Category Archives: Punk

Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor: ‘I wanna punch stuff and yell … but not all the time’

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Having blazed a trail with raucous gigs, the Melbourne punk band’s singer deepens her oft-caricatured image on their new album

There is a moment at the end of Amyl and the Sniffers’ music video for Guided by Angels that sees frontwoman Amy Taylor quiet and alone, for once. After ripping down freeways and tunnels in the back of a Mitsubishi Lancer, her tiny body hanging halfway out of the back window, diving into the sea and dancing between the stationary Sniffers – drummer Bryce Wilson, guitarist Dec Martens and bassist Gus Romer – Taylor walks down a dark footpath, sits in the car’s front seat, laughs briefly and is suddenly still.

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‘We were called heretics and ostracised’: the Stranglers on fights, drugs and finally growing up

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They brawled with the Sex Pistols, gaffer-taped a journalist to the Eiffel Tower and got thrown out of Sweden twice. Now, for their 18th album and final tour, the punks seem to be maturing at last

As Jean-Jacques Burnel drily admits, the Stranglers had “a bad reputation for quite a while”. During the punk years, their many outrages ranged from being escorted out of Sweden by police with machine-guns (twice) to gaffer-taping a music journalist to the Eiffel Tower, 400ft up, upside down, without his trousers. However, the singer and bass player says the biggest outcry actually came when they got themselves a keyboard player.

“It was seen as sacrilege,” he laughs, recalling this supposed affront to the ramshackle garage punk ethos. “And worse than that – he had a synthesiser. We were called heretics and ostracised. Nobody wanted anything to to do with us. But look what happened a couple of years later: synth pop!”

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Big quiffs, zombies and dead crows: the wild world of psychobilly

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The turbocharged twist on rockabilly enraptured 80s punks and rock’n’rollers – and alienated plenty more – with its food fights, ferocious club nights and phantasmagoria

If you wanted to date the moment one of the biggest youth subcultures of 80s Britain arrived, you could pick 40 years ago this month, on 4 July 1981. That night, at the Marquee club in Soho, a few hundred kids gathered to watch a band who were almost singlehandedly kickstarting a new wave of alternative music. Waiting for them to come on, those fans launched into the song that served as their heroes’ unofficial theme, from David Lynch’s Eraserhead. “In heaven, everything is fine,” they sang. “You’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine.” A few months later, that chorus opened, and gave its name to, the first LP by the Meteors. And as their frontman would later claim, “Only the Meteors are pure psychobilly.”

In time, psychobilly – a turbocharged twist on rockabilly, the country-enhanced variant on R&B that prefigured the classic rock’n’roll of the late 50s – would become codified. “My take on it would be a much more aggressive, loud approach to rockabilly that must include a double bass, modern lyrics – no cars, pinups or bubble gum – lots of graveyards, vampires, zombies, horror flick and death-influenced lyrics,” says Mark Harman of Restless, who came through the psychobilly scene in the early 80s. “Anything goes, really. Overdriven guitars and full rock drum kits, big quiffs, weird and wild clothing, makeup and props – blood and skeletons welcome. It should be fast and loud, exciting and fun.”

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Post-punk band Au Pairs: ‘The Thatcher years gave us plenty of material’

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Forty years ago, the Birmingham band released their debut album, and its frank, forthright songs about sex and equality are still pertinent. They explain how music gave their anger a voice

Forty years ago this month, one of the best but often forgotten albums of the 1980s was released: Playing With a Different Sex by Birmingham band Au Pairs. The cover, an Eve Arnold photo showing female militia fighters heading into battle, is a good visual harbinger of the album’s friction-filled songs. Jane Munro’s monster basslines, Pete Hammond’s tight drum rhythms, and the jagged riffs of Lesley Woods and Paul Foad combine to form a tense backdrop for the myriad moods of Woods’ androgynous voice, singing songs that confront conformity and demand equality. “There was just so much to be angry about,” Woods says today. “We were four young people,” Foad adds, “who were pissed off with the political situation of the time.”

Au Pairs formed in Birmingham in 1978. Stewart Lee’s recent documentary King Rocker showcases the scene in the city at the time, with Birmingham’s first punk band the Prefects (later the Nightingales) playing venues like the legendary Barbarella’s, a venue they immortalised in the song of the same name as a place “where the beer tastes of prune juice” and “they sell tickets for the exits”. UB40 and the Beat were also on the same circuit, and Au Pairs, who formed from their city’s Rock Against Racism action group, would often team up with local bands to play gigs for the anti-racist organisation.

