fri 25/07/2025

punk

DVD: Pussy Riot - A Punk Prayer

Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as...

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Television, Roundhouse

The expected curveball came an hour in with a completely unfamiliar 14-minute song. Based around a pulsing bass riff, it was a deconstructed merger of The Rolling Stones’s “Paint it Black” and the Spanish side of Love’s Da Capo. A large contingent...

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Public Image Ltd, O2 Academy, Birmingham

Thirty seven years since first breaking into the public consciousness and following a period being regarded as punk’s pantomime dame, John Lydon is now finally reaping wider musical recognition and kudos. Recent times have seen a revitalisation of...

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LFF 2013: We Are the Best!

The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: National Wake, Drugstore

 National Wake: A Walk in Africa 1979–81South Africa’s National Wake would be noteworthy enough even if their music wasn’t. The mixed-race group emerged in 1978 in a country where the establishment and institutions were directly opposed to what...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Nirvana

 Nirvana: In UteroNext April marks 20 years since Kurt Cobain took his own life. Paving the way for that tragic anniversary is a reissue of 1993’s In Utero, the album which unintentionally became the band’s musical epitaph. Their third, it was...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Classroom Projects, Good Vibrations Records, Darrow Fletcher

 Various Artists: Classroom ProjectsIt starts with a plummy voice: “The poems, the words and the music on this record all come from children at primary schools, boys and girls of eight, nine, 10 and 11 years old.” Although the introduction to...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Eddie Noack, The Dictators, The Allman Brothers, Clifton Chenier

Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69Eddie Noack’s 1968 single “Psycho” was virtually unknown until Elvis Costello released his cover version in 1981. By that time, Noack had been dead for three years. After its resurrection...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Frank Turner

In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had...

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10 Questions for Russell Smith of Terminal Cheesecake

In the late Eighties one of the most sonically unhinged bands of all time came together in East London. Terminal Cheesecake caused few commercial waves but gathered a devoted coterie of fans for their unholy racket at pummelling concerts. Their...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Public Image Ltd, Tom Robinson Band, Michael Chapman, Bobby Whitlock

 Public Image Ltd: Public Image – First Issue“I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile, I think he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, that we’re not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours.” This bombshell...

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CD: Benin City - Fires in the Park

This is not an easy record to get a handle on. When I first got it, I bounced through a couple of tracks idly, and it felt like it was coming from the messy genre fusions of the mid-90s – somewhere between trip-hop, indie-dance, rap-rock and mildly...

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