Billie Joe Armstrong once announced in an interview that his band would never “do a Neil Young”. His meaning was clear. Unlike all the toothless ex-punks and bloated superstars who littered the music business, Green Day would never surrender their distortion pedals or rework their hits on acoustic guitars for the benefit of a cross-legged audience. Whatever Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool had become in the aftermath of 1994’s Dookie – millionaires, celebrities, fathers – they were still punks on vinyl. Smack-in-the-face songs, power chords and bleeding ears remained the band’s calling cards, and they had no desire to change that.

Until the release of Nimrod in 1997, Armstrong was true to his word. If anything Green Day seemed to be getting harder and heavier, with hits such as Brain Stew and Geek Stink Breath (taken from 1995’s Insomniac) trading in bad-tempered guitars and morbid lyrics. So it came as a real surprise when the GD faithful reached the 17th track of the new album, only to be confronted with delicate work of acoustic picking and swooping strings.

Where once he had yelped about masturbation, Armstrong was now singing about forks in the road and lessons learnt in time. Where previously his songs had been thrashed out with youthful abandon on an old Fernandes Stratocaster covered in punk rock stickers, this one found him strumming a Guild acoustic with skill and precision. Dirnt’s basslines were anonymous; Cool’s machine-gun drums were notable by their absence. It was Green Day, but not as we knew it.

It was another test of faith for those who’d fallen in love with the raw sound of 1991’s Kerplunk, but the sheer audacity of releasing Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) more than compensated for its parent-friendly feel. Like John Lydon appearing on I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!, the song’s inclusion was ‘punk’ precisely because it was so ‘un-punk’. As Dirnt would later attest, “putting it on our record was the most punk thing we could do.”

The moshpit might have been bewildered, but those in the band’s inner circle must have suspected that a song like Good Riddance was inevitable. While their gigs were still strictly eclectic affairs, Green Day had long been aware of the benefits of working on acoustic. It was a simple case of practicalities winning out over principals. “The real irony,” revealed Dirnt, “is that for years and years, when people think of us, they think of our heavy guitars and the sounds we’ve had on our records. But we’ve written most of our songs on acoustic guitars. When we wake up in the middle of the night write a song, Billie doesn’t run to his amp and plug in his guitar. He picks up an acoustic guitar and starts jamming on it.”

Nor was Good Riddance written specifically for Nimrod. Armstrong had penned the song three years earlier during the recording of Dookie and didn’t seem bothered whether it even saw the light of day. “I didn’t really think of it as being for an album or anything,” the frontman admitted to Guitar World. Not for the first time, Armstrong’s commercial judgement was flawed. Good Riddance would be the band’s most successful single since Basket Case, entering both the US and UK charts at Number 11 upon its release in January 1998, and giving an incalculable boost to the sales of Nimrod across the planet. Not bad for a song which first appeared in strum-along form on the German b-side to Brain Stew/Jaded.

It was around this time that Good Riddance turned from a song into an phenomenon. Where Green Day tunes had previously been either too smutty or too steeped in distortion to be shortlisted by ad agencies, now the band found their new single being played everywhere from TV shows to baseball games. Good Riddance not only soundtracked the death of a cancer patient in ER (“I heard it was going to be on,” recalled Armstrong, “but I kinda purposefully didn’t watch it”) but also appeared on a series highlights episode of Seinfeld when it ended in 1998. It was played over montages during the PGA golf tour and the World Cup that year, and turned up and more weddings, funerals and graduation ceremonies than almost anything else.

The song was everywhere. Even Glen Campbell recorded a cover version for his 2008 album, Meet Glen Campbell. Good Riddance sounded like a positive ditty, but it wasn’t. The fact that radio broadcasters routinely referred to it as Time Of Your Life – as opposed to Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) – gave listeners the mistaken impression that Armstrong’s lyric was a cosy reflection on past glories. In fact, the song was a bitter rebuke to a former lover. “It’s about an ex-girlfriend who had moved to Ecuador,” the singer told Guitar World. “In the song, I tried to be level-headed about her leaving, even though I was completely pissed off. So I named it ‘Good Riddance’ just to express my anger.”

Armstrong’s lyrics in conjunction with Mark Kohr’s 1997 video (depicting a tattoo youth delivering parcels and a goth dolefully washing windows) lends further weight to the theory that Good Riddance is also an ode to missed opportunities and wasted lives. The concept that he was ‘saved’ by punk from a life of menial labour is a subject that Armstrong has touched upon in several interviews, it’s not hard to see this as a tribute to the ones he left behind. The record-buying public continued to scoop up copies of the single by the armful, fooled by the lilting string sections, thinking it was a song of chest-beating triumph.

While Good Riddance was the final straw for many punk purists, it also announced the beginning of Green Day’s metamorphosis from punk brats into a genuinely interesting band. While their other chart-straddling hit Basket Case had forced them into a restrictive pigeonhole, this latest smash actually broadened their horizons, suggesting through its commercial success that the public were ready to accept new directions from the band. After years of clinging to punk for dear life, Green Day were ready to cut the apron strings.

So, in 1999, the band played their first acoustic set at the Bridge School Benefit concert – a charity event that, ironically, was organised by Neil Young, who also appeared on the bill – while their Warning album of the same year continued to explore this new stripped-back direction (most notably on the acoustic-led title track). “I think Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) has really freed us up, in a lot of respects, to be able to do different things,” said Armstrong in 2000. “To get into more sensitive content without feeling like you’re selling yourself out. Or that you’re doing something because you need a hit.”

He was right, it’s impossible to think of Green Day moving from such straight-ahead thrashes as Basket Case to the intricate and extended ‘suites’ of American Idiot without some sort of stepping stone. With the band’s puerile antics and basic music wearing increasingly thin as they neared their 30s, Good Riddance was an escape route to a more adult sound and a welcome sense of maturity. It allowed them to grow up – without growing old.

“I'm actually dead,” says Kirk Brandon. “I’m speaking to you from inside my coffin.”

In May 2023, Brandon was in Nottingham fronting one of his two ground-breaking bands – in this case, Spear Of Destiny, not Theatre Of Hate – when, he says, “I just had a little heart attack.”

He ended up in Northampton General Hospital for three and a half weeks. “But that's easy,” he says. “I've done a four-month stretch before. That was hard.”

The ‘four-month stretch’ was the result of endocarditis (defined by the NHS as “a rare and potentially fatal infection of the inner lining of the heart”). While he was in, he says, they replaced his aortic valve with a titanium one.

He smiles: “It was a lotta laughs, y’know.”

And how is he now? “Honestly,” he says, “I’m fine. I'll live forever.”

Kirk Brandon was – and still is – the beating titanium heart of post-punk bands Theatre Of Hate and Spear Of Destiny: singer, guitarist and chief songwriter. Inspired by punk, but looking for something more than “three chords and sloganeering”, he came up with something completely unique – although people didn’t always notice.

“When we first started,” he says, “people said, ‘Look at these young pretty boys. Aren't they lovely? Let's take them home’ and they pushed that aspect of it – or the media did. ‘Oh, look, they’re fluffy and harmless – wonderful!’ But that wasn't really what we were doing.”

No shit. A stew of tribal beats, twanging Morricone guitars and searing saxophone, topped by Brandon’s withering, dramatic singing, Theatre Of Hate sounded like a band playing a dive bar on the Eastern Front in a Brecht play.

They did not sound fluffy, they sounded terrifying.

“I looked fluffy,” he says. “I didn't always look like this. This is after the car crash.”

He was a good-looking guy, Kirk, still is. Big-eyed, blonde-haired, with cheekbones and a pout that could’ve put him on a million teenage walls, he could have been a pop star – and he was, briefly – if it wasn’t for the racket he made.

“Compared to the music of today,” he admits, “Theatre Of Hate is definitely avant garde.”

In June, Theatre Of Hate play the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl, alongside Kraftwerk, Death Cult, PiL, The Damned, Johnny Marr, The The, Psychedelic Furs, Peter Murphy and a load more unique, eccentric and visionary musical weirdos borne out of that same period – an extraordinary explosion of music that becomes almost harder to explain the further away from it we get.

In 2025, it’s almost completely impossible to imagine any teenager or 20-something making music like Theatre Of Hate or Spear Of Destiny.

Where did that music come from?

In some ways, Kirk Brandon had a traditional introduction to music. At the age of 12, he saw John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers – the 1968 line-up, with future Rolling Stone Mick Taylor on guitar. A lot of people who saw the Bluesbreakers went on to play blues – to this day, a legion of boring white guys with Strats are playing homage to that kind of music. Not Kirk Brandon.

Maybe it was the influence of the stuff teenage Kirk was exposed to, like Van der Graaff Generator (“strange stuff, absolutely incredible, but weird as hell”), another band with a high-pitched and theatrical singer.

And then there was his dad. A working-class bloke from Westminster who’d fought in World War II, Brandon Sr. was in love with opera and would sing around the house. (Could he have been a performer? “I don’t think so,” says Kirk. “He was never going to be an Enrico Caruso, you know, discovered on the streets of Naples, and turned into a superstar. Instead, they put a uniform on him and sent him out there to kill people.”)

Did opera influence his own singing style? “I don't really think so. It must be in there but I just made it up as I went along. No one told me what to do, I just did it. It's self-exploration.”

Brandon taught himself to play guitar, “making up chords” until it sounded like music. “Clueless, really, but it kind of worked in a funny, weird, kind of way,” he says. “Again, self-exploratory. I used to think that's what music was – that it was meant to be exploratory. It wasn’t about learning somebody’s back catalogue and writing your own songs based around that. Then along came punk rock.”

Like many of his generation, he thought punk was exciting and inspirational, but it quickly seemed formulaic: “Three chords, four chords, and grown men shouting slogans, based around V-C [verse-chorus], V-C, V-C or V-C, V-C, C-out.

“To me, that's boring,” he says. “I don't want to do that. There's a ton of minor chords and discord in Theatre Of Hate. Which is interesting, I think. Even today, it's interesting.”

Theatre Of Hate toured with The Clash in 1981. The Clash themselves had just released the sprawling triple album Sandinista!, an album full of dub, funk, jazz and the occasional bit of rock’n’roll. It was a time for experimentation.

“People expected you to do something different,” says Kirk. “I think people were just curious. ‘What is this?’ Y’know, we had a saxophone, but it wasn't used in the traditional way – it wasn’t playing hokey old jazz riffs and scales, y’know? It was strange. But at the time, there was room for self-exploration. It hadn't become completely and utterly corporate.”

When Theatre Of Hate burned out prematurely, after one Mick Jones-produced album, Brandon and bassist Stan Stammers went straight into Spear Of Destiny. Agumented again by sax and keyboards, SoD developed into something slightly more commercial. With soulful backing vocals, elegiac pianos, and barn-burning sax, they were intense, politically-minded and anthemic – like the E-Street Band fronted by John Lydon.

It was a peak time for alternative music, just as it was Peak Monoculture. Now That’s What I Call Music, Top Of The Pops, Radio 1, the charts – that was how most people got their music. And then there was the underground – several of them, really – backed by independent record labels, the music press, DJ John Peel, left-field music shows like The Tube: post-punk, goth, psychobilly, thrash metal, skate punk, indie and a million other scenes bubbled away.

“You always felt you were at odds with the mainstream,” he says, “and in the background was always the shadow of George Orwell [“The papers talk about Orwell, almost every day,” goes Spear song World Service] and the wartime function of the Ministry of Propaganda.

“I felt that we were outsiders, to be honest. Ultimately, there was never going to be room in the mainstream for someone like us. So if you got a brief window of going on The Tube or even Top of the Pops, as we did, you took it because it wasn’t going to come again.”

Around that same time, in Soho, a scene was developing around the Blitz club, where DJ Rusty Egan was anticipating a Krautrock-and-Bowie-inspired future of frictionless beats and synthetic bass, and a load of artists – Visage, Ultravox, Gary Numan et al – were in a technological arms-race to get the latest keyboard sounds and beats into the charts.

Brandon was around that scene but not of it. In fact, he went in exactly the opposite direction: Something much more organic and analogue, with saxophones, pianos, and guitars and live drummers. He wanted friction.

“That's the either the beauty – or the ugliness – of me,” he says. “I went in the opposite direction to whatever would help.

“I went to the Blitz club quite a lot, and Hell, and all them other ones. It was interesting. It was genuinely funny and fun and silly. Some people inside it took themselves incredibly seriously. Incredibly.

“I was there the night David Bowie turned up,” he says. “He went straight to see Rusty Egan. Bowie was wearing a suit with flares, a 1970s suit that he probably bought in the 70s. It was like an anti-Blitz fashion statement, this awful flared suit.”

If anything, Spear Of Destiny felt like an alternative E-Street Band: the drama, the social commentary, the musicality, the pianos and the sax. “I love Nebraska,” he says. “To me, that's his greatest album. I would say that, wouldn't I? It's like [Tom Waits’] Swordfishtrombones: it's all sort of ‘left side of the pitch’. More obscure, uncommercialised.

“But I was very aware of that Phil Spector-type way of doing things, that Springsteen used a lot. I was aware of that – and the Roy Orbison way – and I suppose sometimes in the arrangements, you would flip through ways of doing things and think, ‘That's not a million miles from the E-Street band.’

“Somewhere in all of this, there's rock’n’roll,” he says. “And that's hard to divest yourself of. Eddie, Elvis, Gene, Fats – rock’n’roll is there, y’know?

I’m not gonna say it's religion but it's a religion, and we kind of buy into it, don't we? We buy into the myth, the mythos.

“A lot of that stuff is like Italian operetta. And like a lot of opera, everybody dies and loses. Women get raped. That's Italian opera. They sing beautifully, but it all goes wrong. So that’s in there too. It doesn't all come wrapped in cellophane with ribbons.”

His greatest album, 1984’s One Eyed Jacks, leaned into that drama. Full of ghostly pianos, crisp guitars and soaring sax, Jacks wore its musicality on its sleeve, but still sounded powerful and authentic.

From the opening seconds of Rainmaker to closer These Days Are Gone, Kirk’s voice – a savage howl one minute, ridiculously soft and tender the next – provides a raw counterpoint to the band’s slick musicianship, piccolos and all. Lyrics like Playground Of The Rich, meanwhile, are more relevant now than they’ve ever been.

The money shots were Prisoner Of Love, a funky attempt at a crossover hit which grated at the time but makes more sense now, and Liberator – a raucous indie disco floor filler.

(What's Liberator about? I ask him. Who's being liberated? “You know,” he says. “I’ve forgotten. I used to have a conscience, but I’m better now. I can't even remember.” Is it about freeing yourself from the tyranny of the mainstream? “Yeah,” he says. “That’ll do.”)

While the Blitz Kids ruled the charts, Spear of Destiny had more in common with another scene at the time. By 1984, the ‘Big Music’ was everywhere: Big Country’s The Crossing took Lizzy’s Róisín Dubh deep into the Scottish glens, Under A Blood Red Sky turned U2 into post-punk Springsteens, and – while The Clash were being overpowered by funk – The Alarm grasped the rebel rock baton and ran with it on their debut, Declaration

Spear Of Destiny were London’s answer to all this Celtic chestbeating. “The Barra boys from London, is that it?” says Kirk. “I don't know. They were doing their own thing. I love Big Country. They had it right from day one. Stuart Adamson was a fantastic songwriter.”

Big Country’s career was sabotaged by record company politics and unsympathetic producers – Spear of Destiny had similar woes. Brandon says he didn't like any of the band’s producers (“apart from Alan Shacklock and Zeus B. Held”), while “record companies just want the flagship hit single,” he says. “They want pretty-looking stars and they want hit singles.” In 1987, he gave them one: Never Take Me Alive went to no.14 in the UK singles charts.

Their manager Terry Razor (“a Scottish gangster,” says Kirk) and the record company couldn't agree on what the single should be, so they turned to Kirk. “I said, Never Take Me Alive. They all looked at me like, ‘That's suicide.’ I thought, ‘I'd rather it was suicide and a good song’. Luckily for everybody, it was a hit.”

Did his audience see this success as selling-out? “I don't think Never Take Me Alive is a ‘sell out song,’” he says. “I tried selling out, failed miserably – but I’m open to offers.

“Never Take Me Alive was a good song. I nicked all this stuff from Beethoven's Mass For The Dead and [Ants guitarist] Marco Pirroni came and played guitar on it.” Marco added one chord to it, he says, but it made all the difference.

Adam and The Ants and Theatre Of Hate had come up around the same time and had a similar MO: the outlaw chic, the twanging guitars, the tribal drums. The Blitz kids were trying to get people dancing and Theatre Of Hate…

“We were making dance music for people in asylums,” he says. “And we succeeded.”

Spear Of Destiny are on tour and have a new album, Janus, onsale now. Theatre Of Hate are on tour from June and appear at the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl on 22 June. For more info and tickets visit Kirk Brandon's website or Forever Now.

When Belinda Carlisle scored a number one single in the UK and US in 1987 with Heaven Is A Place On Earth the vast majority of those who bought her record had no idea that, a decade earlier she was a member of one of America's most infamous and influential punk rock bands. Although she never recorded or performed with the group, Carlisle - using the pseudonym Dottie Danger - was an original member of LA punks the Germs, playing drums alongside her best friend Teresa Ryan (aka Lorna Doom), vocalist Paul Beahm (aka Darby Crash) and guitarist Georg Albert Ruthenberg (aka future Nirvana/Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear).

For the teenage Belinda Carlisle, Iggy and The Stooges' 1973 album Raw Power was the gateway into punk rock.

"I was in high school, and music at that time on the radio was kind of laid-back California, like Seals and Crofts, and the Eagles and The Doobie Brothers, things that I didn't really appreciate at the time but I appreciate now," the singer told ASX TV's Stranded programme. "So when I saw that cover, I was like, Oh my god! It was horrifying and beautiful at the same time. I bought the album because of the artwork and then I listened to it, and was turned on to a completely different type of music that I really had no idea existed, because it wasn't being played on the radio. If it wasn't for Iggy I don't know if I'd be doing what I do, because he introduced me to a whole new genre of music."

Carlisle went into further detail about her love for Raw Power in another interview.

"Time stopped as I lifted the album from the bin and stared at the cover, a photo of a pale, painfully thin, shirtless guy staring off into the distance," she said. "He was hanging onto a standup microphone as if it was preventing him from falling over. The effect was ghoulish, dangerous, frightening, and about a thousand other things all at the same time. I thought, What is this?

"Someone brought the album to art class and I got to hear Gimme Danger, Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell, Penetration, Search and Destroy, and Death Trip. I looked around and saw that most of the other kids in class were reacting like me: grinning as the raw, sludgy loud music shook the floor, the walls, our desks, our chairs, and our brains."

On the other side of the Atlantic, future Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr also had his life changed by Raw Power.

"The cover alone made me want to buy the record," he told The Quietus in 2015.

"It was an opening into a world of rock & roll, sleaze, sexuality, drugs, violence and danger. That’s a hard combination to beat.

"When you inevitably are asked about your favourite record, you can scratch your head and go through a list, because your taste changes from year-to-year or through different periods of your life. However, I have always been able to say that Raw Power is my favourite from the moment I first heard it, and I don’t think it has been equalled since."

In November last year, Alabama Shakes vocalist/guitarist Brittany Howard announced that her new hardcore punk band, Kumite, would be making their live debut in Nashville on January 12, with all proceeds from the show being donated to local charitable organisations.

"Remember, it's hardcore as f*ck to community organize!" she posted on social media when sharing the news.

Live music booker Ben Mench-Thurlow was among the audience for the show at Basement East, which also featured Snooper, Inner Peace and Second Spirit, and he shared video footage of Kumite with the Lambgoat website, which you can view below.

While this documentation of the show seems to indicate that Kumite went down well with the Nashville crowd, the comments section on the gig report on Lambgoat is largely negative, with various anonymous posters venting their pain and despair at what they seem to view as a violation of everything sacred and true about punk rock.

"Another person who just found out about hardcore trying to jump on the train for cool points", writes one poster, while another true 'punx4lyfe' comments, "First show at a packed club with a f*cking light show= hardcore 2025. f*ck these grifters, go back to submitting your albums for Grammy consideration. So punk."

And there's more:

"I'm sure Kumite is going to grind it out, play local shows, support the local scene and mosh...oh wait nah this will die out in a year after they get some unearned festival spots. REAL HARDCORE SURE."

"A little too late to start this virtue signalcore band, trump will be in office in a week."

We'll round off this compendium of warm-hearted, supportive community sentiments with a final howl of anguish from another online punk who isn't over-reacting in the slightest to news of a band playing a gig.

Our anonymous hero writes: "Delete the world seriously time for the asteroid to hit time for a reboot ftw."

Welcome to 2025.

It actor and Saturday Night Live veteran Bill Hader appears in the latest episode of Amoeba Music’s What’s In My Bag?.

The 46-year-old, who admits he asked to be a guest on the Youtube series, offers an in-depth dive into his music taste for almost 20 minutes. He predominantly discusses punk bands – such as the Bad Brains, Minutemen and the Ramones – and experimental artists including Frank Zappa and Beak>.

At the episode’s outset, the actor/comedian says he grew up a fan of hair metal, name-checking Def Leppard specifically. “Then, when I turned 12, my dad gave me this big box of, like, different music,” he continues.

“He’s the only guy I know who hates the Beatles,” Hader adds, “because he was a teenager in the sixties and he was like, ‘All you heard was the Beatles and the Doors!’ So he gave me this box and it was, like, Pink Floyd and Overnight Sensation by Frank Zappa.”

Arguably the episode’s most entertaining moment comes at the end, when Hader picks out t-shirts for his three daughters, aged between 10 and 15. He shows merch from pop stars Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo before picking, specifically for his youngest, a Misfits top featuring the band’s iconic skeleton logo.

“I gotta start them early,” he smiles. “It’s gonna make her cry. It’s gonna scare the shit out of her. I don’t care! I’m gonna be like my dad – this is my version. Nothing against Olivia and Taylor Swift … but, hey!”

Watch the full episode below.

Hader spoke further about his appreciation for Def Leppard in a 2019 interview with Pitchfork.

“In 1988, there was no bigger band than Def Leppard, and I would listen to my Hysteria tape top to bottom,” he said.

“That album reminds me of the fair in [Hader’s hometown] Tulsa, where they would always be playing hair metal – you would get on a ride, and it would be Pour Some Sugar On Me. I always think of those guys with the Iron Maiden t-shirts – they were the cool older kids.”

As well as It and Saturday Night Live, Hader is known for his performances in such comedy films as Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Pineapple Express.

He’s since transitioned more into voice work, and is set to star as the title character in an animated adaptation of Dr Seuss’ The Cat In The Hat next year.

By his own reckoning, Matt Caughthran is on his 20th craft beer of the day. And The Bronx's frontman is not apologising for this at all. It's the feast of Samhain, in Irish mythology a day when the souls of the dead are permitted entry into the living world, and if you're going to be encountering spirits later, whether malevolent or blithe, easing into the hours of darkness protected by beer armour is entirely logical, indeed sensible. That's our excuse anyway.

