity. The lyrics, accompanied by a booklet of illustrations, one for each of the 13 tracks, are pure poetry. And the music, refined but punchy punk rock in perfect Guerilla Asso style, delivers moments of high emotional impact. Masterpiece!

Dead Pioneers – Po$t American (Hassle Records | CD, 12″ LP)

Second album by the Dead Pioneers from Denver, Colorado. Like the first album, an absolute blast. This album has more music and a little less spoken word from Gregg Deal (the band’s frontman), but the political criticism that permeates the lyrics remains powerful and sharp, punk at its most rebellious and angry form, the Dead Pioneers have something for everyone. As with the first album, most of the songs revolve around highly topical and important issues: starting with Native American self-determination, they touch on racism, class struggle, the damage of capitalism, the damage of patriarchy, up to more specific topics concerning problems in American society; such as school shootings and the Second Amendment.
In summary: artwork 10/10, music 10/10, lyrics 11/10, note that you should listen and read the lyrics carefully otherwise you will miss a big part of this great album. We leave you with a quote from the title-track, Po$t American, as a preview of the record.

America so star-spangled awesome
A nice place where the Empire blossoms
Killing Natives, built on slave labor, too
When you bleed you bleed red, white, and blue

The Dreadnoughts – Polka Pit (Punkerton Records | 12” LP/ CD)

In Quezzi, a hillside district of Genoa, Italy, there is a street named after Stefanina Moro, a young partisan and martyr of the Resistance who was born in that very district. And it is with amazement and emotion that we discover that her story has crossed the ocean and reached Canada, inspiring “Tarantella Bang Boom,” one of the tracks on the new album by the Vancouver folk punk band. An extraordinary album that bridges Europe and America, past and present, tradition and innovation, bringing together accordion, fiddle, and mandolin with guitar, bass, and drums. Thus, tarantella, polka, and sea shanties merge with punk rock to draw us into a frenetic dance in the pit, inebriated and liberating, yes, but never forgetting the values of anti-fascism and those who, like Stefanina, fought or still fight to defend freedom: “A real partisan never dies.” Awesome!

Lambrini Girls – Who Let The Dogs Out (City Slang | CD, 12” LP)

More than a record, it is a manifesto that addresses, with anger and grit, the historical moment we are living through, reviewing all the hottest topics. Toxic masculinity, abuse in uniform, nepotism in the music world, harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace, mental health, eating disorders, gay awakening, gentrification and so many other issues are touched upon, indeed shouted with as much rage as possible, throughout this wonderful record. “Who Let The Dogs Out” is able to shake you body and soul with both the lyrics and the music, a true noise vortex characterized by fast-paced drum rhythms, which in some places recall electronic music. The heavily distorted bass produces a super fuzz and raw sound on which the extremely eclectic guitar riffs lie. A crazy experience to be had listening to track after track!

Snooper – Worldwide (Third Man Records | 12″ LP, CD, Tape)

The band from Nashville, Tennessee, give us 11 original tracks plus a stunning and brilliant cover of Come Together. This new work is bizarre, sensational, acrobatic and absolutely lysergic. A crazy journey through melody, frenzy and uniqueness. It is impossible to categorise this album into a single genre. Could we call it punk rock? Egg punk? Post punk? That would be an understatement, given the enormous amount of different influences, from the magnetic bass to the hypnotic guitars, the danceable rhythm and the significant electronic influences that blend with the catchy and well-structured vocals. A sensational album!

Teen Mortgage – Devil Ultrasonic Dream (Roadrunner Records | 12” LP, CD)

The Washington D.C. duo releases ‘Devil Ultrasonic Dream’, a devastating album characterised by their unmistakable punk rock style steeped in garage punk, action rock and hardcore punk. A band that manages to leave its mark on all the tracks on the album, creating the right balance between energetic pieces and slower, almost psychedelic ones. Theirs is a trip guided by a friendly cartoon version of the spectre of death. A band and an album that are definitely not to be missed!

Ska Punk

Catbite – Doom Garden (EP | Bad Time Records)

The new revelation of ska punk returns with a danceable EP and two guests, Patrick Stump and Zayna Youssef. The highlight of this release is the track with Patrick Stump, Tired of Talk. It’s impossible to resist the sound of fresh and vigorous ska, combined with two voices that fit together perfectly. While we wait for a full-length album, Doom Garden is a must-have.

The Guillotines – Parcel of Rogues (A Little Off the Top | CD/12” LP)

From the very first notes, this fourth album by the Scottish quintet will catapult you under a stage, where you’ll find yourself moshing and screaming at the top of your lungs. More than an album, it’s an arsenal of 11 tracks, each more explosive than the last, and a veritable political manifesto. Yes, because, true to their name, they incite rebellion against power: capitalism, the monarchy, the new right, and the new media. They define their music as “punk ska oi!” and indeed, in their very personal sound, cheerful and angry at the same time, the rhythm and horn section characteristic of ska coexist with working-class themes, vocal timbre, and anthemic choruses typical of oi! All performed with remarkable skill, including delightful solos on various instruments. An absolute masterpiece!

Merry Malady – Healthy Life

This is a truly amazing album! Ska-punk by definition, but with prog and folk punk echoes a la Days’n’Daze, listen to it even if you don’t count ska-punk among your favorite genres and you won’t be able to do without it! The product of the extraordinary creativity of Merry Malady, vocalist, guitarist, visual artist but above all songwriter, it is embellished by a band that also includes such well-known names in the American scene as Tara Hahn, lead singer of Half Past Two, and Eric Daino, here on bass and keyboards but also serving as producer. It is a hypnotic record that takes us to explore the innermost abysses of the human soul through lyrics made of bold metaphors and imaginative visions, accompanied by vocal harmonies that enchant and drag us into an emotional vortex. Lyrics laden with the pain of living, which, however, is sublimated in singing, and in the yearning for the healing of the soul. Gorgeous!

The Pomps – Partial Eclipse of The Pomps (Bad Time Records | 12” LP)

Crisp new release from Badtime Records, sure to satisfy the most refined palates. In fact, the Boston quartet churns out 10 tracks that are most striking for the measured dosage of ingredients. Well-known elements such as 2 tone ska, post punk and 80s style new wave are balanced and blended to perfection to create a sound with an original and current flavor that could be called new tone, or post ska. And if you add the vocal timbre you expect for that sound, super catchy melodies, delightful guitar solos and the witty irony of the social and political issue lyrics, you have served up an irresistible recipe to be enjoyed to your heart’s content. Over the top!

Space Monkey Mafia – Death of the Party (Jump Up Records | CD/12” LP)

“Wake me up when the empire ends”: this line, an ironic semi-quotation, sums up the meaning of this masterpiece by the Minneapolis band that leaves us speechless from the very first listen. The party is ending, the capitalist empire is crumbling, but we don’t stop dancing, knowing that there is a better world worth fighting for. A strong political message, indeed, but also a lot of introspection and an invitation to self-care and self-love, in lyrics of the highest literary and poetic quality. And the music? Ska-punk, of course, but with strong jazz and swing influences and a touch of metal, with exceptional vocal and instrumental performances that literally give you goosebumps! A sublime delight for the ears and the soul, it rightfully ranks among the best albums of the year!

Hardcore Punk

Ayucaba – Operación Masacre (Metadona Discos | 12” LP/ Educación Cínica | Cassette) 

You know when they say that an album gets stuck in your head? Well, in this album by the Barcelona band, featuring members of the Otro Futuro collective, there isn’t a single track that doesn’t stick in your mind. The explosive mix of hardcore punk with massive doses of thrash/speed metal and rock’n’roll sweeps us away like a tornado. The riffs are sharp and original, and the songs are all furious and particularly eclectic thanks to Cromi’s vocals, which spew forth all the hatred towards this unjust world. A splendid record!

Haram – ليش الجنة بيتبلش في الجهنم؟ Why Does Paradise Begin in Hell (Toxic State Records | 12” LP)

The New York band’s second album comes out of the blue. The 12 hardcore punk tracks blend seamlessly with an Arabian atmosphere, as evidenced by the lyrics’ language and the artwork. The songs are full of rhythm changes, furious and powerful, and they stick in your head thanks to the fresh and original riffs, as well as the overall atmosphere of the album. A complex mosaic that amazes both when viewed up close and as a whole. What lies behind the music makes this band even more interesting, as they make walking the razor’s edge of provocation their mantra. Criticism of Islamic extremism, mixed with the cultural assertion of the frontman’s Arab origins, is recounted with irony and scorn. A truly explosive mix!

We also recommend this interesting interview published on the release of the band’s last EP, where you can also find some information about this incredible band.

Punter – Australienation (Televised Suicide Records, Drunken Sailor, Green Noise, Sorry State | 12” LP) 

Already from the first notes I cried out for a miracle! Great performance by the Australian band that from the artwork to the sounds, from the musical proposal to the lyrics does everything right in this great 13-track album. In this cauldron that makes up “Australienation” we find hardcore punk, rock n roll, Dead Kennedys-esque early punk and unfailing echoes of Australian legends Radio Birdman. But the most striking thing is the devastating shot and the originality with which these various influences are mixed creating an album that is a masterpiece!

Scowl – Are We All Angels (LP | Dead Oceans)

Anyone who has seen Scowl live knows how much energy they put into their performances and how mesmerising Kat can be. Now, with their new album, the Santa Cruz band moves away from simple hardcore and toward melodic punk, combining it with harder elements, such as heavy metal and scratchy voices. Different for sure, but no less captivating.

Stormo – Tagli/Talee (Prosthetic records | 12’’ LP, CD)

Power and rage condensed into 11 high-quality tracks. Stormo are always a guarantee!
After a short instrumental intro, this new album drags us into a non-stop vortex of sharp sounds, track after track this album flows without missing a beat. Don’t miss it!

Subversive Rite – Apocalypse Zone (Acute Noise Manufacture | LP)

Subversive Rite from New York City came out with this album, originally recorded in 2022. A real hardcore punk blast with UK ’82 and trash metal influences that remind us a lot of Sacrilege but also Varukers and English Dogs. Pump up the volume!

Crust Punk

Apoptosi. – Per Tutto Il Male Che Avete Fatto.

10 short, fast and incisive songs on both the (anti-)music and the political level are the new step in the work of this very young band, which started in 2023. The cover art, the hatred and anger that oozes from the lyrics, which are well composed, and not least, the music itself, are truly sensational. Very high-level and crystal clear ideas. An impressive crust / hardcore record!

Psych-War – Psychotic Warmonger (Agipunk Records, Archaic Records | 12” LP / Archaic Records, Sore Mind | Tape)

After their excellent 2023 demo, the Philadelphia band pleasantly smashes our ears with their debut full-length album. Eleven powerful tracks packed with massive doses of crust punk seasoned with stench breaks, Motorhead-Inepsy punk rock’n’roll echoes and a few Bolt Thrower-style riffs. If you like the Swedish school of Dischange, Disfear, and Wolfbrigade, you’ll be surprised to hear something completely original that will satisfy your weird musical tastes!

War//Plague – The Rot Thickens (Organize and Arise, Phobia Records | 12″ LP)

The Minneapolis band is back in the limelight with an extraordinary album. 8 sensational tracks infused with crust punk, and “infected” with metal elements and stenchcore atmospheres. An unprecedented ferocity: sharp and ice-cold but simultaneously massive and powerful music. I had high expectations of this record, and I can safely say that I was positively shocked!

Oi!

Béton Armé – Renaissance (La Vida Es Un Mus | 12″ LP)

The Montréal band’s highly anticipated album brings us one of the best albums of 2025. In these 11 tracks, with lyrics in French, we find an incredible mixture of potent oi! that winks at the Italian and French schools, wild and granitic rock’n’roll and a nice sprinkling of hardcore. All topped off with a bunch of “oooohhhs” in the choruses and sudden changes of rhythm that are nothing but devastating, like a bolt out of the blue. A masterful album!

Claimed Choice – S/T (Une Vie Pour Rien Vinyles | 12” LP)

After seeing the band from Lyon twice in Bologna, we were particularly impressed, both by the energy of their live shows and the crazy pull of their songs. We listened to their previous works in full and impatiently awaited these new 8 tracks, 6 sung in English and two in French. This S/T, which is presented with a strong, simple and flamboyant cover, fully suits the intense style of the album: bovver rock infused with oi! and 70s glam with a powerful sound. Amazing album, on loop on the turntable for days!

Scalpo – Partita Con La Morte (Mendeku Diskak | 12” LP)

We have in our hands the physical format of the latest album by the Sondrio band Scalpo, released on the Basque label Mendeku Diskak. ‘Partita Con La Morte‘ is a straightforward record, enveloped in 80s street atmosphere, also thanks to Clara C’s evocative artwork. On the musical side, we are facing a punk / Oi! masterpiece: fast rhythms, direct riffs, dark and present bass, and finally an edgy voice singing lyrics that are nothing short of venomous. There are two covers, also very apt: ‘Teppa Life’ by Bloody Riot and ‘Banchetto di Lusso’ by Nerorgasmo. A blast!

Our co-productions, in order of release:

• LeTormenta – Le Ombre Più Buie (LP). “We have already stopped being a band and maybe one day we will start playing again, but not now. We are thinking of pressing it in vinyl format but we have our (usual) (long) timeframe. We hope it can leave you something, for us it represented so much to be able to do it. Thank you for all these years. It was worth it.”. With these words LeTormenta release their final album. There are bands formed by people who have a tireless daily practice, a wonderful humanity, an incredible ability to strive for consistency with their values and ideas. LeTormenta perfectly represent this description. Thank you for what you have done over the years, always leaving us with swollen hearts, goosebumps, drawing the line with intense political activity through both practical example and this proposal of unique, original, charismatic and poetic hardcore punk. This record is wonderful in its sounds, lyrics, and compositional sophistication. Mind-blowing!

• Fracture – Consuming Chaos (CD). We co-released together with other DIY labels the new CD album by Modena band Fracture. 9 chaotic and extreme songs for those who love sounds hovering between grindcore and hardcore with sharp riffs, powerful vocals and pouring blast beats and tupa tupa. The artwork by Illmut Aksam and Matteo Boschini projects us perfectly into the dark atmosphere of the record. Make this explosive work yours!

