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.

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.

With their queercore full of rage and passion, London trio Shooting Daggers recently released their album ‘Love & Rage’ (which we really liked and talked about here). A mix of punk, post-hardcore, grunge, shoegaze and a thousand other influences. They tackle political and social issues that are fundamental to us at Radio Punk, such as transfeminism, the fight against patriarchy and the DIY ethic, all on a skateboard!

• Radio Punk: Hi and thanks for being here! After listening to your album ‘Love & Rage’ we got in love with it and immediately thought of interviewing you! Briefly introduce yourselves to the reader, when and where you started playing together.

Shooting Daggers:
Sal (she/they): Guitar and Vocals
Bea (they/them): Bass and Bvs
Raquel (she/her) : Drums
We’ve been playing with this line-up since the end of 2020. We (Sal and Bea) met in late 2018 and started the band in 2019 with another drummer Godinha. We played our very first shows with him but unfortunately, he had to move back to Galicia during lockdown. After the pandemic, we were looking for a new drummer and we found Raquel through mutual friends in the London punk scene. (Godinha now plays in 2 Hardcore bands; OuttaSpite and Unexist. Shout out!) 

• Radio Punk: Since we have a thousand things to ask you, let’s go in order and start with the first track of your latest album. “Dare” is about Do It Yourself, the ethic that guides our personal lives and which we also transfer here to the webzine. What does DIY mean to you? How do you try to apply it in your everyday life and in your band?

Shooting Daggers: D(o) I(t) Y(ourself) to us means creating opportunities that we would very likely never have otherwise. It’s freedom of speech without censorship. You can spread a message that would likely not be seen/heard on national television through art, leaflets, zines, lyrics. DIY can start from yourself alone but then followed by the help of a community, building a better environment for people who don’t have a voice.
It’s about taking the power in our hands when we disagree or when we have something to say. More specifically for people of colour, women, queer people, working-class people, people with disabilities, and marginalised people in general. We must create a life for ourselves in which we can express ourselves and live without waiting for some cisgender white men to give it to us. (because it’s likely not going to happen).
That’s why we love punk and the punk/hardcore/alternative scene. DIY is the essence of these communities. We apply it in our everyday life as a band in many ways: creating art, contacting promoters, organising our tours. We put our own shows sometimes with the lineup we want, we write all our music ourselves and conceptualise videos and artwork. As a punk band, it is also important to participate in fundraisers and charity gigs and promote like-minded bands as much as possible. We try our best to help the punk community which also helped us so much. 

• Radio Punk: As we’ve said several times before, your album ‘Love & Rage’ blew us away on all levels: music, themes, general concept, musical influences and even the artwork is a blast! How did this album come about? Who did you work with on the more technical aspects like recording, production and cover artwork? Tell us a little bit about…

Shooting Daggers: Love & Rage is an album that came pretty naturally. Once we had a bunch of songs written we realised that if we put them in a certain order, they created a coherent message. It’s not something we thought ahead. We wrote these songs just within a few months. At the time we felt inspired by our queercore community. We wanted to spread a message of sorority unlike our previous EP ‘Athames” which felt more spiteful, although we kept the anger in this one too. We channeled our rage into something more positive and constructive to spread “love” for our community, hence the title. We went to the studio 3 times to finish this album as we were super busy playing shows, but this allowed us to take our time to add details & rethink some of our songs to polish them. We worked with Wayne Adam at Bear Bites Horse Studio in Haggerston London, who helped us complete our work with a modern yet still raw sound.  The Album’s artwork is designed by the amazing Greta Bungle, a Spanish artist who works with mixed media and collage. She also created our “Athames” EP cover, and we liked it so much that we decided to work with her again. 

• Radio Punk: Your project is characterised by a strong focus on transfeminism. Many people approach music first and then political content, but there are also those who decide to make music out of a sense of urgency, using it as a amplifier for socio-political activism. What has been your journey (both personally and as a band)?

Shooting Daggers:  Us three people are political and with a clear mindset. For us, it’s always been natural to include our ethos and political stance into our music and it’s something we probably will never stop doing. Some people seem to think that when you’re a teenager you’re more angry at society and once you grow up you will start being more moderate, but that’s not how we feel. The more we grow as people the more we learn and solidify our political beliefs and we get even more enraged when we don’t see things changing. 
We think that it’s not mandatory to be political in your music, and we have also created some music that is more introspective and about our own life experiences sometimes. At the end of the day, Shooting Daggers has been and will always be a band that was born out of a strong necessity for representation in the punk hardcore scene and we will keep fighting for women and queer people to have a voice and power on stage.

• Radio Punk: In Italy, within the punk subculture, we still haven’t stopped fighting to make the spaces we frequent safe places where queer people and girls can feel comfortable. What about the situation in the London scene? How active are queer people and girls there?

Shooting Daggers: There is definitely a growing queercore scene in London and the UK in general and we’re very pleased to see that. However, it is still too limited to the underground scene and we think that what we need now is more queer and girls in the actual business. More promoters, sound engineers, producers, agents, more queer and women musicians, and not just vocalists (with all due respect to all the amazing front women and queer people in bands that are doing the hard work). It is still a hard life for women and queers to navigate the music industry which is 90% run by cis men. So, big yes to all the awesome queercore bands that are coming out every day in the UK, but we can’t wait to see a radical change in the biz because that’s how you can ensure real safe spaces. Without all these cis men promoters who keep booking dodgy bands with abusers in them and without producers and sound engineers who mansplain you and make you feel less of a professional just because you’re not a man. Unfortunately, we experience systemic oppression and we’re putting in the work to make it stop.

• Radio Punk: Let’s lighten up the chat a bit by asking: which Daria character reflects you most?

Shooting Daggers: We know exactly how to answer this one as we dressed up as them last Halloween! Raquel is Daria, Bea is Jane, Sal is Quinn.  And then we’re all a little bit of a Trent. 

• Radio Punk: Back to music, what are your favourite queercore bands? What other genres of music do you listen to (besides punk)? Recommend us some music!