Besides, today was supposed to be a day off for The Bronx, a chance for the Los Angeles quintet to draw breath and chill during a run of arena shows supporting Sum 41 on their final UK tour. Instead, good eggs that they are, The Bronx slotted in this one-off headline show in the capital, at Signature Brew's Blackhorse Road location, with just three weeks notice, and sold it out in a heartbeat. This is as much for them as for us: Matt Caughthran freely admits tonight that 99.9% of the people in the audiences he's faced in the past fortnight have no fucking idea who The Bronx are, and he understands and respects that: this, he gleefully explains, is a chance to see the band as nature intended, up close and personal, with only true believers in the house.

And it is nothing less than fucking glorious.

In a just world, obviously, it'd be The Bronx, not Sum 41, who'd be headlining arenas in 2024. But, to be fair, The Bronx had their shot at the mainstream too. They had credibility, a stack of awed reviews, heavyweight management (shared with Fall Out Boy and Paramore), and a major label deal for their second album. But the record-buying public just didn't bite.

Admittedly, a more calculating band might not have delivered an album with titles such as Rape Zombie and Transsexual Blackout for their major label debut, and might have thought twice about including lyrics such as "Dear God, I can't wait to finally meet you. You selfish cunt, you've got some explaining to do" (Three Dead Sisters) if angling for radio support. But The Bronx are as honest as the day is long, and bear zero regrets for following their hearts not chasing the money. If that means they have to settle for being the best punk rock band in the world rather than the biggest, so be it.

Whatever, this was only ever going to be A Lovely Time. Matt Caughthran is a truly wonderful host, this crowd is bang up for it, and the set-list is genuinely all killer, no filler, drawing from all six of the quintet's self-titled albums, with old school ragers (Heart Attack American, False Alarm) blending seamlessly with more recent singles (White Shadow, Curb Feelers). Is there a better feeling than being thrown around a black-walled room, grinning from ear to ear and dripping with sweat, while a few hundred equally exhilarated fellow humans scream "You motherfucker, I want your blood"? Maybe there is, but if there is, that pathway to nirvana is almost certainly illegal.

The Bronx will be back next year. Living or dead, you should be there too.

Duff McKagan might have turned 60 this year, but at heart he’s still the same punk kid who set out from Seattle in 1984 with a dream of changing rock history. With Guns N’ Roses, it’s fair to say he did just that. Forty years later, Duff remains the ultimate rock’n’roll romantic – a constant presence on the rock and metal landscape thanks to his work with everyone from Velvet Revolver and Loaded to his solo project, whose latest album, Lighthouse, came out last year. He’s also found time to work with legends like Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne on recent releases. 

In fact, as Hammer chats to him over Zoom, he disappears off camera, only to return proudly brandishing a gold record he was presented for his contributions on Ozzy’s 2020 record, Ordinary Man. “I don’t have my own records up at home,” he admits. “But I’ll have an Ozzy Osbourne album any day!” But what pearls of wisdom does he have to share on a four-decade-plus career? 

YOUR ENVIRONMENT SHAPES YOU 

“Back when I was in my first punk bands [in the early 80s], I always thought there was a special sound to Seattle – even pre-grunge. We’d be in the garage with our friends playing and end up with kinda wet strings because it’s always so damp here! Nobody had a tuner, so you’d tune to whatever the other guys were playing and it created this really heavy sound. When the Seattle sound formed, around bands like Tad, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains… It was like, ‘That’s the sound of wet strings and guys who have to play in puffy jackets!’ Ha ha!” 

BE YOURSELF 

“Punk rock really informed who I am, and still does to this day. Bands like The Clash and D.O.A. really made me want to give a shit and that’s a big part of who I am. At the same time, I don’t define myself musically – I like anything that’s good. Whether that’s Cheap Trick, Ghost or Prince, it doesn’t matter so long as it kicks ass.” 

NOBODY ARGUES WITH MOTÖRHEAD 

“I can remember getting my nose broken at a metal show, just for being there. The biggest spike in the land between metal and punk was Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades. They made it OK for those things to mix.” 

GETTING AWAY ISN’T THE SAME AS GETTING OUT 

“A bunch of heroin came into [Seattle] around ’83 and started taking out people really specific to my musical future. I had to stop and think, ‘I either get out, or I’m stuck.’ So I moved to LA and guess what – heroin was there too! I learned you can’t always get away from stuff like that, but while I was there I met Slash, Steven [Adler], Izzy [Stradlin] and Axl [Rose] – the rest is history.” 

ALWAYS PLAY THE LONG GAME 

“My car wouldn’t make it to New York, so I decided to move to LA instead! It was that simple. I had been playing since late ’78; my first gig was in 1979 opening for Black Flag. By ’84 when I moved, that original spirit of punk was dead and dying. In California especially it was more punk gangs and it just wasn’t cool. So to me, I knew I had to be thinking about what comes next.” 

DON’T SETTLE 

“For so many bands, you’d say, ‘They’ve got everything but…’ I wasn’t going to move to Los Angeles and go into a band that had ‘everything but!’ Playing with Slash and Steven [in Roadcrew, a pre-Guns N’ Roses jam group] I was the singer so we’d got everything but the singer. It was super-fun to play with, but I knew it wasn’t going to be The Thing; even though they’re the best players in the world, we were missing something. So when we finally did get in a room with Izzy and Axl, from the first chord you could just tell.” 

INFORM YOURSELF AND STAY SAFE 

“I brazenly went through [the AIDS epidemic of the 80s] just like ‘knock on wood’, you know? In America, it was first called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency syndrome. So it had this stigma about being purely related to gay people and the thinking was just, ‘I’ll be OK, I’m hetero.’ Then it was like, ‘Oh, intravenous drug use can cause it too’ and I was like, ‘Yeeesh’, because that was closer to home. I knew a few people who got AIDS – I was really close to this guy called Black Randy [a punk singer who passed away in 1988 from complications of AIDS], but I still didn’t want to get tested and we just hoped for the best.” 

ALL THINGS IN MODERATION 

“The first – and only – time I met Prince, I was too drunk. [Guns N’ Roses] were on the Use Your Illusion tour and got invited to see him play, then see him backstage and say hi. I went in the room and it was dark with all these candles around, and I just didn’t know what to say because I was too fucking drunk! Years later, I wrote a column in the Seattle Weekly about taking my girls to see Prince andhow it was magic. I get this call a few days later from this manager, and it’s like, ‘Prince loves your column, he wants to use it in his new tour programme.’ So clearly we had a positive interaction the first time!” 

PROVE ’EM WRONG 

“Velvet Revolver were a perfect band for the time. Around 2003, you started hearing this ‘Rock ’n’ roll is dead’ chat and it’s like… fuck that! It ain’t dead. To who?! We formed that band and once Scott [Weiland] joined it really became a fire-breathing, ‘fuck you’ kind of band. We put that first record out and went on the road with a chip on our shoulders.” 

ENJOY THE SMALL STUFF 

“A bunch of years with Velvet Revolver were logistically challenging. I’d be somewhere like Des Moines, Iowa and it’d be like, ‘I miss my family and that gig we just did was… OK, but not worth me being gone.’ My kids are grown now, so being out with my wife, for the last eight or nine years and not worrying about the kids, we’ve really got into travelling. 

We see a lot of stuff – museums, attractions… you name it, we do it! We actually did some of that with Velvet Revolver; Scott, Slash and I might have our kids with us at the same time, so we’d end up going to a swimming pool or whatever and really seeing stuff. That was such a change from Guns N’ Roses when I was drinking and might not even leave my hotel room.” 

ALL THINGS END 

“We had a great relationship in [Velvet Revolver] and with the audience. We took Velvet Revolver around the world, but there were things in the band that we just couldn’t get around. I don’t dwell on that stuff – I remember those days fondly – but I don’t think we’ll ever come back together with Scott gone.” 

STAYING BUSY CAN BE GOOD FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH 

“Peace of mind and feeling good about a day is like a first-place championship trophy for me. I’ve struggled with things – as we all do – but now I have good week after good week, with no panic attacks or bouts of depression. The road does that for me too – I stay so busy that I literally can’t focus on things.” 

TAKE TIME TO SMELL THE ROSES 

“I’m not used to taking my foot off the pedal. It’s something I had to learn how to do as I was doing it. We got done touring [with Guns N’ Roses] on November 6 and came up to Seattle with our new puppy, so it was like, ‘I’m not going on the road for a while – how do I relax while still being productive?’ I went to Stone [Gossard, Pearl Jam guitarist]’s studio just to do some writing as I’d come up with another 16 or so songs while out on the road. I stay busy, but not overloaded, by any means.” 

GET BETTER 

“When I started writing songs for Lighthouse I had a lot of songs written. I had so many that I didn’t really take stock of how they were sounding or what the overall theme might be. But I’ve realised that I like to try and better myself, especially with my acoustic guitar playing. I’ve been playing drums again, honing my vocal technique and really trying to hone my lyrics.” 

BE OPEN TO OPPORTUNITIES 

“I’ve got friends I’d like to make some records with. I don’t know about getting a bunch of different singers in to sing because I really like doing the solo thing where I do basically everything, but doing something like getting Jerry [Cantrell] to come and sing on Lighthouse suits me fine. And Slash – he played on my record from all the way in 1993 [Believe In Me], so I do like to work with my friends.”

Lighthouse is out now via The World Is Flat. Duff's UK tour starts in Glasgow on October 2. 

“It was a really good experience – and quite good money, too.”

Speaking to The Face magazine in February 1981, The Clash's bassist Paul Simenon had only good things to say about his experience acting in All Washed Up, the film that he and former Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook had recently finished filming in Vancouver. In a fairly unimaginative piece of casting, the three musicians had been hired to play an English punk band, The Looters, fronted by Ray Winstone ('Billy'), and it seemed that a good time had been had by all during filming.

“It was really funny,” Simenon told The Face. “Me 'n' Steve 'n' Paul were staying in the same hotel in Vancouver – they made it in Canada because it's cheaper than doing it in Hollywood – as the rest of the people working on the film. We were supposed to pay for our keep out of our fees, but instead we charged everything we ever had there to the film company – we'd sign for things with names like [Spurs and Northern Ireland football legend] Danny Blanchflower. We must have had thousands of dollars worth of stuff and I don't think they every found out who was doing it.”

The original story-line of the film - “pretty good” according to Simenon - was based on a script by Nancy Dowd, in consultation with Melody Maker journalist (and the bassist's former girlfriend) Caroline Coon.

It told the story of teenage sisters Corinne and Tracy Burns (played by 15-year-old Diane Lane and Marin Kanter) and their cousin Jessica McNeil (played by 13-year-old Laura Dern) who, after seeing The Looters open up for fabulously-named hard rockers Metal Corpses, decide to form their own punk rock band, The Fabulous Stains. When the guitarist of Metal Corpses overdoses at a gig, The Looters are promoted into the headline slot on the tour, and The Fabulous Stains are recruited as the opening band. Tensions between the two bands mount however, due to the headline band's misogynist attitudes, and to teach the English punks a lesson, The Fabulous Stains play one of The Looters songs, Join The Professionals (actually written by Steve Jones for his post-Pistols band with Cook, The Professionals) at a festival held at a shopping mall, where it becomes obvious from the number of lookalike Stains fans in the audience that the support act have started to eclipse the headliners in popularity.

“She's imitating me now!” says an outraged 'Billy', watching Corinne Burns onstage.

“She's doing a fucking better job than what you do,” says Looters guitarist 'Steve' (Jones), throwing in a classic Steve Jones “You wanker!” jibe as a bonus.

Cue the break-up of The Looters, and The Fabulous Stains going on to become superstars.

According to Caroline Coon, the film was supposed to be end with girls across Britain taking inspiration from the teenage trio to form their own punk rock bands, but this denouement was apparently vetoed “by the director’s Hollywood misogyny.”

With no closing scene, the film was actually shelved for two years, until director Lou Adler added a new ending, a fake music video, implying that the group became global pop stars, having adopted a more audience-friendly New Wave style. Despite this frothier ending, when it (briefly) hit cinemas, the film, now re-titled Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, bombed, taking just $25,000 at the box office... possibly not much more than Simenon, Jones and Cook's room service bills.

That might have been that for The Fabulous Stains, except that, via late night screenings on cable TV, the film acquired a cult reputation as a feminist fantasy film, with Hole leader Courtney Love among those extolling its virtues. In Olympia, Washington, Alison Wolfe, lead singer of riot grrrl punks Bratmobile, heard about the film in the late '80s, and made a concerted effort to see it.

“It was like you could only get it from, like, maybe, some cool person worked at a super indie, alternative video store,” she recalled to NPR, for a 2019 feature on the film. “And it would be through bootleg trading and stuff that you could even get near it. And then it would be many generations of a copy.” 

When Wolfe finally tracked down a copy of the film, she was stunned to see the parallels between her own band's journey, and the script.

“It almost looked like the movie was influenced by us,” she told NPR. “But there's no way that could have happened.“

Fellow Olympia riot grrl punks Bikini Kill also tracked down a Betamax copy of the film, taped off the TV by drummer Tobi Vail's uncle, and were blown away by what they saw.

“The three of us lay on our stomachs with our chins in our palms, transfixed as Diane Lane, playing the lead singer of the band, yelled, 'I'm perfect! But nobody in this shithole gets me because I don't put out',“ vocalist Kathleen Hanna recalls in her memoir Rebel Girl.

“At that moment I realized our goal. We were going to be the Fabulous Stains for real.“

Watch a clip from the film below:

Although the Saturday afternoon crowd at The Woodsies Stage thins out after an all-timer of a performance from Kneecap, those that do stick around are treated to another unique version of punk rock, in the form of London-based quintet High-Vis.

If you’ve ever wondered what Oasis would have sounded like if they were part of the 80’s Washington DC hardcore scene centred around Dischord Records, this band have you covered. High Vis are all punk rock energy, grit and bounce melded with the indie guitar tone and flair for massive vocal hooks that The Stone Roses or The Happy Mondays could throw up at their peak.

The result is superb. Not only do High Vis have a strong back catalogue, with tunes like Talk For Hours, from 2022's excellent Blending album, surely a Top 10 single in an alternate universe, but they're also gearing up for a bright future, with the vital, biting Mob DLA, released earlier this month, the first taste for their forthcoming, as-yet-unannounced third record. They also, very evidently, have personality, charm, heart and passion in abundance. Liverpool-born vocalist Graham Sayle appears almost overwhelmed by the occasion, thanking the receptive audience over and over, and opening up about his struggles with mental health, how he feels his disabled brother has been left to rot by a system he clearly despises, and how important DIY punk rock has been to him.

A hardcore scene veteran, Sayle isn't going to get carried away with this one-off contact with a festival which sits right at the centre of the British music industry. “We usually play pubs... and we’ll go back to playing pubs” he shrugs at one point. If there’s any justice in the world, that won’t be the case for too much longer, but then High Vis know as well as anyone that this life isn't always fair, just or egalitarian.  They already have dates in Europe, Australia and America on the docket before the year is out: go see for yourself why these underground heroes are going places.

• How to rewatch Glastonbury 2024: No matter where you are

Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan has revealed the essential piece of advice one hardcore punk icon gave to him early in his career that he has carried with him ever since. Speaking to Metal Hammer in their latest issue, which features Tool on the cover in an exclusive interview, Keenan discusses Tool's first overseas tour, which saw the enigmatic alt-metallers support Rollins Band in 1992. It was Rollins Band's legendary frontman who gave him the advice in question.

“I managed to get advice on many occasions from Henry Rollins," Keenan reveals. "And one of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me was like, ‘Your crew works harder than you are. Don’t be a bitch to your crew and don’t allow your opening act to be a bitch to your crew. It’s not gonna go well.’ That was huge. It was just good to have that advice early on, so I didn’t step in shit right away. He also mentioned when you go overseas, it’s going to be culture shock, and don’t be the fucking American going over there. Just listen, learn, pay attention and just don’t be that guy.”

When asked whether Rollins' previous band, trailblazing California hardcore innovators Black Flag, were important to him, Keenan enthusiastically replies: “Absolutely. That whole era of music was incredible. Having seen those guys playing in tiny clubs and just going for it – whether there’s one person in the room or a thousand people in the room – the punk rock energy of what was coming from the stage was hugely educational. It was the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. And for them it was all intrinsic. They had to be on that stage making those noises.”

Tool hit the UK next month, and their latest album, Fear Innoculum, is out now. You can read more from the band's new interview in the latest issue of Metal Hammer.

He may be one of the world's most celebrated rock stars, but Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder has never forgotten what it is to be a fan, and has always been gracious about acknowledging his debt to his own musical heroes, from The Clash and Fugazi, to Tom Waits and Pixies.

In a new interview with MOJO magazine, the 59-year-old Illinois-born singer/songwriter and frontman also pays tribute to another hugely-successful musical icon, world-conquering artist, Taylor Swift, or more specifically the culture which her loyal and devoted fans, collectively known as Swifties, have created.

Speaking with legendary US music writer David Fricke, Vedder shares an anecdote about taking one of his daughters to see a Taylor Swift show, and reveals that the passion and inclusiveness of the star's fandom struck a chord with him, evoking warm memories of his own coming-of-age within the US punk and hardcore community.

Hailing the "galvanising and powerful" positivity with which Swifts fans embraced  his daughter in the run-up to the show, Vedder recalls “making friendship bracelets with her and the generosity of these young girls and boys, trading these bracelets with different messages on them – lyrics, song titles, just acts of good will on these little bracelets. They had found their tribe; they were all agreeing on something.

“The craziest thing,” he continues, “was it reminded me of punk rock crowds, of being aligned with all of the misfits in our town, back in the day.”

Pearl Jam's forthcoming Dark Matter album is set for release on April 19. The band have already shared the album's title track, and last year guitarist Mike McCready promised that the record is “a lot heavier than you’d expect”, suggesting that it has “the melody and energy of the first couple of records.”

On Friday, October 24, 1980, NBC news magazine show Tomorrow sent their cameras to an east Hollywood club to document a gig headlined by Black Flag, at the band’s own invitation. Guitarist Greg Ginn was tired of his band being harassed by the LAPD, and hoped that the presence of a national TV crew at the Bace's Hall show might deter the cops from clashing with Black Flag fans, and prematurely shutting down their gig, as had been happening with wearying predictability in their home town. 

Instead, the TV cameras got explosive footage of another violent confrontation between punk rock kids and the authorities at the close of Black Flag’s performance.

Skateboarder Steve Alba was one of the those in attendance, and in music writer Stevie Chick’s Black Flag biography Spray Paint The Walls, he recounted his memories of the evening.

“Tension was building as the police went on tactical alert,” Alba recalled. “The punks were ‘Seig Heil’-saluting the LAPD, trying to goad the cops into attacking. The police commander blew the whistle to clear the area. All hell broke loose, like the riot scene in the movie Quadrophenia, cops beating down everybody in sight with billy clubs, shotguns, mace, water-hoses, you name it. Some girl next to me got a club to the head, and blood spurted out like a geyser… It was like a war with no bullets. Instead, it was punches, kicks, bites, tears, knives, rocks, batons, sticks…”

The Tomorrow Show’s report on the gig, the ensuing violence, and by extension, America’s “punk rock situation” was introduced with grave solemnity, making it all the more amusing to modern ears. 

“Punk has it’s own history, it has been around since 1978, maybe earlier”, a voiceover informs America, a curious introduction given that the Sex Pistols had already split by mid-January 1978. Worse was to come when The Tomorrow Show's viewers were informed that the genre had “it's own surprising heroes”, specifically Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler and cult leader Rev. Jim Jones.

“But many of these rebels are our own children," the voiceover continues. “The majority of punks seem to be young WASPs who masquerade at night in leather and chains yet retreat by the light of day back into the fabric of our society as students, waiters, you name it.”

After namechecking the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, the report cuts to footage from Black Flag's show, with violent clashes between police and punks, and then to a Los Angeles TV studio, where host Rona Barrett has convened a panel of three local punks, Black Flag bassist Chuck Dukowski, punk band manager Daphne Vendetta, and photo-journalist Gary Leonard for a discussion on the genre.

“Could you tell me what was just happening there?” Barrett asks. “Was that blood on the floor? And what was that 'Sieg Heil, Seig Heil'? That to me brings up the Nazi movement. Is the punk movement part of the Nazi movement?”

“No, the police, that's the Nazi movement,” Chuck Dukowski answers calmly. “It's a pre-emptive effort to stop the shows. It started two years ago, there was a gig in LA at the Elk's Lodge... the police came, no provocation whatsoever, and made an effort to stop the gig... a phalanx of armed officers came through and beat the living crap out of a lot of kids, and told them never to come back."

“Why are the police against you?” asks Barrett.

“I think it's because they're scared,” comes the reply.

Watch the ensuing entertaining discussion unfold below:

When Roddy Woomble looks back over Idlewild’s career, he sees a band constantly out of step with whatever is happening around them. With the hindsight of being in a band whose 30th anniversary is starting to come into view, the frontman thinks it’s probably done the Scottish rockers a favour. “It’s allowed us to do our own thing,” he says over Zoom. “It’s not been a consideration if it fits in with the current trend or what people are listening to, it exists in its own little place.”

Woomble is not the sort of person to go sticking on his own records at home but he made an exception recently for his band’s 1997 mini-album Captain, reissued last month as part of National Album Day. “When you listen to an old record like that, it’s a bit like looking at a photograph of yourself when you were younger – you recognise that as you but at the same time you feel completely different from that, it feels a lifetime ago,” he says. Woomble was 19 when Idlewild made Captain and now he’s in his mid-forties. His life has been documented and reflected in the music he’s made.

Idlewild have released eight records since then, each one turning the dial. In the beginning, they were a thrillingly chaotic, punky mess. Then the youthful snarling was gone and they were erudite indie-rock melodicists trying to make sense of life in their mid-twenties. Over the intervening years, there has been jangly college-rock, yearning anthems, contemplative, countrified and wearied songs, poppy, bombastic and hopeful songs. At their peak, Idlewild could seamlessly go from sounding arty and abstract to rolling out an indelible hook that you made you think, ‘Well, that’s going to go in the Top Ten’, sometimes in the same song.

Captain captured the group – then a four-piece consisting of Woomble, guitarist Rod Jones, bassist Bob Fairfoull and drummer Colin Newton – in the sort of raw state that can’t be replicated. “It’s not dated because it’s literally four people playing live in a small studio,” reckons Woomble. “There’s not many overdubs and it’s what the band sounded like live.” The band were so unschooled at the time, he recalls, that they were baffled when producer Paul Tipler asked them to do a second take.

They were quick learners, though, and they had to be – as 1997 turned into 1998, Idlewild were being tipped as one of the hottest new bands of the year. Captain had been recorded for Deceptive Records, the indie label founded by Steve Lamacq, but by the time it came out in January 1998 Idlewild had been snapped up by Food, a subsidiary of Parlophone and EMI. Studio chops could wait, the label decided, with the opinion that the best way for Idlewild to break through was by people seeing their exhilaratingly fierce live show. “The whole year was spent in a van,” Woomble recounts. “We did support tours, club tours, we played everywhere and that really is what got us our fanbase. It was cool because - I’m not slagging off these bands cos it’s wrong to do that - but they put us on tour with bands that, basically, we were better than. It reflected really good on us because we’d go on, be jumping around, falling off the stage and just being really chaotic, and then the Warm Jets would come on and stand still and sing their songs.”