• 17 Incubi – Rullareee! (LP). This new co-production arrived in our house in vinyl format along with a bottle of Genepì liqueur, kindly offered by 17 incubi! Starting from the physical copy, the record features beautiful artwork by Mr. Alfredo Tattoo, with a screen print on the B-side by Sericraft. The frenetic and volcanic design sets the mood for the album: fast-paced, hard-hitting hardcore punk made in Turin, the kind that hits you with a series of punches until you’re knocked out. The lyrics tackle social and political issues, but also personal ones such as friendship. The sound is simply perfect, thanks to the excellent production by Tino Paratore (Church Of Violence, Havoc, …), and enhances the splendid bass and guitar lines, the bone-crushing drums and the furious vocals embellished with powerful choruses. 13 damn hardcore punk tracks, just what you’d expect from the old school but with a fresh and charismatic twist!

• Minoranza Di Uno / L’Incubo – Ed È Per Questo Che Io Ti Bacio Sempre (CD). Not only sunsets in the north-east, but also some healthy anarcho-punk with a kick! This is how I would introduce this four-song split between Minoranza di Uno, now a legendary band based between the provinces of Gorizia and Trieste, and L’Incubo, a Gorizia-based band that already has an album released last year. Minoranza di Uno reconfirms its established mix of anarcho-punk and hardcore together with its unmistakable political-introspective lyrics. On the other hand, L’Incubo draws us in with its decidedly dark and heart-wrenching mood. What a crazy duo!

• Stiglitz – Quando Tutto Tace (LP / CD). We are delighted to co-release this album, in which we worked together with our friends at Flamingo Records and Rumagna Sgroza. We have been following Stiglitz, a band from Genoa, for years. They impressed us from the very first moment, and we have developed a strong bond with them, just as we have with the other two labels involved in this release. This album, entitled Quando Tutto Tace, perfectly reflects the essence of the band as it conveys authenticity, spontaneity, heart, love, and passion. Nine tracks plus an intro and outro help you to immerse yourself in and emerge from this wonderful journey through narrow streets, social spaces, views of the sea and grey suburban buildings. Stiglitz, like good sailors, guide us on an inner journey where every human relationship is fundamental and where talking to each other while looking into each other’s eyes is what really matters. The songs intersect a punk oi! base with hardcore, punk rock and post-punk elements, creating a unique, original sound that sticks in your head. The physical format features an evocative photo by Fabrizio Fritz Barile, a pillar of the Genoese skinhead movement and beyond, framed in Stefania Carbonara’s beautiful graphics. Fabrizio Sferrazza and Toni Cocks feature on Senza Chiodi and Ma Se Ci Penso, giving an even more collective feel to this album recorded at David Knezevich’s Velvet Worm Studio from Small Thing. In the end, the result is an album that speaks of Genoa, for all the people who live it intensely every day. We said it when we first heard it, and we’ll say it again now: we are fucking in love with this record!

• Quasi Buio – La Prima Stella Dell’Ultimo Mattina (LP). The Rome-based band formed by Francesco, Mics, Stefano and Ben is releasing their second album this autumn, featuring 11 songs in just about 13 minutes. Short and sweet! After seeing them live, we were pleasantly surprised by their fast, pounding old-school hardcore punk sound, with riffs that stick in your head and sharp, screamed vocals. There is a lot of commitment in this new work, you can hear and see it – thanks also to the exquisite artwork by Francesco, the band’s singer – there is a concept and attention to detail that goes from form to content. The introspective and emotionally charged lyrics take you on a journey through different themes related to our place in the universe. In the hardcore punk scene, this is an album that stands out thanks to its unmistakable dusky atmosphere. Superb work!

L'articolo The best punk albums of 2025 proviene da Radio Punk.

Acts of Love

“…I believe that this compilation should finally bury the stupid myth that punk was a mindless discordant aberration on the face of pop music. What these tracks represent is a period when the music business lost their grip, a period when the people took back what was rightly theirs and celebrated their victory in music and sounds. The music business has learnt the lesson, and has tightened its control again (just look at the present “alternative” charts and you’ll see just how much ground we have lost). It might be a very long time before we are again able to create the chink in the armour that made it possible to make recordings of the nature that we present here. While you are enjoying what is on offer here, recall that none of it
was made for profit. This is the peoples’ music, made by people, for people…” (excerpts from Penny Rimbaud’s introduction to “A sides” compilation cd, april 1992)

How strange is the fate of those anarcho-punk hippies: more than forty years after their breakup, Crass have not become rusty scrap metal or museum dust like some of their “colleagues” from back then. On the contrary, I think they can still intrigue and inspire more than one young person today – or at least I hope so.

I am someone who has read thoroughly the lyrics of anarchist poets as Fabrizio de André and Alessio Lega much more often than the books of Errico Malatesta. I know that for some of my comrades I am blaspheming, but I confess that I arrived at my twisted and extravagant vision of anarchy largely thanks to the inspiration I drew not only from those singer-songwriters comrades, but also from the lyrics of songs by Crass, Poison Girls, Flux of Pink Indians, Franti, Kina, and a few others, as well as from hanging out with them and other bands, rather than through more traditional paths such as, er, reading and studying certain writings by Mikhail Bakunin.

I remember that when we used to talk about Crass at the editorial meetings of A/Rivista Anarchica in the early 1980s, in the presence of certain old anarchists (people who were undoubtedly worthy of respect, but who remained, so to speak, someway nineteenth-century in spirit) some raised their eyebrows and others even took offense. I think that people like me seemed to them to be just ignorant troublemakers without a future, but it turned out not to be true. Crass also seemed like just another shitty punk band, but that was not true either. It seemed like it would all end in 1984, but in some ways that year was when it all began.
I already wrote here in March 2022 about how I crashed into Crass. Today I’m going to focus on their next to last album, released in January 1985: there’s no trace of their name on the cover – just the title “Acts of love”. The band had broken up six months earlier. Maybe I will describe their last record, “Ten songs on a summer’s day,” in another future post here.

It’s you who makes the world around you
The silence is yours
In every line upon your face
and every fold that holds your eyes a story
That story is you
There is no cosmetic for our frustrations
If upon my tears you build the utopia of which you dream
Be warned
Your petty prejudice will push you again into maliciousness
Beyond our alienation
And its tiresome manifestations of violence and greed
There is balance and harmony
Isn’t the world already at peace?
I suggest togetherness, proclaiming my love and compassion
Will you make that into commodity, asset and possession?
It’s you who makes the world around you
You alone can answer for it.

In my first post on Radio Punk I told you about when, in the summer of 1979, a friend of mine who had just returned from a short trip to London gave me “Stations of the Crass.”
It was a recently released album, and he had bought it because he was attracted by the incredibly low price and intrigued by the cover, but once he got home, he listened to it and didn’t like it at all. For me, however, that record sparked a huge commotion in my head and heart. And it wasn’t a case of falling in love with the music: compared to other bands, Crass sounded really bad, and I didn’t feel much like listening to “Stations” compared to certain other records of that period – such as “Y” by the Pop Group, “Fear of music” by Talking Heads, or the Cure’s “Three imaginary boys.”

Two things about Crass and “Stations” struck me deeply. The first was their sound, so dirty and poor and shaky and rough, surrounded by a reverb that made it sound very similar to the noise echoing in the basement where I used to play with my band. I was convinced that my bandmates and I had developed a particular creativity and style all our own, but that our skills were poor and we were completely unsuited to the scene and new trends – yet there were people like Crass who had dared to document their technical inadequacy, made it public, and turned it into a point of pride. It was clear that they considered the packaging less important than the intrinsic value they attributed to each piece: this reasoning knocked me out. In half an hour, all my thinking about discipline, the value of practicing the instrument, and exercise had collapsed. All my beliefs about music, how to make it, and why to make it were shattered.
And here’s the other reason: I was really fascinated by the lyrics of the songs, they had enlightened me. I found them evocative and amazing: a shake-up, an adrenaline rush, a box of firecrackers, a string of slaps in the face and loud kicks in the ass. For me, those lyrics were nothing more and nothing less than an instruction manual for learning how to really live instead of just surviving: get moving Marco, you’re almost 22, fuck the idea that there’s no future and no dreams, if you really want to change your life you have to get off your ass and get busy. Don’t expect someone else to do it for you. That was my very first impact with anarcho-punk.

Along with the record, my friend had given me a handful of flyers printed by the band that he had collected at Housmans bookshop in King’s Cross – a legendary place that a young restless reader from the northeastern suburbs of the empire like me used to fantasize about. Crass’s anarcho-pacifism and their practices of self-management and direct action had really grabbed me, so after a while I made up my mind and wrote them a letter. It wasn’t a typical fan letter, but I told them who I was, about my home, my friends, the free radio station I worked with, the band I played in, my bad luck, my messes, my aspirations, my difficulties. To my great surprise, they replied after just a few weeks: and it was a real letter, handwritten, not a circular. In the envelope were a couple of flyers, a badge, and a warm invitation to keep in touch.

After further correspondence, in the summer of 1982 I managed to take the train to London and, once there, pop into Rough Trade, then a must-visit destination for all indie music fans. In the store, I met Scott Piering who was in charge of the label’s press office: I left him a few copies of our Venetian fanzine and he gave me his time and attention. He said he liked the fanzine even though he couldn’t read it, and was surprised to find translations of some Crass and Poison Girls lyrics inside. “I did them myself”, I told him. “Wait a minute”, he said. He picked up the phone, and arranged a meeting for me with John Loder. We met there in the store a couple of days later.
John was very kind and helpful: he liked our fanzines too, gave me some records as a gift, and wrote down the phone number of their commune in Epping on a piece of paper, inviting me to call – which I have done several times since then. The following year, I finally managed to visit Penny, Gee, Phil, Joy, and their mates at Dial House and a few months later I published a self-printed book with their lyrics translated into Italian. In May 1984 I attended one of their concerts in Nottingham, and when I asked if I could plug my tape recorder into the mixer, they had no objections. I first made some cassettes and then a CD, which I distributed in support of A/Rivista Anarchica monthly magazine.

Here is another excerpt from “Acts of Love”:

Those hours are distant shadows
Silent
the beating sea
throwing winds upon a distant shore
Beneath the silence that holds us apart is a name
The name seizes its own reality
Where were you then?
Hiding in prosperous groves of lemon and grape?
You push aside the ivy with your white fingers
I shall never forget you
The silence of those fingers blinds my eyes
my ears are blinded by the whiteness
Walk here, here and beyond
Wait for me by the naked sand
The waves roll contented to the sea
Hold me as a memory
I’m a huge whale that fights for oceans and air.

As you most probably know, if you follow these pages and hang out with certain people, Crass were a collective of English punks active between the late 1970s and 1984. A couple of them, the older ones, had been involved in certain creative fringes of the British hippy movement for a long time in the 1960s. Anarchists and pacifists, they did not have an easy life: from the outset, they had to fight hard not to succumb to silence.

I’ll make it as brief as possible. Their debut album was released by the tiny London indie label Small Wonder in October 1978 with a couple of minutes of silence instead of the first song on side A, “Reality asylum”, a feminist outburst against religious oppression – the workers of the vinyl pressing plant had deemed it offensive and refused to process it.
The following year, Crass founded an independent and self-managed record label of the same name, and managed to issue the banned song as a single and reissued their debut album in its entirety – only to find very soon Scotland Yard officials at their doorstep, alerted by reports of blasphemy. This was a quite unusual issue in their country, and the vice squad, more accustomed to dealing with prostitution and pornographic publications, probably did not know how to handle properly the matter. The band managed to avoid legal repercussions by candidly denying any involvement in the plan, and succeeded in this most probably because the various members, although already known to the authorities, still had clean records.

The police warned them that by doing so they were only asking for trouble and suggested they stop provoking, but Crass decided to continue anyway: from then on, their records were systematically censored and boycotted. Shops that displayed Crass records in their windows received discreet visits from the police: at first, they asked the managers to remove them from the shelves and return them to the distributor, then they moved on to threats. Some rebellious shopkeepers were reported to the authorities, and one in Manchester and one in Norwich were even put before a judge and convicted for selling “obscene material” to minors. I’ll leave you to imagine the pressure exerted by MI5 on concert organizers and venue managers, and I’ll just mention the warm welcome given to the band at the few concerts they managed to organize themselves – they were hated by everyone, right and left, from the National Front to Class War and beyond.

Between 1978 and 1984, Crass released a dozen records, including singles, EPs, and albums, and even managed to sell several hundred thousand copies, but inexplicably never made it into the charts. The British music press hastily panned their debut and routinely described their work in derogatory terms, accusing them of being dangerous extremists, pathetic late-sixties hippies fighting outdated battles, the personification of hatred, a band only good for making pins, “a disaster for youth cultural policy” and “the worst thorn in the side of the movement” (the latter two quotes are taken from two Italian music magazines). There are dozens of people around the world who have become rich by marketing, without having asked for or obtained any authorization or license, T-shirts, pins, and other merchandise bearing their name and logo, as well as counterfeit copies of their records.

Shortly after the outbreak of the British conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, Crass wrote fierce and desperate songs against the war, attracting the attention of the Tory government and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself – whom they dared to mock in public and put in serious difficulty during a BBC radio debate, where they revealed confidential information live on air. The anarchists’ access to national radio was heavily contested. During the broadcast, the BBC switchboards were jammed with hundreds of protest calls: publicly disagreeing on a subject such as war was considered absolutely unacceptable at that time.

In the midst of the war, Crass managed to press a transparent and anonymous flexi-disc abroad with “Sheepfarming in the Falklands,” one of their bitterest pacifist songs, and smuggled it back into their homeland. With the help of some Rough Trade employees, they distributed it by inserting it into the covers of other records, but a large part of it was soon intercepted by the police and seized. The release of “Sheepfarming,” considered by many parliamentarians to be an “obscene” song, led to even greater police attention being focused on those who were now considered nothing more than “traitors to the country”.

As soon as the war ended, the so-called Thatchergate scandal broke out: a recording of a fake telephone conversation between Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan was anonymously sent to the editorial offices of the world’s leading newspapers. Although the recording was clearly a fake, it caused a series of diplomatic incidents: the United States pointed the finger at the KGB and the Russians at the CIA, and an international intrigue was about to explode. Instead, it was their own doing…

The group disbanded in July 1984 after a tumultuous concert in Aberdare in support of the striking Welsh miners.