Shooting Daggers: Limp Wrists, G.L.O.S.S., Dicks, The HIIRS collective, Tribe 8,  Against Me!, SeeYouSpaceCowboy , Slutbomb. From our friends’ scene, The Menstrual Cramps, Death Goals, Gender Warfare, Uncertainty, Throlz, Caution Elderly People, Liv Wynter, Es, Traidora, Deadname 

Bea: I listen to screamo mainly, I can recommend Dreamwell who’s also fronted by a trans woman and Blind Girls who are some of my most recent discoveries. Besides alternative music I listen to EDM a lot. An artist I love is TR/ST who does some very cool dark wave, synth-pop or Bou who’s my favourite drum n bass producer at the minute. 

Sal: I listen to a bit of everything, I know it’s a boring answer and I know that saying “it’s a boring answer” has been said a million times. I don’t listen to Hardcore as much anymore and I find myself enjoying it less and less at live shows. My fav music is the one that moves me and generally, it has a feminist message or something I relate to. Anyway, I’m really digging Kathleen Hanna’s playlist for her book Rebel Girl lately. I’m also absolutely loving the new Amyl and the Sniffers singles.

Raquel: Bands I’ve been listening to a bunch recently are Mannequin Pussy, Gouge away, One step closer,  we just played a few dates with them and got their new songs stuck in my head! Also I’m listening to La dispute and tummyache a lot lately with whom I’m also super excited to play in a couple of weeks!  

• Radio Punk: You have a sound full of influences and peculiarities, let’s ask you a nerdy question that will interest the insiders: what kind of instrumentation and setup do you use?

Bea: I play with a 5-string Fender Jazz. My pedal set up is: BOSS chorus, Deluxe Bass Big Muff, Bass Preacher compressor and tuner. My amp is an Orange Terror Bass. 

Sal: I use a Mexican fender stratocaster (with double pickups). I play in E standard and drop D.I have a pretty big pedalboard: I have a Strymon deco to split my sound into 2amps, a little Lelhe to switch from one amp to the other. I also have: a fat metal distortion, a small clone chorus, an MXR delay pedal (which is useless, idk why I left it on my pedalboard) a Boss-20 for my vocal effects, and a boss tuner.

Raquel: My current set up consists of a 3 piece drum kit, I use a Mapex black panther 14×6.5 Ash Burl Coffee Burst Ltd edition snare, Tama Iron Cobra 600 single pedal, Istanbul Agop Xist cymbals (14” H-Hats, 16” and 18” Crashes & 20” Ride), a low pitch blast block and a Roland SPD SX 

• Radio Punk: You recently released the video for the song Wipe Out, which is made up of a lot of clips of girls on rollerblades and skates that you collected through a call on social media. How cool is that! Are they all skateboarders? Board or quad? How many ramp bruises do you have at the moment?

Shooting Daggers: Yes! We posted a few stories on Instagram to collect videos of queer and women skating. It was so cool to see skateboarders and roller skaters from all around the world submit their clips.

Sal: I’m actually the only one who skates in the band (skateboarding). Bea used to ride longboards and roller skates a few years ago. I must admit that I don’t have many ramp bruises atm cos I’m not comfortable with ramps (yet! I can learn anything, it’s all about mental). It’s more that I don’t usually skate ramps and I don’t have many tricks on ramps except drop-in, axle stall, and if I’m lucky rock n roll &, fakie rock. Rock to fakie is supposed to be an easy beginner trick but I think they’re absolutely terrifying and they will f you up too. I haven’t skated properly in a long time, maybe 2years but I really want to get back to it. We just came back from a 3 days tour with One Step Closer and most of them were skaters. We only had a little sess at the end of the show but they made me want to skate every day again (love to these guys). 

• Radio Punk: You’re playing a lot in the UK these days and we really want to see you live. Have you ever played in Italy? What kind of relationship do you have with the Italian DIY punk scene? Are there any bands from the past or present that you particularly appreciate or are inspired by?

Shooting Daggers: We would love to play in Italy! Bea is Italian so it’s definitely on our bucket list. 

Bea: I’ve been in bands in the Venezia area before moving to the UK but I wasn’t super involved in the scene. I always loved going to Venezia Hardcore Fest and that’s definitely somewhere I’d love to play with Shooting Daggers one day.  We have a few connections with people from the hc scene, like people in Stormo and Golpe who are incredible bands and they put on shows in Bologna and Milano. The bands I am most inspired by are the og hardcore Skruigners, the screamo kings Raein and the post punk legends Sick Tamburo. Also, last but not least, we all share a deep love for Raffaella Carrà among the band! 

Sal: I’ve been to Venezia hardcore and it was really fckng cool. Super political, sick bands were put on and it felt like a real DIY punk community. I love Shoki from Milan but I’m not sure if they’re playing still. If they are, I hope we will play with them one day.

• Radio Punk: Unfortunately, as we know, even our small niche reflects society’s discrimination, have you ever felt uncomfortable as queer people and/or girls in the punk scene? And as a queercore band have you ever experienced discriminatory situations? What advice would you give to girls and people from the Lgbtqia+ community who want to be an active part of the punkSubculture?

Shooting Daggers:  Oh yes, it happened way too many times, unfortunately. We had situations where promoters gave info to our male driver instead of us at the venue, and others where we had to drop a few events to avoid playing with dodgy people who didn’t take abuse seriously enough. We told some festival promoters that we didn’t feel comfortable playing on the same bill as some bands because some members were accused of horrible things (that our friends testified and/or have experienced). We have been minimised, ignored, and mansplained by bands, producers, or sound engineers who even told us how to play our instruments…the list could go on. 
Keep being the professional musician that you are and always speak up! Seek comfort and a safe space with people you trust and cherish. Start your band and just have fun! At the end of the day, it’s worth it when one girl or one queer person in the crowd feels seen and heard and feels like they too, can do whatever they want.