Woomble thinks a crucial part of why they made a connection with fans in those early days is because they were pretty much the same age as their crowd. “We were only 18, 19 and our audience was 15-20, so there was a real union there between the band and the crowd,” he states.

Another reason might be that the musical landscape Idlewild emerged into was basically a scrapheap. Britpop was long over, and its main players had either creatively run out of puff (Oasis, Suede) or gone off in search of fresh territory to explore (Blur, Pulp). There was a dearth of new bands to get excited about because there was a dearth of exciting new bands. To hammer home this point, a swathe of young groups began turning to the acoustic guitar – never a good sign that something interesting is about to happen. 

And then, writhing about on a stage floor seeing what damage he could do to his larynx, was Roddy Woomble and Idlewild. “You can look at that two ways,” he says. “One, we had our own appeal, we were on the fringes and it made us unique, but on the other hand we missed out on jumping on bandwagons that bands have had a lot more success by being able to do. It was post-Britpop and everyone was bored with what was going on and were looking for something new, and it was before The White Stripes and The Strokes and all the American bands came over in 2001.”

Being out of whack became a running theme throughout Idlewild’s career. By the time a new wave of British groups were making guitar music popular again in the early-to-mid ‘00s, they had moved on. “That was when Warnings/Promises came out and we were making like 60s and 70s Laurel Canyon-inspired country-rock, so we were totally out of step with that too!” he laughs.

By that point, their label Food had been fully incorporated into the major label machinations of EMI, a change that wasn’t wholly positive for Idlewild. “Food was quite small,” Woomble remembers. “Even though it was part of EMI, it was run out of a small office in Camden so it felt like a family-based thing, you got to know all the people really well.”

Artistically, Idlewild were on fire at the turn of the millennium, their second album 100 Broken Windows fusing the barbed attitude of their early work with a deft appreciation for songcraft, but the world around them was changing rapidly and they began to feel like the runt of the litter. “We were label mates with Kylie Minogue, Radiohead, Blur, Coldplay and we were obviously at the bottom of that pile in terms of popularity,” Woomble says. “Even though we were doing quite well, we were still like, ‘Wait a minute, now we’re being judged against these bands’. Being on a label with these worldwide massive acts when you’re struggling to get an audience outside the UK and even in the UK you’re selling 100,000 records instead of 500,000 records, which then on a major label wasn’t much of a success. We always got a sense that maybe we didn’t belong there.”

Despite that, they kept getting better. Their third record The Remote Part introduced epic anthems into the mix and signalled a commercial breakthrough, going to Number Three in the UK Album Charts. From the outside, it appeared that Idlewild were on the crest of a wave but there were tough times to navigate inside the band. Rather than remembering the period as a triumphant victory lap, Woomble looks back on it as failing to seize their moment. “That record was really popular in the UK and there was a lot of expectation for us and then everything sort of fell apart. Our bass player [Bob Fairfoull] left and we were doing these big shows and we weren’t really that good. It really felt like we missed our opportunity, just being unprepared for that moment and also realising how quickly the spotlight moves on.”

By the time Idlewild returned with 2005’s Warnings/Promises, they felt a little like yesterday’s men, bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs now hogging the limelight. It wasn’t all negative, though – in 2003, Idlewild were taken out on tour to support Pearl Jam in the US for a month and Woomble looks back on the experience with fond memories. “It was their bass player Jeff Ament, he was a big Idlewild fan and they always ask bands they like to tour with them, they’re famous for choosing good support bands and treating them well,” he says. “It was just great. They play to 25,000 a night in these really cool venues and they were just so nice, such lovely guys, and if the place wasn’t busy before we went on, Eddie Vedder would go out and sing a few songs on his own and he’d introduce us onstage so we’d always play to a big crowd. If they wanted to have a drink with you, they’d hire a bar, not in a flashy way, just a neighbourhood bar and they’d hire it out so we’d all go for a drink and they wouldn’t get bothered by millions of fans. Nothing but good memories from that. And also we got to watch them every night, and they’d change the setlist every night and play long sets and very fan focussed, it was great. It was a brilliant month.”

Ups and downs for any band who manage to stay together for almost 30 years is inevitable – the trick is learning how to navigate them. It’s been almost five years since the last Idlewild record, but Woomble is confident that if the band, who are now a six-piece, can all get in the same room to work on new material, it’ll come together quickly. “The pandemic took it out the band a bit because we all live in different places and we were so separated from each other for a few years,” he explains. “We did plan to follow up the last record relatively quickly but now it’s been four years since that came out, five years nearly. We’ll definitely do one at some point.”

Woomble thinks that the various line-up changes they’ve made over the years around him, guitarist Jones and drummer Newton are what’s helped them carve out a long career. “Whoever has come in has brought in different dynamics and influences and challenges so it’s never been the same band but kept the core the same.” The same, but different. Always out of step, existing in its own little place. Roddy Woomble wouldn’t have it any other way.

Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist and co-founder Flea knows a thing or two about the LA music scene, so when he was recently asked for a very specific opinion on the 70s punk rock movement there, he had an answer ready and waiting.

Making his debut appearance on Youtube hot sauce challenge/interview show Hot Ones, Flea - real name Michael Balzary - discusses his early career, the influences that have shaped him and plenty more.

"Is there an album, a specific album, that you think best synthesises the angst and sound of that late 1970s LA punk rock scene?" asks host Sean Evans early on in the interview.

“There are a lot," Flea replies. "So for me, the big one was the Germs album (GI). It touched my heart so much and made me feel so much emotion and feeling, the same as when I listed to John Coltrane."

Released in October 1979, (GI) was the only full studio album released by the Germs; frontman Darby Crash (real name Jan Beahm), took his own life via a heroin overdose the following year.

"I realised that it doesn’t matter how technically brilliant you are," continues Flea when discussing the album. "Like, yes, it’s great to learn stuff and the more colours you have to paint with, the more options, incredible. But there’s something about working with very simple materials and having a lot of restraint and being able to express yourself. Like Bob Marley always talked about; it doesn’t matter what kind of music [you write], all that matters is your motivation and what you’re trying to say. And that really hit home to me when I heard that Germs record. So that’s a huge record for me.”

Darby Crash's death would spell the end of the Germs as a functioning unit, though the remaining members did reunite for a four-year spell in the mid-2000s with actor and singer Shane West, who played Crash in 2007 biopic What We Do Is Secret, fronting the band. Germs guitarist Pat Smear would go on to find wider fame as a touring member of Nirvana and as rhythm guitarist for Foo Fighters.

Watch Flea's Hot Ones interview below. 

Today (Friday September 29), Pittsburgh metallic hardcore ragers Code Orange unleash their fifth studio album The Above, three years on from its critically acclaimed predecessor Underneath. Much like Underneath, The Above is receiving rave reviews, with Metal Hammer writing Dave Everley describing it as a "bold album and then some" in a glowing 9/10 write-up.

In the latest issue of Hammer, Code Orange frontman Jami Morgan and guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers discuss the difficulties of releasing Underneath just as the pandemic was killing off the momentum of countless metal bands, as well as the myriad ingredients that went into making its incredible follow-up. Morgan notes that while he has full faith in his band's music's ability to reach and touch people, he's not counting any chickens when it comes to Code Orange's success.

“I feel like we have this special recipe, and if people just taste it they would love it,” he explains. “But it isn’t coming from a place where we think we’re owed anything or we’re special. I don’t feel like I am more special than, say, my dad, who gets up first thing in the morning every day and goes to work. We put in the work in this band. You’re not entitled to magazine covers or record sales when you choose to make this music – you have to do the best work you can. I learned that from growing up, I learned it from hardcore too.”

“The new album has all the things that I think people seem to like." he adds of The Above itself. "It’s got a bit more of that alt rock vibe, so I feel like that should maybe make it click. I just know that, in life, you have to keep rolling the dice.”

When it comes to any lost momentum owing to a certain virus that swept the globe three years ago, the band are in no mood to feel sorry for themselves. “That time left me with no regrets,” says Reba.  “When everything shuts down, some people shut themselves down. We kept finding ways to fill that time, and I think you’re about to hear the growth we made on this new album.”

Read more from the band in the latest issue of Metal Hammer. The Above is out now.

Earlier this year, the world's first bespoke punk rock museum, opened in Las Vegas.

The museum's website proudly states that the facility, whose investors include NOFX's Fat Mike, Epitaph Records founder/Bad Religion founder Brett Guerwitz, Germs/Nirvana/Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear, Blink-182's Mark Hoppus, Rancid's Tim Armstrong, Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman, skate legend Tony Hawk and Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge, "houses the world's most expansive, inclusive, and intimate display of artifacts, fliers, photos, clothing, instruments, handwritten lyrics, artwork, and just about everything else donated by the people and bands who were there." And now they're discussing the possibility of bringing an equally extensive heavy metal museum to life in Vegas too.

The revelation came during a recent interview which Fletcher Dragge conducted with Matt Pinfield and Josh Bernstein from the DannyWimmerPresents podcast.

"I wanted to do both," Dragge tells the host, revealing that he's currently helping curate 'Crossover Corner' in the "bad ass" punk museum, and that "Motorhead's shit's on the way."

When Bernstein suggests that Motorhead represents "the intersection where metal dudes and punk guys all shake hands", Dragge agrees, and rewinds the conversation back to 1980/'81, a time when he freely admits that "if you liked metal, you were my enemy... I was like, 'Kill all hippies!'... but if you showed up in a Motorhead vest or shirt, you were good."

The guitarist then says, "It would be great to build a metal museum right next door, which we're actually talking about."

Dragge also reveals that he's been talking to Dave Grohl about getting the Foo Fighters leader to contribute some "cool shit" personal effects to the punk museum.

"He said, 'Pat [Smear] told me about it, but I had no idea it was this gnarly... I'm going to my mom's house and I'm gonna dig through her basement, [because] all my shit's in the basement." Then I sent him a picture of an envelope, a letter that he wrote to like Ian McKaye or something, and I said, Does this ring a bell? And he was like, motherfucker, I was such a nerd!":

More information on The Punk Rock Museum can be found on its website.

Watch the interview below:

"I was swept away with the majesty of rock – as a kid I had Kiss and Led Zeppelin posters on my bedroom wall – and I couldn’t believe that there was something as exciting and moving as rock ’n’ roll in existence. In 1976, when I was 12 years old, I saw Kiss in Chicago, and that gig was the most exciting two hours of my life. But the majesty of it was beyond me. I was a kid in a basement in Illinois, and these people were fabulous and spectacular. I wasn’t spectacular.

"Then I read about the Sex Pistols in Creem magazine. And I started playing guitar in a band within 48 hours of after hearing Never Mind The Bollocks…

"I remember that moment so perfectly. I was in my mom’s Honda Accord at a friend’s house and I’d bought the cassette and once I put it in the deck I didn’t leave the car until it finished. It was my punk rock revelation, the moment where the skies open and you go, ‘Oh, a lot of that music which I’ve liked up until now isn’t so important anymore.’ And it also made it accessible. I couldn’t play like Jimmy Page and I’d no hope of living in a castle on a Scottish loch, but I could do later today… and I did. I went to my theatre club and announced that a band was forming, and I was the guitar player – because I had a guitar in my closet for four years which I’d never played – and my journey in rock ’n’ roll began right there.

"That was in 1981. The band was called Electric Sheep. Adam Jones of Tool was also in the band, playing guitar. There were three bands in our school. One was a pretty-boy pop band, the second was a bad-boy metal band, and then there was us. The others were covers bands, but we did our own stuff. To be honest, we weren’t good enough to do covers! We sounded like a cross between Devo, The Clash and the Pistols. But it didn’t last long. I do recall that we had song titles like Salvador Death Squad and Five Buck Whore. Even in those days [I was] mixing up politics with more earthy ideas!

"In 1986, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my rock n' roll dreams. It was horrible. I was entirely unprepared for the world and living on my own. My degree amounted to nothing – I couldn’t even get a job selling Iron Maiden T-shirts on Hollywood Boulevard – so I had no money and I was hungry. I sold garbage bags over the phone, I was an exotic dancer… Brickhouse [by The Commodores] was the money-making jam.

"I imagined LA was going to be a mecca for brilliant musician, an island of Steve Vais, but it was an island of Faster Pussycats, and no-one wanted me in their band. I’d answer ads and the first question would be ‘How long is your hair?’ It was massively disheartening. I’d stand in the Whisky-A-Go-Go watching these hair metal bands and think ‘All my practising has been for nothing, there is no room for me in this world.’ But eventually I discovered that there was another scene in Los Angeles - the Jane’s Addiction, Fishbone, Red Hot Chili Peppers scene – and the rules were entirely different there. That was a world of oddballs into which I was welcomed with open arms. And that was a road which eventually led to Rage Against The Machine."

In the first week of this month, more than 1.1 million music fans attended live gigs in London, leading Mayor Sadiq Khan to proudly declare the capital the “undisputed world leader in live music.” But it would be unwise, indeed myopic, to interpret London's capability to simultaneously host four or five 60,000-plus capacity live events as a signifier that all is hunky dory in the city's live music scene.

Seven months on from the tragic deaths of gig goer Rebecca Ikumelo and security guard Gaby Hutchinson in a crowd crush at the O2 Academy Brixton, the iconic South London venue remains shuttered, with the Metropolitan Police reportedly endorsing closing it permanently. Meanwhile, the presence of a Fightback Lager pump at the Windmill, less than a mile away, is a reminder of the perilous state of the industry at a grass roots level, the brand being launched in 2018 to generate funds for the Music Venue Trust, a registered charity which acts to protect, secure and support music venues across the UK.

Anyone wondering why such a charity might exist in Britain in 2023 need only take a head-count of paying customers tonight in The Windmill, one of the country's most cherished small venues, rightly celebrated for its pivotal role in championing emerging talent and helping launch the careers of Dry Cleaning, Shame, black midi, Goat Girl and many more: there are fewer than 40 people here for a four artist, Saturday night bill enticingly previewed in an Instagram post by headliner SUN as "a line-up of mean, frenchy bitches you won't forget."

The paucity of paying guests in attendance, however, does allow one positive aspect of the evening to become immediately apparent: that, when not actively performing, each artist on the bill will offer enthusiastic stage-front encouragement to their peers. This nurturing, supportive atmosphere will reach its apogee, three-quarters of the way into the night, with a thrilling onstage collaboration, but we'll get to that later.

First up, the recipient of recent Radio 1 support for her excellent 2023 singles Late and Snake (Rejection), Estelle Mey takes the temperature of the room with a confident, powerful six-song set. Known on the south-east's rock circuit as the leader of Kent alt.rock quintet Salvation Jayne, the vocalist/guitarist's raw, riff-heavy solo material has been perceptively likened to PJ Harvey-meets-early '90s Sepultura, but intriguingly, the highpoint comes via a stylistic curveball, with a bold stripped-back acoustic reading of Snake (Rejection), delivered cross-legged on the venue floor and augmented by stick-free tea-chest percussion from drummer Rob Dowsett, which hushes the venue with its original punk rage ("I’m fed up to the teeth and it tastes like acid") swapped for a stark sense of southern gothic dread.

Mango In Euphoria, aka Manon Jocelyne Berard, brings an entirely different approach to her dissections of love, lust, dark impulses, shattered dreams, and defiant self-belief. Occupying an artistic space somewhere between Peaches, Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey, the singer describes her music as "dirty dark disco" and her live shows as "like a therapy session in a nightclub", and clad tonight in a sea shell bra, fishnets, black pants and heels, she comes across as an electro-goth mermaid with vengeance on her mind. "I’m not the girl you can tame," she warns on set opener Goddess. "Coming from chaos, full of light." Ghost deals with toxic relationships, there's an excellent cover of Britney Spears' Gimme More, and set closer Hollywood, released as a single in March, is a wide-eyed but wary stumble through a cyber-goth dystopia after dark, with predators and blood-suckers watching on. Catch MIE next month on the Songs Behind The Music livestream fundraiser for the Music Venue Trust if you wanna know more.

When this writer last saw A Void, pre-pandemic, supporting Soap Girls at now-closed  north London venue Nambucca, they played with an intensity half-a-notch below spontaneous combustion. Marrying riot grrrl rage with deft grunge dynamics, and fronted by magnetic livewire Camille Alexander, the trio are less chaotic but no less fierce tonight, with set-opening new single 2023 ("It's 2023, soon we'll all burn in hell') quite the introduction. Drawing largely from last year's Dissociation album, the trio have a masterful grasp of the Pixies-patented '90s alt. rock quiet/loud/quiet/REALLY FUCKING LOUD template, but Alexander's shining melodies and ability to switch from sugary crooning to cathartic screams elevate the likes of Stepping On Snails and Newspapers skywards. To close out A Void's set, Alexander invites Karoline Rose Sun onstage for a ferocious twin vocal take on Hole's Violet which would make Courtney Love immensely proud, perfectly teeing up the headliner's own set.

In a candid 2022 interview posted on her Instagram, Karoline Rose Sun aka SUN reveals that the first time she ever screamed, while living near the Black Forest as a teenager, was to repel an assault: "The sound that came out of me was so bestial it literally saved my life," she states plainly. After playing in hardcore, crossover and death metal bands, the singer/guitarist hit upon her own unique sound, Brutal Pop, the title of her 2019 EP, followed up, in January, by the Brutal Pop 2 EP. On songs such as Wave and Killed My Man, SUN's seamless transitions between pop melodies and ungodly shrieks is genuinely astonishing, while Come Clean is a perfect balance of riffs and rage, and the set's penultimate track, the deceptively hooky John & I (Money) sounds like Deafheaven going ham on a children's nursery rhyme. Earlier this year, SUN was invited to play outside Metallica's Stade de France show in Paris to welcome ticket-holders before the main event: it's not inconceivable to imagine her songs being screamed back at her within those stadium walls at some point in the near future.

"A line-up of mean, frenchy bitches you won't forget": nailed it.

Guns N’ Roses were a tight gang back in the 80s, but they weren’t averse to collaborating with other musicians – especially ones they grew up listening to, In 1987, the band backed Alice Cooper on a new version of his classic 1971 single Under My Wheels. Four years later, The Coop return the favour by guesting on Use Your Illusion I track The Garden.

Another hero who was allowed entry into the Guns N’ Roses inner circle was ex-Hanoi Rocks singer Michael Monroe. The cult Finnish glam punks, who split in 1985 – the same year GN’R formed – were an influence on their American counterparts, musically and terms of image.

Former Hanoi Rocks singer Mike Monroe would go on to collaborate with Guns N’ Roses on two songs – Use Your Illusion I track Bad Obsession, on which he played harmonica and saxophone, and GN’R’s version of Ain’t It Fun, originally by US punks the Dead Boys, which appeared on 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident? covers album.

Monroe recently spoke to Classic Rock about his friendship with Guns N’ Roses, how his appearances on Bad Obsession and Ain’t It Fun came about and Axl Rose’s strange “voodoo”…

Where did you meet Guns N’ Roses for the first time?

Michael Monroe: “I had heard about them and seen parts of their Welcome To The Jungle, video but I had no idea how famous they were already then. I first met Axl when he happened to stop by the video shoot for [Monroe’s 1989 solo single] Dead, Jail Or Rock’N’Roll in Midtown Manhattan. He had heard a tape of my then-upcoming album Not Fakin’ It and he really liked it. He came up and introduced himself and turned out to be a really nice guy, so we got along great. He liked the song as well as it turned out, so he ended up doing a guest appearance on the video.

“We were both Nazareth fans. It was no surprise to me that he liked them, as I could hear the influence of [Nazareth singer] Dan McCafferty in his singing style. However, he wasn’t familiar with the song Not Fakin’ It, which was a Nazareth cover on my album, so knowing that it was a Nazareth song made him like the album even more.

“I think the next time we met was at a dinner in New York where I also met Slash for the first time and their management. That night me and Slash ended up hanging at my flat downtown in the Lower East Side. And The first time I met the whole band was at a RIP magazine party where they invited me to play the harp [harmonica] and to sing a backing vocal on their cool, fast version of Heartbreak Hotel.”

Did they talk about Hanoi Rocks’ influence on them?

“They did acknowledge that Hanoi Rocks had influenced and inspired them. Axl told me that Izzy [Stradlin’, GN’R guitarist used to tell him, ‘Do your hair like Michael Monroe’. I saw a little bit of that in some of their early photos and the Welcome To The Jungle video. However, Axl has always had his own unique style. They kindly often mentioned Hanoi Rocks in the press too, and they released Hanoi's European album catalogue in the States on their Uzi Suicide label which was really cool of them! Axl said he wanted people to know who and what Hanoi Rocks was.”

How did you end up playing on Bad Obsession?

“They sent me a rough mix of the song and asked me if I would play the harp and the Saxophone on it. I dug the song and said yes, so they flew me to LA for the recording session. When I arrived in the studio they played me some of the new stuff they had recorded, like Live And Let Die, which sounded really impressive blasting out of the big speakers.

“I ended up doing an entire saxophone horn section for Bad Obsession. Slash had very specific idea of how he wanted the harp melody to be, so  we worked on it until it was perfectly what he wanted.”

And how did your appearance on their cover of the Dead Boys’ Ain’t It Fun come about?

“Axl mentioned to me on the phone that he was not that familiar with the Dead Boys material, so I made him a tape of their first two albums. I gave it to him when I got to LA for the Use Your Illusion sessions. We were driving around Hollywood in Axl’s car, listening to that tape, and when Ain’t It Fun came on, Axl said: ‘Wow, this a great song! We’ve gotta record this for our covers album. We’ll do it as a duet, you and me.’ He immediately called Slash and said, ‘Let’s get the band together, we’re covering this Dead Boys song…‘

“The recording of the song was magical. Stiv [Bators, Dead Boys frontman, who died in 1990] was definitely there in spirit. When Stiv and me used to record vocals in the studio, Stiv had this ritual in which he placed a bunch of burning candles in a circle around me and had me sing the vocal inside the ‘protective’ circle. So me and Axl collected all the candles we could find in the studio and made a circle of them around us. We were placed facing each other. Then we lit up the candles and sang the song face to face. In some parts Axl even sounds just like Stiv. I remember thinking that they had the same kind of voodoo.

“I didn’t ask for money for doing Ain’t It Fun. So many people saw dollar signs and got greedy when it came to Guns N’ Roses, which I found quite obnoxious. All I asked was to have ‘In memory of Stiv Bators’ in the album credits and to spell my name right. Axl replied: ‘Yes, of course!’ I was so happy that I was able to do this for my late, dear friend, and to raise awareness of Stiv Bators and the Dead Boys. Now millions of their fans could see Stiv’s name and hopefully find out more about him.”

What made Guns N’ Roses so great back then?

“They were for real. They had their own style and were truly rebellious with a ‘don’t give a shit‘ attitude, plus they rock hard, and there’s still and audience out there wanting that.”