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Platinum pop-punks the Offspring: ‘We’re outcasts among outcasts’

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They scored a UK No 1 single and the biggest-selling independent album ever. Thirty-seven years into their career, the California band ponder middle-aged sex – and being denied respect

“It’s very fashionable now to say, ‘When we were young, we didn’t fit in,’” says Dexter Holland, frontman for multi-platinum punk-rockers the Offspring, Zooming from the band’s plush Orange County recording studio. “But it really was true for us in high school, where everything was about looks, athleticism and popularity. I mean, look at us!”

Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman, guitarist and Holland’s long-standing foil, leans in and taps his milk bottle-lensed specs. “And you should have seen me back when I had braces and headgear,” he grins.

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Poly Styrene’s inspiring sensitivity should be the true legacy of punk

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Mixed race, with braces on her teeth, Poly broke the mould of UK punk. A new documentary explores her struggle to find meaning in the Day-Glo chaos of modern life

The moment I heard that Marianne Elliott-Said, AKA Poly Styrene, had died, I was at band practice. We put on X-Ray Spex and jumped around, screaming along to Identity, Oh Bondage Up Yours! and Germ Free Adolescents. On that day in 2011 we lost one of punk’s greatest heroes and one of the few who really looked and sounded like me. She broke the mould of UK punk stereotypes. She was brown, chubby, weirdly dressed and had braces on her teeth. Even in an era when quirky, abrasive style was all the rage, she stood out.

Poly Styrene embraced this. She played with the attention her weirdness attracted, making a cartoon of herself. To be an artist is often to feel like a shiny trinket – hip and trendy one moment and disposable the next – and Poly had a fascination with all things garish and throwaway. She knew that through selling her art, she herself would inevitably become the product. Consumer culture overwhelmed and horrified her at times but she poured those thoughts and feelings into surrealist, confrontational art and music.

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Toyah Willcox: ‘My mother always wanted me altered in some way. I was never right’

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The singer and actor has had a productive pandemic – and gone viral from her kitchen. She talks about escaping her childhood, sexual harassment and persuading her rock star husband to dress in a tutu

Of all the celebrity offerings that have come out of the pandemic, the gloriously weird videos made by Toyah Willcox and her husband, Robert Fripp, are surely the most compelling. It is possible, within each short clip, to cycle through every feeling from wanting to cover your eyes while being unable to look away, to the dawning realisation you may be watching a profound piece of performance art. Mostly, it is impossible not to laugh. There they are in their cosy Worcestershire kitchen, perhaps with the dishwasher open in the background, with Willcox, accessorised with mouse ears, tap-dancing, bouncing off the Aga. Both dressed in black tutus at the end of their garden, the pair dance across the screen to music from Swan Lake. Fripp lies on the floor of the hallway, while Willcox – dressed in red PVC and devil horns – performs the Kinks’ You Really Got Me on the stairs. It’s joyous.

Willcox has been uploading their Sunday Lockdown Lunch videos since April last year; they also do a weekly agony aunt session, and Willcox does her own Q&A, talking about her life and long career as an actor, pop star and general cultural fixture for the past 40 years. It started, she says, as a way to occupy Fripp, the musician and founder of the prog rock band King Crimson. “Here I am in this house with this 74-year-old husband who I really don’t want to live without,” she says. “He was withdrawing, so I thought: ‘I’m going to teach him to dance.’ And it became a challenge.” They posted a video, and it took off. “It was: ‘Wow, I’ve never experienced the power of that connection.’”

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On my radar: Jason Williamson’s cultural highlights

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The Sleaford Mods frontman on a favourite singer-songwriter, a hellish horror film and why he spends seven hours a day on Twitter

Jason Williamson, lead vocalist of English electronic punk music duo Sleaford Mods, was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1970. He moved to Nottingham in 1995, where he began working with rock band Spiritualized and electronic duo Bent. In 2009, he met Andrew Fearn and they released the first Sleaford Mods album, Divide and Exit, in 2014. They have since been called “the voice of Britain” by their fans and “the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band” by Iggy Pop. Their latest album, Spare Ribs, is out now on Rough Trade Records. The band will tour the UK in late 2021.