“…It should be remembered that the anarcho-punk movement was not a beginning as much as a continuation. Before that there’d been the hippies, the beats, the bohemians, right back to the beginnings of human consciousness. There’s nothing new about social dissent, but unless it is willing to adapt to the times and to offer something radical and new in itself, it can become as rigid as that which it claims to oppose (which is one good reason why today, in 2008, I so loathe the fad for retro-punk). We all know the System stinks. We all know we can stop it for a day, or even two. We all know that McDonalds and Coca-Cola are crap. We all know that wars kill… What we don’t yet seem to get a handle on is how once and for all we can change all that. Thirty years ago, anarcho-punk broke a lot of new ground, not least in learning that oppositional politics tend to do little more than strengthen the opposition…” (excerpts from Penny Rimbaud’s introduction to “The last of the hippies”, 2008)

In January 1985, just a few days after the release of “Acts of love,” Crass were dragged into court where a judge deemed them “an association operating on the fringes of legality” and described their records as “crude and vulgar, consisting largely of offensive garbage,” as well as “stuff that no one would want to keep in their home”. Their third album “Penis envy” was judged by the court to be “contrary to public decency” because of its lyrics and cover art. The judges told the press that they “wanted to set an example and make a real contribution to improving human values and restoring public morals in the interests of all young people”.

“…It would take more than VAT to make us stop. The reason the band stopped was several reasons. One, we always said we’d stop in 1984. That’s why we had the countdown on the numbering [of the LPs]. Secondly, when we got to 1984, Andy wanted to go back to art school, he went to the Royal College. And none of us could see any point in continuing without Andy. The band kind of operated like that. We certainly couldn’t get a stand-in, because that wasn’t what the band was about. We were all very committed to each other, and that was the band. And if somebody left, then the band stopped. We decided on a more positive note, in the sense, a lot of young punks here were immersed in death and disaster. And they were forgetting why they were angry. I thought that was very negative. So we did “Acts of love”… I thought it was very important to do that…” (Gee Vaucher interviewed by Richie Unterberger on Perfect Sound Forever, 1998)

We have seen it clearly all before: the system proved capable of absorbing and recycling opposition, including radical opposition, and making even punk manure palatable and tasty – all it took was sprinkling some sugar on top in the form of reissued vinyl with a few bonus tracks scraped from old rehearsal tapes. However, this does not seem to have worked very well in the case of Crass.
As I said at the beginning, the group has not been active as such for over forty years, even though some of the former members have continued to be artistically active in their own way and their old records have continued to be in constant demand. Thanks to One Little Independent, which acquired the Crass Records catalog when Southern closed after John Loder’s death, their old stuff continues to be reissued, and Steve Ignorant occasionally sings the usual old songs in front of an audience of nostalgic old punks who share heartbeats and choruses with many curious young punks.
Edited by Gee Vaucher for Exitstencil Press and entirely self-produced, last year was released a beautifully packaged, three-inch-thick book about the Crass years containing photos, written material and graphics, bringing together contributions from fans and supporters around the world. Unfortunately, after Brexit, with the addition of customs duties and extra-EU shipping costs, both the book and the records reissued by One Little Independent cost us Italians an exorbitant amount.

And here I am at “Acts of love.” At first, I had many scruples in writing about this record here. There isn’t a single guitar lick, shouted verse, or loud drum beat in here, not even a minimum of distorted sounds that you would accept as punk, and probably because of all this it might be hard for me to justify its presence here. But I sincerely believe that this is the right place for it: it represents a different path, an uphill climb by all means, to recount certain roots. I think it’s an important piece in helping to better understand the succession and stratification of events and reasoning that led to the formation of Crass – motives that were anything but musical, economic, or fashionable – and above all, it can explain the reasons for such a strong unity among the group’s members.

At the end of the gigs organized in the spring and summer of 1984 to promote their fifth album “Yes sir, I will”, and shortly before the band broke up, Penny Rimbaud threw himself headlong into a musical project radically different from that he had pursued with Crass. He had found and collected fifty short poems he had written between 1968 and 1973, and imagined reading them with some background music. Instead of punk, inspiration came from a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, the first fully digital keyboard, which had just been placed on the market and which John Loder had immediately purchased for Southern Studios.
Penny began experimenting alongside Paul Ellis, keyboardist for the Poison Girls at the time, who also added his Prophet 5 and Prophet 8 analog polyphonic synthesizers to the equipment. The two worked poignantly in the studio in the spare time, and the project soon began to take shape, being completed after a few months. Eve Libertine provided vocals to 49 tracks, Steve Ignorant to the last track on the album.

Here is one more excerpt from “Acts of love”:

When you woke this morning you looked so rocky -eyed
Blue and white normally
But strange ringed like that in black
It doesn’t get much better
Your voice can get just ripped up shouting in vain
You’ve got to make such a noise to understand the silence
Screaming like a jackass, ringing ears so you can’t hear the silence
Seeing it but not being touched by it.

“Acts of love” was released in January 1985 by the band’s label Crass Records. The vinyl package included a large-format booklet with one or two poems by Penny on each page, accompanied by fine illustrations by Gee Vaucher. Neither poetry nor songs, but acts of love: this is how the fragments that compose it were called. Forty minutes without time, space, or dimensions.
No advertising campaign was organized for promoting the record, only a short press release that was also included in a flyer accompanying the group’s correspondence at the time: “…Fifty songs written in memory of Wally Hope”, Penny wrote, “Songs dedicated to my other self, a self that exists, intact, beyond the social conventions that give me a name, a number, an identity, and a definite space in time. They describe my deep sense of unity, peace, and love: they are my declaration of war against those who want to desecrate and destroy it. These poems are the expression of my desire for revolution, the description of what I believe is possible, and for this very reason they are the reason for the anger I feel”.
He continued with this sentence: “It is an attempt to show that the origin of our anger is not hatred, but love” that I feel is very important to understand Crass as a collective.

Wally Hope was the nickname of Phil Russell, a dearest friend of Penny and Gee and one of the regulars at their shared home, Dial House, when it had just opened. Russell was an anarchist/mystic pacifist and visionary, one of the creators and organizers of the earliest British free festivals, whose premature death, the result of forced confinement in a psychiatric hospital and compulsory medical treatment, prompted the two future members of Crass to transform the hippy philosophy of “peace and love” into the raw anger of punk. Penny writes extensively about him in “The last of the hippies” and in the subsequent “Shibboleth”.

“…Wally had travelled the world and had met fellow-thinkers in every place that he had stopped, but always he returned to England… Wally could talk and talk and talk. Half of what he spoke about seemed like pure fantasy, the other half like pure poetry… On our first meeting, Wally described Windsor Free and other gatherings that he had attended. Not particularly liking crowds, I had always chosen to avoid festivals, so my knowledge of them was very limited. Wally outlined their history and then went on to detail his ideas for the golden future. He proceeded to unfold what seemed to me to be a ludicrous plan. He wanted to claim back Stonehenge, a place that he regarded as sacred to the people and stolen by the Government. He wanted to make it into a site for free festivals: free music, free space, free mind. At least that, like happily ever after, is how the fairy story goes…” (Penny Rimbaud, excerpts from “The last of the hippies”)

Credited solely to Penny Rimbaud, a version of “Acts of love” was published by Exitstencil Press in 2012, in the form of a CD and a booklet with all the lyrics and illustrations made smaller in a 5”x5” format. In addition to the restored and digitalized version of the original recordings, the CD features about twenty other fragments and a poem by Eve Libertine.
In 2023, One Little Independent released a limited edition double vinyl of 1,000 copies, which collects the original recordings and a reinterpretation by Japanese pianist and music experimenter Mikado Koko. You can find some interesting contributions on Penny’s YouTube channel here.

Two documentaries, both independently produced and extremely well made, tell the story of Crass. “There is no authority but yourself” is the work of Dutch filmmaker Alexander Oey (released in 2006 – a low-resolution version can be viewed on YouTube). “The Sound of Free Speech” by British director Brandon Spivey, was released in 2023 and focuses on ”Reality asylum” – it is available for streaming on the Streeen platform here.
Almost twenty years apart, the two directors went to Dial House to ask almost the same questions to the same two or three former members who agreed to answer – and I note that the silence of the others is equally significant.
From both films, it is clear that the collective as such has disappeared: Penny answers the questions, Gee answers, sometimes Steve answers – Crass does not answer. Those who were among the main inspirers of punk proved completely useless in organizing any kind of birthday party, and in fact were left out of the media circus surrounding the 20th, 30th, and 40th anniversary celebrations. No doubt they will be left out of the 50th anniversary celebrations, which the entertainment industry is already organizing in grand style: I wonder what awaits us in 2027, certainly not a Crass reunion… Could it be that with the help of AI and big money from the multinational record companies, someone will manage to resurrect and perhaps virtually exhibit together Sid Vicious and Joe Strummer.

Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it

L'articolo Crass: Acts Of Love proviene da Radio Punk.

“…Politics in the more conventional sense concerns struggles over balances of power involving large nodes in the web of human relationships with strands running out in all directions, nodes like states, transnational corporations, and so on… Of course, a lot of political activity involves people who occupy strong nodes in the web seeking to defend their position, or other people trying to push those occupants of the strong nodes out of place so that they themselves can enjoy the privileges of that real estate. But there is another kind of politics that seeks to restructure the web itself so that power is distributed more evenly. Let us call this insurgent politics. Insurgent politics is necessarily experimental, unruly, and disruptive. It examines, tests, expands, breaks, and restructures the strands between the nodes in the web. It always centers on struggle. This is so close to my artistic aesthetic that in this light it is hard for me to even discern the line demarcating art and politics at all. For all my work is in some sense about struggling with the limits of the social and physical world: testing, examining, expanding, breaking, and restructuring. Seeking possibility where before there was none, making new connections and rupturing old ones. It is fundamentally about struggle – struggle with and within the social and physical world. Others can make peaceful, sonorous music about beauty and symmetry and celebrate the world as it is. For me, struggle is the root, the source…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

Bob Ostertag, then. I know, you’re all wondering: who the hell is he? Quick answer: an American musician, a journalist/writer, and an activist. And who’s ever heard of him? The most knowledgeable and passionate among you will already be scrolling through different mental lists of members of minor and microscopic meteor bands, endless lists of impossible-to-find records and cassettes duplicated in just a few copies. Others will already have armed themselves with a PC and/or smartphone by relying on a search engine, and will soon have found a tall, bald Bob Ostertag with a moustache and goatee who is hyper-productive (music, films, books, computing, performance, activism, teaching, and so on) and who perhaps has little to do with punk as we know it here and now. 
But that’s not entirely true. In the liner notes to one of his albums, he writes: “…My friends and I didn’t wear safety pins or mohawks, but I’m not sure we weren’t punks. We were really loud, and our music was perfect for CBGB’s, where we often played…”. Let’s say that Bob was a rehearsal room roommate, stage companion, and a strong supporter of punk, especially the stars-and-stripes version of the mid/late 1970s. He knew, listened to, and frequented the scene, but he did something else entirely and was interested in something else entirely – for example, social conflicts, history, and radical journalism. 

I think Bob Ostertag is an interesting person, with a lot to say and just as many experiences to recount, and that he has composed some remarkable works – and if they can’t be crudely labeled as “punk,” so much the better. One of his books was recently translated and published in Italy: I read it years ago in English, and I think that whoever worked hard (literally for years) to bring Bob and his book, his insights, his reflections, and his lucid analysis here to Italy did me and you a big favor. 
I thought I’d talk about it here because I’m convinced that this is a place where attentive and curious people hang out. I’m certainly not going to invite you to buy anything, but I hope that reading this will spark something in your mind and make you want to investigate, delve deeper, and open your ears to Ostertag’s strange music, so full of meaning and constructed in such a mysteriously attractive way.
 

“…The thoughts that occupy the pages of this book begin in Manhattan, where I moved in 1978 at the age of twenty-one to play music. And here they end, in a coffee shop down the block from the downtown loft where I used to live. My old doorway is now as close as one can get to the site of the crumbled World Trade Center without special ID. Soldiers in camouflage fill the sidewalk out front… In the subway down below, as was often the case when I lived upstairs, an African American man is playing soprano sax… He has a sweet tone and a nice sense of melodic ornamentation. But instead of playing NYC subway standards like “Take the A Train” or a Coltrane-inspired “My Favorite Things,” he is playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and hearing it is sending cold chills down my spine. Up above ground, American flags flutter everywhere…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

To tell you about “Music, politics, people and machines” (that was the subtitle of “Creative Life” in the original American edition of 2009), the first thing that came to my mind was to compare the environments in which Ostertag and I grew up and draw parallels between our childhood and adolescence. Of course, our homelands and families were both different and distant, just as the opportunities and chances that life offered us were different and distant, but deep down I had a strong suspicion (or perhaps a presumption) that we had gone through similar or at least comparable experiences and vicissitudes, and that we therefore had things in common. 

As I set about weaving some kind of presumable network of relationships, I realized the looming risk of turning it all into a self-referential and unrealistic endeavor. So, much more simply, I came back down to earth and collected my notes in the form that follows.

“…My music is often described as “political”, yet it is never about trying to convince anyone of anything, not about getting anyone to think like me, not about moving anyone to march on anything… But I do use “political” elements: a recording of a Salvadoran boy burying his father (“Sooner or Later”), images of war (“Special Forces” and “Yugoslavia Suite”), memoirs of friends who died of AIDS (“Spiral”), letters to heads of state (“Dear Prime Minister”), audio from a queer riot (“All the Rage”, “Burns Like Fire”), and others. I do not use these with the intention of achieving a political result, but simply because they are what move me. They are my life, which has been lived in Central America, New York City, San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic, and the United States during a particularly bellicose time in its superpower reign. I use them because it would be unimaginable for me not to. Everyone who spends a life making art has a particular affinity with certain particulars of their craft. Some painters are drawn to color, others to form. Some musicians have an instinctual affinity with harmony, others with melody. For me, the social relations within which I live and make music have always been the materials to which I am naturally drawn…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

On the other side of the world from Venice, Italy, in Colorado, a rectangular US state located roughly halfway between the east and west coasts and roughly halfway between the Canadian and Mexican borders, Bob Ostertag was born around the same time I was, he in April and I in October of the same year. It was 1957, and I had no idea he existed until 1980, when I bought one of his records because Fred Frith played on it – an English guitarist I really liked and whom I had met personally a few years earlier with his band at the time, Henry Cow. 