At the dawn of the new millennium, At The Drive-In were unquestionably the most exciting band on the planet. Their 2000 masterpiece Relationship of Command had brought post-hardcore, art punk, cryptic lyrical flights of fancy and utterly chaotic live shows to a rock scene that had become bloated with childishly wacky pop-punk and dunderheaded nu metal. 

They captured the imagination of fans, were loved by their peers (the album was released on the Beastie Boys' record label Grand Royal), by critics and turned up on mainstream TV shows like Late Night with David Letterman and Later... with Jool Holland (famously causing a kerfuffle by losing their shit and stealing Robbie Williams chair). They looked set to make rock’s mainstream as redundant as Nirvana had made the hair metal bands of the 1980’s.

But in March 2001, a mere 14 months after Relationship of Command’s release and just as it looked like alternative music had their new figureheads, they split up. Physically exhausted, bored of the music industry game and sick of the sight of each other, At the Drive-In were gone, stating in a press release at the time that they needed to time to “rest up and re-evaluate, just to be human beings again and to decide when we feel like playing music again." 

We didn’t know it at the time, but two-fifths of At the Drive-In would come back with something even more subversive and unusual than the band they had become known for. And remarkably, against all the odds, even addiction, death and fighting their own audience couldn’t stop The Mars Volta’s De-Loused in the Comatorium from becoming a classic.

Inquests into the ATD-I split revealed that the band had divided into two camps: bassist Paul Hinojos, drummer Tony Haijar and guitarist Jim Ward on one side, the trio going on to form Sparta and release a clutch of albums indebted to Fugazi, and the duo known at the time as 'The Afros', guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, on the other. 

Bixler-Zavala happily took the rap for the band's break up in the press in the aftermath of the split, claiming he was frustrated at feeling confined by the rules that come with being in a hardcore punk band. Apparently, he and Omar’s desire to make an ATD-I album that sounded like Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn was continually dismissed by the other members. Which one might sympathise with.

Truthfullty, we didn’t expect to hear much from the duo initially, with the expectation being that they would concentrate on their dub project De Facto, who had formed in 1998 and had one self-titled EP, released in 1999, to their name at this point. 

But something else was stirring. For as the pair rehearsed with their De Facto bandmates - keyboard player Isiah Owens, sound effects man Jeremy Ward, bassist Eva Gardner and original drummer Blake Flemming (soon to be replaced by John Theodore) - it became apparent that the songs they were making were an entirely new entity.

Three songs were written and recorded, which became 2002’s Tremulant EP, the first release from the newly christened The Mars Volta. Gardner described the period as “A really exciting time, as it was just this new music.”

It was too new for some people. The EP featured 3 songs over a 20-minute run time, and was full of weird, free form progressive sounds and ambient electronic noise. If you’d bought it expecting some kind of continuation to Relationship of Command you were in for a hell of a shock. 

The Mars Volta started right at the bottom. Tiny club tours were booked, with the band touring in a van like the DIY act that they then were. 

Their first ever show in Anaheim, California was attended by celebrities such as Courtney Love and Winona Ryder, but was mostly remembered for Bixler-Zavala bickering with increasingly frustrated ATD-I fans, who had come expecting a punk rock show and had instead been greeted by a load of widdly, psychedelic, prog jams, and began shouting for One Armed Scissor. He eventually snapped and told the “whiny emo kids” to “go get a box of Kleenex”. It didn’t feel like a recipe for success. 

There were those in high profile positions who saw the potential in The Mars Volta though. Despite deep suspicion of the music business, the band, having released Tremulant on the tiny Gold Standard Laboratories label co-owned by Omar, signed to major label Universal Music on the proviso that they maintained total artistic control.

And after Eva Gardner left in 2002, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea was so keen to champion the band that he agreed to step in for their debut album De-Loused in the Comatorium (his RHCP bandmate John Frusciante also appeared on the record), the studio sessions for which were overseen by superstar producer Rick Rubin, whose CV at the time included Slayer, The Cult, System of  A Down and more.

Quite how far away from “whiny emo kids” Omar and Cedric had travelled with their new band could be seen by every facet of the creation of their debut album, from the artwork designed by Pink Floyd collaborator Storm Thorgerson, to the cast of characters involved in the recording (20 different individuals). Then there was the concept of the record, a tale of a gentleman named Cerpin Taxt, who falls into a week-long coma after overdosing on a cocktail of morphine and rat poison.

Sounds wacky, but given where Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez were at the time, maybe not so much. Throughout the creation of De-Loused... the pair were heavily using, with Rodriguez-Lopez telling Harp magazine in 2006 that their drug habits prior to getting in the studio were “a really positive experience.” as they stayed at home, painted, created art, read and wrote music, but by the time the band reached the studio, cracks were beginning to appear. The pair were hiding their drug use from each other, Omar had developed a stutter and had two major breakdowns. It was, in his words, “everything cliched about doing drugs, and it got really ugly, really quickly with Jeremy [Ward].”

On May 25, 2003 Jeremy Ward, having completed what would be his only contribution to a Mars Volta album, died of a heroin overdose, joining “that stupid club” at the age of 27. It was a tragedy that scared Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez straight, as they vowed to clean themselves up immediately.

De-Loused in the Comatorium was released on June 24, 2003. It wasn’t an instant success, peaking at a respectable if unremarkable 39 on the US Billboard 200 and at number 43 in the UK, but reviews were glowing. It received 9/10 in NME, whilst Uncut said "Imagine a jam session between King Crimson, Fugazi and '70s Miles. Now imagine it working. That's the Mars Volta." in their 4-star review. It also gained a full 5Ks from Kerrang! who claimed The Mars Volta had “seized their moment to change the face of rock and roll... whether they’re successful or not is irrelevant; it’s the taking part that counts.”

With The Mars Volta now established as one of prog-rock's most successful and essential modern artists, it’s hard to place yourself in the mindset of just how unlikely what they went on to do seemed at the time, not least because of the obstacles that the band had to overcome. But one thing is for sure; the reputation this album has is thoroughly deserved. De-Loused in the Comatorium still sounds as forward thinking, as unique and as unpredictable as it did back then, the jerking, Salsa thrash of Roulette Dares (The Haunt of) and Drunkship of Lanterns, the swinging punk-funk-jazz of This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed, the Floyd/Doors darkness of Televators or the chaotic, prog gallop of the albums “big single” (an absurd and immaterial notion for such a densely challenging record) Inertiatic Esp, they all remain as breathtaking as they did in 2003.

And the mad thing is that, as The Mars Volta’s career has progressed, so they’ve become even more challenging whilst converting more and more people to their choir. Very impressive, very strange.

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala were meant to give us “the next Nirvana”. They didn’t do that, but what we did get was far more interesting.

When any band announces a final tour nowadays, we take such declarations with a mountain of salt. Black Sabbath. Kiss. Mötley Crüe. All bands who’ve rinsed the whole “final tour” concept for every last dime. Even Texan pop-punkers Bowling For Soup got in on the action back in 2013 - only to return to the live music scene in 2016. Just last week, Sum 41 declared their retirement from touring with a final run of shows planned for the not-too-distant future. I guess this is growing up. 

So when legendary So-Cal punk rockers NOFX declared last year that they were calling time on their acclaimed 40 year career, the news was met with a certain amount of scepticism. Presumably this was another of punk rock provocateur Fat Mike's little jokes? But no, when this writer spoke with NOFX's band leader hot off the heels of said surprise announcement, he assured me of his group’s intentions.

“I need it to end,” he told me. “I’m tired of being Fat Mike on stage. There’s so many other things I want to do in life. Every show on this last tour will be completely different. I’m so excited to play them. It’s going to be really special. And we’re not doing the whole Black Sabbath/Mötley Crüe thing. On October 6, 2024 in LA, that will be the last time NOFX ever plays.”  

Time will tell. But one thing remains undisputed at this stage in the game: if this is indeed the end, NOFX are going out on the highest of all highs – drug-related puns aside. 

This writer has been lucky enough to have seen the band (rounded out by guitarists Eric Melvin and El Hefe and drummer Erik “Smelly” Sandin, plus touring keyboardist Karina Denike) live on countless occasions over the last 25 years. During that time, their performances have ranged from sublime to shitty. NOFX themselves would be the first to tell you that professionalism and consistency have never been high on the agenda. This, after all, is the band who called their first live album, I Heard They Suck Live. And as Fat Mike sings on the opening track to Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing, 60%, a song that’s become something of an overall mission statement for the band, “I'm not here to entertain you, I'm here to meet my friend the Russian, the Irish, the German, the Colombian. I don't care how bad I fuck up, I care about how fucked up I get. I'm not your clown, I'm your dealer.”

So imagine the crowd’s surprise when NOFX take to the stage at Poble Espanyol in Barcelona for the first of their final European shows, and we’re greeted by a well-oiled, finely tuned, actually in-tune machine. 

By Fat Mike’s own admission, the band have been rehearsing. As a result, they’re remarkably well prepared for the occasion. It’s evident that they care about putting on a great show, too. And there’s an overriding sense of humility, commitment and gratitude on display throughout the band’s epic two-and-a-half hour set that’s been hitherto hidden beneath a sea of self-deprecating humour and schtick. 

All of that’s still here in abundance, of course. Topped up with a healthy dose of bad taste banter and politically incorrect jokes. Some things never change. Nor would we ever want them to. But NOFX are clearly intent on giving their fans nothing short of 110% tonight, and this evening’s show is by far and away the best this writer has ever seen them play.

With three gigs across the weekend and different records scheduled to be performed in their entirety alongside sample selections from the greatest songs ever written (by them), tonight’s crowd is treated to a haphazard hybrid of two all-time classic albums - So Long & Thanks For All The Shoes and White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean - and an additional assortment of nuggets from one of the best back catalogues in punk rock. 

The setlist alone is enough to lay claim to the fact that NOFX are indeed the greatest and most important punk band of their generation, the likes of which we will never see again. And if the scenes from tonight’s sold out crowd confirm anything, it’s that this band mean an awful lot to an awful lot of people. There’s going to be a great big NOFX-shaped hole in our hearts once they’re gone. So long, fellas. And thanks for all the shoes. 

Barcelona: Night One set list

Intro/ Stickin In My Eye
Murder in C
Bob
Punk Rock Elite
K-hole
All Outta Angst
Soul Doubt
You're Bleeding
Straight Edge
Liza and Louise
The Bag
Eat the Meek
Kill Rockstars
Dads Bad News
Fuck the Kids
Hobophobic
Monosylabic
I'm Telling Tim
Cant Get the Stink Out
Please Play This Song
6 Years On Dope
Days n Daze
Green Corn
Six Pack Girls
Quart in Session
180 Degrees
Flossing a Dead Horse
All His Suits
Falling in Love
Champs Elysee
Desperations Gone
Johnny Appleseed
I Wanna Be Your Baby
She's gone
Buggley
Church and Skate
Kill All the White Man

When it comes to passionate punk rock superfans, Moby probably isn't the first person that comes to mind. But, long before he was releasing electronica classics like Porcelain and We Are All Made Of Stars, he was the guitarist in 80s hardcore punks Vatican Commandos. 

In the decades since he may have found fame making top-quality chill-out tracks, but his love for prog, punk and metal is well documented. Sporting a "Vegan Is For Life" tattoo on his neck, Moby has also made no secret of his love for animal rights, even releasing an album with that title in 1996 that brought his punk past back into his sound. 

Now Moby is bringing those worlds together again in his first film. The documentary Punk Rock Vegan Movie sees him explore the intersection between punk history and animal rights movements, aided by a stellar cast of guest musicians and contributors including Captain Sensible (The Damned), Rob Zombie, Alissa White-Gluz (Arch Enemy), Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat/Fugazi) and Derrick Green (Sepultura). 

We caught up with Moby to find out how he first discovered punk, why he still loves heavy music and what makes Punk Rock Vegan Movie is so vital. 

Right at the start of the movie, a talking dog asks you "if you make pretty Enya music, why make a movie about aggressive bands?" It's bizarre, but does raise a good point...

“The really interesting and surprising thing to me is that that these genres of music that are usually seen as being the most aggressive, the heaviest, the loudest, they’re also the most conscious. There are way more activist punk rockers and metal musicians than there are indie rockers. Indie rock is largely apolitical – I’m not maligning it, but it tends to be a little more passive and gentle, not activist oriented.

 The whole way this movie came together was me talking to friends in the animal rights movement, and none of them knew it had its origins in the worlds of punk and metal. I thought that was common knowledge. Punk rock certainly, but a lot of metal as well is where a lot of modern animal rights ethos and aesthetic came from, and I was surprised so few people were aware of that.”

Do you remember how you first discovered music - was it through punk, or was that something that came later?

“When I was 12 or 13, I was obsessed with the radio – this was the mid-70s, so radio could be anything from Led Zeppelin and The Eagles to Donna Summer and Abba. As a kid, I loved all of that and I don’t think there was a single song I disliked. Meat Loaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light scared me, because it was talking about sex and I was really uncomfortable with that! 

But apart from that I’d sit by the radio every day with my grandfather’s Dictaphone and I would hold it up to the speaker to try and tape my favourite songs. I was a 12-year-old nerd – I didn’t have any friends and didn’t play sports, so there was a lot of time spent by that radio!"

How did punk figure into that?

"WNEW was the most progressive station at the time and they played The Clash, I Fought The Law. I taped it off the radio, and it was like the Lou Reed song Rock N Roll, where he talks about the girl at the beginning hearing rock’n’roll on the radio – that was my experience, hearing The Clash in 1978 or 1979. I was just like, ‘What is this song?!’ and knew it was special. 

Around that same time, there was a writer for Saturday Night Live named Michael O’Donoghue who released this movie, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, which was a strange collection of video clips he’d compiled into a movie. For some reason, my mom and I went to go see it and we were the only people in the theatre, but one of the clips he included was Sid Vicious doing My Way. That was my introduction to punk rock.”

And when did you start getting involved in the scene? 

"When I was about 13, I started sneaking into New York to buy records and started going to shows when I was 14 or 15. The first show I went to was Fear at the Mudd Club, around 1981. I guess I had front row seats for the development of so many genres; there was hip-hop, house music with Frankie Knuckles, hardcore, crossover… I remember the first time I became aware of [crossover], I’d heard D.R.I., but [Anthrax guitarist] Scott Ian, who’s a friend of mine, really clued me in. I couldn’t understand how this guy who loved punk so much could play in a metal band! But it was all happening in lower Manhattan, genres co-existing and sharing the same rehearsal spaces.” 

Punk Rock Vegan Movie features an almost ludicrous list of guest speakers - from Ian Mackaye to Rob Zombie. How difficult was it getting everyone on-board? 

“Luckily, for the most part I had known a lot of these people for a long time. Ray [Cappo] and [John] Porcelly of Youth Of Today and Shelter, I’ve known them since we played together in 1982, when they were in a band called Violent Children and I was in Vatican Commandos. I’d see [Cro-Mags singer] John Joseph around the Lower East A fun fact about Rob Zombie; he drew the cover art for the Vatican Commandos' seven-inch single Just A Frisbee."

Who were you proudest to get for this movie?

“Steve Ignorant. Hands down, when he and Ian MacKaye agreed to do the movie, it really felt like things were happening. I didn’t really know either of them, so getting them involved felt like getting a blessing from the ethical gods of punk rock – I didn’t even know Ian was a vegan and had been since the 80s, because he never talks about it."

How does that all tie in to the veganism/animal rights aspects of the movie? 

"The vegan punk rock/animal rights world is surprisingly close-knit and I run into a lot of those guys at awards ceremonies and whatever. I knew Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy and she introduced me to Doyle from The Misfits. The first time I saw The Misfits was in 1982, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I actually went backstage. They were the scariest human beings I’d ever seen – I backed out the dressing room just glad they didn’t eat me! Tuns out Doyle is one of the nicest guys on the planet, but when I first encountered them in 1982 I was terrified.”

When did you personally adopt veganism?

“I had this weird hypocrisy that is quite dominant; growing up, I loved animals but still ate meat. I once had this conversation with [Black Sabbath bassist] Geezer Butler. Credit to him, because he’s the original – he went vegan in the 60s, he was pioneering the way before anyone – but we were saying that you could be sceptical of people and not trust them, but you’d love all animals unconditionally. Around 1984, I realised it was hypocritical of me to love animals but still be part of this thing that causes them misery and death, so I went vegetarian, then went vegan a few years later.”

What do you hope that Punk Rock Vegan Movie achieves?

“Well, it’s an interesting way to release a movie because there’s no real commercial aspect – my goal is to basically give it away for free, wherever movies can be given away for free.”

Do you think the movie will tour over the summer?

“I’ve toured for a very long time, and I’ll never complain about travelling, but my goal in life now is to stay as close to home as possible. Maybe I can just hire some other little bald guy to go out and tour it for me – we’re pretty interchangeable.

Watch Punk Rock Vegan Movie for free now on Slamdance.

Viral pop punk cover sensations Punk Rock Factory are back at it again - and this time they've taken on one of their most unlikely covers yet, courtesy of one of the 21st century's biggest and most critically acclaimed musicals. 

The South Wales four-piece have set their sights on a cut from Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway smash hit Hamilton, releasing a rocked-up take on You'll Be Back, one of the production's most famous songs.

Accompanying the new single is an entertaining video featuring our beloved foursome (er, well, threesome in this case) decked out in regal Hamilton gear and, at one point, breaking out into a dance routine that London's own West End would be proud of.

"When we heard You'll Be Back from Hamilton, we absolutely knew it had to go on the album," comment the band in a new statement. "It’s equal parts sinister and endearing and already a sing-along anthem, begging to be a rock hit!

"We worked with Sitcom Soldiers for this music video, and shot in their studio in Bolton," they add. "It's the first time we brought in a new team, and didn't create the video ourselves DIY. We also had great fun dressing up in regal style outfits, too.  Also, you'll notice we're lacking a bass player in the video... Benj's first child was actually born two days before the shoot so he had to miss out on this one!"

The album in question is Punk Rock Factory's new studio record, It's Just A Stage We're Going Through, out March 31. The quartet have a flurry of UK dates lined up through Spring and Autumn this year.

Watch Punk Rock Factory's cover of You'll Be Back below.

The Damned's Captain Sensible, Refused vocalist Dennis Lyxzén and Rise Against Tim McIlrath are among the musicians interviewed about the links between punk rock and veganism in the trailer for Punk Rock Vegan Movie, a new documentary film written and directed by former punk-turned-electronica superstar Moby.

The film, which explores the ongoing relationship between punk rock and animal rights, is set to premiere at the Slamdance film festival in Park City, Utah on January 20, after which Moby has promised to make it available for free.

“Punk Rock Vegan Movie was created to shine a light on the surprising and inspiring history of punk rock and animal rights," he says, "but also to remind people of the importance and desperate urgency of adopting the uncompromising ethics and actions of the original punk rock activist. After it makes its world premiere at Slamdance, it’s yours. It’s my goal to give the movie away, as I can’t in good conscience try to profit from what is essentially a labor of love and activism.”

The film also features interviews with Fugazi/Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye, Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, Rob Zombie, HR from Bad Brains, Steve Ignorant from Crass/Conflict, Quicksand's Walter Schreifels, Fall Out Boy's Andy Hurely and more.

Speaking recently on the Progressive Radio Network, Moby said, "If you look at footage of people at a punk rock show, they're basically beating the hell out of each other, and screaming at the top of their lungs, who would think that what they're screaming about often-times is animal rights, so I wanted to basically shine a light on this fascinating activist culture that very few people outside the world of punk rock or animal rights would even be aware of."

"My hope is that maybe someone watching this movie is like, 'Oh, like, these are my musical heroes, and they're all sorta saying that using animals for food and destroying the only home we have doesn't make sense'. Maybe, best case scenario, I reach someone and help facilitate a good change."

Watch the trailer for Punk Rock Vegan Movie below:

When Jackass hit TV screens in the early 2000s, it quickly propelled its cast of hitherto unknown stuntmen into the big leagues. Hell-bent on self-destruction, Johnny Knoxville and his crew of fearless reprobates became notorious for the wince-inducing injuries they inflicted upon themselves in the name of entertainment. But it wasn’t just show’s cast that found themselves thrown into the limelight; so, too, did the show’s theme tune.

It’s difficult to think of Jackass without also hearing the opening refrain of what has become known, unofficially, as ‘The Jackass Song’. Before its fate soundtracking the hijinks of America’s most notorious pranksters, the song was known simply as punk-rock staple Corona – an upbeat, jangling slice of Latin-infused roots punk lifted from Minutemen’s seminal third album, Double Nickels On The Dime. Despite their now synonymous association, its place alongside Johnny Knoxville’s trail of televisual destruction sits slightly at odds with the song’s origins.

“Corona is very heartfelt,” says former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt. “[Guitarist] D. Boon wrote that one on a trip to Mexico. After all the drinking and the partying, the morning after, there’s a lady picking up bottles, to turn them in to get monies for her babies. It really touched him.”

Tragically, Boon would never learn of the song’s legacy. A year after the album’s release, he was killed in a car accident. The song sparks memories in Watt that he still cherishes. “When I hear that – he plays those motifs, that kind of mariachi, I mean, it’s just everything for me. D. Boon, in that song, it really means a lot. Music was personal with us, it’s how we were together, and then the [punk] movement let us do it in front of people.”

The juxtaposition between the song’s subject matter and its association with Jackass is something Watt acknowledges. “I know it’s used as the theme song for Jackass – people getting tasered in the balls – but it really don’t have things much to do with that. That’s the trippy thing about it; it’s surreal, the connection.” Despite that connection, the show failed to make a fan in Watt. “They sent me the pilot, for approval, and that’s the only one I ever saw, and I couldn’t believe it,” he laughs. “What I liked about it was they were really doing this shit, this was not fake. Yeah, I liked that. But… I couldn’t watch more. They dressed this guy up in like, County Jail clothes, and they put him in a hardware store, asking for a hacksaw. The police come! The Sheriff almost ran the car off onto the sidewalk, and I was like – ‘Okay, I like the reality content here’. After that, I can’t watch that crap, y’know. But that’s why I let them use the song.”

Of course, as soon as Jackass hit MTV – dragging Corona along with it – what had been a relatively low-key project at the time was suddenly thrust into the mainstream. Almost 20 years after the song was written, Watt found himself faced with a generation of new fans. “[Music] goes through all these stages,” he says. “And so, guys experience you through Jackass – you can’t laugh at them too much because, y’know, how else do things get transferred? I got it from a movie – old movies are a huge, huge influence. So, you look at that, and you look at Jackass – it’s still transmitting information to turn people on. You don’t know what the thing is that’s going to bring you in. So with these kids, it was Jackass – okay, so be it.”

“I mean, it gets a little weird,” he counters. “I get asked to do work towards things, and I got asked to play the Hot Topic stage [at an event]. And I was like ‘Wow, D. Boon would like this!’ Then someone told me – ‘you know Hot Topic is a store in the mall where you buy punk clothes?’ – I thought it was literal hot topics! I had no idea about the store.”