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Sylvain Sylvain was the visionary eye of the New York Dolls’ storm

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The guitarist who never lost his defiant streak brought solidity and swashbuckling style to one of the 70s’ wildest bands

There is a story that Sylvain Sylvain liked to tell about his arrival in New York City. He was Sylvain Mizrahi then, a seven-year-old Syrian Jew whose family had fled Egypt for the US during the Suez crisis. “I was probably one of the last immigrants to sail into New York harbour to be greeted by the Statue of Liberty,” he recalled. “I would be standing there in my fucking brown shoes and people would say, ‘You speak English?’ I’d say no. They’d say, ‘Fuck you.’ The first words I learned when I got off the boat were ‘fuck you.’”

Related: Sylvain Sylvain, showboating guitarist of New York Dolls, dies aged 69

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Dave Grohl’s teenage obsessions: ‘I learned drums by arranging pillows on my floor’

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Ahead of the 10th Foo Fighters album, their frontman recalls the music and scenes that made him – from punk gigs in Chicago to sleeping on floors in Italian squats

Before I was a teenager, I started playing music in my bedroom by myself. I fell in love with the Beatles, then began to discover classic rock. I went from Kiss to Rush to AC/DC, but in 1983 I discovered punk rock music through a cousin in Chicago. My world turned upside down. My favourite bands were Bad Brains and Naked Raygun; I listened to Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. My introduction to live music came when my brother took me to a punk show in a small bar in Chicago. I didn’t have that festival/stadium/arena rock experience; I just saw four punk rock dudes on the stage, playing this fast three-chord music, with about 75 people in the audience climbing all over each other. It changed my life. One of the most prolific scenes in hardcore American punk rock was in Washington DC, just across the bridge [from Grohl’s home town of Springfield, Virginia]. So I started going to see bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi. By the time I was 14, I was cutting and dyeing my hair and wearing leather jackets. All I wanted to do was leave school, jump in a van and tour shitty basement clubs with my punk band.

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Nick Kent: ‘I was in the right place at the right time, on the wrong drugs’

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The rock critic who revived British music writing at the NME in the 70s is back with his first novel – a caustic tale of rock megalomania

Nick Kent, who is as close as British music journalism ever came to producing a legend, finally stopped writing about rock in 2007. “There was really nothing around that sparked my imagination,” he tells me. “There was no mystery, and rock’n’roll needs mystery.”

So ended a singular odyssey that had begun 35 years earlier, in 1972, when Kent joined a then struggling NME and, within a year or two, had helped push its weekly readership to near the 300,000 mark. Back then, a tall, stick-thin fop in leather trousers, matching biker jacket, a dangling earring and eyeliner, Kent was as sartorially stylish and – to borrow one of his own phrases – as “elegantly wasted” as the dissolute rock stars he profiled. And he walked it like he talked it, hanging out with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, befriending Iggy Pop, stepping out with Chrissie Hynde (briefly a fellow NME writer) and even playing guitar in a very early incarnation of the Sex Pistols.

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Patti Smith: ‘As a writer, you can be a pacifist or a murderer’

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As she prepares to ring in 2021 with a performance on screens at Piccadilly Circus, the punk poet explains why she’s optimistic amid the ‘debris’ of Trump’s years in office

Patti Smith talks about her first poetry performance – in 1971 at St Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery – as if it were yesterday. “I remember everything,” she says over the phone from her home in New York. Smith was in her early 20s, working at a bookshop and living in the Chelsea Hotel with her then lover, the playwright Sam Shepard. She had attended poetry readings before, most of which put her into a deep sleep. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t boring,” she recalls. “Sam said that since I sang to myself all the time, I should try singing a song, or maybe do something with a guitar.” And so she called on the musician Lenny Kaye to provide “interpretative” noises on guitar while she half-read, half-sang her poems.

The show was an instant hit. “It seemed to make a big impression on people – which I really didn’t understand,” she says. The producer Sandy Pearlman approached her afterwards and suggested she front a rock band. She eventually took his advice, making the landmark album Horses in 1975, and an icon of American punk was born.

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Steve McQueen: ‘It’s rebel music that moves me’

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The director on the reggae-fuelled house parties he witnessed as a child - lovingly recreated in his new film, Lovers Rock – and how their raw energy shaped his taste in music

Reggae music is the beating heart of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which traces Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In the 1970s, when the characteristically defiant Bob Marley song that gives the series its title was released, McQueen’s aunt, Molly, used to regularly sneak out of her family house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on weekend nights to go to “blues parties” – all-nighters usually held in someone’s house.