In “Getting a Head,” Fred’s guitar, already played in a very unconventional way, is rendered practically unrecognizable by the treatment it receives. Bob had designed and built a system of three interconnected reel-to-reel tape recorders: the passage of the magnetic tape over the heads was made unstable and irregular in a random manner because it was run through rings connected to helium balloons left free in the air (you can get a rough idea from the photo on the back of the album cover, which I have included above), just as unstable and irregular was the operation of the recorders themselves—an aggregate of analog and mechanical devices, cheap and shaky. Quite a far cry from the mathematical precision and crystal-clear sound of the luxurious loops designed and created by Robert Fripp, known as “frippertronics.” 

I then bought his next album, “Voice of America,” which documents two very lively performances recorded in London and New York with Phil Minton and Fred Frith. Since then, I have bought many more of his records and some of his books: Ostertag has written several – “Creative life” is his first and, for now, only book translated into Italian, a co-production between Candilita in Naples (link: www.candilita.it) and Colibrì in Milan (link: www.colibriedizioni.it). 
 

“…”Voice of America” was created in 1980 at a turning point, after Vietnam and president Carter, after years of liberal America, Ronald Reagan arrived, whom no one expected, and that was the beginning of a right-wing policy that continues to this day. I was twenty-three years old, I had just returned from Nicaragua where there had been a revolution, and I found myself in a completely opposite situation. It was a special weekend, the American hostages in Teheran had been freed and there was a sense of nationalist revival, and at the same time there was the Super Bowl, which is another super-nationalist American event. I took my tape recorder and recorded Reagan and the Super Bowl from the television. That evening I was supposed to play with Fred Frith, and without telling him I played the tapes during the concert. I didn’t do it to make a political statement, I did it because I was pissed off. It was angry music, maybe unlistenable, I don’t know, but definitely angry…” (excerpts from an interview by Giuseppe Aiello, 2015)
 

In the early 1970s, when I started high school, I was an introverted kid who tended to get lost and confused. I was a loser, basically. The neighborhood where I lived was a tough place where the countryside was quickly succumbing to concrete and asphalt. At home, however, I felt comfortable, in the sense that my parents loved and supported each other and never let their problems, difficulties, and frustrations hail on me. 

Unlike many of my friends’ parents, mine were not a source of stress or overly controlling: my dad worked himself to death doing shifts at the chemical plant, my mom was in poor health and was often in the hospital or bedridden for long periods of time, so since I was in middle school I had my own house keys and fairly flexible curfews. My family’s difficult, if not critical, situation must have made me take on responsibility a little earlier than usual. My parents were affectionate and trusted me: they never blackmailed me by demanding great results at school, they never embarrassed me by investigating the company I kept, nor did they put me in a difficult position by asking me to justify the presence of certain books, records, magazines and newspapers in my room. 

Those had been tough years, all those months of strikes and demonstrations – Dad had been threatened several times with transfer to the company plants in Sicily and, like some of his colleagues, had even risked dismissal at times. It was the early 1970s, and the effects of the protests of 1968 were still strongly felt: only recently had Italy become aware of the presence, reasoning, needs, and more generally the culture of that social group born out of the protests – ‘young people’. 

Wearing colorful t-shirts and growing your hair long had become the most obvious and widespread symbols of protest: it was common for the police and carabinieri, suspicious of your appearance, to stop you on the street or in front of the school and take you to the police station or barracks for a check and to be put on file, and then perhaps summon your parents (at that time, you came of age at 21) to give them a hard time and cause them trouble. 

But us girls and boys knew it deep down in our hearts: we weren’t just puppets at the service of fathers, priests, husbands, and country, nor were we obedient housewives and mothers forced to keep quiet, bear children, and then raise them, nor were we expendable flesh in the fields, in the barracks, at the front, in workshops and factories, but we each had our own individuality and rights, we had a head and a heart filled with ideas, needs, aspirations, and expectations. We liked certain music, we read certain books and certain poems, we loved watching certain films. Among our desires, in addition to the innocent one of growing our hair and wearing multicolored clothing, many of us dreamed of having the opportunity to study and perhaps that of travelling  – a destiny generally reserved only for the wealthiest.

It’s not all that complicated for me to get an idea of what Bob Ostertag’s life as a kid might have been like. I can picture him isolated, bewindered, and buried up to his neck in the middle of the American countryside, surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothingness, a life as bleak and inexorably flat as the plains, punctuated by school and the liturgical calendar – but these are just assumptions borrowed from cinema and literature. His official website (accessible at bobostertag.com) features a biography less than forty lines long, which begins in 1978 when Bob was already 21 years old. But fragments and traces of his earlier personal history, even the most profound and intimate, can be found in his books, particularly in his recent “Encounters with men” (Black Lawrence Press, published in America last year). 

In this book, among other challenges he has faced throughout his life, he recounts his difficulties at school, including bullying and insidious, if not dangerous, teachers. He describes how his parents forced him to play sports so that he would stay away from what they considered to be bad company, and how it was precisely that bad company that often inspired and stimulated his learning. 

I can thus reconstruct a life in a rural nuclear family like those shown in American TV series, which we have also been watching regularly on television for decades. From the outside, it seemed like a simple happy life, consisting of school, gym, high-protein dinners, and punctuated by celebrations involving turkeys in the oven and trips to relatives’ homes in New Mexico, but just beneath the surface of normality, that life hid many questions and dark spots. 
His father, an Episcopal priest, systematically abused him, first with spankings and then with punches and kicks, until Bob grew old enough to fight back. Bob’s mother, an unemotional woman forced to be in tune with her husband, contracted kidney disease and decided to end her life by refusing dialysis. Only after his wife’s death, and in the grip of a severe nervous breakdown and depression, did Bob’s father confessed his bisexuality to his children and tried to rebuild a life that resembled him.

“…Looking back, what stands out is how carefully I kept my distance from my father. The less he knew about my life and what I was really up to, the better. The other side of that coin was him keeping his life separate from mine. I now know that the other Episcopal priests around him were also closet homosexuals, as were his closest friends… I tried hard to know nothing about these men. Not their desires. Not their shame. Not their cover stories. Didn’t want to confess my sins to them. Didn’t want to put on a dress and eat the body of Jesus, nor drink his blood. Most definitely did not want to be an adolescent acolyte alone with one of them in the sacristy, most of all with my own father. But for a brief time, that was unavoidable. I was the preacher’s kid. Kids in the church who were my age were supposed to be acolytes. Thus I was to be an acolyte… Acolytes are the boys who dress in robes and carry the cross and the candles and bring the priest the bread and wine. One of the jobs of an acolyte is to help the priest undress from all the frilly ritual clothing backstage after the show. One by one he peels off the layers and hands them to you, mumbling a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo. Magic incantations… I had to do this several times for my own father. We did it exactly the way the rituals of the Episcopal Church specified. There was no touching or nudity, but if I were to single out an experience from my youth that would qualify as “sexual abuse,” that would be it: a boy and a man absolutely alone, no one else can see or hear, the crossdressing, and that somehow we are supposed to be “united in the body of Christ”…” (excerpts from “Encounters with men”)

Compared to what my parents had to deal with when they were my age, such as surviving through World War II, my teenage problems were fortunately different and much less serious and complicated, and were mainly focused on school, where I was taught things that I understood very little or not at all. I did well in Italian and English, but during the other lessons I would sit at my desk in a vegetative state, accumulating perplexities and questions in my head until the bell rang at the end of class. For the rest of the day, I drifted happily, fantasizing about pop music. I fed on crumbs from a radio, a mono portable record player, and a very cheap cassette recorder. 

At that time, there were broad categories such as pop, jazz, rock, and classical music: punk, metal, and other labels dividing the music scene had not yet been invented. Or perhaps those labels already existed, but we didn’t know about them. By “we,” I mean myself and a handful of my friends and schoolmates and neighbors, weird kids for whom music occupied a strategic place inside the heads and who spent half their afternoons listening to it and practicing it more or less clandestinely instead of studying. There weren’t many of us – fewer than we would have liked, but still too many for the tastes of the people around. Some teachers at school shook their heads, thinking we were just born crooked and raised wrong, and since we didn’t go to church, some parents thought even worse and demanded that their sons and daughters stay away from people like me. 

The likes of me lived in the so-called “cardboard condos” (cheap houses with six or nine small apartments) and in the “big barracks” (very large buildings with 24+ small apartments) arranged along the crossings of the State road #245, on the outskirts of Mestre in what would become a high-risk neighborhood within a few years. We were all children of factory workers in Marghera, raised in poor families. In the middle of the month, on payday, my father and mother would sit at the kitchen table and, after deducting the rent and food expenses and the cost of a couple of bus or motorboat trips to hometown, they would resign themselves to the fact that there was not much left to celebrate. It was pretty much the same at my friends’ homes.

We were used to poverty, and anyway, we kids really didn’t need much: a pair of jeans handed down from an older cousin and a jacket picked up at American Strasse (note the double meaning, understandable only to those who speak Venetian: it was the nickname of a market stall that sold used goods salvaged from who knows where and often flea-ridden), an old military shoulder bag to stuff books, notebooks, cassettes, and records into, in winter some wore berets, others fisherman’s hats, all of us hungry for words, sounds, visions, suggestions – a hunger we satisfied by dreaming. Dreaming was wonderful and free, but to keep dreaming we had to keep sleeping. And so, one fine day, a couple of my friends and I woke up. 

In the whole neighborhood, there was only one other kid who loved music more than anything else, just like me: Mauro lived right behind my house in another “cardboard condo”. He was almost a year younger than me, he loved to play flute and had enrolled in the conservatory in Venice. Like me, he didn’t go to the parish youth club either. He had got hold of a worn-out Binson tape echo somewhere and, in my garage, which was transformed into a rehearsal room once a week to the delight of the neighborhood, he used it to modify, layer, and distort the sound of his flute. We had stolen a microphone from a concert. Together with Roberto, a schoolmate of mine a couple of years older, we had formed our own trio, which was soon joined by a drummer and a long list of guitarists who generally didn’t last very long in the band – an afternoon, a few weeks, a few months. 

Roberto was already in his fourth year and was studying electronics: he had designed and built a complicated sound generator complete with cables, inputs and outputs, knobs and various buttons – more than a few flashing colored LEDs were just for show. It was a real noise machine: we were the only band in town with equipment like that – apart from Toni Pagliuca of Le Orme and Claudio Ambrosini of Arid Land, both very famous local bands, who owned a real synthesizer, or perhaps more than one. 

Dario had seen and heard us play at a collective concert in his school’s main hall. He lived in the countryside just a couple of kilometers down the State road #245, studied electrical engineering, and was in his fifth year. We used to meet on the bus, and one day he came to my house with his tool bag: he fixed the volume potentiometer on my beat-up electric bass and gave my amplifier an overall tune-up. Once, when I went to visit him at his house, probably to swap records, he gave me a couple of crazy distortion pedals that I don’t know how he got his hands on and which he had then modified. Every time I pressed the button with my foot and ran my bass through those fuzz pedals, the hairs on my back stood on end and something bizarre happened to my privates. 

To our mess we added the noise produced by a couple of old cassette players, also modified by Dario with additional buttons that speeded up or slowed down the tape playback. With old cassettes, adhesive tape, and razor blades, Roberto and I had created short loops with random recordings such as radio frequencies, excerpts from what sounded to me to be news programs in foreign languages, dogs barking, traffic noises recorded on the highway, and trains passing on the railroad tracks behind my house. 

Our rare live concerts were the subject of much discussion. I don’t know if ours was courage, stupidity, boldness, or sheer nerve: perhaps it was a mixture of all these things. Needless to say, we were terrible, but that didn’t matter: playing kept us busy and away from danger. Imagining and making music kept us alive. 
Back then, in the first half of the 1970s, things like “circuit bending” and “tape manipulation” were unknown, or to be more precise, my friends and I were completely unaware of them, lost as we were in the middle of nowhere in the northeastern province. We just did it. Now we do know that all around the world young people like us were tinkering with soldering irons in who knows how many small clandestine and illegal electrical workshops, just like the ones Dario and Roberto had set up in their basement at home. 

Ostertag had also struggled to make friends in the village, but one day he finally managed to find a couple of strange guys he could bond with: Jerry and George, who attended the same high school as him. They soon started playing music together – Jerry on drums, George on bass, and Bob on guitar – spending half their days squeezing out long improvisations and offbeat songs. 
Jerry was the son of farmers and lived outside the city with two problematic parents, one brother who was mentally challenged and another who was hyperactive and abusive. George had been taken into foster care by a devout and practicing Christian couple. He practically owed them his life, but he didn’t feel like a believer at all, so he tried to drown out his remorse and sadness by listening to Frank Zappa and growing his hair long enough to reach his butt. All three of them were heavy users of LSD. 

The trio, albeit intermittent, lasted until the end of high school: George was increasingly depressed and couldn’t even apply himself to the electric bass, he did poorly in school and couldn’t afford to go to college, so he decided to hang himself. Jerry simply disappeared one day. Bob met him by chance many years later on a bus in San Francisco – he would die of AIDS shortly thereafter. 

In “Encounters with men,” Bob reflects in hindsight on the fact that all three were young homosexuals, but without realizing it. A few years earlier, the Stonewall riots had taken place in New York, and several organizations and associations connected to the LGBT community had already been established in San Francisco, but the three young friends knew nothing about it. They were just confused kids, completely unaware of themselves, who had grown up in the middle of nowhere, isolated from the rest of the world. In that place far from everything, certain information took a long time to arrive – if it arrived at all. 

My friends and I played pop music. Pop was just a name like any other, in the sense that it wasn’t something worth wasting energy and time arguing about: there was no need to label our favorite sound in a specialized way. We were just kids, we were so marginal that the market hadn’t noticed us yet to turn us into consumers, nor had we losers and penniless kids noticed the market yet. Slowly, however, I realize that things around me are changing. Whereas before I struggled to find any reliable information (never trust magazines like “Giovani” and “Ciao2001”, which pushed you to buy new records to take to a desert island), now magazines like “Muzak” and “Gong” are coming out, which are very well done, critical and thoughtful, and therefore useful. 

On the shelves of the big bookshop in the city main square, from one day forward are shown simple, accessible pop booklets and bigger, cooler pop books, even pop encyclopedias. I’d love to get my hands on some books with lyrics by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez: they don’t cost much, but it’s still too much and I can’t afford them. That’s when the market notices me, and that’s when I notice the market: from now on, music has to be paid for. You can’t find records for rent anymore, so I fall back on recycled cassettes and used or borrowed records, because new ones are too expensive. 