Sal: I still feel uncomfortable and unwelcomed in Hardcore & Punk scenes. I feel a little less ‘preyed’ in the crowd cos I’m not 18 anymore. I even wonder sometimes if we will ever be fully part of the punk/hardcore scene, to me it’s easier to build a new scene in which we can express ourselves.
My advice would be: have the confidence of a cis man because from the inside you quickly notice that a lot of musicians are not that talented or skilled and that it’s not the only thing that matters to have a good band. We tend to put bands on a pedestal when in reality, they are just little weirdos practising in their bedroom, music lovers, lyrics writers, nerds, who decide to form a band. They just do it because they want to, until they get really good at what they do with the power of collaboration. It’s as simple as that. So, just do it yourself, break your mental barriers, do whatever makes you happy. In a male-dominated scene it’s gonna be less welcoming but you will find your own scene and your group of friends. 

• Radio Punk: We found some of your interviews online. Ask yourself a question you would have liked to have been asked, but no one has ever asked you, and give yourself an answer!

Shooting Daggers: We thought about it and that’s a tricky one. We’re all vegan and have been working in almost every vegan place in London if you combine the 3 of us. We could talk for hours about anything vegan-food-related. 

So maybe: What’s your favourite vegan food/vegan place/vegan recipe?

Sal: I’m an expert in vegan mac n cheese, I can’t make them for shit but I love them and I could probably make a UK map on where to find the best ones. I also love any vegan pepperoni frozen pizza with a good old Encoda Carolina Reaper hot sauce to dip your slice in (if like me you love a spicy kick). That sauce with vegan nuggets is also proper mint.

Bea: there’s so much amazing vegan food in London, it’s hard to choose but I would say my top 3 are Vegan Planet (Chinese), Purezza (Pizza) and LD’S Kitchen (Diner style food). Best vegan recipe is simple for me: pasta and its infinite ways of cooking it in a vegan way, pasta al pesto is my ultimate comfort food. 

Raquel: As B already say, we are spoiled by choice in the UK and especially in London. I’m gonna be the boring one here and say I’m a sucker for a good salad! Love them with loads of grilled veggies and all kinds of toppings. 

• Radio Punk: We’ve come to the end, so we’ve gained the right confidence for the last, personal question. Who are you in life? What are your passions? Are you in any other bands and/or projects? What jobs do you have? Thank you very much for taking part in our webzine and we hope to see you soon in Italy!

Bea: I am a freelancer so I do a bit of everything to survive, I do translations, tutoring, I write for a music magazine and I am a vegan chef. I have a huge passion for languages, especially Mandarin Chinese, which is what I studied at uni. I love animals and I am a very proud cat parent and a big advocate for animal rights and veganism (as we all are in the band). I crave a good old day rotting in bed when I can. I enjoy watching wrestling with my partner and I love queer nights and drag. I don’t have any other bands at the moment but I would love to start producing electronic music in the future or have a screamo project. 

Sal: I’m going through hectic times at the moment. I’m moving out, and trying to find a sustainable career & environment. So let’s say that I’m living day by day. On a better note, though, I’m launching a Zine workshop at the Greenwich Library Centre in June and I’m super excited about it. I have another band called Deathchops, we’re y2k punk and we should be recording soon and I’ll be recording, mixing and mastering everything. I’m a vegan chef but I’m not thriving so I’m considering pursuing studies, it’s all a bit blurred atm. I need to make some serious decisions about my life now. 

Raquel: I just play in one band at the moment, weird reading that back as I’ve been playing in a lot of bands at once for a really long time, but we are so busy that I choose to just focus all my energy with shooting daggers and it’s what it feels right at this time of my life.  I’m also a promoter, I’m part of a DIY non profit collective called South London Scum and we organise gigs monthly. My day job is being a barista in a little cafe not far from my house. When I’m not working, playing music, putting on gigs or practising. I do love spending my free time creating/experimenting with visual arts, I’m currently trying to learn how to animate and learning a bit more of graphic design and music production. I also love reading, crocheting and going to the movies.

Credit Photo: Martyna Bannister IG: @gingerdope

L'articolo Interview with the band Shooting Daggers proviene da Radio Punk.

I’ve found the meaning of life, hidden in the grooves of a flat black plastic disc. I promise myself I will get to that new world, but I don’t know how to make it happen. What, or who, could possibly help me get closer to that parallel universe?
Albertine Viv, “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys” Thomas Dunne Books, 2014

I was immediately struck by Viv Albertine’s story when I attended the presentation of the book ‘Clothes, Music, Boys’ at the Hellnation shop in Bologna. Paola De Angelis, the translator, clutches in her hands a large bound book from which countless colourful post-it notes sprout. With great transport she describes it, or rather, she describes the sensations she felt when she first read it and inevitably captivates those who, like me, attend the presentation. It is an autobiography, written by Slits guitarist and singer-songwriter Viv Albertine herself, who tells us in an honest and frank way about her life from childhood to the present (the book was written in 2013 and only recently translated for Blackie Edizioni).

Why should I read it? I ask myself. Many books have been written about punk and its key characters, but what really sparks my curiosity in this case is the fact that Viv is a woman. In fact, this book is not the classic musical tale about concerts, the Roxy, pogo sticks, tinny guitars, drugs and sex, but rather a story of a woman, often alone, who finds herself facing her time with a guitar in her hand and an overwhelming desire to express her emotions through punk music. Still, you won’t be disappointed, everything I listed above is present and there’s more: the Clash and the Sex Pistols, Vivienne Westwood and “The Shop” (that’s what “Sex” was called by the regulars) the record labels and tours, back-combed hair, life in squats and much more of London at the turn of the 70s and 80s.

I’ve got so used to my life being challenging and fraught with danger that I don’t question it any more. Whether I’m knocking on the door of a hardcore sex shop, walking through suburban streets being verbally abused and spat on, or being threatened on the tube, I don’t give in. I don’t dress normally to have an easy life.
Albertine Viv, “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys” Thomas Dunne Books, 2014

Side A:

In the first part of the book, Viv talks about her childhood and adolescence, her encounter with music and her desire to play music. After discovering Patti Smith, who will forever remain her female reference in music, she discovers that yes, girls can play music and can break that crystal image that society wanted for them. So she soon starts going to concerts and after seeing the Sex Pistols she decides that, even though she can’t play yet, she will buy a guitar and join the Slits. 
Viv opens up, recounts his friendship with Sid Vicious and Joe Strummer, the pilgrimages to Sex, the love affair with Mick Jones, the relationship with the other members of the band, namely Ari Up, Tessa and Palmolive. She drags us into many anecdotes, sometimes sad or very embarrassing, in which the historical and cultural context of the period emerges. She tells us how the Slits’ iconic albums “Cut” and “The Return Of Giant Slits” came out, the recordings and live concerts. 
And finally, the dissolution of the band.