Cultural misunderstandings aside, Watt hopes that for some viewers, Corona might have provided a portal into punk. “Whatever gets you there – it’s like the way I try to write songs on the bass – a springboard, launchpad. Now, you take it – what are you going to do with this? Instead of selling someone a clay pot, I’d like to sell them a lump of clay. ‘Now – what are you going to do with this lump of clay?’” he explains. “It’s an enabling thing. And it’s the same thing with the Jackass connection. I’m not asking them to be little Jackass copies, xerox clones or rubber stamps. But listen to D. Boon – he wrote that song about that. Maybe think about it, maybe you’ll write a song, and you’ll be part of something, in a band with your buddy, or a stranger; there’s a million, billion different ways to do it. And I’m interested. Everyone’s got something to teach me, even the guy or girl just starting out.”

A heartfelt song about the struggles of a Mexican mother might not have seemed, on the face of it, a natural calling card for what would become one of the best-known – and most ridiculous – TV shows of the 2000s. But their association proved fortuitous in a way no one could have anticipated when the song was written. “People will come up to me and they call it ‘The Jackass Song’,” says Watt. “But actually this was a way Boon could help his daddy after he got killed. His daddy had emphysema, and from the show, the monies went to help his pop.”

And so from a song inspired by a woman trying to care for her family, eventually, Boon was able to provide for his own. “Right…” Watt pauses. “Isn’t that trippy? All from these guys getting tasered in the balls, or getting put in a Porta Potty that gets tipped upside down. But that’s why I really like Corona. It’s a strange mixture of things, but to me, it’s all the nice things about the Minutemen.”

Jackass Forever is released in cinemas on February 4

25 years have already passed since the LA band chose a Lollapalooza show to protest against music censorship. But the root causes that led to this unforgettable show of defiance go back even further.

Led by Tipper Gore, wife of the soon-to-be American Vice President Al Gore, the PMRC (or Parents Music Resource Center) was a pressure group formed in 1985. Its intention was to increase parental control over how children could access music that they considered to have violent, sexual or drug-related themes. How they proposed to do this was by convincing record companies to label albums with stickers.

Initially, 19 companies agreed to the demand, but before the ‘Parental Advisory’ stickers actually appeared, the US Senate agreed to hold a hearing on the issue. Three rock stars became unlikely allies in the fight against this form of censorship – Frank Zappa, John Denver and Dee Snider. But despite their best efforts, the stickers were finally introduced at the end of the hearing in November 1985.

This hot topic united acts from across the musical spectrum and a number of musicians spoke out against what they saw as an unjustified attack on a basic American constitutional right to free speech. But it was RATM’s visual protest that created the most fuss a full eight years later.

The plan was simple. The band, already known for their willingness to highlight radical political views, would use a 15-minute set on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour to play nothing at all. Instead, vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarists Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilks would simply stand in a line at the front of the stage, totally naked. Band members would be gaffer taped at the mouth and would have one letter of “PMRC” daubed on their chest.

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“When we walked out onstage people loved it, they were cheering,” recalls Commerford. “But little did they know, we weren’t planning on playing a note.” By deliberately leaning bass and guitar against the amps, instead the band created a wall of feedback that went on and on and on.

“After 10 minutes of standing there naked, what started as cheers turned into bottle throwing,” says Commerford, recalling the moment the crowd realized the band wouldn’t play a single note in the short time allotted for their set. “People were just bummed out. We were hauled off by the police… that was a special moment.”

The band members were deadly serious about their opposition to politically connected people interfering in artists’ right to express themselves. But Commerford also had another, more personal issue on his mind at the time, worried that his dick looked like he’d just walked out of the sea. “It was incredible. I was trying to fluff things up to get the blood flow to happen. But it wasn’t really happening!” No matter. Shrivelled or not, Rage still managed to pull off one really big protest.

After the Sex Pistols dream ended in a nightmarish mix of rancour and recrimination, guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook eventually returned with The Professionals.

Legal issues and drug problems kept success at bay, but now the latest line-up are giving it another go. There’s a new album, and amongst the featured musicians are Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, and Cult axeman Billy Duffy. We tell the full story in Classic Rock 244.

Below, all three pay tribute to the band where it all started, The Sex Pistols.

Duff McKagan

“I was around thirteen years old when I first heard the Pistols. Being from a family of eight kids, I finally had a band and sound I could claim as my own. Jonesy’s guitar sound and style, Cookie’s drum attack and groove remain the benchmark for what’s right with rock‘n’roll, and have influenced my every musical move since.

“I’m sure they don’t remember, but my band The Fastbacks opened for The Professionals in Vancouver in 1980 or ‘81. I was in the company of legends, and more than likely just another young goof they were trying to get away from (plus… I didn’t have drugs!). I became friends and then good friends with both of them in the mid-nineties because Steve and I played in the Neurotic Outsiders together.

“When Cookie asked me if I wanted to be on the new record it took me less than one half of one micro-second to say yes. I was never physically in the studio with the band, but I have a little home operation and was able to get a guitar sound that fit the tracks that they sent from England. It’s a great way to do it these days. I did the same a few years back on a Manics record.

“Did I enjoy being a Professional? Are you kidding me? They’ve always been one of me and all of my teenage friends’ favourite bands. They all freaked when I said: ‘Hey! Guess what?’ If you listen to my guitar playing on Neurotic Outsiders or Loaded stuff… it’s all about Steve. He taught me how to play through the Pistols and The Professionals.”

Billy Duffy

“I first saw the Pistols at their second Manchester gig in July 1976. They left a huge impression on me and, of course, like many people of my generation they changed the course of my life. Unlike many I still have the poster and two tickets – it cost a quid, by the way. I have to give a shout out to The Buzzcocks who opened the show with their first ever gig who were amazing too; I ran out and bought Spiral Scratch as soon as it came out. And also Slaughter And The Dogs, from my local council estate, who probably were the biggest reason I went to the show, to see the ‘local lads made good’.

“I met Steve [Jones] in Los Angeles in, I think, 1987 when The Cult were on a short break, after the Billy Idol arena tour we’d just completed, and before we embarked on our own headline tour with special guests Guns N’ Roses. I believe we were attempting – unsuccessfully – to record a song for a single. Too many distractions, I think. Steve came by on his big red Harley and let me have a go. Been mates ever since. As for Paul [Cook], I think I met him when he was drumming for Chiefs Of Relief, who played with The Cult at Brixton Academy around the same time.

“Paul asked me if I fancied playing on atrack or two of the new Professionals album in his usual no-stress, low-key way, and I was, of course, happy to do so.

“Once I had set up a studio session to play on the tracks, Steve Jones called me up, and initially I was worried he was gonna bollock me for playing, when in fact he asked me if he could come along at the same time and play a bit too. That’s how we ended up on the same three tracks. The session was fun, so we decided to do another, and that was how it came to be.

“It was an amazing experience for a fanboy like me to play with Steve and Paul. It’s probably apparent that we are all fairly close friends these days anyhow, and at times we have ‘jammed’ with each other, but it was still both an honour and a thrill, especially to record with Steve at the same time. On one of the tracks, I think I tapped into my inner Steve, the ‘when in doubt, Chuck Berry it out’ guitar solo approach which has served us all very well over the years.”

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Phil Collen

“The Pistols ushered in a desperately needed breath of fresh air, as the music industry and the country were becoming fairly stale. I never suffered teenaged angst as a kid because I had a release valve that was playing and creating music. But when I first heard God Save The Queen that valve was opened all the way. Forget genres and labels, the Pistols were the ultimate rock band with an absolute fuck-offness that I’d never heard before, that affected everything around it, from fashion, politics and uk society in general.

“As I’m from London I’d be playing in some of the same pubs and clubs that the Pistols were in. I’d also hang out in some of the same places as Paul and Steve so, it was the occasional nod ‘alright’ type thing, and after Def Leppard blew up we eventually started talking, especially if we were both touring the states.

“Aside from playing together in Manraze, myself and Paul have remained great friends outside the confines of the band, and Paul’s wife Jeni is an inspirational life-changing raw-food specialist as well as being friends with me and my wife, Helen. So when Paul and Jeni stayed with us in California earlier this year Paul said: ‘We’re doing a new Professionals album. Wanna play on it?’ I jumped at it. and one song turned into three. I recorded it at my house and I loved it. I naturally play guitar very aggressively, but don’t always get the chance to let go, so this was perfect.”

“Did i tap into my inner Steve Jones? absolutely. i love Steve’s playing and he is an inspiration. I’ve told him before but I’m not sure he believes me. Steve’s guitar sound is one of the two best guitar sounds I’ve ever heard live, and I’ve seen everyone from Zeppelin to Van Halen, and Steve’s energy and sound is still the best. and I’ve always loved Paul’s playing. Probably because he uses the sticks upside down so he can hit the drums harder. But the two of them are like a living, breathing entity. It’s such a rare delight.”

You can read the story of The Professionals in Classic Rock 244. Buy it online or become a TeamRock+ member to read it right now.

The Professionals: "We didn't want to do this as a nostalgia trip"

Rocket To Russia is peak Ramones. It’s the album that should have catapulted them into the mainstream, and a collection the nestles comfortably alongside the likes of London Calling and Never Mind The Bollocks in punk’s spiky pantheon.

Released in November 1977, it’s been repackaged by Rhino Records for a 40th anniversary release, and in its deluxe form features 77 tracks across five discs featuring rare demos, alternative takes, rough cuts and live tracks.

Below, the albums producer Ed Stasium looks back at the 13 classic tracks that made up the original album.

Cretin Hop

In my humble opinion the best opening track on any of the Ramones LP’s. It seizes ones attention with Johnny’s relentlessly ripping guitar, followed by Tommy and Dee Dee’s powerhouse churning, then Joey takes us on a one-two-three-four mentally disturbed comedic journey in less than two minutes.

Rockaway Beach

Inspired by the Beach Boys, this east coast answer to Surfin’ Safari was the second track that we recorded upon entering Mediasound on August 21, 1977. We had SO much fun recording the backing vocals in the isolation room in Power Station Studio A.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

My favourite Ramones ballad (I Want You Around comes in second). Johnny overdubbed acoustic guitar. You can hear him counting to himself on the track during the pauses, one can distinctly hear this on the Rocket To Russia Box bonus material.

Locket Love

I recall the band sighting The Steve Miller Band’s success with that soft-rock California sound. We attempted to slightly mimic this by adding ‘clean’ and acoustic guitars, doubling them and featuring them in the mix as opposed Johnny’s tracking guitar. This ‘softened down’ mix was resolved in the kick-ass tracking version on the RTR Box.

I Don’t Care

This was the first song that Joey wrote. Joey’s brother Mickey taught him the chords to Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen and he immediately penned this tune. Joey wrote Here Today, Gone Tomorrow the following day. Whilst perusing the multi-tracks for the box set I discovered that we recorded a new version of I Don’t Care at Mediasound but we opted for the ‘B-Side’ version on the original LP. This previously unheard alternate version is included on the Rocket To Russia Box.

Sheena Is A Punk Rocker

Sheena and I Don’t Care had been recorded earlier in the year at Sundragon Studio where we had recorded Leave Home. Both songs were remixed at Power Station during the Rocket To Russia sessions. This is yet another example of the Beach Boy influence as Johnny and Tommy asked me to play a plunky guitar bit that was similar to Little Honda. In addition, we brought in my boyhood friend Michael Bonagura with Kathie Baille and Alan LaBeouf for a Beach Boys backing vocal vibe. They later became Baillie And The Boys and had several top ten country singles in the 90’s. Talk about juxtaposition!

We’re A Happy Family

A brilliant song about a dysfunctional tribe. Tommy and I had a blast doing the audio montage to accompany Joey and Dee Dee’s bantering in the outro section. Carefully listen for a toilet flush, lion, alarm clock, my DJ impression, a bunch of friends at an actual party, my daughter Sara crying and my dog Finchley barking. The original LP faded before Joey says “Where are my safety pins” as the band didn’t want to be associated with the hard-core punk piercing trend.

Teenage Lobotomy

Rocket To Russia was the first record to be mixed at the new Power Station studio. At the time we had very limited ‘outboard’ gear, not one reverb plate or digital reverb device was yet in place. The very obvious reverb that one hears on this song during the Lobotomy chant sections was achieved by using a stairwell that ran the entire height of the building. We sent a tape delay to a pair of JBL 4310 speakers that were placed in the stairwell. Using a pair of Neumann U-87 mics, we returned them to the Neve desk and blended them into the mix. This method was the only reverb used during the mixing of the entire original LP. During the early 2000’s a fire inspection by the NYFD demanded that the speakers be removed as they deemed them a hazard in case of emergency.

Do You Wanna Dance

A far cry from Bobby Freeman’s latin flavoured original, this is again screaming out Beach Boys. We used their version as a template for the arrangement and the backing vocals. There is a great scene in Rock n Roll High School with Riff and the band marching down the halls of Vince Lombardi High to this song. Ironically, Mark is ‘Drum Syncing’ to Tommy’s track in the film!

I Wanna Be Well

With an intro right out of the Young Rascals I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore, the ‘brudders’ from Forest Hills take a biographical jab at their previous mind-altering outcast life sighting LSD and DDT as an early influence, topped off with daddy’s financial crisis.

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I Can’t Give You Anything

Another track that the lads gave the ‘soft-rock’ treatment to as they were always hoping for a chance of radio play. If one zeros into the original mix you can hear Johnny’s classic Mosrite/Marshall sound in the centre surrounded by a double-tracked Strat played through a vintage Fender Deluxe with the addition of a Martin D-28 panned hard left/right.

Ramona

I always loved the instrumental sections where they unwittingly snuck in a ²⁄₄ bar amongst the ⁴⁄₄. Johnny’s prowess for switching from muted to open guitar is in full force on this song. We edited out the last verse on the original LP mix. That version has some sweet harmonies on the last verse which remain intact on the Rocket To Russia box.

Surfin’ Bird

The definitive version of The Trashmen’s hit. When we recorded the track a 40 second gap was left in the breakdown section. Joey later recorded the vocal separately and we edited the tape to accommodate the length of the vocal performance.

Why Is It Always This Way

According to the original track sheet this was the first song we recorded during the Rocket To Russia sessions. On that first day in the studio Johnny brought in a 45 RPM copy of The Sex Pistols God Save The Queen and played it in the control room before we started tracking. He considered them the competition and wanted to be sure that his ripping guitar sounded superior to Steve Jones’ tone. Personally, I have a fondness for both guitarists but Johnny’s tone positively rips on Rocket To Russia.

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Rocket To Russia is available now.

Ramones - Rocket To Russia 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition album review

Brett Gurewitz has been flying the flag for punk rock since he co-founded Bad Religion in 1980. But his punk credentials go way further than that – from his co-founding of the essential Epitaph label to his relentless championing of dozens of young, worthy bands who may have never had a change to shine had he not given them their break.

Here, we pay tribute to the punk rock godfather himself.

1) His band injected punk with three-part harmonies

Bad Religion’s 1988 long-player, Suffer, is one of the most influential punk records of the past 25 years. Its fusion of three-part harmonies, political lyrics and punk-rock helped launch and influence a thousand bands, some of whom would later find a home on Gurewitz’s record label, Epitaph. “I think we definitely stood out, and we were the quintessential Californian punk band, because we started putting in harmonies that were clearly inspired by the surf sounds of the region. I am proud of [Suffer] and I’m proud of the influence my band has had on music in general. I think that record was the start of it.”

2) He helped to make 80s punk more intelligent

Since the release of their debut album, How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, in 1982, Bad Religion have always tackled political issues head on. They helped make a whole generation of punk bands and fans more socially aware. “I think it’s accurate to say we were the ones doing it who attracted a broad audience, and so we get credit for it a lot of the time. But a lot of bands were doing it, whether you’re talking about Patti Smith way before us – who, to me, was very intellectual – or the Germs. I thought of Darby Crash as a philosopher back then, and I idolised him. And then there was also the [Dead] Kennedys. We’d come from a lineage of that, and I guess we popularised it by putting it with music that was a little more accessible.”

3) Epitaph Records is his label

Founded in 1980 to self-release Bad Religion records, Epitaph is now undoubtedly the most successful punk label on the planet. The phenomenal crossover success of The Offspring’s 1994 album, Smash, which has sold over 12 million copies worldwide, has helped enable Brett to continually invest in a plethora of new talent. “[Epitaph] is just this big organic thing. We started making records, the group got popular, and that enabled me to help other groups make records. It’s the greatest privilege of my life to be able to do work that I love and, hopefully, I have made some sounds in the world that other people have enjoyed… The Offspring were immensely important in terms of allowing Epitaph to have its staying power.”

4) He doesn’t stop at punk

Over the years, Gurewitz has launched and been involved in a number of Epitaph sister labels. These include Hellcat (ska, hardcore, oi!, psychobilly), Fat Possum (raw Mississippi blues imprint) and ANTI- (Tom Waits, Bob Mould, Solomon Burke), while Epitaph has also expanded its roster to include metal bands such as Parkway Drive and Bring Me The Horizon. “With ANTI-, I had the opportunity to sign the greatest artist in the world back in ’98, and that was Tom Waits. I didn’t think he would fit into the scope of Epitaph, and I was also looking for a channel to do something beyond punk-rock… I don’t have much of a philosophy other than ‘don’t get a real job’, but if I see an opportunity in music that I like, I’ll do it.”

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5) Producing? He does that, too

Brett has both produced and engineered a raft of great records during his career. Albums by Rancid, NOFX, L7, Down By Law, Pennywise, H2O and, of course, Bad Religion have all received the Gurewitz touch. “I like records to hit me very directly. I don’t want to feel like I’m eavesdropping on a room on the other side of a wall. I want to be in the record with the singer invading my space. I like sounds that poke out in a way that seems impossible. It’s about clarity and immediacy, and trying to make the louder stuff the stuff that strikes the emotional chord.”

6) He gets great tone with no fuss

Whether behind the desk or playing guitar himself, Gurewitz has always nailed killer sounds. The 16 songs across Bad Religion’s latest album, True North, are a case in point. “I’m really pleased with the guitar tones on this record, and part of that was keeping it simple. We didn’t f**k around with a lot of hi-tech amps. We used a lot of [Marshall] JCM800 and Les Paul combinations, but we were playing around more with guitars than amps. One thing that was really eye-opening, and actually really fun for me, was using the Kurt Cobain Jaguar, which I’d just got from Fender. It has a very unique, rich sound, and has a lot of harmonics because the bridge isn’t a through-body bridge. I wouldn’t use it on its own, but I would sometimes combine it with a Les Paul.”

7) He’s still punk at 55

True North is jam-packed with short, sharp, speedy punk songs, matching weighty political insight with aggressive immediacy. “I basically sat down and I tried to figure out the essence of what Bad Religion really is, and what really informed our early writing. And, of course, punk-rock was partly a reaction against the self-indulgence of the music of the time.

“So, I started rekindling all these sensibilities, and my co-writer Greg [Graffin] and I set a limit for ourselves of trying to write songs that were two minutes and under but packing everything we could into them, like we used to do. It’s a fun record with just song after song after song on rapid-fire… We had such a positive experience making this one, and everyone can expect at least one more from us.”

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In truth, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was a direct result of punk. Metal bands grabbed punk’s DIY baton and ran – pressing their own singles, booking their own gigs and giving a swift two fingered salute to the ambition-stompers in corporate music business sausage machine.

We could theorise endlessly why the new British rock explosion detonated at this exact time: soaring unemployment; Maggie Thatch and free falling social decay; the miners’ strike; inner city riots; planetary alignment; extra-terrestrial activity or the price of fucking cheese… but the simple explanation is that it was just meant to happen.

Iron Maiden prime mover Steve Harris is insistent that it didn’t happen overnight, for Maiden anyway. “We’ve paid our dues like most bands,” he says. “We’ve done the clubs. Maiden took four-and-a-half years to get a recording contract. It’s not like we just appeared.”

But that was how it seemed. The beginning of the NWOBHM – regarded by many to be a Maiden, Angel Witch and Samson gig at London’s Music Machine on May 9 1979 – opened the floodgates on a veritable tsunami of exciting new British rock.

It’s true. UK metal never really went away, it just didn’t make the headlines for a while. But after the 60s tri-partite supernova of Sabbath, Zeppelin and Purple burnt and faded, it took until the tail-end of the next decade for British rock to gather enough old tyres together to light a convincing fire under the press’ arse.

Harris is right enough, there were bands like Priest and Lone Star along the way – as well as monster bands from across the Atlantic like Kiss, Aerosmith and Rush, and even one or two, the Scorpions for example, from Europe. But there was no internet, no specialist rock press – you had to be supremely dedicated to be a rock fan back in them days.

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The shape of punk to come: How punk became part of classic rock's story

Much has been made about Green Day’s career trajectory, taking them as it has from garage-dwelling punks to multi-millionaire major label rockers, and all but destroying their punk rock kudos in the process. But cast your minds back to when the band were in their relative nascency – particularly their mid-90s incarnation – and you’ll be treated with a catalogue of moments which would be enough to make the Sex Pistols flinch. Well, almost.

Below, the 10 most punk moments from Green Day’s career.

10) Hotel hooliganism

Surprise log-from-above, plus traditional antics

In 1997, the Sunset Marquee hotel in LA provided the setting for one of Green Day’s most rock’n’roll moments. While they were staying there, Dirnt decided to defecate from the balcony, the turd landing on actress Juliette Binoche’s patio below. Later that evening, things got even more out of control when Armstrong walked down the hotel corridors naked, knocking on doors, before topping off the night by throwing their TV set out of a third-storey window.

9) Tower Records gets trashed

BJ in random retail rampage

Green Day’s 1997 appearance at a Tower Records store in New York saw Armstrong yell, “You can do anything you want, because you’re not at Tower Records, you’re at a Green Day concert!” before proceeding to spray-paint ‘Nimrod’ on the walls, shower beer and water over CD racks and bodysurf over the crowd. He then spray-painted the windows, and to finish off, mooned the crowds outside. Later, a store manager had to wrestle a 200-pound monitor away from the singer, who was attempting to throw it off a landing.

8) Look, ma – no pants!

Billie Joe makes an arse of himself onstage

During Green Day’s performance at Milwaukee’s Mecca Auditorium in 1996, Armstrong dropped his pants to his knees and exposed his buttocks to the 6,000-strong crowd in attendance. In order to avoid a potential riot, the police waited until the last song was played before apprehending the cheeky young naturist as he was making his way to his limo. Armstrong was then taken to the Milwaukee police station and cited for indecent exposure. After posting bail of $141, he was released. A Milwaukee PD spokesman later commented on Armstrong’s arrest: “The problem was that he exposed himself to a crowd of about 6,000 people, including people as young as 10. That was our main reason for taking the action.”

7) Billie Joe arrested for DUI

It’s that man again – this time behind the wheel

An early Green Day song entitled DUI (which later surfaced on the Japanese version of Shenanigans) proved to be a little too prophetic for Armstrong. On the evening of Sunday January 5, 2003, while driving his black BMW along Telegraph Avenue near his home in Berkeley, California, Armstrong was pulled over, and after failing a sobriety test, was arrested for driving under the influence. He was taken into custody, but later released on $1,200 bail.