There were reduced rates for students at La Fenice theater, and you could often get in for free, but at pop and jazz concerts in other theaters and at the sports arena, they ask for tickets that I can’t afford: if you don’t have money, you’re left out. I don’t have any, so I’m left out. I don’t have the courage to steal the records and books I want to listen to and read, so I’m left out. I soon learn to have fewer scruples, and even to stop having them altogether: I never thought it would be so easy to take a couple of records or books from the shelves in stores, hide them under my parka, and simply walk out without rushing or attracting attention. 

“…In 1976 I left my hometown in Colorado to study at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio. I spent the first year in ecstasy over escaping from smalltown Colorado and finding a community of others my age with similar interests. I spent the second year banging my head against the wall. Everything I learned there I learned from other students or just one teacher…, a wonderful composer who was denied tenure my second year…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

By the mid-19th century, Oberlin was already an important center of abolitionism: fugitive slaves were relatively safe when they reached the vicinity of the city by taking advantage of the railroad line, from where they could then travel by water to Lake Erie and reach western Canada and freedom. The city’s university was one of the first in the United States to accept African American students, and the first to accept female students – but you can find and learn more about all this online. 

At the age of twenty, Bob Ostertag managed to leave town: he enrolled at the conservatory in quite a big city in another state, and soon formed a trio with two of his classmates: Jim Katzin on violin and Ned Rothenberg on wind instruments, while he tinkered with a used synthesizer he had bought after getting rid of his old electric guitar. The band was Fall Mountain and, just a couple of years later, the three recorded their first and only album “Early fall” in New York City for Eugene Chadbourne’s Parachute label.

Despite being a white, conservative institution, Oberlin College was exceptionally open to cultural exchange: in 1977, it invited none other than Anthony Braxton, a radical black saxophonist and composer and jazz superstar, to lead a workshop on improvised music. Bob immediately signed up and participated, bringing with him his Serge synthesizer, which he had bought by mail order and assembled himself – a box with knobs, buttons, and tangled cables, and no keyboard. In Italy at the time, Paolo Tofani of Area had one: he had bought it on the advice of John Cage, and then used it when recording the “Maledetti” album.

“…Anthony [Braxton]’s workshop was a revelation. While most professors at the conservatory were highly adept at conveying their sense of boredom with their own classes, from the minute Anthony walked into his workshop there was an electricity to it wholly alien to everything else I had experienced at school. I learned more in the first hour with him than I had in two years of classes. The most startling thing was how seriously he took his encounter with students. It was immediately clear that he expected great music to be made, right there and then. His demeanor would have been no different if he was in a room of world-class virtuosos instead of struggling students… I learned essentially (…) what it means to be a committed musician. How to center your life on it. How music must absorb you. How you must enter each musical situation with the expectation that it will be transcendent. And how to share a sense of this kind of engagement with those around you… The rest you have to work out for yourself…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)
 

My survival kit consisted of a very few new records bought / more records found in second-hand shops / many stolen, homemade cassettes, but above all: music from the radio. Fortunately, the era of free radio stations had begun in my country, and fortunately I found myself in the middle of it: I was one of the youngest contributors to Radio Mestre 103, one of the very first independent FM stations in Italy. 
 

There were many anarchists running and hanging around the radio station: they were like older brothers and sisters to me, teachers, guides, shelter, fog lights, inspiration, and role models. I was curious and tried to take part in as many opportunities as I could: with the excuse of doing reports and interviews for the radio, I sometimes managed to sneak into concerts in the early afternoon to ask the musicians questions during the soundcheck breaks. And if I couldn’t, I would join groups of older kids who were protesting the excessive price of admission tickets and break through. 
I didn’t care if they played jazz or rock or rubbish inside the theater or sports arena: I wanted to take back something that I felt had been taken away from me, and taking back the music – whatever it was – was just another attempt to try to take back my life, piece by piece. How I loved to find myself in the middle of the mess. 

Among the various characters who frequented the radio station, there was a couple of hippies who were at least fifteen or twenty years older than me. I don’t know exactly what they did for a living, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that they were drug dealers. They were smiling and peaceful, always dressed fashionably and smelling of patchouli, and perpetually traveling, preferably in Northern Europe. From there, they would occasionally return to their home in Venice with boxes full of records we had never seen before, made by musicians we had never heard of, which they then sold at low prices to the radio station’s editorial staff and to us collaborators. 

It was from them that I got the System Tandem album on Japo, which would heavily influence our band’s style, as well as “Afric pepperbird” and “Sart” by the then unknown Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The two offered me some vinyl records by John Fahey, an American guitarist who blew my mind. Once I was given two records for free: a Brainticket LP (it had a silly warning sticker on it: “After listening to this record, your friends may not know you anymore!”) and “Children at play” by Tom Van der Geld – the two hippies felt they couldn’t sell them as the cover sleeves were a bit damaged.

There was a skinny guy with long hair who came from out of town in a van that smelled terribly of gasoline and burnt gaskets and always seemed on the verge of taking its last breath there on the side of the road. He had set up a homemade stall for selling books and t-shirts outside concert venues. They had nicknamed him Agony, I guess because he looked really unhealthy – just like his van. When you asked him something, it took him a while to think and reply between coughs. 
Every now and then, Agony would give me a book that was too dirty and damaged to sell: he had piles of cheap, semi-clandestine publications stacked on the counter, mimeographs with hippy poems and comics or with translated lyrics by singer-songwriters like Neil Young and bands like Jefferson Airplane, reports of protests at concerts, flyers, texts criticizing major record labels and certain bourgeois publishers – all very cheap, self-produced, published or distributed by Stampa Alternativa. I didn’t even know such things existed. That’s where I learned that there are the masters of music and that people like me are enlisted in the guerrilla war to fight them. 

“…On the second day of the workshop Anthony asked if I would join his ensemble for a concert tour of Europe. I was stunned. Just a few weeks later, I found myself in New York City rehearsing with a fourteen-piece big band featuring virtuosos such as George Lewis, Kenny Wheeler, Marilyn Crispell, and many more. For a kid from a small town in Colorado, just being in New York was a full-on sensory assault… When I arrived on the first day of rehearsal, Anthony welcomed me in, handed me my parts, and then turned away to deal with the hubbub enveloping him… I stared at the charts Anthony had given me and my heart sank. Keyboard parts! I didn’t know how to play keyboard. My synthesizer didn’t even have a keyboard. In fact, it didn’t even have anything you could hit to bang out a particular rhythm or pitch. It was an automatic music box. You played it by using colored wires to connect inputs and outputs in different patterns, listening to the sounds that resulted, and then responding to the result by changing the automated parameters with knobs. What was I ever going to do? I was absolutely convinced that I should not be there. A country boy in the city. A kid among adults (I had turned twenty-one the week before). A white in a room full of blacks. A student among teachers. And most importantly: with the wrong instrument… What was a white kid with an automatic music box that made electronic bleeps and bloops in no particular rhythm or key going to do onstage with a collection of jazz greats getting down with some highly deconstructed yet totally foot-stomping big-band charts?…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

A few days after the rehearsals in NYC, Ostertag and the other members of the Creative Orchestra are flying to Cologne, Germany. They all gather in the huge concert hall of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the national radio station that had commissioned major works from composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage – the spearhead of avant-garde music. What followed were two weeks that are difficult to describe, and which Bob sums up as follows: “…Anthony [Braxton] taught me how to internalize a sense of struggle in music… A famous quote by Frederick Douglass says: if there is no struggle, there can be no progress. For Anthony, if there is no struggle, there can be no music…”.

After that European tour, Bob decided not to go back to the conservatory. Most of the members of Braxton’s ensemble lived in New York, so he too found himself renting a tiny apartment in the East Village and soon befriended musicians such as Fred Frith, who had arrived in America from London shortly before, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne, and John Zorn, who lived nearby. They had no money, no subsidies, no funding, and very little attention from critics. But they lived on nothing, played in nothing places, and didn’t have to answer to cultural commissions or wait in line at offices for arts funding. 
Since no venue wanted them, Zorn often organized house concerts that only five or six people could attend. Playing at CBGB’s was the best they could hope for. When the New Music New York Festival was organized in 1979, which in theory was supposed to broadly represent the city’s scene, including the alternative scene, no one invited them. So Zorn and Chadbourne quickly organized a three-day counter-festival with concerts by small groups and musicians snubbed by the official festival: just a few people came, and no one wrote about it. 

My childhood dream revolved around four thick strings. At the beginning of my freshman year at high school, I saved every penny I could, even skimping on food, and managed to buy my first electric bass – a well-used, unbranded piece of junk. The strings were a mess and needed to be replaced, but the smell of my poverty must have moved the widow of the music teacher, who was left alone to run the shop. Instead of turning her back on me and giving me the chance to steal, she gifted me with a complete set of replacements. She also gave me some picks for free, which I never used: I liked using my fingers.

At the time, I was influenced by Mauro Periotto’s playing style with OMCI: he was perhaps the first bassist whose style I wanted to emulate, but I never even came close. During my adolescence, I attended numerous Area concerts, becoming inexorably entangled in the vertigo woven by Ares Tavolazzi’s fingers. When, in October 1980, I had the good fortune to meet him at two consecutive concerts with Weather Report, I was amazed by Jaco Pastorius’s friendliness, wonderful cheerfulness, and smile, just as I was deeply saddened and hurt by his death. 

For years, I kept trying to make my old electric bass fly high, without ever really succeeding. 
A thousand times I found myself listening to a record where I would have loved to see my name printed on the cover. I imagined myself and my band playing while someone was recording in the next room, me watching the others in the group looking at me and laughing, and then I start laughing too, and we find ourselves throwing handfuls of notes at each other with the flute and the guitar and the drums as if they were snowballs, going crazy with happiness and flying, dissolving, disappearing, burning, becoming light. 

“…Our little Colorado town was as white as the Colorado snow until you crossed the railroad tracks to where the Latino farmworkers lived. But one day while I was in high school an apparition appeared seemingly out of nowhere. His skin was black like black coal. With this ear-to-ear smile of perfectly white teeth. He was tall, maybe six foot five or more. And skinny. That alone would have made him one-of-a-kind where I lived, but there was so much more. He played electric guitar with a wah-wah pedal like Jimi Hendrix. He wore crazy clothes. He walked around town in a silver cape and purple goggles. Oh, and he was beautiful. I had never met a man who was beautiful like that. And he had a girlfriend, who was a black as he was, and as beautiful, and as tall, and spoke English with a French accent. Dazzling… I never knew how they arrived in such an unlikely place, had no idea what they had done or who they had been before they showed up in my life. And they never offered any details. They were just suddenly here… And here is the best part: they both really liked me. They liked having me around. And they had their own place. A parent-free zone! With them in it! And I was welcome there! I was a devoted electric guitar player back then. He and I were at about the same skill level. And we were both Jimi Hendrix devotees. So we worked on guitar licks together, and talked about this and that… Then one night the two of them had a party at their place for all the young friends they had been making. For some reason I cannot 

remember, I couldn’t go. And the police burst in with guns drawn… We were in the Rocky Mountains, not in the south (…) [and] police in our town did not take out their guns much. I ran with kids who bought and sold drugs, and took more than our fair share, and we were always dodging the cops, and coming within an inch of getting busted, but there were never guns involved. Never. These two beautiful people had done nothing, and the police busted into their party with guns drawn. The next day they were gone for parts unknown. And that was that…” (excerpts from “Encounters with men”)

Time passes, it’s 1977. I’ve grown up. I’m no longer the kid struggling at technical high school, but I’ve graduated and enrolled at university. For a couple of years now, I’ve been scraping by with precarious and underpaid jobs as a shop boy, delivery boy, warehouse worker, waiter, assistant, laborer, sales clerk, exploited seasonal worker, part-time handyman. I’ve also had my first head-on collisions with the system: fired on the spot for being a conscientious objector to military service when by law it was still impossible to say no. Months and months of trouble at the police station, at the harbor master’s office, at the municipal military office and at the job service agency. 

These are dangerous times. If you raise your voice to protest or even just to make yourself heard, you risk your life: the police, the carabinieri, and the fascists kill girls and boys like me every day on the streets. In the space of a few years, they killed Franco Serantini, Claudio Varalli, Giannino Zibecchi, Alceste Campanile, Francesco Lorusso, Roberto Franceschi, Giorgiana Masi, Walter Rossi, Fausto Tinelli, Lorenzo Iannucci, and many, many others. A list of deaths as long as Italy itself. They were all guilty of being young and not resigned. Perhaps for you these are just distant words, people you don’t know, faceless names that mean little or nothing, but for me each one is a cut across my heart that has not healed in fifty years. 

Autumn and winter of 1977 at university were peaceful, mainly because many of our teachers were more left-wing than us: behind the lecterns were partisan couriers and people who had lived through and built the Resistance, experimenters, writers and translators of poets, artists and frequenters of artists. Venice is not like Rome, Milan, or Bologna: there were a few assemblies, but no Molotov cocktails or balaclavas, no trade unionists to scold us from a stage, and no tanks hunting for subversives among the gondolas and tourists. In Venice there is just fog, and the city is being dismantled in silence, brick by brick. 

I decide to drop out of university at the beginning of my second year – because of my declaration of conscientious objection, I had been kindly warned at the police station that I would never be allowed to teach at school. Before returning home, I stop at the employment office and accept a job as a laborer at the same factory where my father worked, a job offered by a subcontracted maintenance company. My father gets really angry. He almost puts his hands on me: he doesn’t want me working in the factory at all. He yells at me that he wants a different future for me than his own, and he hugs me desperately, bathing me in his tears.

My twenties are dark gray and dirty, with a suffocating chemical stench and a soundtrack of unbearably loud noise. Every day I find myself forced to choose between unemployment and illegal work, between red flags and dropouts, between the first joints made with weed grown secretly behind the house and the dealers who give you the first dose for free (but only the first) and ride around on souped-up mopeds with pockets bulging with money, between a rally in the square and roadblocks on the highway, between pacifism and violent far left formations, between ecological recycling and polluted air, between running away or staying at home. 