Side B:

The Slits disbanded.
Viv is alone and even music is no longer part of her life. In this part of the book, it feels bad, very bad. Viv goes through a long phase of her life in which she conforms to the rest of the women of the 80s and shamelessly recounts how she had dulled her revolutionary, emancipated, and pioneering past. Marriage, abortion, cancer, fivet, psychological violence, motherhood, loneliness, a bland bourgeois life. 
And finally, after sixteen years, Viv re-emerges from her lethargy and decides to start from scratch: she buys a guitar and starts playing. 

Concluding, this book is truly unique; it is full of emotions, stories and characters. Viv, through her story, conveys to us (perhaps unintentionally) the importance of always remaining true to oneself.

Something snaps in me. What are you doing. Viv? Stop messing around. What do you want out of life? I realise I don’t want to be with either of them, so I walk out, hail a cab and go home. It’s time to show people, and myself, what I’m made of. Time to try, and maybe to fail again, but better that than never try at all.
Albertine Viv, “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys” Thomas Dunne Books, 2014

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We are a DIY project and you can support us, if you like, in the following ways:
– you can take a look at our catalog and order records, CDs, books, pins, and more;
– you can join our open call with a previously unpublished article.

L'articolo Viv Albertine “Clothes, music, boys”: Story of a punk woman proviene da Radio Punk.

Starting in the late summer of 1979 I initiated, first driven by curiosity then by a strong sense of identification and belonging, a stable correspondence relationship with the British anarcho-pacifists Crass. At the time, travelling, faxes and phone calls cost a lot of money and the mail offered me the only affordable way to establish and maintain contact. In a letter from Dial House one day, I was told that there was Diavlery Productions, a collective from Bologna with whom they were collaborating: they were punks who distributed in Italy the records of Crass Records and other small labels of the English anarchic and independent scene, and surely getting the records from them would have cost me less than in a shop. In the letter there’s a phone number, I call and Giampi answers – he’s very kind, helpful and cheerful but it’s a bit hard to understand what he’s saying because he speaks in bursts. He seems to know a lot of interesting things, stuff that would normally become known to us in the provinces in the north-east much later, even too late perhaps, or never. So we made an agreement, and after a while, one day, with a friend of mine from Murano, we smashed the savings bank to stock up on records, took a train and a bus to Bologna, and arrived at the anarchists’ old headquarters, the Cassero of Porta Santo Stefano. Giampi, or rather Jumpy, is just as I imagined him: a little younger but smarter than me, smiling, skinny, he basically speaks without pausing for breath. Every now and then, he comes out with a few delirious phrases of his own, but as a whole he’s OK, he’s really nice and I like him. Tiziana and Walter, two dear comrades from the Berneri circle whom I would later meet for decades at the editorial meetings of A/Rivista Anarchica, look at us slyly. The corner occupied by the punks is practically a pile of boxes with records, cassettes and packages of paper inside: far from being a shop, it is rather an informal place where you have to make do to find what you want and some space for yourself in the midst of the mess. You can stay there indefinitely chatting, listening to music, leafing through fanzines, looking around and observing the multicoloured fauna that passes by, stays and then leaves. There we meet Carlo and Laura, so nice, kind and good too, both of them with Jumpy in Raf Punk – whom, at the time, we only knew in our Venice circle because of a few flyers and the protest at the Clash concert in Piazza Maggiore, and whom we considered a mythical band for this reason, even though they had not yet recorded a single song.

From our patrols in squadrons and solo tours in Milan, Turin, Rome and Bologna, we soon realised that things worked differently at home in the north-east for us marginalised and unfortunate provincials than in the big cities. First, we did not have some kind of herd identity to flaunt and defend, but rather a profound and very important individual need to be together, to huddle together, not to feel alone. This was to eliminate the friction between our different preferences in music, clothing, reading, style. Basically, everyone dressed and wore make-up and combed their hair as they wished, and this was not a problem for anyone. And when we got together for a group concert it happened that the stage was peacefully shared by groups playing punk, dark, electronic, research stuff and even rockblues, reggae and jazz without anyone having anything to say against it. Rockgarage, our Venetian fanzine, didn’t have a damn thing to do with the things punks did in Bologna, but to be honest it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the others that were printed by various groups, both punk and non-punk, in different Italian cities either. We were a completely informal and elastic collective: there were those who joined and stayed for a while and then disappeared and maybe came back to show up. We didn’t have to follow anyone or respect deadlines, obligations, commitments, let alone indulge the ass-pulling of someone hungry for the limelight. Young and wild beasts, we were spreading counterculture in a horizontal and unconsciously anarchic way: no corporals to follow, no organisational centre to report to, no shop to run. Taking advantage of the fine speeches on youth culture that then filled the mouths of the councillors at Ca’ Farsetti, one day we tried to raise our voices: we demanded and succeeded in using public spaces on the mainland to organise concerts, meetings, performances, exhibitions of comics and graphics, video festivals, all things that had never existed in the area and which we suddenly and urgently needed.

Every initiative we set up was a success and there was never a single incident. Clearly, they had mistaken us for nice guys. This lasted until someone at the town hall took the trouble to venture beyond the cover of the fanzine: since then, we have encountered only the silence of perpetually out-of-office contacts.