6) Green Day Vs Third Eye Blind

Backstage skull-smashing

In 1998, during Green Day’s set at the KROQ Weenie Roast, Third Eye Blind bassist Arion Salazar ran onto the stage and bear-hugged Mike Dirnt. Surprised by Salazar’s action, Dirnt kicked and hit Salazar, leading to a scuffle. Backstage later, Dirnt was hit on the head by a beer bottle thrown by an unidentified person from Third Eye Blind’s camp, which caused him to suffer fractures to the skull. Salazar later apologised and admitted to being pissed as a parrot. No charges were ever pressed over the matter.

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5) Green Day booted off Australian TV

Unruly punk threesome in pre-watershed swearing shocker down under. Strewth!

The band were escorted off Australian TV in 1998 when, after appearing on youth music show Recovery, they offered up an impromptu rendition of The Grouch. Not scheduled to perform, the boys hijacked instruments from the show’s house band for their performance. Whipping the studio audience into a frenzy with lyrics a tad too strong for prime time – such as ‘The world owes me, so fuck you’ – they were escorted by security off the set and out of the building.

4) Tonight we celebrate our love

GD lament Aniston’s absence in an unconventional manner

In 1996, after Green Day had performed Brain Stew on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, the band returned to the green room and proceeded to rearrange it rock’n’roll-style. When the show had finished and Green Day had left, producers walked in to find the room an absolute mess, with peanut butter smeared all over the cushions of the couch. They also found an Elmo doll hanging from a noose. Admitting to the incident, the band explained that it was sparked by their anger upon hearing that Jennifer Aniston’s appearance on the show had been cancelled at the last minute.

3) Billie Joe lets go of his inhibitions

Fearless frontman stuns New York with a burst of birthday-suit bravado

At the tail end of their year-long Dookie tour, Green Day gave a spellbinding performance at New York’s prestigious Madison Square Garden arena in December 1994. After the set, the crowd broke out in rapturous applause. The band naturally decided to return for an encore – but not just any encore. The fans were in for a big surprise when Billie Joe – never one to do anything by the book – hit the stage completely starkers, except for his guitar, to perform a cover of the Kiss classic She.

2) We’re gonna start a riot

Radio freebie attracts too many fans; carnage ensues

In the wake of the Woodstock incident the month before, Green Day performed a free show for local Boston radio station WFNX. A modest crowd of 10,000 was predicted by organisers, but on the day 100,000 turned up – causing a logistical nightmare for all. With police and state troopers called into action and crowd control unable to contain the hordes, the crash barriers came down and all hell broke loose. With panic setting in, the gig was called off after only a few songs. The crowd went mad, causing more havoc that quickly spread through the streets of the city. The band were hastily ushered under the building, and watched the whole fiasco unfold in safety.

1) Peace, love and mud fights

Woodstock becomes Mudstock after GD incite crowd

When Green Day hit the stage on the third day of Woodstock ’94, the 350,000-strong crowd were primed and ready to rock – but Armstrong had other plans. After someone lobbed mud at him, he encouraged the crowd to throw more, and the set soon degenerated into a filthy affair, with band, fans and crew engaged in a monumental muck scrap.

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The holy trinity of punk were so perfectly formed that it’s hard to imagine the scene without any one of them. The Pistols: searing and sneering, nihilistic and iconic (the artwork, the clothes). The Damned: the court jesters. Daft, tough, Tiswas-anarchic, a British Stooges/MC5. And The Clash: the guttersnipes and street punks, the voice you could relate to, and without whom it’s hard to imagine The Jam, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham 69 or Generation X, let alone Green Day, Rancid, or maybe even U2.

The Clash articulated the frustrations of working class kids in a way that the chin-stroking protest pop of previous generations couldn’t hope to, in a way that was more inclusive than the fury of the Pistols or the Damned’s goth theatre. (And, yeah genius, we know the irony: Joe Strummer went to a private boarding school and his father was a top diplomat. Hate to break it to you but David Bowie wasn’t really a spaceman, Tom Waits wasn’t a hobo and Ice-T didn’t really kill cops.)

The Clash was hurriedly-written and recorded and it’s a messy and thrilling snapshot of two creative forces gelling for the first time. From their vocals (Strummer’s yobbish bark balanced by Jones’s boyish sensitivity) to their lyrics (famously, Strummer changed Jones’s track I’m So Bored With You to I’m So Bored With The USA), and even their guitar-playing (Joe’s choppy rhythm guitar versus Mick’s slightly weedy-but-melodic lead), the album is a true Strummer/Jones production. Both men were classic rock’n’roll dreamers. To find themselves in the right time and right place with the perfect partners must have been a buzz and, amid the anger and the outrage, the album captures that rock’n’roll woah perfectly.

Mostly The Clash talks about people in boring jobs, with annoying bosses, in a world going to shit. A London burning with boredom, where everyone sits around watching television. Where the TV is full of American cop shows, because killers in America work seven days a week. Where you get hassled in the street by cops and pressured to take a shit job down the Job Centre. Where ‘hate and war’ has replaced ‘peace and love’ and the world is full of cheats and junkies.

Sounds joyless? It’s only half the picture – a bit like describing Trainspotting as a movie about heroin addicts in Edinburgh. The Clash is full of defiance and dark humour and plenty of cheap thrills. Short adrenaline bursts like 48 Hours and Protex Blue (a stupidly laddish ode to the top condom brand of the time: ‘I don’t think it’ll fit my PD drill’) add levity to darker tracks like Deny and Cheat, while Janie Jones, Career Opportunities, London’s Burning and Garageland do all the heavy lifting – full of righteous anger, great one liners and gleeful humour. (Garageland, the witty riposte to Charles Shaar Murray’s earlier line that The Clash were a garage band “who should be left in the garage with the engine running”, isn’t bitter or spiteful but a warm salute to everyone who’s ever been in a dodgy band with ‘five guitar players, one microphone’ and an old bag of a neighbour who calls the police.)

Slap-bang in the middle of each side are two tracks about race that would define their career: White Riot and Police And Thieves. Junior Murvin’s Police And Thieves single was released in the UK in July 1976, the perfect soundtrack to that year’s Notting Hill carnival riot and tailor-made for the Roxy, the punk club where Don Letts DJ’d, playing reggae and dub records (there just weren’t enough punk records to play all night and reggae’s outsider status meant it fitted perfectly). The Clash gave the song steel toe-capped boots and a knuckleduster to create punk-reggae, cementing a relationship between the two genres that continues to this day.

If Police And Thieves embraced multi-racial Britain, both musically and philosophically, White Riot was a little more singular. A two-chord rallying cry – rock music with all the blues stripped out of it (the album version is twice as fast and three times more furious than the laughably rinky-dink 7” version that came out just a month before in March 1977) – White Riot suggests that white people could learn a lot from west London’s black community, that if they too stood up against authority they could take over, instead of taking orders: ‘All the power in the hands/Of the people rich enough to buy it/While we walk the streets/Too chicken to even try it’.

Strummer’s lyric clearly admires the section of the black community that ‘don’t mind throwing a brick’ – the rioters pushed into confrontations by aggressive policing and refusing to take it anymore. Where White Riot becomes problematic is in the fact that its sentiments echo that of many far right groups. The National Front had similar views: that Britain was run by bankers (read ‘jews’) and white people should fight back and reclaim their country. Punk rock was a musical white riot – mostly white bands singing music (mostly) stripped of black influence – and a far-right and fuckwitted element of the Oi! movement made much mileage out of this.

If The Clash never really disavowed White Riot, they also never recorded anything like it again.

Police And Thieves showed where The Clash could go – not just deeper into reggae, but also into other musical styles – while White Riot was forever held against them as a reminder of where they came from by a punk audience who wanted their music to get more brutal, not more musical. It was a dichotomy that haunted the band throughout their career.

It split the audience and ultimately split the band too.

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On February 18 1977, Stiff Records released the first British punk album. The Damned’s Damned Damned Damned combined the heads-down, no-nonsense approach of The Ramones with the demented, frantic aggression of The Stooges, and screeched to a fizzing climax in just under 30 minutes. Legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel celebrated the album’s arrival by playing five tracks on his show, and shortly after the band jetted off to New York to become the first punk band to embark on a US tour.

Four decades on, and The Damned’s legacy is obvious. They’ve influenced everyone from Bad Brains to Black Flag and Guns N’ Roses (who covered debut single New Rose on “The Spaghetti Incident?”), and BMG are re-releasing Damned Damned Damned as a special 40th anniversary edition. The new version features sleevenotes by punk journalist John Ingham, had written their first review as well as the first interview with The Sex Pistols (for Sounds magazine the previous year).

To mark the album’s release, The Damned’s vocalist Dave Vanian and guitarist Captain Sensible sat down with Classic Album Sunday’s Colleen Murphy to discuss the album’s impact.

“It captured the essential part of the band,” says Vanian. “The essence, the excitement. Everything was there, and that’s why it still sounds good.”

“You have tho remember that at the time, the pre-eminent sound was Emmy Lou Harris and Little Feat and the soft disco pop that was on Top Of The Pops all the time,” says Sensible. “This [Damned Damned Damned] really got up people’s noses, and I know there’s been faster and louder bands since, but that record was a seismic moment.”

Watch the full video below.

Damned Damned Damned is released on February 18. The Damned are on tour from later in the month (see dates below).

Damned Tour Dates

Feb 28: Music Zone Kowloon, Hong Kong
Mar 02: Umeda Akaso, Osaka, Japan
Mar 03: Shibuya Club Quattro, Tokyo, Japan
Mar 04: Yokohama Bay Hall, Yokohama, Japan
Mar 08: The Studio, Auckland, New Zealand
Mar 10: Metro Theatre, Sydney, Australia
Mar 11: Meredith Supernatural Ampitheatre, Meredith, Australia
Mar 12: 170 Russell, Melbourne, Australia
Mar 15: The Triffid, Newstead, Australia
Mar 17: Capitol, Perth, Australia
Apr 06: The Belasco Theater, Los Angeles, CA
Apr 07: House of Blues, San Diego, CA
Apr 08: House of Blues, Anaheim, CA
Apr 09: House of Blues, Las Vegas, NV
Apr 11: The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA
Apr 12: Ace of Spades, Sacramento, CA
Apr 14: Crystal Ballroom, Portland, OR
Apr 15: Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, Canada
Apr 16: The Showbox, Seattle, WA
Apr 18: The Depot, Salt Lake City, UT
Apr 19: Summit Music Hall, Denver, CO
Apr 21: Delmar Hall Saint Louis, MO
Apr 22: Fine Line Music Cafe, Minneapolis, MN
Apr 23: House of Blues Chicago, Chicago, IL
Apr 24: Mercury Ballroom Louisville, KY
Apr 26: Deluxe at Old National Centre
Apr 27: Bogart’s, Cincinnati, OH
Apr 28: House of Blues, Cleveland, OH
Apr 29: Saint Andrews Hall, Detroit, MI
Apr 30: The Phoenix Concert Theatre, Toronto, Canada
May 02: Club Soda, Montréal, Canada
May 04: Paradise Rock Club, Boston, MA
May 05: Warsaw, Brooklyn, NY
May 06: The Stone Pony, Asbury Park, NJ
May 07: Theatre of Living Arts, Philadelphia, PA
May 09: Baltimore Soundstage, Baltimore, MD
May 11: The Masquerade, Atlanta, GA
May 12: House of Blues, Lake Buena Vista, FL
May 13: State Theatre, St Petersburg, FL
May 14: Revolution Live Fort Lauderdale, FL
May 16: House of Blues, New Orleans, LA
May 17: House of Blues, Houston, TX
May 18: House of Blues Dallas Dallas, TX
May 19: Mohawk, Austin, TX
May 21: Marquee Theatre, Tempe, AZ
May 31: Parc Del Forum, Barcelona, Spain
Jun 03: Camden Rocks Festival 2017, London, UK

The Story Behind The Song: New Rose by The Damned

So Against Me! are one of the best punk bands going. We know this. You know this. The Gainesville quartet have rattled through seven full-lengths since their debut LP, 2002’s Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose, and have unleashed myriad gems in the form of b-sides and demos. Right now, we’re focussing on the group’s 10 greatest album tracks.

10. Because Of The Shame (2010)

Fifth album White Crosses was produced by Nirvana/Smashing Pumpkins album captain Butch Vig and, as a result, it’s slicker than a lubed-up penguin bombing down a bowling alley. And that is why Because Of The Shame works so well. Essentially a Bruce Springsteen song the Boss couldn’t be arsed to record, this track’s piano intro, post-chorus “WOAH-OAH-OAH!” and twinkly key progression all point to stuff like Thunder Road, Save My Love, Hungry Heart and the like; the final riff basically sounds like Springsteen’s broken into the studio with a Telecaster and just gone, “You’re welcome,” before riding into the sunset on his motorbike, or something equally cool. Because Of The Shame isn’t typically Against Me! but it’s an anthem nonetheless.

9. Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists (2003)

Another oddity now, this time from the band’s second LP, Against Me! As The Eternal Cowboy. Save for the Moog-drenched 8 Full Hours Of Sleep from Reinventing Axl Rose, the band hadn’t really jumped outside their booze-drenched punk template. As The Eternal Cowboy changed this, most notably on Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists. The near-five minute duration is kept ticking by Warren Oakes’ superb timekeeping behind the kit, exercising restraint until the band reach a hearty crescendo during the song’s climax. Laura Jane Grace’s mundane lyrics escalate and descend into a cry of “I hate this stupid fuckin’ drumbeat but I’m not gonna tell anyone,” to which Oakes responds with a saucy fill. So yeah, maybe it’s not the most immediate track on As The Eternal Cowboy, but Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists remains heinously catchy while expanding Against Me!’s palette.

8. Holy Shit! (2005)

“The guitars exploding to a drumbeat that’s driving. It’s pretty fucking boring, oh don’t you think?” Poor Oakes, no wonder he bloody left. Anyway, Against Me’s third record, Searching For A Former Clarity, was a further-reaching affair than the previous two, but Holy Shit!’s mid-tempo, country-infused rock is a standout example of the band’s talent within the confines of a seemingly simple song. Grace’s “Good God!” line through the chorus is eerily reminiscent of Marilyn Manson when he really drawled on his earlier stuff, while Andrew Seward’s surprise bass in the first verse is a left-of-centre treat.

7. Stop! (2007)

The catchiest pop song that was never a pop song. Done.

6. Bamboo Bones (2010)

Capping off White Crosses, Bamboo Bones remains the record’s highlight and leaves a warm, fuzzy feeling once it’s over. Yeah, it’s clean, it’s well-produced, but can you not hear the conviction behind Grace’s words? Just because it’s expressed through that soaring chorus’ harmonised vocals as opposed to screaming until she coughs up blood, doesn’t mean it’s any less heartfelt. Aside from the song’s undeniably massive, squeaky clean delivery, a spasmodic bridge of feedback and fuzz hits before that elated, final refrain.

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5. Cliché Guevara (2003)

Rattling with a scuzzed-up Springsteen riff before descending into Against Me!’s now-trademark, chest-beating folked-up punk, Cliché Guevara is an As The Eternal Cowboy gem and an absolute arse-ripper live. It’s an exercise in brevity, politicised barbs shooting from Grace’s gob in a tirade of precise, pin-pointed rage. But mate, it is so catchy. “A new waaaaay on!” will probably be stuck in your ears until you die/go deaf and James Bowman’s isolating six-sting hammering before the second verse is moshpit-inducing magic.

4. Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners (2005)

Bouncing like Franz Ferdinand but, well, good, Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners takes Grace’s rantology approach spread across Searching For A Former Clarity and spits it all out atop this infectiously groove-laden number. Grace breaks down management deals and the filtration of the band’s capital, her pissed-off declaration, “Gotta make your money while you got the chance, do whatever it takes to sell it” holding even more weight given that the band signed to Sire just three months after this record’s release. One of Against Me!’s boldest dancefloor anthems and, y’know, they’ve got a few.

3. Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong (2002)

Reinventing Axl Rose is a primitive, bloody-nosed debut record that shines to this day. Its opening track, Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong, pretty much epitomises most of the record’s content; low-fi, wiry guitars; Grace’s impassioned, untrained screams and multi-layered melodies; the country-drenched Wild West strings and subsequent acoustic guitars riding the song’s relentless trot; the gang vocals, ARGH¸ the gang vocals. Against Me! moved away from this raucously raw brand of punk pretty quickly, but traces of it remained in various forms and Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong is arguably its strongest showing, still after all these years. “AND JUST LIKE JAMES, I’LL BE DRINKING IRISH TONIIIIIIGHT!”

2. Thrash Unreal (2007)

No, it’s not a thrash song. Although Against Me! didn’t bless us with their interpretation of Pleasure To Kill, they did pen an absolute beast that stands out as a highlight on fourth LP New Wave; that album’s pretty much perfect, so to have any song raise its hand and say, “No, I’m the best one” is testament to the band’s quality control. That backing vocal. That build into the chorus. Everything about Thrash Unreal just bleeds authenticity, from its bare bones composition to its lyrics’ confessional nature. Against Me! were labelled sell-outs following New Wave’s release on Warner subsidiary Sire Records. Imagine. Like, actually imagine listening to Thrash Unreal’s unmistakeable honesty and marking it the work of a money-grabber. Dicks.

1. True Trans Soul Rebel (2014)

Much like Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong summed up Reinventing Axl Rose, the lynchpin of 2014’s masterwork Transgender Dysphoria Blues is undoubtedly True Trans Soul Rebel. Intertwining Grace’s own gender transition with a concept revolving around a fictional transsexual prostitute, the album is second only to New Wave in terms of quality and True Trans Soul Rebel is its flag-waving representative. “You should’ve been a mother, you should’ve been a wife. You should’ve been gone from here years ago, you should be living a different life” is one of Grace’s most poignant batch of lyrics and, backed by that certified winner of a chorus, True Trans Soul Rebel is set up as an Against Me! classic and one of the finest, most empowering rock songs of recent times.

Against Me!’s new album Shape Shift With Me is out now. The band are currently on tour.

VIDEO: Against Me! perform Fuckmylife666 unplugged

I first saw Agnostic Front in the basement of a YMCA in Boston in 1984. I paid $3 to see them, Void from D.C., Murphy’s Law from New York City and a bunch of other bands. I was rocking my dad’s G.I. boots and the big American skinhead suspenders.

The hall was completely dark except for the light on the stage, and Agnostic Front came out and opened with the song Victim in Pain. I remember being up against the back wall when they started and the next thing I was right at the front. My friend Keith and I were the only ones dancing because those were the days when there was beef between Boston and New York, so all the Boston kids were just standing there – they weren’t going to get into it, even though they wanted to.

So the drummer at the time [Dave Jones] went up and grabbed the mic and he said, “Yo, we just drove eight hours up here and you guys aren’t gonna dance? What’s up with that?” I thought they were fantastic though, and the next day I went to Newbury Comics and bought the gatefold of Victim in Pain.

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In my opinion, Agnostic Front are just as legendary as Sick Of It All. There wouldn’t be American hardcore without them. And Vinnie Stigma is one of the most interesting and entertaining people you could ever meet. There are many levels to Vinnie: he’s a skin and he’s one of the original Lower East Side crew guys, but he’s also one of the most thoughtful, generous and polite people you’ll ever meet.

Vinnie’s got so much heart and soul. I’ve got so much love for him. He’s always been my friend and he will always be my friend. I call him every day on the anniversary of Rick Wimert’s [ex-rhythm guitarist in Barr’s old band The Bruiser’s] death, because Vinnie was a good friend of Ricky as well.

He doesn’t drink anymore, but when he did he’d have this drinking song and he’d come on the bus with this look in his eye and you’d know right away it was going to be one of those nights. So there’s that Vinnie, too. He’s also the guy that’s been in hardcore since day one. He’s been a soldier for this music for so long. I don’t know why no one has ghost written a book for him yet. He really needs one.

What’s even more amazing is that he looks younger every time that I see him. I don’t know what his secret is, but whatever he’s taking I want some of it. He looks fantastic. I really could go on and on about him all day long. He’s just an amazing human being. Here’s to you, Vinnie.

Dropkick Muphys’ new album 11 Short Stories Of Pain And Glory is released on January 6 via Born & Bred Records. Al was speaking to Matt Stocks.

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Pieced together from over 20 years’ worth of her diaries – and including extracts from them – Tranny, the autobiography of Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace, is a revealing portrait of the singer which charts her lifelong struggle with gender dysphoria and how the artist formerly known as Tom Gabel dealt with it. Here’s what we learned from reading it.

1. HAIR METAL HAD A HUGE IMPACT ON HER GROWING UP

As a child, Grace was really into the likes of Poison, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi. But it was Guns N’ Roses who had the most impact, both for their music, but also their androgynous aesthetic. “Hair was big, clothes were tight, lines were blurred. I often couldn’t tell if band members were boys or girls and I liked that.”

2. SATANISM OFFERED AN ESCAPE

As a teenager, Grace frequently wore women’s clothes in secret. She made a blood pact, using a knife and a bird feather, with the Devil in the hope that she’d wake up “not a girl, but a fully grown woman”. It didn’t work.

3. NOTHING FELT WORSE THAN BETRAYING HERSELF

In 2004, Against Me! were on tour in Italy when they encountered three transsexuals outside a roadside food truck. As other members made fun of them, Grace laughed along, “the whole time knowing the truth about myself, that I wished I were so brave”. In the book, she admits that she’s been called a sellout many times, but “this experience, that moment – that’s what it feels like to truly sell out”.

4. NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS ARE MADE TO BROKEN

On New Year’s Eve, 2004, Grace made a commitment to being both sober and male, which meant no more cross-dressing. One night in February, she discarded a huge bag of women’s clothes in a supermarket dumpster in an attempt to follow through. Neither resolution lasted a particularly long time.

5. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN GIVES GOOD ADVICE

Against Me! came under a lot of fire for signing to Fat Wreck, which “pure” punks considered a sellout move, so the backlash was even more vitriolic when the band signed to major label Sire. This resulted in a period of turmoil and stress for the band, and much internal insecurity for Grace. Cue an unexpected letter from The Boss, who’d been to see the band play, which offered invaluable words of advice: “If you’re not reaching out beyond the audience you have to the greater audience you might have, you’ll never find out what your band is truly capable of, what it’s worth, and how much meaning you can bring into your fans’ lives.”

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6. GRACE’S JOURNALS OFTEN GAVE BIRTH TO LYRICS

Many entries Grace made in her journals would later reappear as lines for Against Me! songs. The most poignant of these was something she wrote about her late friend and occasional lover, CC, after she was murdered, and which ended up becoming part of the song Because Of The Shame: “There are so many things that I regret about my relationship with CC, so many reasons to feel guilt. Because of the shame I associate with vulnerability I am numbing myself completely. Can you hear me right now?”