Our band falls apart when Roberto is handed his draft card, of which he tells us about on the day before leaving. After a long silence, we learn that he has been admitted to the military hospital in Padua. Then they send him home, but he no longer seems like himself: you talk to him and he stays silent and stares into the distance through the walls. He has dismantled his noise machine. 
Mauro and I try to keep the band together for a while, but one day he decides to focus on his studies. With the help of a friend of mine who rather clumsily tries his hand at building guitars, I assemble (body, neck, mechanics, and pickups from four different sources) a fretless electric bass and soon find a place in another band. They are nice and very good. Our songs are complicated and bizarre, but the overall sound is a little too soft and prog-rock oriented for my taste. But who cares, Marco, who cares: rock on with those four strings.

According to the TV news, there was a new world war underway: punk. And judging by the presenter’s scandalized expression, “who cares” should have been punk’s keyword. 
The truth is that the young people in town know nothing about it: punk doesn’t make it into the left wing press and doesn’t get played on free radio stations. Johnny Rotten and those other idiots mocking us from the pages of newspapers were just ridiculous: we all had plenty of firsthand experience of delinquency, hooliganism, misfortune, malaise, rebellion, discomfort, and profanity. We didn’t need those stupid English punks to know how bad things were.

I had bought Patti Smith’s early albums because it felt like my sister was singing on them. I stole a seven-inch single by Television and then bought “Marquee moon” because Tom Verlaine sounded like a brother I had been separated from at birth. The Clash’s debut album arrived like a comet star high in the sky when I, and all of us youngsters in town, were up to our necks in shit. I’m no longer used to looking up, so I don’t know anything about it until a kid who hangs out at the radio station dares to play “God Save the Queen” and “White Riot,” two fucking songs from two fucking records that an aunt had given him after a short trip to London. The members of the radio station editorial office give him hell: punk is nothing but fascist music that must stay off our airwaves, they declare. I did not agree. I thought that fascists and anarchists were two very different shades of black. 

Time passes quickly, always dark gray and dirty. It’s already 1979, and I really, really, really need to breathe and dream and let off steam and get some air and sky and music and get away. 
I’m among those who break into the city sports arena to see Fabrizio de André¹ with PFM, but I leave disappointed. I need to find my place in the world, whether it’s in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow, come on. Every night I dream of buying a black Fender Jazz Bass and then climbing over the fences of the ring road and hitchhiking to go and play who knows where. Instead, I decide to stay at home and look after my parents, whose health is getting worse and worse. 

That summer, a friend returning from a short trip to London gives me a Crass record and, holy shit, within half an hour all my beliefs about music, how to make it and why to make it, are shattered. I go to a Patti Smith concert in Bologna, slipping into the crowd without anyone at the entrance asking me for a ticket. I find a steady job, and not in a factory. I turn twenty-two. After less than six months, I decide to stop playing music. 

“…As my father grew old, I did become close to him in a way. Once he needed me and I no longer needed him, an easier familiarity became possible. He passed many years in assisted living, needing ever greater assistance, so the tables were turned, in the way that life’s
rhythm dictates for parents and their children. But in a fundamental way I kept my distance. For one thing, he had been in and out of mental hospitals with depression so bad he became dissociative. So you never knew if having a real conversation with him about difficult topics would set off another crisis.One day the phone rang and it was him, calling from a hospital
where he was recovering from surgery. 
“Bob, I have had a lot of time to think and reflect on my life while lying in this bed, and I think I owe you an apology.”
“Really? For what?”
“There was a time I spanked you too hard. It has been weighing on my mind. It was too hard.”
“Oh, come on Dad, don’t worry about it.”
That’s not your problem anymore, I thought. It’s mine…” (excerpts from “Encounters with men”)

I would say let’s stop here. I think you have now built up a sufficient overview to tackle the reading of “Creative life”. Thinking it would be useful, I also translated other excerpts from recent interviews, but I am convinced that they do not add much to these notes. The book is a collection of writings by Bob Ostertag, most of which have already been published in American magazines but are completely unpublished in Italy. 

The book exudes human warmth and appeal: there is an interesting piece on “Art and Politics after September 11” that is perfectly clear and understandable even to us Europeans, an account of Ostertag’s journalistic activities in Central America at the time of the Sandinista revolution (when the only commentary that reached our part of the world at the time was those two or three lines on “Washington Bullets” by The Clash – a fact I have reflected on at length), and an excerpt from the diary of his trip to Eastern Europe at the time of the war in the Balkans. The fourth and final chapter of the book is full of considerations and points for discussion on the relationship between music and machines. 

Very often, if not always, Bob writes with his heart in his hands. His reflections are enlightening and relatable: it is easy to see that they are not boring and distant theoretical writings, but rather suggestions to open our eyes and finally start thinking, to notice the hidden connections, if not the explicit and subtle strategies that power uses to stay alive and crush us. I would say that this is a very useful manual for venturing to see the world in depth without being content to float on the surface. 

“…I’m not an artist that’s excited about technology. There’s many artists who look at computer technology and think, “Yeah, computers will set us free.” And this is not me at all in any way… I use it. I’m attracted to it. But I don’t worship it… I think technology is very ambiguous. Many negative things and many positive things. But more than anything, technology is everywhere. It’s everywhere… It’s just something that’s become like the air we breathe. It’s everywhere… And so to be an artist in 1999, at least in the United States, I feel somehow we have to address technology. New technologies are now part of everybody’s everyday life in the United States, but I think new technologies have become part of life in Yugoslavia in a very different way. Yeah, definitely. New technology is also part of the way they are leading wars… But I really did not want to come to the Balkans as an arrogant American who thought he understood everything and just was coming to show everybody the wonderful thing he made in the United States. I really don’t want to do this… A thing that really motivated me to make the piece was watching the war and realizing that because the war has become so technological, there’s no contact, no communication between the soldiers on one side and the soldiers on the other side. They’re 30,000 ft in the air or they’re all the way on some ship in the ocean pressing buttons, they don’t even see… Um, it’s not a piece that places blame on one person or another person. It’s not a piece that attempts to convince you that somebody is right and somebody is wrong, but it’s a piece about the shocking fact that American technology has reached the point that for Americans waging war is like playing a game. So there is a distinctive social message in it… And I use images from the war in Yugoslavia, I use computer game images and I use the images that are on the screens of American airplanes and tanks and they all look the same… But I think if I’m going to make a piece about this and I’m not going to try to do it here, then what am I doing? So, you have to take a risk. And sometimes if you’re going to be honest with art, then you have to take a risk…” (excerpts from a Radio FreeB92 interview, Belgrade 1999)

Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it 

¹ Fabrizio De André (1940-1999), a widely popular Italian singer-songwriter. An openly anarchist and a peace activist, he was watched and filed by the police since the beginning of his music career in the early Sixties. Some of his songs were censored and were refused airplay at the national radio and television, but were regularily airplayed at the Vatican Radio. After his death, by popular demand, many streets, squares, theaters, libraries and schools were named after him.

L'articolo Bob Ostertag – Music politics people and machines proviene da Radio Punk.

Shortly after seeing them on stage at Sottotetto in Bologna this past February, the French band released their new album, Evermore. The live show was incredible, and we loved the record so much that we included it among our favourites of the month. So, we decided to get in touch with the band and ask them a few questions—happy reading!

• Radio Punk: Hey guys, welcome to our ‘zine! Let’s start from the beginning: how, when, and where did Lion’s Law form as a band?

Lion’s Law: We started the band in 2012 in Paris, let’s say with members of Street Kids and Maraboots. Both bands were singing in French, and we wanted to do something in English. We asked Thomoï, Legendary drummer of Komintern Sect, and when he surprisingly said yes, it all started!!! 

• Radio Punk: We know that you are very active in the music scene, not only as musicians. Could you give us an overview of your past and present bands, as well as any other side projects related to music?

Lion’s Law: Uffff I don’t know if I can even remember all the bands we all played in, but let’s try: Komintern Sect, Teep’n’teepatix, Burning Heads, Maraboots, Street Kids, Hard Times, Metal Urbain, Al Kapott, Hoax, DIG, Mowol, Faction S, Rixe, Atlantes.. Haha, it’s mental but yes, we all make tons of music and as you said, other projects, I (Wattie) have been booking shows under the name BSC for about 15 years now in Paris. I also run a web radio airing 24/7 called Droogies Radio! 

• Radio Punk: Many European cities, such as Bologna, where we’re writing from, are rapidly gentrifying and selling out to mass tourism. You live in one of the most tourist-heavy cities in the world. How do you experience this situation? Are there squats, social centers, venues, and other places where skins and punks gather?

Lion’s Law: These places are mostly gone now, compared to when we were kids, it’s totally différent, I feel like they wanna turn our city into a museum or like something only désigned for tourism, Airbnb’s and expensive groceries are the only thing you’ll find! But there’s a little community of punks trying to keep the alternative alive! We mostly gather in the streets or in pubs, we don’t really have our own space. 

• Radio Punk: Watching the Sewer Rats video, we noticed imagery that conveys unity between punks and skins. What is the general state of the Parisian punk Oi! scene?

Lion’s Law: We’ve always been shaved-head punks, what we call skinheads! We grew up tight, and there’s no real border between punks and skins here. Big up to my boys in Breakout!

• Radio Punk: Speaking of Evermore, would you like to share some curiosities and anecdotes about this amazing new album? What are the main innovations and differences compared to your previous work?

Lion’s Law: Well, this album is a new page for the band and for us a big, uncertain step. Our main composer and guitar player, Louis, left the band before we started writing this album. So we didn’t know and we feared that we couldn’t step up and write songs as good as he did !! But I like that now it’s more of a common process of writing… if we did it, you tell us! 

• Radio Punk: You just wrapped up an incredible European tour with Mess and Claimed Choice. Which places do you remember most fondly? And what were the craziest and most bizarre moments you experienced over the past few weeks?

Lion’s Law: It’s not just because you guys are Italians, but we had a great time in Bologna, that’s for sure! We played 21 shows around Europe with this crazy team, because let’s be honest, we all party hard every night !!! And it’s good to catch up with old friends in every city! I gotta say Berlin is still on top of Europe! 

• Radio Punk: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us! To wrap up the interview, tell us: who are the members of Lion’s Law in everyday life? (Hobbies, jobs, passions, guilty pleasures?)

Lion’s Law: Lion’s Law in 2025: 
Drums – Thomoï, punx since 1980 and biggest pothead on earth 
Guitar – Daick, Ex Straight Edge lord, broke up his edge on tour with Lion’s Law and now enjoys a warm 8°6 beer. 
Guitar – Vovott, InFamous 80’s punk guitar hero, please listen to Al Kapott.
Bass – Swann, the secret hidden kid of Matt Freeman and Beyoncé. 
Vocals – Wattie, not much to say about him.

Photo by Nina Galdino

L'articolo Interview with Lion’s Law proviene da Radio Punk.

In 2025, Bologna-based Oi! band Zeman celebrate ten years of activity. On 17 March, they released their new album, Ancor Non M’Abbandona. Following their previous full-length records, Attitudine Offensiva and Sunday Boys, as well as a split with Coru & Figau, the new release features 11 fresh tracks and is available on vinyl. It’s a co-production between Hellnation, Tough Ain’t Enough, Relax-O-Matic Vibrator, and Rusty Knife. To mark the occasion, we caught up with the band.

• Radio Punk: Hello there, and welcome to our zine! Although we’ve known each other for years, we’ve never had the chance to interview you as Zeman – though you lot have already been featured here with other projects like Cesoia and C4. Let’s start from the beginning: tell us the story of Zeman.

Zeman: It’s mostly a story of getting through, one way or another – hoping your liver holds up, surviving monotonous, underpaid jobs, scraping by in rented rooms, staying on your feet for the last drink, the last pointless scrap at five in the morning. Music had little to do with it. Especially in the beginning.

We were relentless. Sleeping two or three to a room, with no money to even get into bars or pubs, so we’d buy Lidl whisky for seven euros and drink at home on Via della Liberazione, playing cards. We’d get through at least two bottles of awful bourbon a week, but rarely straight – it was undrinkable. We’d cut it with Coke or just ice. The rest of our money went on canned beer and vodka stuffed under our jackets.

Bologna was different then – an open-air eatery, a playground for cash-flush Americans and Germans. Kebab prices have doubled since. Mauro was living in a student housing shoebox, and I was paying just over a hundred euros for a 1-bedroom flat that turned into a 2-bedroom flat whenever a mate needed a place to crash. Temporary contracts came and went like cockroaches on the floor.

We used to go to nights run by collectives, but only to nick booze and cause chaos. The autonomists kicked me out of their parties in Via Zamboni more than once – we were too working-class for the bourgeois offspring sent to Bologna for their political holiday in the cradle of ’77 [The so-called ‘movement of 1977’ was a spontaneist, mostly student-based ultraleft movement in Italy, reaching its peak in 1977, with Bologna as one of its strongholds – Translator]

I come from a working-class neighbourhood of twenty thousand blokes who do manual labour, warehouse work, or drink away what’s left in dimly lit social clubs – between addiction treatment centre queues for methadone and bottles of Ichnusa beer at eight in the morning.

The line-up has changed over time – Gaber was on bass until he moved to Barcelona, Norby played drums before heading back to where he came from, though he still plays with us, and Vinc from Gruppo Erotico Barletta was on guitar, but living far away makes it tough to piece everything together.

But we keep going – what else would we do? Spend Saturday nights in pizzerias or binge-watch TV series on the sofa, ordering junk food? Fighting is the only thing that keeps us alive. An uneven fight against fate. And since none of us has won the lottery, we’ve got no choice but to keep going.

The only thing I own is a Moto Guzzi V7, 750cc, made in Mandello del Lario, bought on instalments with my dad’s pension as collateral. The exhaust sounds like a distorted bass hammering against a snare drum. It goes from 0 to 100 in five seconds flat – like our new songs ‘Bardana’ and ‘Disciplina’.

• Radio Punk: Let’s talk about the new record. What do you feel you’ve brought to your discography with this album compared to the previous ones? What subject matter do you tackle?

Zeman: Lately, we’ve been hearing too much soft stuff – melodic guitars and polished vocals pandering to the audience, clean punk rock being passed off as Oi! or whatever. That’s not what we want. With this album, we’ve aimed for the sound of 1980s Italy – Nabat, raw, hard, uncompromising, lo-fi recordings that spit out pain and venom. We drew inspiration from recent French, Spanish, Catalan, and Basque releases like Beton Arme, Squelette, Brux, Aresi, Ultra Razzia, Rixe, and Reconquesta.