In those days with no internet and no e-mail, in addition to Crass, I had frequent correspondence with a lot of other people and bands, fanzines, fans, musicians – even abroad. One of these was Daniel, who got in touch with me after picking up a couple of issues of Rockgarage at the London Rough Trade shop: it struck him that I had translated the lyrics of the Poison Girls, the anarcho-punk band where, he explained, his mother Vi and her partner Lance played. In the early days, still practically a kid, Daniel himself had played in the band, before changing his name to Pete Fender and forming Omega Tribe. This caught me off guard and was a lot of fun: I can’t see myself playing with my mum and dad in a punk band… At the time, there was a flexi with this Poison Girls song on it: it wasn’t danceable or consumable at all, in fact it was hard to listen to the end, it was so desperate and bleeding, but the lyrics made me unexpectedly see my parents in a whole new light. I am referring to ‘Statement‘, and There is a mother screaming at the sky. Here is a taste of it:

I denounce the system that murders my children
I denounce the system that denies my existence
I curse the system that makes machines of my children
I reject the system that makes men of machines
I reject the system that turns bodies of my own sweet flesh
Into monsters of iron and steel and war
And turns the hands of my children into robot claws

I reject the system that turns the hearts of my children
Against this earth
I curse the system that turns the genitals of my children
Into factories of fire and destruction
And rapes our flesh
And tears our womb
This earth our home.

There are no words
For us no words

Vi would be Vi Subversa – Daniel’s mother’s nickname, her real name was Frances Sokolov. A letter V turned upside down to make it look like the A for anarchy, a bit like Fabrizio de Andrè does with his hand on the cover photo of one of his last records. Vi’s feminist and pacifist and awful and transversal songs just sounded weird: they weren’t studded sugars or easy-to-digest punk anthems. They sounded more like a liberating coming-out of colourful, self-conscious rags to be worn casually on the street. The lyrics looked you straight in the face and pushed hard about happiness, about growing up and becoming aware, about contradictions, about breaking free from conditioning, about the relationship between girls and boys. I had stumbled upon the Poison Girls and their songs through the flyers Crass sent me. In their early years, in the mid-seventies, they were an experimental theatre collective based in Brighton, they had gradually moved from theatre to songwriting and decided to move to London. There they had befriended the Dial House people and played together with Crass in concerts in support of CND, and together they had made a split single to raise funds for the Autonomy Centre in Wapping, one of the first attempts to bring anarchists and punks together in the same cultural centre. Together they had also organised the occupation of the Rainbow Theatre in London, which lasted a few hours and ended under police batons, and – with a handful of other groups – the subsequent occupation of the Zig Zag Club for the first collective anarcho-punk concert after the Falklands war. With Crass, they ended up arguing one day, over a written contribution by Vi that was deemed unsuitable to appear on an animalist, pro-vegetarian compilation planned for release in 1983 – a project that was on hold for a while and eventually not even completed.

Daniel and I mail each other from time to time, and when one day I call him to tell him that I’m spending a few days in England and that it would be nice to see each other, his mother answers: oh yes, Marco the Venetian, Dan is not here right now, but you’re coming anyway, he’s playing with his band in those days, we’re playing in London too, come and see us, bye bye. I leave from Venice as part of a group of tourists, and in mid-June 1983 we meet: Omega Tribe have organised a music party in a small youth centre on Adelaide Street together with Lost Cherrees and Wet Paint Theatre – a concert that was certainly interesting, but the evening was marred by a despicable fascist attack that I will recount on Rockerilla, triggering a bit of agitation in my usual mail rounds, in the middle of which some dickheads also write anonymous threatening messages. Fuck it. The next day the Poison Girls are playing at the Ace in Brixton. At the venue’s ticket office, I get a nice surprise: I find out that they’ve put me at the top of the guest list. They give me a backstage pass and let me in. Vi welcomes me with open arms and introduces me to the others as a close friend of her son. In a matter of seconds, I have a beer in one hand, a sandwich in the other and half a dozen people around me asking for things. I point out to them that I had brought a tape recorder with me to interview them, and the opposite is happening instead. We all laugh.

– Lance, why did you start playing with the Poison Girls?

Lance – Because at the time I was the lover of the singer of the band, and I had nothing better to do than follow her in her craziness in and out of bed.

– Most of your fans are very young. How do you approach the relationship with those who, because of the age difference, could be your children?

Vi – In the beginning, kids would come to our concerts thinking they were dealing with teenagers, and they were surprised to see me and Lance on stage. They knew our songs but expected something quite different: the kids saw us as the eccentric parent or revolutionary schoolteacher. Then they had to change their minds.

I talk extensively about the concert and publish the interview in the November 1983 issue of Rockerilla. What wonderful memories, and I’m not just talking about the performance. When Vi and Lance hug me it’s just like breathing the air of home: I feel that they love me, that they care, that they’re glad I’m there, that they think they’re doing the right thing and that I’m doing it too. Dan’s mum had him and his sister a short distance apart, she was still quite young and had to raise them on her own. My family story is different, and I tell it. Lance of the band is the drummer, but he is above all the creative soul. With his sly manner he somewhat resembles my father: he looks at me sideways and smiles, he is so thoughtful and kind to me, curious and attentive in listening to my questions and incredibly off-the-wall in his answers, which he fills with jokes and laughter. A biting humour that left its mark on me: it was his way of teaching me to keep my head up, not to give up, not to be afraid – just like my father used to do. This is ‘Don’t go home tonight‘, a song that fascinated me every time, gave a nice radical shuffle to my doubts and indecisions, and that still makes me feel a certain unease for all those dreams that ended up in crumbs. Back then, you really thought that songs, certain songs, could change the world.

Are you a child of a friend of the state?
Are you a little chicky of a friend of the state?
Do you go to work for a friend of the state?
Are you making time with a friend of the state?

Don’t go home tonight

Do you go to bed with a friend of the state?
Do you suck the dicky of a friend of the state?
Are you wined are you dined by a friend of the state?
Do you suck the titty of a friend of the state?

Don’t go home tonight

So do you sell your body to a friend of the state?
And don’t you see the money is too little and too late?
And do you sell your sister like a chicken on a plate?
And would you kill your brother to satisfy the state?

Don’t go home tonight

Who offered you security and freedom if you wait?
Who tricked you with a uniform, and filled you up with lies?
When you try to find your own way, using your own eyes?