Back then, the blues party was a staple of West Indian immigrant life in England, a makeshift club-cum-shebeen, usually held in someone’s front room or basement, where, as the night progressed, the sweet smell of ganja merged with the lingering aromas of West Indian home cooking. As an escape from her strict, religious upbringing, Molly would dance until dawn to roots reggae, sweet-sounding “lovers rock” and floor-shaking dub instrumentals.

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Joy Division: all of their songs, ranked!

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It’s 40 years since the release of their final album, Closer. From flexidiscs to French magazine giveaways, which tracks match up to the Manchester band’s beautiful, brutal best?

Failures has a very Joy Division title, but the sound is sub-Raw Power-era Stooges. Meanwhile, the fact that Ian Curtis sounds about 13 years old underlines the slightly amateur air. With the best will in the world, you would have needed powers of clairvoyance to work out that its authors would turn out to be epochal.

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Carpe DM: 60 years of the Dr Martens boot – fashion’s subversive smash hit

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The humble eight-holed work boot has won over everyone from postal workers to punks, teens to today’s celebrities and influencers. How did it stride to world dominance?


Tony Benn wore them. So did Agyness Deyn. Suggs loved them, also Kathleen Hanna and Joe Strummer. And Jordan Catalano. Hailey Baldwin, Rihanna and Bella Hadid still do. Once you start looking, Dr Martens are everywhere. Sixty years after launching the eight-hole 1460 boot – on, as the name suggests, the 1 April 1960 – it is an undisputed classic, one of those rare-as-hen’s-teeth designs that is as likely to be spotted in a museum as it is (until recently, of course) on the streets outside. It is up there with Levi’s 501s, the Fred Perry polo shirt, the Converse All Star and the Harrington jacket.

And, like these other items, the 1460 is enjoying a fashion moment beyond its classic status. Perhaps because the past decade has been so turbulent – even before we had a global pandemic to contend with – fashion has returned to the dependable. The Hadids, Baldwin and Kaia Gerber are all endorsing Dr Martens. In other words, as Vogue declared in October, they have become “model off-duty staple”. While the vegan range and patterned designs have been credited with a 70% rise in profit for the brand in 2019, the 1460 remains the bestseller and it is this history that is likely to have attracted rumours in March of a potential £300m sale to a US private equity firm.

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‘A generation that decided to fight’: making music amid chaos in Venezuela

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As they endure a political crisis that has led millions to flee, Venezuela’s musicians are striving to make life worth living

‘Everything here happens at gunpoint,” someone tells me when I arrive in Caracas. Venezuela is in crisis, suffering from a lack of power, water and basic supplies and enduring widespread violence on the streets: the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence estimates that the country has the world’s highest murder rate at 81.4 per 100,000 people. According to the UN, around 4.5 million people have fled since 2015, escaping an economy in a state of hyperinflation and the authoritarian rule of president Nicolás Maduro.

The chaos has intensified recently, as opposition leader Juan Guaidó – recognised as the true president by more than 50 countries – was forced to storm a barricade of riot police to gain access to the country’s national assembly. Donald Trump has now rolled out economic sanctions to try to squeeze Maduro out of power – but they will squeeze an already embattled Venezuelan public, too.

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Andy Gill, influential guitarist with Gang of Four, dies aged 64

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Gill’s guitar sound inspired Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe and Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose debut album he produced

Andy Gill, the guitarist with Gang of Four, whose sound influenced generations of post-punk bands, has died aged 64.

The news was announced by the band on their social media channels on Saturday. No cause of death has yet been announced, but they referred to him as “listening to mixes for the upcoming record, whilst planning the next tour from his hospital bed”.

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Punk persecution: how East Germany cracked down on alternative lifestyles – in pictures

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Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police regarded punks as the most dangerous youth element in the country and ‘the leading force’ behind anti-government activities. These unnamed police mugshots from the former DDR demonstrate the lengths to which the security services would surveil, harass and detain punk ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathisers’.

  • Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr is published by Dialogue Books



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Ex-pastor sentenced to 18 years in child sex abuse case

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A former New Jersey pastor who co-founded a Christian music festival has been sentenced to 18 years in prison in a child sex abuse case. A former New Jersey pastor who co-founded a Christian music festival has been sentenced to 18 years in prison in a child sex abuse case.