We entrusted the mixing and post-production to Alex from IENA. We wanted a record that captured what we lived and felt – drums pounding like a hammer on a metal bench, solos scraping at a garage door, vocals reverberating from beneath a stadium underpass. All that mattered was that it sounded real and raw, stripped back, sometimes dissonant – like a machine gun, like a Futurist poem. Zang Tumb Tumb.

As for the themes, we’ve tried to step away from the typical rhetoric of old, which now feels distant to us. ‘Bardana’ is about a crime in 19th-century Sardinia, where bands of armed horsemen raided the homes of the wealthy, killing everyone in their path. ‘Incorruttibile’ is about Robespierre, one of history’s greatest revolutionaries. Then there’s the nocturnal atmosphere of ‘Rasoi’, Sunday mornings heading to the stadium, the wake-ups, and our city in ‘Aspettando solo un goal’ and ‘Una vita intera’. The most identity-driven tracks like ‘Teste Rasate’ and ‘Ancor Non M’Abbandona’ tell our origins – we came from nothing, immigrants, and no one ever gave us anything (the album title comes from a line in Dante’s Inferno). ‘Fenomeno’ is about people who think they’re someone special, mostly online – it’s easier today: two posed photos, a bit of nonsense, and you’re set. Finally, ‘No One Likes Us’, our rework of the track by The Business, adapted to the streets of San Donato and our own terraces. Better Millwall than West Ham.

• Radio Punk: Can you tell us about the team behind the sound, artwork, photos, and the labels that helped release the album? We’re not just looking for a list of names – give us some behind-the-scenes insight.

Zeman: After ten years, we can confidently say that we all contributed fairly equally to the music on this record – riffs, melodies, rhythms, and sounds. We recorded in our bunker, Il Vecchio Son, at Sonhouse Studio with sound engineer Grug. The gang vocals session was legendary – there were at least ten of us, polishing off a bottle of whisky and a couple of crates of beer. The chants you hear at the end of the songs were all spontaneous – we actually had to cut some bits because things got out of hand. As mentioned earlier, Alex from IENA took care of the mixing. We wanted a raw, obsessive, clanking, anti-commercial sound – something that stands apart from most of today’s Italian releases. The mastering was done at a studio in Florence recommended by Alex.

The artwork was created by Tommy, a long-time mate. The photos and video for the album’s release were done by Camilla, who was incredibly patient, considering that we’re not exactly natural-born models, don’t look great in photos, and have no idea what to do in front of a camera. Before the full album, we recorded a promo and sent it to labels we respect, mostly French, Spanish, and Basque, alongside Hellnation – the indestructible hub of quality Oi! In the end, the record was co-produced by Tough Ain’t Enough (Spain), Rusty Knife, and Relax-O-Matic Vibrator (from Marseille, where we’ve played before), and, of course, Roberto from Hellnation.

• Radio Punk: Your bio and flyers say you’re from Bologna, but none of you are actually from here. What’s your relationship with Bologna and its stadium? What are the hangout spots for the kids, aside from the ‘Bar dei Ragazzi’ [a bar in the San Donato immortalised in a Zeman song on the previous album – Translator]?

Zeman: It’s all about the red and blue, basically. Those are the colours of my hometown, Sassari, the city where we formed, and of Cagliari, which I hate, but Mauro and Norby support, even though Vinc’s Barletta team has the colours red and white – but that’s another story.

The first time we ever rehearsed was at Vecchio Son in Bologna – the rehearsal space that Steno from Nabat runs. Steno had never seen us before, nobody had, and that’s where we chose our band name and wrote songs like ‘No Fair Play’, ‘Attitudine Offensiva’, and ‘Disciplina’. So, what else are we supposed to put in our biography, if not Bologna? Besides, we’re not Lega [Italian far-right party] supporters – the whole Jus Sanguinis thing [‘right of blood’ = nationality determined by descent] is a thing of the past, like something spouted by Calderoli [Roberto Calderoli, an Italian far-right politician known for his racist remarks – Translator].

The places we hang out at, and have always hung out at, are basically the ones where you spend less. I’ve never been into political gathering spots, those trendy places where people chat – it’s just not my thing. The national average beer consumption in Sardinia is the highest in Italy, on par with Munich, and I’m not about to spend eight euros on a pint or some overpriced craft beer. So, you’ll often find us in San Donato: Bar dei Ragazzi, Sardocinese, Bar Kantelli, and Bar Texas.

As for Oi!, we should mention Bologna City Rockers, the Sottotetto venue, and what used to be the Skeggia – a place run by Bologna’s Forever Ultras. It was all about long nights, ultras scarves, Campari and gin, all crammed between the bar and the wall, with stage diving from the door. But now they say they’re rebuilding the stadium, with parking lots, fast food joints, and balloons for kids. We’ll patiently wait for another venue, and if there isn’t one… well, we’ll figure something out. We even wrote a book about the Skeggia – me and the guys from Bologna City Rockers: skinheads, punks, and hooligans. It’s a true self-production, all done by us, no profit, no booking.

• Radio Punk: You’re a band that’s openly skinhead and anti-fascist, and you make that clear in the lyrics of this album, such as in ‘Nemico’. What struggles are closest to your hearts, and in general, what’s your take on the current geopolitical situation?

Zeman: With this album, we didn’t feel the need to repeat that we’re an anti-fascist band. We’ve been playing for over ten years, and people already know where we stand, so we focused on expressing other aspects of our lives. We’ve been involved in many anti-fascist struggles in the city, from street demonstrations to scuffles outside gigs, kicking Nazis out or stopping them from getting in. That’s what matters to me – being real, all the way.
That said, there’s one song we felt compelled to write in light of recent international events and ongoing wars: ‘Nemico’ [enemy]. Why? Because the democratic West has already decided who the new enemies of the established order, common morals, and civilisation are. It’s a holy war against anyone who doesn’t conform. The enemy is the Palestinian, the enemy is the Russian, and we, who have long memories and have studied history, know you can never trust the Americans.

• Radio Punk: Since the album is a collaboration between Italian, French, and Spanish labels, do you have plans for a European tour or something similar? And in general, what’s in store for Zeman in the future?

Zeman: There will be a promotional tour, starting with dates in Italy and Sardinia, and possibly later expanding to Europe. But don’t expect a three-week tour in France and Spain – we all work during the week, and we’re only free on Sundays and, when we’re lucky, Saturdays. As for the bands that do big tours in South America, the US, Poland, and so on… What kind of jobs do they have?

• Radio Punk: Ten years of playing is no small feat, especially since you’ve always stayed active in the truest sense of the word. You’ve seen and been through a lot. Do you think the skinhead scene in Bologna and Italy has changed over the years? What do you like about it, and what would you like to improve? After this philosophical question, we’ll thank you, say goodbye, and raise a toast to you. Oi!

Zeman: Everything changes, nothing stays the same. Panta rei. The scene is no different. The average age has definitely gone up, especially at live shows – you don’t see many young bands anymore, and that’s the case across Italy. In France, Spain, and Euskadi, though, the scene seems livelier. In Bologna, there’s still some movement, I think. Bands like Oltre La Linea, who are a bunch of solid lads from nearby Porretta. We won’t mention Cesoia, or else people will say we’re biased. Then there are all the bands we’re always happy to share a stage with: Nabat, Diario di Bordo, Zona Popolare, Rude, and Ghetto 84.

A lot of it comes down to venues. There aren’t many self-managed spaces left, so more shows are happening in clubs. This isn’t bad in some ways, like for the acoustics, organisation, and beer in glass bottles. But I think we lose some spontaneity, opposition, anger, avant-garde spirit, and contrast. Oi! needs vitality, people who come from nothing, from the provinces and outskirts. Eight-euro tickets, nine-euro drinks, six-hundred-euro rents for a studio flat – these things take away the magic.

We’re still the invincible ranks with black flames on our lapels [a reference to ‘Fiamme nere’, a marching song of Arditi del Popolo, Italy’s first paramilitary anti-fascist organisation, founded by ex-WWI combatants in 1921 – Translator]. I hope a new generation of kids will rise up – stealing wristbands to sneak into gigs, grabbing bottles from behind the bar, and getting kicked out, just like we did. Who knows, maybe they’ll make music that challenges our certainties, waking us from the suffocating numbness of gig photos, likes, shares, and petty arguments on social media. We’re trying to resist. And if you don’t like it, well, No one likes us, we don’t care.

Translation by Matt Zurowski
Credit photo: Cami Cristo

L'articolo Interview with Zeman proviene da Radio Punk.

What you’re about to read is the first chapter of ‘Punk Radar’, our new article-series that aims to discover places and projects in Italy (and beyond), whatever might symbolise our subculture and is related to the world of DIY.  The intention is both to promote the project chosen for the article and to give some information about the city that hosts it, in order to give as complete a picture as possible of the punk and DIY scene in that area, including self-run spaces, record shops, ‘friendly’ bars and pubs and more. There will be no shortage of musical curiosities, a bit of history and even some advice on what not to miss in the city. A column for the punks, by the punks, for those who, like us, wander the world in search of underground places to have a pint and places full of stickers to scare off tourists!  

It was 2017 when Alberto and Emanuela opened a record shop in a somewhat hidden area of Genoa. Sometime later Massimo joined the crew and Flamingo Records was born, one of the most active punk realities in Italy and Liguria. In October 2024, the Pink Flamingo moved to Via Luccoli 17r, in a bigger and more central location that allowed for the organisation of smaller events and, above all, more space and therefore a wider musical choice. However, Flamingo Records is not just a record shop, but a cultural centre of the city, where people can come in, exchange information about concerts, talk about music, bring their own productions or admire Fabrizio Barile’s exhibition inside the shop, free of charge. We are crazy about this project and the people who are part of it, so we are very happy to launch this new hybrid column in the company of the Genoese flamingo!

Let’s leave room for questions!

Radio Punk: Hello Alberto, Hello Maso! Welcome back to our ‘zine! Tell us a little bit about it: how did the Flamingo Records shop come about and why the flamingo as the main animal?

Flamingo Records: The shop was started by Albe and Emi as a punk-only clothing and record shop, of course we starved ourselves because there weren’t enough punks in the city to support that kind of stuff, plus it was in an area where only the daredevils would go. A couple of years later we integrated Maso into the crew and decided to become a record shop in our own right, but always with a focus on the most obnoxious music, from oi! to drones to Norwegian organists to ska, just stuff that makes most people shit their pants. Flamingos have a stupid face, so we love them. 

Radio Punk: In the new shop we know you have a very special exhibition, what does it consist of? Do you have any other events or projects in the pipeline for the shop?

Flamingo Records: A good friend of ours, Fabrizio Barile, is one of the biggest collectors of punk culture material in Italy.  For years he has been organising exhibitions to show very rare gems (he has a whole exhibition on punk in Switzerland, for example.) With him we thought of setting up a permanent exhibition in the shop and changing the theme every three months or so. The first one was about signed material (records, promo photos, press kits). At the moment I am writing in front of signatures from the Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Blondie, Sham 69, to name but a few. The idea is always to give people an excuse to come into the shop, if only to look at the display and have a chat. On the opposite wall, we have just started displaying the fantastic screen prints of Jessica Rassi aka JJ Farfante, who has worked with top bands over the years including Mudhoney, Melvins, Boris, Yob and many more. Screen prints are available for purchase, but as I said, you can go in here without the anxiety of buying, just to enjoy the air you breathe in a record shop. In these first two months we have played several artists in the shop, we have presented three books, we have no desire to stop, every idea is good to open this space to people.

Radio Punk: As a very important meeting point of the city, would you like to recommend other underground/punk/diy places in Genoa where one can meet other badly dressed riffraff with dubious musical tastes like us?

Flamingo Records: Apart from the occupied spaces, there are no real punk meeting places, but places like Fitz, Kowalski, Mescite and Neat are important evening meeting places that also promote very good events. There are also many associations that promote culture in all its forms, such as Disorder, Drama, Metrodora, Adescite and many others. Tourists often ask me where they can go to have a drink while listening to punk music, well, there isn’t one, in case one of the readers wants to start a failing business…

For concerts I would say, besides Zapata and Pinelli, Villa Rossi, Cinemino Ad Astra, Luzzati. Genoa lacks a venue like the Raindogs in Savona, the top for music programming in Liguria.

Radio Punk: We know you don’t like wild tourism, but if someone on our tour is passing through Genoa, where can they find the best focaccia? Tell us what and where to eat and drink without getting fleeced. Finally, a cultural question: what do you recommend to see in or around your city that isn’t a tourist attraction? 

Flamingo Records: In the centre it’s quite a hassle to find a decent focaccia, wild tourism has lowered the quality, I recommend getting it in the suburbs. For me, the best focaccia in Genoa is Marinetta’s in Voltri, there are those who disagree, but they’re people with no sense of taste.

For me, the best thing to do is to spend a day getting lost in the alleys, half a day at Villa Pallavicini in Pegli and if you have time, take a car, drive up the Faiallo Pass and look at the view from the mountains.

Radio Punk: In the last few years several social spaces have been cleared out, including Buridda, Utopia, TDN and Zapata, which not only played an important political and cultural role, but were also important for subcultures. How has the city’s punk scene changed from a few years ago? What is still going on today? 

Flamingo Records: Underground music in Genoa has always had its natural place in the social centres or self-run spaces. Recent political developments have taken away most of the meeting places, even if Zapata and Pinelli are resisting, times are hard. In this respect, I would like to say that, despite the fact that I am a shopkeeper and therefore theoretically more protected by right-wing politics (in theory, of course, it is an idiotic idea), the social centres have always supported me much more than I could have expected, understanding from the beginning what my project was and what my ideals were. On the other hand, this is a city full of contradictions, did you know that thousands of containers of goods arrive in our port from China, but in the chicest areas of the city centre you can’t sell so-called chinoiserie? 

Anyway, the punk scene is alive and kicking and there are lots of young people at the gigs.

Radio Punk: …And instead, as Flamingo Records, do you feel a responsibility to spread counterculture and promote generational change? And how could this be done?