Don’t go home tonight

Vi, Lance and the Poison Girls’ weren’t just sad, problematic, and devastating songs. Every now and then a corrosive chart-topping piece would come out of their hands and heads – indie, mind you. I used to put this one on the radio a lot, because it’s an all too clever lyric, tacked on top of a simple rock’n’roll that immediately catches on and over which, as an alternative to pogoing, you can even dance the twist. It’s called ‘State control‘:

State control and rock and roll are run by clever men
What they sell is selling very well and the price is up again
State control and rock and roll are run by clever men
What you know is what they show so it all goes round again

State control and rock and roll are run by clever men
Politics are ultra chic and wars are in again
State control and rock and roll are run by clever men
Revolution’s this year’s thing, we’re on the streets again – and again

State control and rock and roll are run by clever men
It’s all good for business, they’re in the charts again – and again
State control and rock and roll are run by clever men
They build you up and they break you down, then you’re on the dole again

You know it’s true – but what can you do
Look for a gap – to get out of the trap
It’s a vicious circle – try and break loose
Break out of the trap – get out of the noose
You know it’s true – but what can you do
Cos what you’re feeling -is a human being
Not this year’s thing
Or last year’s thing
This year’s thing
Or next year’s thing…

State control and rock and roll
Are run by clever men
It’s all good for business!
And it all geos round again

State control and rock and roll
Are run by clever men
And anarchy
Is this year’s thing…

In 1984 they self-produced the double album “7 year scratch” to celebrate seven years of singing on the road: they threw in a handful of tracks from their various records, a couple of old demos and a whole disc of live recordings. I know that in recent years their albums and singles have been collected in anthology CDs and reissued several times, but I like to pick up the old vinyl copies from back then every now and then, the ones I almost wore out but kept fondly. How strange, listening to Poison Girls songs makes me nostalgic for my parents, who have been gone for over thirty years.

The thing I did least willingly in the long time I collaborated with A/Rivista Anarchica was writing two lines to report that Vi and Lance were gone, losses that occurred about a year apart in 2016 and 2017. Those two were happy, among us young anarchists: they were of the kind that somewhere inside in their heads had kept going on in their twenties. The kind you learn a lot of things from, without them standing there to teach or explain anything to you on purpose. If you get a chance, go and listen to some of their old songs again: Vi’s voice will certainly surprise you, voice of a fox and a crow, but pay attention to Lance with his stainless strokes on the drums – each one a hammering vibrated with joy at the foundations of the system, always a laugh on, always a sneer to spit in your face. Anarchists, rebels, and dreamers – they all enriched the world with their wonderful poetry, their love and their boundless sense of peace.

Article by Marco Pandin, stella_nera@tin.it
Translated by Deesastrous

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L'articolo Poison Girls: State Control and Rock’n’Roll proviene da Radio Punk.

A band from London who sing in Italian. They came out in 2021 with the LP “Gli Occhi Dello Stato” (literally “The Eyes Of The State”) through the Catalan “Common People Records”, a record that gathered a lot of success and praise from the fans of oi! punk, but also post-punk/new wave. There’s not a lot of info on this project online, which is why we are particularly excited to present to you this small chat with Zanzara, in hopes of getting to know better a really interesting band!

Radio Punk: Hi! We’re very happy to have you on our pages. As I touched on in the introduction, there’s very little info on you around and a lot of people in Italy are asking themselves who Zanzara are, so we’ll start with a classic question. Tell us about you: who are you, when and where you started the band, and what prompted you to start a project with this interesting mix of oi! and post-punk?

Marco: Hey! My name is Marco Palumbo-Rodrigues…the concept of Zanzara started a few years ago in Salerno, Italy when a couple of song ideas were written and some basic recording was done but then it fell to the side as other projects progressed. It was during the first 2020 lockdown that it was revisited and the album completed. Initially there were 2 of us in Zanzara when we wrote some demos; I am currently writing the second album so that one will hopefully be recorded as a band that we can then play live with. I am a huge fan of Camera Silens who, in my opinion, have a great mix of Oi! and post-punk as well as Blitz so these were a strong influence in writing for Zanzara, I find it impossible to space the post-punk thing! It seems to rear it’s head in everything I write in every band I am in…there seems to inevitably be a sting post-punk element in there.

Radio Punk: Do you have any experiences in other bands or projects, in the past or in the present?

Marco: Yes, I am in a bunch of bands, I sing / have sung in La Rabbia, Miscalculations, Sanguisuga, Illegal Leather, Cold Callers, Stalin Video, Disco Lepers, Zuletzt, Vacuum, The Gaggers, Violent Streaks and a bunch more!

Radio Punk: How’s the DIY scene in your neck of the woods? Are the various scenes open to each other or there’s not much support between skin, punx, crust, anarcho-punk, punk rocker, and so on?

Marco: The London scene is pretty small but it’s nicely mixed with all types of punk, Oi!, Hardcore, post-punk etc cohabiting in harmony! That’s kind of how London is in general…it’s a real melting pot of cultures and backgrounds so it has a great balance. There are many shows here that have very diverse styles on the same bill.

Radio Punk: How do you feel about the Italian scene where you live?

Marco: I think that at the moment Italy is producing some really killer punk and hardcore – I really like some current Italian bands like Lucta, Kobra, Lingua Serpente, Golpe, Impulso, Sloi, Tuono, Idiota Civilizzato, Testa Dura, Iradei…there’s a lot of really good stuff coming out of Italy recently. 

Radio Punk: You are all the rage in Italy, thanks definitely to your unique but at the same time explosive sound. Are you experiencing success in other countries too? Which ones? And how was the reception for “Gli Occhi Dello Stato” in your area?

Marco: The reception has been great all over which I’m over the moon about. There have been reviews and feedback from all over Europe, Australia, Japan and the US…all very complimentary and the LP is about to go into a second press so it’s been really great.

Radio Punk: Why the choice to sing in Italian while having headquarters in London? Is it something that you feel might have penalized you a bit, or on the contrary, this was really welcomed in England? Are you going to continue down this path or we can expect some changes in the future?