7. THE ROCK IS A FAN

After appearing on The Tonight Show alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Grace gave the former wrestler-turned-movie-star a copy of White Crosses, the band’s latest album at the time. Although the performance itself didn’t go too well because of a camera malfunction, Grace says a major consolation was “watching [The Rock] drive off the Burbank lot in his huge SUV with the windows down, blasting I Was A Teenage Anarchist and nodding along”.

8. THE FIRST PERSON GRACE CAME OUT TO WAS BRENDAN KELLY

Grace had struggled with gender dysphoria for the majority of her life, but despite a few lyrical hints, it was something that she kept secret until 2011. The first person she told was her friend, The Lawrence Arms vocalist/bassist Brendan Kelly. A few months before, after reading into those lyrics, he had asked her on his local Chicago TV show, “So, Tom… do you put on panties when you’re at home?” “I’m panicked now,” Grace admits in her diary about telling him, “but it was such a relief to speak those drunken words last night, to emotionally unload on someone, anyone, relief.” Soon after telling Kelly, Grace came out to her (now ex-)wife, Heather. The feeling in doing so was unlike anything else ever experienced. “I had sampled every barbiturate and narcotic from A to Z in my lifetime,” she writes, “but this was a high I’d never felt before.”

9. GRACE STOPPED HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY TO WRITE TRANSGENDER DYSPHORIA BLUES

Grace started taking hormones to help her transition to female, but her “body was reacting violently to the mixture of alcohol, anxiety, and hormones”. As a result, she stopped taking them in order to finishing writing Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It left her feeling incredibly depressed and near-suicidal, but after two weeks, the album was done.

10. WHEN SHE FINISHED THE BOOK, SHE BURNED ALL HER JOURNALS

While it was her incredible dedircation to keeping a diary that helped Grace retrace her feelings and her journey for her autobiography, when it was finished she decided to burn them all as a symbolic gesture for moving onto the next stage of her life as a woman. “I’m at the final page of this journal. When I get home, I’ll toss it atop the pile with the rest. Dozens of books, filled top to bottom in ink, teeming with my every thought, fear, and emotion of the last three decades. I’ve decided to burn them all, a funeral pyre for Thomas James Gabel. A true prick. I hope we never meet again.”

Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is out now through Hachette Books. Against Me! tour the UK from December 6.

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Sonically, the Sex Pistols’ debut stripped rock’n’roll back to its first principles. Visually, its sleeve did exactly the same.

“The only real thing about Never Mind The Bollocks was that it had to look ugly,” recalled their late manager Malcolm McClaren. “We came up with the ugliest cover we could think of; that in a sense would attack the idea of super-graphics. I wanted to make ugliness beautiful.”

The Pistols needed a renegade artist to make it fly, and McLaren knew just the man. In 1976, he wrote a short telegram to Jamie Reid, with whom he’d studied at Croydon College Of Art in the late 60s: “Got these guys, interested with working with you again.”

Reid was already several years into his career by this point, and his CV made interesting reading. As well as illustrating an anthology on the situationists (a 1950s movement of artistic pranksters), this son of a liberal newspaper editor had himself spent five years at the helm of a political rag called Suburban Press (sample headline: ‘Save Petrol – Burn Cars!’).

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As it turned out, many of Reid’s ideas from this last project would be carried over to Never Mind The Bollocks…

“The style of punk was something that was actually formulated a good few years before,” he explains, “when myself and a collective of people in Croydon were running an anarchist printing press. The style of punk came directly from that. It wasn’t the pop phenomenon that interested me.”

“It all came out of that 60s art school thing,” McLaren remembered of the sleeve’s genesis. “Anarchic, nihilistic, intellectually looking to change life. Changing life meant being an outlaw. Being an outlaw meant being a criminal. And we thought that was something that artists and criminals have in common.”

Fitting, then that the …Bollocks sleeve combined its lurid colours with lettering arranged in the style of a ransom note. That process may have caused Reid “enormous aggravation”, as the title and the contents of the album were shuffled by the band, but it nailed punk’s much-touted DIY ethos as succinctly as any of the three-chord anthems within, and was duly adopted by countless bands in the movement.

It was, Reid concludes of the sleeve, “intended to articulate ideas, many of which were anti-establishment and quite theoretical and complicated” (although, at his more playful, the artist has dismissed it as “cheap hype”).

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Back in March of this year, the son of two of punk’s trailblazers, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, announced he was going to burn his entire collection of punk memorabilia in a show of defiance against the establishment.

Joe Corré, who founded the luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur, before selling it for £60 million in 2007, will torch his collection – valued at between £5 and £10 million – at a yet-to-be-decided London location, on Saturday 26 November, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK being released.

What’s drawn his ire is that the establishment’s attitude to punk has come full circle since the 70s: rather than it being reviled as a dangerous counter-culture that offended the core of British values, whatever they are, it’s now celebrated and viewed with fond nostalgia through exhibitions like Punk London.

So what’s got Joe itching to torch the lot? To find out, we went to a press conference he held in the days before the Great Punk Bonfire of 2016, and here’s what we learned.

Corré says each generation faces its own set of problems

Corré: “There was a whole generation of people that were completely fed up with the status quo. We were hated across all creeds and classes to the point that the Sex Pistols were banned from the radio and you couldn’t buy the records in the shops. My parents’ shop [punk fashion boutique SEX] was smashed up every weekend. The Mayor of London at the time recommended that we dig a bloody great big hole and bury all the punk rockers down it. Out of that people found their creativity. But today, we have a young generation facing catastrophic climate change and coming out of university riddled with 50 grand’s worth of debt. In the 1970s, people could be more creative and they could afford to live in this city, whether it was in squats or whatever. We know the solutions to the problems young people face are not going to be solved by a new generation of bankers which is what you’re going to get with people taking choices for corporate careers so they know they can pay off the debt they’re going to get themselves into.”

Modern punk is pointless, apparently

“If [punk] is the way [young people] are going to have a voice, they don’t have a very big voice. Who the hell cares? Name me any one of them [bands] that’s managed to do anything that’s been a challenge to the status quo? (At this point, another attendee interjects: “Pussy Riot?”) Hmm, I guess that’s true.”

He sold a bunch of punk stuff to fund his business

“When I started Agent Provocateur I had no money, and the only thing I had as a kind of currency was this collection. So I sold it at that time to raise money for the business, and years later when I sold the company I ended up buying it back. It’s been this hoard that follows me around for a long time. In that respect I will not burn all of it, because some of those things are personal and they don’t mean anything to anyone else, but they mean something to me. As for the rest of it, I’ve been wondering for a long time what to do with it all, and I think this is the right opportunity to say, ‘punk is dead, stop conning a younger generation that it somehow has any currency to deal with the issues they face’.”

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He won’t sell his collection for charity, but he will donate the proceeds of the accompanying documentary

“I have to say that in my lifetime, I have witnessed the sell-off of every asset that this country ever owned, to the extent where the job of the state is now taken up by the charitable sector. You have charities where people are earning £250,000 a year to sit on the board. These things have become corporations in their own right. I must add at this point that the documentary we are making, 80% of all the profits and income from that will go to help London youth, and in particular climate change and environmental issues.”

He’d rather burn his stuff than give it to punk fans

“I think the die hard fans are confused. Why would I give it to them? They’re just conformists in another uniform. Who cares about being a die hard fan of something that’s over?”

So what have we learned from this? What we appear to be witnessing are the actions of a bored, grumpy millionaire who has nothing better to do that simply throw his toys out of the pram, douse them in petrol and set them on fire. Well, not all of them. He’s admitted he’s keeping some of the good stuff. Basically, Corré is acting like a hypocrite who has benefited from the mainstream warming to punk and allowing his mother to build a hugely profitable fashion brand. The really punk thing to do would be to donate the lot to charity, or at least do something with it that furthers the cause punk started: social change. He could probably pay off 100 students’ debts or make a generous donation to climate change research instead of making Central London warmer for an hour. Ever get the feeling you’ve been heated?

Has the true spirit of punk gone up in flames?

Those old enough to remember The Clash playing their first gig have to accept they are now the old farts, which is why young bands like The DeRellas can’t be blamed for constructing their own identikit versions of the music that seemed so new 40 years ago but itself was built from earlier inspirations.

Flying their mutation of the Fuzztones’ skull and cross-guitars logo, the band brandish energetic ditties such as Rip It Up and Strung Out Sin City that ride their reconfigurations of blueprints and attitude once cooked up by the Damned, Ramones and Heartbreakers (along with a romp through Adam Ant’s Plastic Surgery).

Nobody should deny these new glam-punkers their right to cavort on such well-trodden ground, though.

Mike Watt is a busy man. Currently touring and recording with a number of musical projects, including experimental post-punk trio Il Sogno Del Marinaio, his past work includes punk band fIREHOSE, collaborations with Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore and joining The Stooges in 2003. But he first cut his teeth with seminal hardcore punk band Minutemen. “It’s strange,” he reflects. “I’ve never looked at the arc of my own music. But I actually wrote most the [Minutemen] songs, looking back – but not the good ones! [singer/guitarist] D. Boon and [drummer] Georgie wrote the good ones.” He pauses. “And of course, a lot of my favourites are the D. Boon ones.”

Below, he picks the Minutemen songs that mean the most to him.

Corona

Mike: “Corona is very heartfelt. D. Boon wrote that one on a trip to Mexico. After all the drinking and the partying, the morning after, there’s a lady picking up bottles, to turn them in to get monies for her babies. D. Boon, it really touched him. I know it’s used as the theme song for Jackass, but it really don’t have things much to do with that. That’s trippy about that, it’s surreal, the connection. People will come up to me and they call it ‘The Jackass Song’ – but this was a way Boon could help his daddy after he got killed. His daddy had emphysema, and from the show, the monies went to his pop. So when I hear him sing that song, when I hear that – he plays those motifs, that kind of mariachi – I mean, it’s just everything for me. Music was personal with us, it’s how we were together, and then the [punk] movement let us do it in front of people. The movement was so inclusive, and it seemed that if you wanted in, you had to bring something original – it was kind of a toll. And for D. Boon, I remember him telling people, “Okay, whatever we play, it sounds like the Minutemen”. And that’s what I hear in Corona. There’s a little Mexico in there, it’s got a little ‘thinking out loud’ – what D. Boon called our lyrics. Like, D. Boon’s thinking about what’s going on here: we’re having a party at the beach, and this lady, by using the empty Corona bottle – it’s not like D. Boon liked Corona beer! – no, she’s using that bottle to help. So there’s a real connection there. That’s why I really like Corona – it’s a strange mixture of things, but to me it’s the nice things about the Minutemen.”

This Ain’t No Picnic

“You don’t know it in the lyrics, but where this song came from – I know the story [laughs]. Boon was working at [his father’s] parts counter, and his daddy put in radios at the dealer shop, and he’s there at the counter, and he’s listening to soul music. There’s a guy there who has a… difference of opinion, ‘I don’t want to hear that… kind of music’, he uses that word. So D. Boon couldn’t do anything – he’s the low man on the totem pole, so he has to turn it off. But he writes a song, This Ain’t No Picnic, and it’s about work, but he actually never brings that subject up in the song. But I know, I was there. We even made a video, because MTV came on, and we made a decision – we thought, ‘Oh, the new telephone pole is MTV’, so we spent $400 to make this video, because we thought it would relate to other working people, because we were kids working, and there was something about that. And also, you’ve got to remember too, we were boys in the 60s. There’s civil rights, there’s the war, young people are taking things into their hands and trying to change. By the 70s, that’s over. And we’re like, ‘WHAT?! It’s not our turn?!’ So working, it’s this big influence that even pushed us into the punk movement.”

The Anchor

“The third one is The Anchor – the first time we played over two minutes. It’s a song about a dream, it’s trippy. I wrote the music to The Anchor, but Georgie – he never gave me a title, he always gave me words. And he would write these at work, on the laze, so semi-conscious. And they’d be surreal, written in early morning too, where he’s half awake and on a lake, and with the lake and stuff, he writes a song about a dream. Because you can express yourself about different things – concrete things like D. Boon did, Georgie – dreams. Songs are about transmitting all kinds of information.”

Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing

“I wrote a song, maybe the best one I wrote for Minutemen that I like – Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing. I actually wrote the song for Michael Jackson to sing. I thought if he sang this song, everyone would know what the Minutemen was about. So I sent it to the management, and I never got a word back. But that was like, balls out, I totally had a reason for this song – it’s not just for D. Boon to sing and George to put drums on. This is – Michael Jackson, will you sing this song? And I look back at young Mike Watt and it’s like, ‘Wow, you had a little nerve there!’”

Anxious Mo-Fo

“Georgie wrote the words to this one I ended up calling Anxious Mo-Fo. Although I wrote the music, it’s Georgie’s words [that] inspired me. ‘Serious as a heart attack!’ it’s like Georgie was commenting on our own band. Georgie could do that, he could put himself out, be kind of objective a little bit, where me and D. Boon were just too much in it, too subjective, to see the forest for the trees. Georgie had that talent. That’s why the Minutemen, after Georgie stops writing songs, after Double Nickels On The Dime, the band changes. The last two records, Project Mersh and 3-Way Tie (For Last), are really, in my opinion, lamer records. We peaked with Double Nickels. I think we were gonna come back – we had this plan for a triple record, where half of it was gonna be live, to fight the bootleggers – D. Boon worked in a political thing where people would vote, put a ballot in, vote for your favourite song and we’ll play ‘em live for you. So I think we were gonna have a comeback, but we were definitely on a downhill thing when Georgie stopped writing words for us.”

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Self-Referenced

“This guy called [Ethan] James – who ended up recording Double Nickels – put out a compilation. He says, “you give me your song, and I’ll let you record one song for free”. What we do is put three songs together, so we got three songs out of it [laughs]. And there’s a song on there called Self-Referenced, that I wrote, and it’s just trippy the dynamic – the thing about getting louder. It’s where I figure out getting soft – getting soft is actually louder than getting loud. If you bring it right down it’s called decrescendo, it’s been around for a few hundred years [laughs], but for me for a while it was new. And D. Boon liked it – how do you get louder if you’re already loud? But if you bring it down, it sucks the thing out of the room – it’s a real dynamic thing. Of course it’s coming from gigs, it’s not really a studio thing, it’s from playing in front of people. So I thought here I made kind of a musical progress, this thing of dynamics. I like it because it was important in my journey.”

Fanatics

“I read something about these hangings in Turkey, by the government, a left-wing guy and a right-wing guy at the same time. And I gave D. Boon the words and D. Boon – ‘I’m not going to play guitar’ – he would just dance and sing this song. So on the record, you’re going to hear just bass and drums. By the way, I heard about this movement in the 90s, ‘Basses and Drums’. I went up to West Hollywood, the Viper Room, to see, and it was just two guys with sweaters playing machines – it was not a bass player and drummer, it was a form of fast dance music [drum’n’bass]. [Laughing] Mike Watt gets fooled again! But Fanatics is such a trippy song ‘cause D. Boon decides ‘I’m not gonna play guitar’ – this whole thing about the [band] hierarchy, D. Boon was really in charge of it. That was the political thing about the Minutemen – the lyrics he was was thinking out loud, and the way the band was structured – he didn’t want the guitar dominating. So he dances and sings the song – which is a very serious song, it’s literally talking about reading from the newspaper. So it’s like… what the fuck?!”

History Lesson (Parts I and II)

“D. Boon wrote a song called History Lesson – history is us just being idiots to each other, in the name of whatever. Well, I make a response to that – and the hardcore scene in the same way. In those days, five years was a big gap, so people like TSOL happen, and the people are writing into Flipside Fanzine like – ‘No! That’s art-rock! The real punk is this!’ So I take both subjects – D. Boon and History Lesson I, and I wrote a response using Velvet Underground Here She Comes Now – I’m not a big guitar man, okay, the strings are too little, I can’t hold it – but it’s called History Lesson Part II, and I talk about me and D. Boon making a band. And then I’m Joe Strummer, and Richard Hell, and John Doe, because I’m play-acting – I’m doing Cosplay! And it’s not about you being better than someone else just because they write different songs or wear some different kinds of make up, or ‘he’s a jock’ – I remember seeing TSOL, and these big strong guys, like – ‘why are you in the scene?! You’re not a misfit!’ Yeah – there’s different ways to be a misfit. There’s not one way of looking like a vampire in Hollywood, or corndogs in Pedro; there’s all kinds of ways of not fitting in. I know this sounds simple, but it’s profound when you’re younger and you have paradigms and stereotypes shoved on you. So I wrote History Lesson Part II in response to History Lesson Part I, those songs go together, though they’re not on the same records.”

Cohesion & June 16th

“The big joke? We make a double album because the Hüskers do. We had one album done, they came into town with Zen Arcade, and we were like, ‘Fuck! We should do that!’ but we had no concept to unify them, so we made up stuff. One of ‘em was, ‘Sammy Hagar can’t drive 55’, so we said ‘Oh, well we’ll drive 55, because he makes safe music, but we’ll make crazy music’ – double nickels on the dime means driving 55… Nobody ever got the joke! Another one – like Ummagumma, the Pink Floyd record, where they each have a quarter of a side, we all have a solo song. Boon’s song for that record is called Cohesion – he plays by himself, Spanish guitar, it’s actually a kind of a Flamenco song, and I love it – but the band’s not on there! I love that song in the context of the Minutemen, it’s like – ‘What?!’ But this is what it’s like if [D. Boon] doesn’t have his band – I know what he’s trying to say. D. Boon was a very deep guy. The thing about Double Nickels On The Dime, and all my songs – I’d just finished reading Ulysses by James Joyce, which happens on June 16, that book’s all one day. And so [June 16th]’s an instrumental on that record, but it’s also Raymond Pettibon [SST Records artist responsible for Black Flag’s bars logo]’s birthday – June 16. So I really like that song – there’s no words, we’re using notes to talk, and that’s my version of Cohesion.”

You Need The Glory

“Minutemen are kinda existential for me. The songs tell stories to me, it’s weird for one of them to be higher than others. They all got fuckin’ stories – it’s like taking one colour out of a rainbow. But… Double Nickels On The Dime – it had 45 songs. How do you put 45 songs in order?! Well, in those days, it was vinyl, so I gave each dude a side, and I thought, ‘we each pick ‘em’, sort of like we’re doing now. So we drew straws, Georgie got first pick. Remember the joke, with Ummagumma, everyone had a solo song? He picks his solo song [to go first]! It’s whistling, playing oil cans – it’s so bizarre. It’s sort of on the level of Cohesion and June 16^th, it’s like not using lyrics to talk.”

We Jam Econo: The Story Of The Minutemen is available on DVD.

Punk rock, of course, was never meant to form empires. As timely, influential and brilliant as counterculture albums like American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown were – with their multi-part rock operatics about war, religion and big pharma, and their 20 million combined sales – they turned Green Day into a ballooning brand to rival any trainer-flogging rap mogul. Broadway and film musicals, a triple-album release they called “prolific for the sake of it” over the course of 2012… it’s to their credit they didn’t release a fragrance called Molotov.

It’s refreshing, then, to find them returning to the snappy single-album format for a 12th release ‘make under’, even though Revolution Radio feels like the sort of water-treader that suggests emo punk exhausted its potential for innovation when American Idiot started taking cues from The Who.

Its style remains glammy punk pop, now with occasional nods to Muse and 5 Seconds Of Summer, and its issues remain pertinent but predictable: mass shootings inspired by violent internet videos (single Bang Bang), the rebel-numbing effect of social media (the title track and Somewhere Now) and odes to horny, hedonistic youth (Youngblood, Too Dumb To Die, Outlaws).

The engrossing full-album reprise Forever Now gives an insight into frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s booze and pills-induced 2012 meltdown, but otherwise Revolution Radio is more melodic air-punching about guns, gas and the American nightmare. File under: Ain’t Broke.

“When I was growing up and getting into music, Nirvana were a huge influence on me.

“Their debut album Bleach was the first record of theirs I’d heard and I remember thinking it all sounded so unbelievably violent. It’s not really, though. They’re all sort of pop songs, in a way. That was the way Kurt Cobain wrote songs, they all had this real pop sensibility to them. His songwriting was incredibly special, but, because of the way the guitars and the drums were, it’s a hard listen. It’s a fucking tough pill to swallow, but it’s all there.

“Just look at their back catalogue and the amount of work they did in such a short period of time. Every record they made is a classic for a different reason.

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“I have a lot of favourite Nirvana songs. I think my favourite is probably Heart-Shaped Box, but then if you asked me tomorrow it would probably be different. Right now, that song’s jumping out at me. It’s a painful listen. But their record that really changed my life, truly, was their MTV Unplugged album. It introduced a lot of music to me at an age where I didn’t feel very open to listening to new music. But in that record he covered Meat Puppets, Lead Belly and David Bowie. They really went to town during that performance, and through that record, I discovered so many artists that eventually became incredibly important to me. I’d often sing the Nirvana cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Lead Belly – the original’s called Black Girl – to my daughter to help her go to sleep. That and Blackbird by The Beatles send her off real quick.

“Every time I go on stage I want to play Smells Like Teen Spirit, but I can’t. Gallows used to play Nirvana songs in practice quite a lot because I’d sort of insist on it. I never liked going to practice, so when I did go, I’d insist on playing songs I wanted to hear, rather than ones we needed to practice. Pure Love even played some Nirvana songs. When we get our new record Modern Ruin out next year, I think we’ll have a bit more room in the setlist to explore some stuff. I think that’s the time we’ll start to break out some more covers!

“I watched Montage Of Heck not long ago, and it really changed the way I thought about them and about him as a person. With Nirvana, there was something so magical, so violent, and narcissistic about them in a lot of ways. Kurt was pouring himself out in a way that he really wasn’t comfortable with, but it was the only way he knew how. They were a phenomenal band and all incredible musicians, but Kurt definitely left us way too soon.

“Nirvana made me want to pick up a microphone and scream my guts out for a living. I feel really lucky that I can do that and this is my job. But it doesn’t feel like a job; it feels like a fucking dream every day.”

Frank Carter and The Rattlesnakes are on tour now. Modern Ruin will be released in January through International Death Cult.

Frank Carter Goes Back To His Hardcore Roots

Nirvana Quiz

The Misfits frontman Glenn Danzig has always been a target of some light-hearted piss-taking, especially from the UK press. He was once nicknamed Fonzig and the label sort of stuck. That’s not to say that he’s not without a sense of humour; he played a beach-loving goth in the US comedy series Portlandia and voiced his grumpy likeness in the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

But when it comes to memes, the Internet has outdone itself. Look at these gems…

Dancing With The Stars is basically the US version of Strictly Come Dancing. Neither audience will ever get to enjoy the sight of the Misfits man do the hustle or even an impassioned Argentine tango. He’s too busy crooning about teenagers from Mars or astro zombies at the moment.

Aw, he’s wearing a tiny tuxedo. If you squint, Danzig looks a bit like Tattoo from Fantasy Island. As far as we know, the late Hervé Villechaize never fronted the Misfits.

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“We swim the seas at night, we go where clownfish dare…”

Even rock stars have to buy cat litter while wearing one of their own band t-shirts. The Internet wasn’t so forgiving though.