Flamingo Records: I think that the push towards a subculture is something personal, that everyone matures on their own. Let’s face it: the classic punk or metalhead is a lonely weirdo. There were no punks in my neighbourhood, no one who listened to the same music as me, no one who wanted to go to a concert, and yet I felt an irrepressible urge to do so. I made friends through punk, but I would listen to this music if I was the last man on earth. So no, I don’t feel any responsibility or any particular desire to pass anything on to young people; I just want to promote good music and a certain kind of ethos, and if someone is interested, they can be 12 or 70 years old. Anyway, just to make you laugh, a few days ago a crazy kid with a Borsalino hat and shiny shoes came into the shop and asked me where the 45 rpm beats were… he was a 9 year old mod!

Radio Punk: Finally, we would like to thank you and ask you a question as if we were customers in your shop: do you recommend any bands from Genoa that we should definitely listen to?

Flamingo Records: You’re spoilt for choice and I can boast that all the good bands are under Flamingo Records, so go to our bandcamp and you’ll get an overview of Genoese punk. I advise you to bookmark the name Demo Dum for the future, really forward kids.

USEFUL CONTACTS:

• Promoters: Adescite Crew, Disorder Drama, Wet Mary, Cane, Associazione Culturale Metrodora
• Other record stores: Disco Club, Black Widow Records
• Self-managed social center: CS Zapata, CSOA Pinelli
• Other Venues: Trinità, Circolo Matteotti, Arci Perugina, Cinemino ad Astra, Giardini Luzzati, Raindogs (SV).
• Labels & Distro: Lanterna Pirata, Taxi Driver, Marsiglia Records, Brucia Records, Blood Rock
• Fanzines: Noisext, Up Zine
• Recording studios: Greenfog studio, Studio K
• Miscellaneous: Pepita Ramone, Disorder Drama

L'articolo PUNK RADAR: Flamingo Records Store – Genoa proviene da Radio Punk.

Cesoia – made up of Gerry on vocals, Davide on guitar, Matt on bass, and Mauro on drums – haven’t been around for long, but they’ve already played a decent number of gigs and released a debut album at the end of 2024. So, let’s get to know Cesoia and their skinhead rock ’n’ roll!

Radio Punk: Hello lads – welcome to our zine! Tell us a little bit about how, where, and when Cesoia got started, and which other projects, bands, or collectives you have been or are currently involved in…

Gerry: Hi there! Me, Davide and Mauro have known each other for over 15 years – we all moved to Bologna from distant places in Italy. Then a few years ago, we met Matt, and after a many chats over many beers and shots, Robert Johnson appeared to us and we realised we should probably drink less and start a band that mixes the energy of rock ‘n’ roll with the rage of Oi!

Mauro and Davide come from Sardinia, where they played in various punk bands before moving to Bologna for university. It was not long before they formed Zeman. I sang in a few punk bands in Naples before moving to Bologna. It was here that I started Misfatt with Vinc from the local Oi! band Zeman during the lockdown period – a demented Misfits-style band singing in the Neapolitan language. We never played live, but we had a blast. Matt, on the other hand, has lived in a several different countries and, ages ago, played in garage bands such as Mod Fuck Explosion.

Radio Punk: Your themes and style are unmistakably working-class and skinhead. Tell us a bit about your lyrics and the messages you want to convey to your audience.

Cesoia: We live every word in our lyrics, and our lyrics are us – from laughter to rage, from social injustice to workplace strife, from class struggle to everyday battles, from drunken nights to late-night odysseys in search of the last open bar. In short, it’s music of the people, for the people. And to those who listen to us – great choice, keep it up, Oi!

Cesoia – S/T

Radio Punk: Let’s move to a topic that’s very important to us. What role does politics play in your lives? And what’s your take on those who identify as apolitical skins?

Cesoia: The members of the band have different political leanings, but we’re all anti-capitalist and anti-fascist. For us the real threat is not from below but from above, from control at all costs to the standardisation of entertainment. We’re all politically conscious – being apolitical is not for us. Politics is part of our lives and taking a stand on certain issues is a must.

Radio Punk: You’ve been around for quite a few years, despite the band’s relatively young age. How have you seen the punk and skinhead subcultures change over the years? Do you think there’s a new generation coming through, or are we heading towards the end of subcultures? If it’s the latter, what can be done to turn things around?

Cesoia: Subcultures have obviously changed along with society, but we still believe that those who gravitate towards skinhead and punk circles hold the same values as they did in the beginning. Of course, there will always be a few idiots trying their best to make you think otherwise, but the trick is to ignore them. The real enemies are elsewhere – it’s not about whether some kid is ‘inadequate’ because he doesn’t have the right clothes or whatever. As The Business said, ‘Fight the real enemy’.

For us it is about our friends and keeping the scene alive. The generational change in Bologna has slowed down – mainly because fewer self-run spaces, community-run centres and so on, mean fewer places for people to come together. For example, we recently played at the CPA community centre in Florence, and there were a lot of young people there who made the space their own.

Radio Punk: What bands are your main musical influences? Recommend some must-listen Oi! and rock ’n’ roll bands to our readers… And on the other hand, what are your guilty pleasures when it comes to music?

Cesoia: Apart from ’80s Oi! and ’70s glam/bovver rock, we’d mention what we call ‘punk with a Harrington jacket’ – bands like Slaughter and the Dogs, The Ruts, and 999, so bootboys, pub rockers, and glam rockers who somehow ended up in punk. We also love stadium glam like Slade, delta blues, country & western, Aussie rock, and first-generation rock ’n’ roll legends like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry.

Guilty pleasures? Sabrina Salerno and Amanda Lear.

Bands we recommend: The Reapers, No Time, Claimed Choice, Mess, Siekiera, Tchernobyl, Miners, Rose Tattoo, and of course, Nabat and The Business… but we could go on forever.

Radio Punk: What’s your connection with the city you live in and its scene? What do you love most about Bologna, and what would you change if you could?

Cesoia: We all come from different places, so more than us having a connection with Bologna, Bologna is what connects us – this is where we met. The scene here has always been very varied, from the skinhead world to the punk scene. There were and still are very important venues like Atlantide, XM24, A Skeggia, Vecchio Son, and the Bologna City Rockers collective, which organises all the best gigs.

Nowadays, with pedestrianised zones, restrictive regulations, and sky-high rents, the city is turning into an open-air shopping mall, where those who create non-mainstream meeting places are seen as a problem to be eradicated. Evictions, lawsuits, bans and restrictions make things difficult, but there are still people who fight for these spaces with passion. That’s the beauty of the city.

Radio Punk: What’s in the pipeline for Cesoia? Will there be a tour or any gigs to promote this record? Will it be released in a physical format too? And in general, what’s next for Cesoia?

Cesoia: Gigs are coming up as we go along and we’ll add them to our Facebook page as they happen. We have decided to make our debut album available for free on all platforms. We’re planning to record another album in about a year, and this time we’ll release it in a physical format. As for the future – the future not what it used to be, so we’ll see how things go.

Radio Punk: We’ll wrap things up here – thank you very much! We’ve known you for years, but some of our readers may not. Who are Gerry, Mauro, Davide and Matt in normal life? What are their jobs, hobbies and passions? And finally, if you had to choose – whisky or borghetti? Thanks again and see you next time – Oi!

Gerry: Right, so I work as a stagehand for concerts and theatres, Mauro is a healthcare assistant, Matt is a translator, and Davide is a precarious teacher. We spend our time listening to music, watching ’70s and ’80s horror and exploitation movies, reading, hanging out in the dodgiest bars in town, and disturbing the peace.

Whisky or Borghetti? Why choose?

Thanks to you lot – see you around!

Credit photo: Francesca Chiari
Translation by Matt Zurowski

L'articolo Interview with Cesoia proviene da Radio Punk.

As a longtime passionate and keen observer of the UK punk scene, I took the liberty of highlighting ten bands that deserve to be known.

Disclaimer: This article does not pretend to be either an encyclopedia or an archive of UK and Ireland punk, but rather a journey reflecting personal tastes and preferences. If you think something is missing, don’t hesitate to tell us! (contact us by email or write us on our social networks).

Chubby and the Gang: West London

Chubby and the Gang is a band formed in 2019 from the fusion of various UK hardcore-punk groups. The band consists of vocalist Charlie “Chubby Charles” Manning-Walker, guitarists Ethan Stahl and Tom “Razor” Hardwick, bassist Maegan Brooks Mills, and drummer Joe McMahon.

Their debut album Speed Kills was released by Static Shock Records after their first U.S. tour and was later reissued via Partisan Records. Their second album, The Mutt’s Nuts, came out in 2021 and includes the iconic track “Coming Up Tough,” which initially drew me to the band. After lineup changes, concerts, and growing fame, their latest album, And Then There Was…, was released a few months ago—a record I’ve practically worn out from playing.

I was lucky enough to see them live last month in Manchester—just a relentless half-hour set without breaks, but packed with energy.

Listen on Bandcamp

The Chisel: London

The Chisel is a punk band formed in 2020 in London, originating from the collaboration between vocalist Nicholas Sarnella and Cal Graham. They later recruited guitarist Charlie “Chubby Charles” Manning-Walker. This trio recorded the EP Deconstructive Surgery, with Manning-Walker on guitar, Sarnella on drums, and Graham on vocals, before adding bassist Tom Ellis and second guitarist Luke Younger.

After two EPs—Come See Me / Not The Only One and Enough Said—they released their debut album Retaliation via La Vida Es un Mus. Their latest work, What A Fucking Nightmare, came out a year ago on Pure Noise. Notably, among their numerous live performances, they also released a split EP with the Mexican street-punk band Mess.

Their music is often fast and aggressive yet melodic, with Graham’s vocals showcasing his Lancashire accent. The quintet will be back in Italy this March for a show in Milan. I had the chance to see them nearly two years ago in Bologna, and it was an absolutely devastating live performance.

Listen on Bandcamp

Fulmine: Around

Fulmine is a five-member band consisting of Luca, Sarny, Alex, Joe, and our friend Charlie “Chubby Charles.” Their debut 7” Randagio was recorded by Ben Spence at Fuzzbrain Studios. Reportedly, the band recorded these six tracks in just as many hours without a single rehearsal.

The sound is raw, intense, and essential, with highly incendiary lyrics. The surprising thing is that the lyrics are entirely in Italian, echoing the Oi! sound of the 1980s. At the moment, little is known about the band—it seems more like a fun side project. But a damn good one.

Rifle: London

Rifle is a British punk band from London known for their raw and direct sound. Formed in Camden, the lineup includes Max, Ross, Cam, Flynn, and Alb. So far, they’ve released three EPs: Holloway Demos (2022) and Under Two Flags (2023), the latter featuring five tracks and Pack Mentality (2024).

Their influences range from bands like Chubby and the Gang to The Chisel, blending ’70s British punk with the intensity of ’80s American hardcore. Recently, they’ve been very active on the UK live circuit, sharing stages with bands like High Vis, DIZ, and Crocodiles.

Listen on Bandcamp

Clobber: London

Yet another London-based hardcore punk band I’ve been keeping an eye on. Clobber first caught attention on No Echo in early 2022 when they released their debut EP Tribal Rites of the New Friday Night. Their rough and wild sound has made waves in clubs across the UK, sharing bills with hardcore legends like Madball.

Signed to Venn Records, they released their second EP, Yesterday’s Heroes, Tomorrow’s Snide, in 2023, addressing government failures, police corruption, and the negative impact of social media on young people. Later that year, they dropped their debut full-length album, Violent Back Beat Noise, featuring eight tracks in a limited-edition release. They’re currently playing shows across Europe and will perform at the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool this August.

Listen on Bandcamp

Lambrini Girls: Brighton

Hailing from Brighton’s ever-thriving music scene, Lambrini Girls are a duo featuring Phoebe Lunny (vocals, guitar) and Lilly Macieira (bass). Active for a couple of years, they released their first EP, You’re Welcome, in 2023 through Big Scary Monsters, and just weeks ago, they dropped their debut album Who Let The Dogs Out on City Slang.

Their songs tackle social criticism, violence, and abuse, delivered with fury through fast punk rhythms, sharp guitars, and aggressive drumming. Definitely a band to watch.

Listen on Bandcamp

Kid Kapichi: Hastings

Kid Kapichi is an English punk rock band formed in 2013 in Hastings, East Sussex. The lineup features vocalists/guitarists Jack Wilson and Ben Beetham, bassist Eddie Lewis, and drummer George Macdonald—a gritty quartet that openly challenges the establishment.

After building their reputation through local shows, they released multiple singles and EPs before touring Europe in 2019. Their debut album, This Time Next Year, arrived in 2021. On March 26, 2022, the band opened for Liam Gallagher at London’s Royal Albert Hall—Gallagher personally invited them after praising their song New England.

In June 2022, they signed with Spinefarm Records and later released their second studio album, Here’s What You Could Have Won. Their third album, There Goes The Neighborhood, was released on March 15, 2024, followed by a European headline tour.

Through their songs, they paint a vivid picture of life in small towns—exploring politics, pub culture, late-night adventures, and the desire to rebel against a corrupt system.

Listen on Bandcamp

Soap Box: Glasgow

Formed in the spring of 2022, this four-piece band took time to refine their sound before making their public debut. Since then, they’ve built a small but loyal following through various UK gigs.

They’ve released multiple singles and the Hawd That EP (2023). In the coming months, they’ll open for Kid Kapichi’s tour.

Listen on Bandcamp

Meryl Streek: Dublin

Meryl Streek is the ambitious project of a 32-year-old Irish producer from Dublin. I had the chance to meet him personally two years ago when he played his second-ever live show, introducing his stunning debut album, 796. The album’s title references a tragic event—the 2014 discovery of 796 children’s remains in a mass grave at a nun-run facility in Galway.

Following a couple of singles and countless UK live shows, he recently released Songs for the Deceased via Venn Records. His music transforms political manifestos into raw, furious anthems, tackling themes like church abuse, suicide, alcoholism, and political decline.

Listen on Bandcamp

The Dogs: Wales

After a few digital releases, this Welsh band debuted on vinyl with Total Dog Shit, a 10-track 12” released via Mendeku Diskak. Their sound is a mix of Oi! and straightforward punk—effective, insolent, and full of disdain for human stupidity.

The trio will be playing several live shows in the coming months after opening for The Chisel in London and Blackpool last December.

Listen on Bandcamp

Article By Demis Trieste

This article is an unedited piece written by Demis for Radio Punk. Its sharing is free but if you would like to republish or quote it write to us at info@radiopunk.it

L'articolo Punk in the UK and Ireland: an alive and kicking scene proviene da Radio Punk.