Marco: I was born in London and have lived here my whole life but both of my parents are Italian. I have spoken Italian since birth and always wanted to do an Italian-language project. The first time I sung in Italian was with an early band of mine called Blacklist Brigade, we did some songs that had Italian lyrics and then we even did an Italian version of our second album which was never released. I then started La Rabbia which is a hardcore punk band where I sing in English and Italian. My first all-Italian project was Sanguisuga which is 100% Italian. The debut album came out a couple of years ago on Wanda records and was received really well. That was the first real time that I dedictaed myself to composing completely in Italian. I absolutely love native-tongue punk from all over the world so I really wanted to do a foregin-language band and all of the bands that I sing in Italian have been totally welcomed here in London. I love bands from all over…Rata Negra, Kohti Tuhoa, Inyeccion, Kolla Kestaa, Impotentie, Hekate, Golpe, Masshysteri, Oblaka, Cadenaxo, Muro, Knugen Faller, Eppu Normaali…loads of killers! Zanzara will always be 100% Italian!

Radio Punk: How do you feel about politics, meaning values such as anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-sexism, and DIY? In Italy, the punk and skin scene, while not necessarily being militant, is luckily clearheaded in the vast majority of cases and doesn’t have anything to do with Nazis, Racists, and all-around weirdos. Basically, there’s a strong stance on those topics, likely due to the fact that this subculture originated and evolved in social spaces. Is it the same way in London and England?

Marco: Those negative mindsets and not tolerated here in London at all. We are very lucky that the punk scene is not infected with this. Again, it may be due to the fact that London is such a cosmopolitan, progressive and free-thinking city that the scene is just a mirror of that. I can’t speak for other cities in England as I don’t know if these issues exist there…I have personally never experienced it. When I write lyrics, for any of my bands, they often have a strong political, social or psychological theme but I write from a very open and layered perspective so it’s never too obvious exactly what each song is about to the listener and I think that’s important. To me, a song is like a painting – not too much should be given away, people need to work out their own reactions and emotions to it. There should be no true definition of a song or piece of art in my opinion. 

Radio Punk: Searching a bit for info, we’ve noticed that you’re pretty much non-existent as a band on social media. Is it a personal choice dictated by an old-school mentality? Broadly speaking, how do you feel about socials and platforms like Spotify and other similar ones? Do you think the punk scene should avoid all of these places and get back to its more DIY roots, or we should accept and just learn to use them to our advantage?

Marco: I think there is a certain value in keeping a low-profile on social media. Not to be invisible but to be reachable by those that want to find you. I have no issue at all with social / music platforms and I use many myself. I’ll always be a vinyl guy but I often listen to on-line music, podcasts and radio shows. I have run No Front Teeth Records for 20 years and we decided not to get involved with the digital side of the releases we put out. We are strictly all about the physical product and especially the 7” record. We have absolutely no issue at all with bands who we release putting their music online digitally, in fact we have super-happy for them to do so and encourage it. Bands should make revenue from wherever possible. Platforms like Bandcamp are amazing for this and super-important. I think the DIY ethic is fundamental but I think things like Bandcamp can be totally DIY as well as things like podcasts on Spotify and internet radio shows…the underground can still use mainstream methods to spread their message.

Radio Punk: We’ve reached the end, we want to thank you a lot again and leave you to your favorites!

Thank you!

Zanzara favorites:
Favourite Record: Very tough…there are so many! A definite pick for me would be D.O.A. ‘Something Better Change’
Favourite Book: ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ by Tom Stoppard
Favourite Movie: Another tough one…maybe ‘The Grandmother’ by David Lynch
Favourite Projects:  Radio Shows: Rock ‘n’ Roll Manifesto, Let’s Go / Blackwax, Cat Nouveau, Maximum Rocknroll Radio, Losin’ it with Luscious. Zines: Razorblades & Aspirin, Ox, Razorcake

L'articolo Interview with Marco from Zanzara proviene da Radio Punk.

When we think about England’s underground music scene between the ‘80s and the ‘90s we all got in our minds that Earache banner lighting up like a Christmas tree. That’s completely right, no doubt about it.However, great punk and hardcore bands never really stopped coming out of UK, even in years when deathmetal and grindcore were the big thing. Those less known bands got an almost unique way of sounding, enough to make them hard to classify or to make examples of how they sounded without actually listening to them. At the end of a decade where band used to (as written in Albert Mudrian’s Choose Death) challenge on who could play faster than anyone, and bands like Heresy, Ripcord, Electro Hippies, UnseenTerror and NapalmDeath grinded down the venues in UK and Europe, different sounds started to evolve quickly, sometimes even in almost opposite directions. If on one side, the death metal explosion will merge it deeper and deeper with grindcore, on the other hardcore punk is quite in stall.

Many bands tried to get bigger turning into – sometimes ridiculous and lame –metal bands, others reached maturity, losing momentum, energy and freshness.

The best and most original stuff came out from that bands that didn’t choose to follow the trends or just tried to cut-and-paste the “coolest sound of the moment”, but instead, who metabolized those different influences, making them part of their sound, perfectly merged with their previous musical background. A common example could be G.B.H., that always have tried to make their sound different, even adding metal riffs and a more complex drumming, despite the critics of some of their first-era fans. Let’s spit it out, I love late G.B.H. records, the ones after Midnight Madness and Beyond, maybe even more than their “classic” stuff.
Two similar cases are Meatfly and ForceFed. Both are born from the ashes of Heresy, both of them shared some members (Kalv on bass, and Mike Knowlton, who replaced Jamie Sims at vocals in Force Fed’s last record) and they both shared the same label – In Your Face Records -. They represent the two souls that begin to emerge in the latest Heresy EPs.
Between 1989 and ’91, Force Fed released two LPs – Claustrophobia and EloundaSleeps – and a bunch of 7inches, summing up a hysterical and manic hardcore, almost astonishing. Heavy, powerful but at the same time fluid and fast, something between Articles of Faith and Christ on Parade, with some great thrash hints.
A gloomy and hammering hardcore, with a schizophrenic voice screaming and trembling that gets less obscure with their second record Elounda Sleeps, when they changed the singer, but it really goes almost unnoticed, they remained a really great and solid band, unexplainably confined deep farther from the public’s favorites.