Before the Misfits, Danzig was just plain ol’ Glenn Anzalone from New Jersey: ‘You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life…’ You’re imagining what he’d look like mid-jive now, aren’t you? Majestic is the word.

Just relax, stare at the grid and let your eyes flit around. After a minute, it becomes impossible to tell Danzig and the Alien star apart. They’re definitely two separate people, but your mind can play tricks. Thanks, mind.

Don’t utter a single word.

Life would be very different if the Birmingham new wave band were comprised solely of Glenn Danzig. We’d like to hear Hungry Like The Killer Wolf, though.

A couple of forays into Hollywood history now. First up, some genius has imagined what it would be like if Danzig replaced Kevin Costner as the leading man in the overlong 1990 Western Dancing With Wolves. Come to think of it, it’s easy to imagine him wandering around a remote Civil War outpost and shouting at passing wolves.

And finally, nobody puts Danzig in the corner. Apart from that bloke from North Side Kings who gave him a cuffing in 2004.

The first album I ever bought with my own money was Dig That Groove Baby by the Toy Dolls. I went to this independent record store and I loved punk rock; I’m from Orange County, California, so punk rock was really big back then. I think I saw some sort of video footage of Olga [Michael Algar], the singer, and he was just this really lanky, skinny guy – he was almost like a cartoon character, and I just thought he was so interesting and cool.

So I bought the record. I loved the record. I could tell you the exact track listing of that record, I’ve listened to it that much! Spiders in the Dressing Room, Dig That Groove Baby, Nellie the Elephant… they have a lot of great songs. They also did a live version of Wipeout as a single, and that was great.

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I was a little skateboarder, surfer kid, so I skated down to the record store, bought the record, took the record home and went straight to my bedroom, put it on and sat down with the lyrics. I was always really into lyrics, so I’d sit and listen to the entire record, just reading along with the songs and that was a really big deal for me.

What I really loved about The Toy Dolls and all those independent records was that they were super honest. They didn’t have major labels telling them what they could say and regulating what they put out. They put out what they wanted to put out, because they were indie.

Obviously, the record doesn’t resonate with me in the same way it did when I was a kid, because I’ve matured and grown and got into all other genres of music. But I can put Dig That Groove Baby on and it’ll take me back there and it reminds me of why I got into it in the first place, along with the rest of my punk rock collection like The Replacements, Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, GBH and bands like that.

Buckcherry have set up a Pledge Music campaign to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their album 15 with a vinyl and CD reissue. The band are on tour now.

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“I always said when I was little that my two favourite bands were Sex Pistols and Parliament. People might say they’re completely different, but they both had that ‘fuck you, we’re gonna do what we want’ kind of attitude.

“There was an amazing amount of honesty I found in the Sex Pistols. There was a radio station I used to listen to and at midnight they’d play all the good stuff that I didn’t know was called punk rock at the time. I liked the music before I even knew what it was, and I thought Johnny Rotten was an amazingly witty and intelligent person. He led so many close-minded people in for the slaughter thinking they could have a shot at him, but they had no idea what was going on. It was absolutely brilliant. Obviously it was more of an English thing than over here, but I was really appreciative of the way he went about it.”

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“I think of lot of punk rockers just went for shock value, but it wasn’t shock with Johnny, it was awe. There was substance there. If it wasn’t for John Lydon, the Sex Pistols wouldn’t have the legacy that they do. They wouldn’t have had the influence they did. It took somebody to be incredibly brilliant on so many levels, and to come off as brilliant. He was on a lot of different levels with the way that he did things. He knew what people wanted – the presentation they wanted, the result they wanted, and he wasn’t going to let them get it. And that sums up punk rock to me. He wasn’t a circus act, he was the spokesperson that was needed.

“He used to live in Venice and every time that I’ve been semi-close I kept my distance. He probably wouldn’t like it because people used to spray paint Suicidal on his house! I think it would be a situation where I tell him he’s brilliant and he’ll say something that I absolutely don’t deserve. I could tell him all the reasons why I admire him but I don’t really think he gives a damn, and that’s why I like him.”

Suicidal Tendencies’ new album World Gone Mad is out on September 30 through Suicidal Records. Mike Muir was speaking to Luke Morton.

Sex Pistols Quiz: Never Mind The Bollocks...Here's The Sex Pistols

The band that changed my life is Rancid. When we were kids, we weren’t really allowed to listen to anything other than golden oldies. Our parents were afraid that we would become devil worshippers or something. But when Let’s Go came out, my older brother [Josh] bought the album on cassette. I must’ve been around 14 at the time and I’d never heard anything like it before.

I remember him telling me, “They’re from the East Bay and their singer is called Lint – he used to be Operation Ivy and they were legendary. Then they started this band.” He was that older brother – a music historian!

There was no internet back then and we lived in a really small country town, so if we ever got hold of a Rolling Stone magazine or anything like that, then we read it until it was wrinkled. We’d fight over it and rip out the pictures to keep. After I saw Tim [Armstrong] for the first time, I started putting pins in the sides of my pants and using dental floss to sew patches onto my jacket. Rancid showed me that you didn’t need money to look cool.

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After that, I started going to shows. The punk shows were always where we had the most fun. That was when we first met Rancid. We were kids. We met Tim and Lars [Frederiksen] and gave them our tape. Tim actually called me the next day and told me that he liked it. Later, when we got signed, we saw them in Boston when we were on our very first tour for the first Good Charlotte record. They remembered meeting us and they invited us to come and watch them play the venue next door. They even gave us a shout out on stage. They said, “This is for our boys Good Charlotte who just played next door!”

Now, I remember being a part of Rancid’s fan base before our band got signed; they were very passionate and they all stuck together. So when you got the nod from the guys in Rancid – particularly at that time back in the late ‘90s – it was a big deal. They were the guys that stood next to us in the early 2000s when we started getting a lot of shit from punk bands. They put their arms around us the whole time.

The summer after our first record Good Charlotte came out in 2000, we went out on Warped Tour. Rancid invited me to come on stage with them and play Olympia, WA. I didn’t want to because I was afraid or whatever, but Tim and Lars said, “You need to be on stage with us.” So I got up and played with them every day and Lars tattooed me as well! They really were like big brothers to us. We have a lot of good memories from that time and we’re still close friends to this day.

I actually had coffee with Tim not too long ago when we were both back in LA; we talked about those times and how long we’ve known each other. It’s been 20 years since I met them as a fan until now. Those guys have played such an important role in the music I love and how I dress. And the one thing that I think Rancid do so well is their classic approach to songwriting; they write great songs with great melodies and Tim’s delivery is one-of-a-kind. That’s something that we learned from them.

Their lyrics deal with poverty a lot. That really spoke to us as kids because that was a big part of our lives growing up. They made us feel like we weren’t alone. So we wanted to talk about hard times and coming from nothing because we felt it might help a handful of kids get through the day. Tim was always told stories in a very real way and that was a huge influence on us as well.

If I had to choose a band that’s influenced our aesthetic, our work ethic and the way we learned about the world, then it would definitely be Rancid. They’re the band that we look up to the most.

Good Charlotte’s new album Youth Authority is out now through MDDN. The band’s North American tour begins next month.

Benji was speaking to Matt Stocks.

Ruts DC have teamed up with Henry Rollins for the title track of their forthcoming album, Music Must Destroy.

On July 16, 2007, Ruts DC played for the first time in 27 years to benefit their late guitarist Paul Fox, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Rollins, already a massive Ruts fan, filled the late Malcolm Owens’ shoes at the now legendary London Islington Academy show.

Earlier this year, the band released their single Psychic Attack while they worked on new full-length album. The single Music Must Destroy is out today and features their one-time guest vocalist. Ruts DC are very much back.

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“This is a song about having a choice – reclaiming the often misunderstood ‘punk’ word destroy and taking it to mean breaking down what is wrong with this society,” says Ruts DC bassist Segs. “The chorus came in a dream and the verse just came out in front of the microphone when we recorded it. I guess we can only hope that it’s message will have a positive effect on those that listen. To me, it seems divine. It’s sublime and it’s of this time.”

“It is a great honour to not only be a part of the new Ruts DC album but also in the video for Music Must Destroy, growling away with my worthy constituent, Mr. Segs!” adds Rollins.

Check out the video below.

Ruts DC’s new album Music Must Destroy will be available on September 16 through Westworld/Sosumi Recordings. You can get it on CD, vinyl or from iTunes.

The band will play a special album release show in London at Camden’s Underworld that night.

Lou Koller has spent the last 30 years fronting New York hardcore heroes Sick Of It All. The band will release their twelfth studio album When The Smoke Clears in November.

You don’t tour the world for three decades without learning something along the way…

“Hardcore is a double-edged sword. It’s the same for anyone who loves something. There are so many aspects of it that I love and that I cherish, but there are also so many parts of it that I fucking hate and despise. For the loving aspect it’s the family part, which is still true. And it’s not like in those cheesy hardcore songs that are about ‘the crew’; it’s more ‘if you need something then I got you’. When we tour we meet people all over the world that are willing to help out and give up their time to take us somewhere or put us up for the night. The best example that I saw is when the guitarist from Bad Brains, Dr. Know, had a heart attack and got a huge amount of medical bills, and a bunch of the guys in the hardcore scene decided to do a benefit for him. But he didn’t want a traditional benefit so they played a free show in Tompkins Square Park, which is downtown in the Lower East Side of New York where it all started for us, and they told people if they wanted to donate, then they could. They got all the permits and everything and over 2,000 people showed up. It was a fucking great day: the bands were amazing, there were no fights or anything like that, and at that free show they raised over $25,000. That’s family. I saw people at that show that I hadn’t seen in 20 years and they came out just because they heard it was for Gary’s benefit. It was great.”

“One of my biggest pet peeves in hardcore is the generational divide. I can go to other shows in other genres and people will say, ‘You gotta see ‘so-and-so’. They were the originators of this style.’ And people go to see it. When we were young we’d go to shows and people would tell us we had to go and see the Zero Boys because they were the originators, and we’d go check it out. Nowadays, kids just want to be into hardcore for a few years and then they move onto something else. That’s weird to me, because the band that they love probably sounds exactly like Madball, and Madball have been touring for years and they fucking kill it live. But all the Madball clones that came after them outdraw them. Those bands will even play with them and they’ll be on stage saying, ‘We got everything from Madball. It’s such an honour to be playing with them. You guys have to watch them, it’s gonna be fucking awesome.’ Then they finish and all the young kids leave. That’s fucked up. But it’s a different world now. For us it was a salvation. I liked metal and I had fun at metal shows, but I never really felt like I belonged. I just can’t get that generational aspect to hardcore nowadays. I hate saying it because they’re friends of mine, but when the era of Snapcase, Strife and Earth Crisis came they would all name check Sepultura and Slayer as their influences. Now they’re both great bands, but what about Minor Threat and Reagan Youth? Then you get further down the road and ask newer bands who their influences are, and they all say Pantera. Again, great band, but you’re a hardcore band – what about the Dead Kennedys? It’s fucked up.”

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“Touring is a lot of fun but it’s also a lot of hard work. I always think of that line from the Dire Straits song where they say, ‘That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it / Money for nothin’ and chicks for free.’ When I see my friends after I get back from tour and I tell them I’m tired they always go, ‘Oh yeah, I bet you’re really tired. You’ve just been partying non-stop.’ I’m like, ‘No, man. Touring is hard fucking work.’ It’s long hours of driving on no sleep and working to different schedules every day. I have friends who wake up at 6am, go to work and are back home by 5pm, then they clock off. With us it could be we play a festival in Spain and we go on at 2am, then the next day we play at a festival in Belgium and we go on at 3pm. So when do you sleep, eat, warm your voice up or stretch before you go on? I know that sounds petty and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but that’s part of it and it can be gruelling. But I still love it. I love it so much. When I had my daughter I was scared that I was going to start to hate touring. I remember this one hardcore band was up-and-coming, everybody loved them, and they were on the cusp of breaking big in the hardcore world, but their singer moved in with his girlfriend and he was like, ‘I can’t go away anymore. I want to get a regular job and stay at home.’ And he did; the band just ended. So I was worried about that happening to me. But I can’t stop touring because a) it’s where I make my living and b) I love it too much. It’s always hard to leave, and it’s even harder now my daughter is six and she’s more aware of it. She cries her eyes out before I tuck her into bed the night before I leave, but I have to explain to her that when I’m back from tour I’m home ²⁴⁄₇ and we can hang out together for a whole month without me having to go to work. Then what happens is my wife complains that she doesn’t get to hang out with her daughter as much as me because she works her ass off when I’m home. So I can’t win!”

“My family are my backbone. They’re there for me when I’m up and they’re there for me when I’m down. It’s stabilised so many things in my life and made me focus on continuing with the band, because now I have people that depend on me. I don’t think there’s a bad aspect to family life, except for the feeling that you get when you have to leave to go away on tour. But the way we travel we get to bring our families out with us sometimes and that’s great; last summer I took my wife and daughter to three of the festivals that we did and they loved it.”

“Human beings need that connection with one another. People need to be open and communicate with each other.I don’t think a lot of people realise what a dark and heavy album Scratch The Surface was for us to make. Then two years later we released Built to Last, which was still heavy but had a much more positive sound and feel. The whole reason for that was we’d toured for two years straight on Scratch The Surface and we were in situations all over the world where fans who became friends went to bat for us. I remember we played a show in Argentina and the promoter was ripping us off, and some fucking kids came and stood up and fought for us. That happened all over the world, and that’s why Built to Last was so much more positive. That’s the beauty of travelling the world in a band; you make these lasting ties with people. We played Indonesia once and now I have friends for life that come to the US and I take them out and we hang out together. Anybody can travel the world, but it’s very rare that you lock into people like that. Being in a band makes it easy to travel and make friends all over the world, and I’m very grateful for that.”

“Nobody would want to read a Sick Of It All book. We don’t really party or go crazy on tour. I stopped doing all that before I was even in the band. I’d just turned 18 when the band started and by that time I could legally drink in New York – back then. After that, it was no longer fun anymore. I was more into the illegal aspect of drinking underage. I also don’t have an addictive personality. The first time we went on tour with D.R.I. was the first time I experienced girls who would come to the show and have sex with you just because you were in the band. I was watching D.R.I. – not to be rude, but they’re not the most handsome men on earth – hook up with all these beautiful girls and I couldn’t believe it was happening. But that’s never been on our agenda; none of us are into drink or drugs or groupies. Armand [Mijidi] is a big beer snob and he drinks expensive beer everyday, but never before a show and he’s never played drunk. I did play a show on really strong painkillers once, and Armand and our roadie Mike said it was the funniest show I ever did and that I should play like that every night. They wanted me to become addicted to painkillers! Thanks a lot, guys.”

“I’m not bragging when I say this, but I think Sick Of It All have solidified the fact that we’re a great live band. I’ve heard a lot of people say that. It kind of sucks, but it’s also kind of a badge of honour that there are so many bands – even bands that we’re friends with – that would have us removed from shows because we were supposed to go on before them and they were afraid that we were going to show them up. Just because of the way we are on stage, bands were afraid to go on after us and that really sucks. But it’s also kind of a cool badge of honour, too. I think that’s going to be Sick Of It All’s legacy, that we’ve always held onto what we thought were the ethics of hardcore, and always remained a thorn in the side of the establishment.”

Sick Of It All will release their new album When The Smoke Clears on November 4 through Century Media records.

Black Flag was huge for me. When I was getting into my adolescent years I had all these raging emotions that a lot of young boys have, especially boys that come from broken homes and crazy family stuff, and I’d already heard punk. I’d heard the Sex Pistols and stuff like that and it was cool. It was pretty fucking vicious – no pun intended. But what I heard in my head was even more extreme.

When Black Flag came along I was like, ‘This is it. This is exactly what the doctor ordered.’ That unhinged guitar playing that Greg Ginn was doing was amazing. As a fan of Hendrix and avant-garde jazz, he was right there at the centre of all of that and he embraced all of it in his playing. I could tell that what he was doing was deliberate, too. It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh this guy can’t play.’ It was discipline. Later on, I got to know Greg Ginn and it was all confirmed for me. He was like, ‘This is method.’

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I went to see the Decline of Western Civilization at the theatre when it was first released. I begged my grandfather to take me and finally he did. He sat through the whole thing and I can’t imagine what he must have thought, but Black Flag were the first band on and getting to see their energy and what they look like was such an eye-opener for me. And having the Damaged album come into my orbit right after that was unbelievable: I was like, ‘Oh my god. OK.’

So Black Flag were definitely the band, and Damaged was the album, that made me realise I could do it myself. Everybody has that band, and for a lot of people it was the Ramones, but for me it was Black Flag.

Right after that my family moved to Atlanta and I had to figure out a way of doing what those early punk bands were doing in that town. I’d just left DC, which had one of the most vibrant scenes ever, but I just found out about it as we were leaving so I didn’t get to immerse myself in it. In Atlanta there was nothing going on like that at all, but the beauty of that was that my friends and I had to create it. Black Flag was the catalyst for a lot of that.

Getting to know your heroes was the beauty of that scene as well. It was so small back then – I’m talking ‘82/’83 – that you got to know everyone that was on your favourite record because they were most likely going to be crashing on your floor when they came through town. And if you wound up in their town at some point you were probably going to crash on their floor, or whoever they could hook you up with. It was that intimate. Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat and everybody in that scene became my friends, and they were all people that we called on when we needed something. It was a beautiful thing, man.

I can’t think of another time when kids seized the means of production like that. I’m talking about 15 year old kids who were like, ‘We’re gonna book studio time. We’re gonna make a record. We’re gonna call the pressing plant. We’re gonna press up 1,000 of these 45s and we’re gonna sell them through mail order right out of our bedrooms, and then we’re gonna go out on tour.’ It didn’t matter that you were 15 and you couldn’t drive. That’s what my first band Neon Christ did – our drummer Jimmy Demer was 14 when he booked our first tour and neither of us could legally drive so we got some friends of our singer to help out with the driving and we went and did this whole east coast tour. That wasn’t the norm for most kids back then. Now it’s more part of the cultural firmament, and it was really great to be at the ground floor of that. We learned from the best, man – Black Flag.

William was speaking to Matt Stocks. Giraffe Tongue Orchestra’s Broken Lines will be released on September 23 through Party Smasher Inc.

It’s really happening. The original Misfits will reunite at Denver’s Riot Fest this weekend! Vocalist Glenn Danzig and bassist Jerry Only have resolved their differences, Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein’s back on guitar and they’ve roped in ex-Slayer drumming demigod Dave Lombardo, too. While we could ruminate over their perfect setlist, here’s 10 banging tracks that the horror punk legends will most likely omit from their comeback extravaganza…

10. Cough/Cool (1977)

Culled from the band’s early sessions and serving as their first official single, Cough/Cool has more in common with New York’s artsy, keyboard-driven beatnik scene than it does B-movies and shouting “woah-oah-oah!” with your mates. It’s gritty and, dare we say, urban. Still, even back then, Danzig’s hooks were undeniable; imagine screaming along as Evil Elvis snarls, “Cover your face when you walk by!” before going absolutely mental to the frenetic keyboard outro then – BANG! – something like Death Comes Ripping arrives.

9. Dig Up Her Bones (1997)

The Michale Graves records had some great moments. No, really, they did. American Psycho, in particular, still kicked you in the arse with a pair of Dr. Martens. Just with, well, metal toe caps. Heavy metal toe caps. Graves’ silky drawl in the verses could easily be matched – and even bettered – by a rabid Danzig if he decided to turn up and own it. And Christ, the image of Only, Danzig and Doyle shouting, in unison, “Point me to the sky above!” is tantamount to winning the lottery and getting through an entire season of Game Of Thrones without spoilers.

8. Dr. Phibes Rises Again (2001)

All right, they’re never gonna play this one – it’s nearly seven minutes long and the Misfits are only doing 75 minutes on Sunday, so classics must be given priority. Still, the muscular, metaller-than-thou riffing of Dr. Phibes Rises Again would be an intense opener. Lombardo counting everyone in on the cymbals. Jerry and Doyle thrashing away, Jerry handling vocals seeing as, well, he’s done it for the past decade or so; allowing him this would get it out of his system. And then, as the poignant line “Rises again!” rings out… Darkness. Danzig. Skulls or Halloween or something equally amazing to follow.

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7. Vivid Red (2011)

This second cut from The Devil’s Rain doesn’t suck at all, it’s just… it’d be so much better with Danzig tearing through it and not sounding like Pat Boone. We love Jerry, bless him, but when he sings “The horrors that I see, the Hell that surrounds me”, he’s just delivering words from a page. Danzig could take this devilish ditty and give it some (fuckin’) attitude, leaving Jerry and Doyle to shout “VIVID RED!” for two minutes.

6. The Forbidden Zone (1999)

Graves’ second outing with the band, Famous Monsters, wasn’t as rough and ready as American Psycho, nor was its quality anywhere near as high. It did, however, boast a few absolute bangers, The Forbidden Zone being one of them. Its chorus’ vocal harmonies are to (un)die for, and it’d be an absolute treat to hear Only and Danzig tackle them live. Then again, it might sound shite, but if they nailed that “All the evidence destroyed” part, it’d be unadulterated black magic.

5. She (1978)

The B-side to Cough/Cool’s single back in 1977, She was originally devoid of guitar. Thankfully, the boys beefed it up a year later, leading to the version you probably know and love from 1986’s Collection I. Lyrically, it focusses on Patty Hearst’s abduction in 1974; even in their early days, the Misfits were more than just brains for dinner, lunch and any other meal/snack times. Again, it’s just one of those all-time classic Danzig vocal lines that doesn’t rely on gang shouts – She lives and dies with Danzig, and that’s a beautiful thing.

4. Helena (1999)

Going back into Famous Monsters territory now, and with good reason. Helena is an absolute anthem. The dunderheaded, thrashing mid-section; the “Der! Der! Der!” call and response opening riff; the undeniably sick yet foot-tappingly catchy refrain: “If I cut off your arms and I cut off your legs, would you still love me anyway?” Graves’ delivery was sincere but slightly cartoony. Those lines rolling from Danzig’s tongue would ensure complete, utter devotion from the audience. Either way, it’s clear someone’s enjoyed the 1993 film Boxing Helena.

3. Shining (1997)

Here’s round two for American Psycho. We’ve just thrown this one in to see if Danzig can handle the key change in the song’s final chorus. Well, that and the fact that Shining is the rawest, catchiest song the Misfits ever recorded without their original frontman.

2. The Devil’s Rain (2011)

Another one from the Misfits’ latest album, The Devil’s Rain, that was surely conceived with Danzig in mind. “It’s pouring down, it’s come for you. The Devil’s rain!” could have been nicked straight from Danzig’s Deth Red Sabaoth (released a year prior, coincidentally) and honestly, this would be a cracking, atmospheric number with Glenn at the helm. Yes, we know it’s not Astro Zombies, but it’s spooky in its own way.

1. Raining Blood (1986)

They’ve covered everything from Black Flag to The Rocky Horror Picture Show over the course of their career and it’d just be rude not to, right? We just want to see the original line-up. How much are last-minute flights?

Misfits play Riot Fest in Chicago and Denver this month.