Force Fed – Claustrophobia

Force Fed – Elounda Sleeps

Just like Meatfly, active in the same period. They released two killer albums too and other two 7inches, including a live EP recorded in Japan, where they recorded and released for Discipline Records their last album, Fatness, maybe their masterpiece, just a year after the self-titled ripping debut LP.
Meatlfy – exactly as ForceFed – don’t sound similar to any band I heard before, they’re something of unique and kinda unheard. It’s hardcore, no doubt about it, but it’s just completely their own way. Their songs are technical, long and articulated, with hammering fast drums, time changes and a disorienting atmosphere.

I dig ‘em from the very first listening, because of their unique and outstanding fast thrashy sound!

It’s really hard to compare them with other bands, maybe only some early Negazione stuff, Adrenalin O.D., the most hallucinated Accused records sound kinda close to them (or maybe Massappeal from Australia, for the music nerdest of you).

Meatfly – Self-Titled

Meatfly – Fatness

From the same fast sounds came out the Jailcell Recipes, which still got some Intense Degree’s and early Stupids’ vibe in their first record Energy in an Empty Tank World. Their more “melodic” evolution was already clear, then it got compete in the Poulton Road 7inch EP, to culminate in the amazing – and sadly final – Two Years of Toothache LP. Fast-paced hardcore punk, catchy, just more essential than the Meatfly or the ForceFed sound, but no less abrasive. They released two LPs for First Strike Records and a couple of 7inches before calling it quits in 1992.

Jailcell Recipes – Poulton Road

In the same year, splits up one of my favorite UK hardcore punk bands, tied for Meatlfy, Can’t Decide!
They released only two LPs – the self-titled debut album, followed by Five Seven Nine Eleven – and a 7inch split single with Meatfly, they got a sound that reminded me great overseas bands like 76% Uncertain, SNFU and Bad Religion, great blend! They got some ex-Heresy and Ripcord members, lately in Dumbstruck and Violent Arrest (John Milllier on drums and Steve Ballam on six-strings). I got so into them, after discovering them from their anthology CD compilation that Boss Tuneage Records released in 2004, that I immediately started looking for buy all their stuff! Clean and solid vocals that move sinuously, even surrounded by thick guitars and a great binomial of bass and drums. 

Can’t Decide – Self Titled

Can’t Decide – Five Seven Nine Eleven

Way more long-lived and prolific were the Cowboy Killers, from Newport Gwent, Wales. Formed in the middle of the eighties, they kept playing and releasing albums and stuff till the end of the nineties, splitting up after their last effort Thank You, Fuck You and Goodbye. In all these years, they released 4 studio albums and 3 or 4 live albums too, plus 5 seven inches EPs. Started in the late 80’s with two great Eps, the split 7inch with The Sect, Here Today, Here Tomorrow? and the iconic KKK Wives on Holiday, which were followed by their very first album Koyaanisqatsi. Manic, sardonic and hysterical, bizarre like a low budget cabaret, their sound is inspired by the late and more mature Dead Kennedys – Plastic Surgery Disasters and Bedtime for Democracy era – the almighty Spermbirds (if you don’t know them, you suck!) and that blazing punk rock/hardcore from California, summed up in D.I. and Adolescents blend. All this, melted with vitriolic and desecrating humour, offensiveness and iconoclasm, sometimes fueled by surf-rock fuzzed intermissions. Their albums are not so easy to find – you always got the damn internet by the way, use it! – but the one and only Boss Tuneage Records released an anthology CD compilation with all the early stuff from the band, everything before their third album Dai Laughing.

Cowboy Killers – Koyaanisqatsi

Cowboy Killers – Press and Run Like Hell

Cowboy Killers – Dai Laughing

Cowboy Killers – Punks Look Like Jerks From Outer Space

Always of the same period, even if more punk rock oriented,TheJoyce McKinney Experience! Their singularity were a double female singing (Sharon Hunt and Yvonne McAvoy), which gave to their sound a unique and remarkable note, closer to later bands like Tilt or Bulimia Banquet. The most melodic of those bands, but always without losing their attitude and the impact of their sound, exemplified in their only album Joyce’s Offspring, followed by the two Eps Boring Rock and Cuddle This! In 2006 came out their double CD anthology Love Songs for Kirk, always on Boss Tuneage Records, with demos and previously unreleased material, which would have been on a stillborn second album that never saw the light.

The Joyce McKinney Experience – Joyce’s Offspring

Dan got a female singer too, Julie Dalkin. They’re the last band I’ll write about today, and got a quite longer activity period compared to the other above mentioned bands. Born in mid-‘80s, they ended splitting up in early nineties after releasing four LPs, a cassette album and a bunch of 7inches EPs, they played a strange but great mixture of anarchopunk and catchy punk rock, even experimenting with some synths, combining mid-tempos with faster and in-your-face tracks. The result is an almost unheard punk sound, unique compared to the crust/stenchcore paradigm who almost ruled the squats in which they used to hang out. They even dared a primitive anarchopunk-hip hop crossover, as in some tracks from the Mommy with Child and BunnyLP. Way ahead for the 1988 U.K. punk scene, isn’t it?

Dan – Can You Dig It?

Yeah, I know what you’re wondering now: “what the fuck does this guy do all day?”. I got a job, like almost everyone I suppose, I like going to shows and listening records. That’s it. I just like this stuff, this things, this so-called genre – that is not so easy to define. In my head it’s all so simple that is really difficult to explain or write about.

Well, I just hope you’ll enjoy these bands half than I do, they’re all rad, choose your favorite.

Unfortunately – or luckily, in certain ways – they’re all kinda obscure less-known bands, so keep your eyes open, you can find them in some distro or record store for peanuts. Buy and play them. Because no downloaded file or playlist, even if easier, can compare to a record, a CD or even a cassette.

Written and translated by Rash

L'articolo Out of Darkness proviene da Radio Punk.