sun 27/07/2025

punk

Save The 100 Club!

Musical luminaries including Mick Jagger, Paul Weller, Ray Davies and Liam Gallagher are lending their support to a campaign to save The 100 Club, the historic music venue in London’s Oxford Street. Soaring business rates of £4000 a month and an...

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Bellowhead, Bristol Old Vic

Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an...

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Hot Chip/ LCD Soundsystem, Alexandra Palace

Unlikely cool. It’s what unites LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip. They’re the geeks and outsiders who made it to being hip on the dancefloor. These improbable, subversive electro-pop heroes have united this autumn for what for fans has been a dream...

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Wilko Johnson, O2 Academy Islington

Wilko and Telecaster: ‘A great Wilko riff motors along like a speeding truck over the roughest terrain.'

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an amphetamine-fuelled chicken on rollers? No, it’s the one-time guitarist for Dr Feelgood (during the only period that matters) still doing the moves that made him the main reason to see the band in the mid-1970s...

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Carl Barât, Scala

It is not easy to kickstart a fresh musical career after you've been in a painfully fashionable – and intermittently brilliant – band. It is even harder when this is your second bash at starting out again. And harder still when a couple of months...

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Manu Chao, Coronet Theatre

“It’s not often you get a global superstar down at the Elephant and Castle,” marvelled a local who spent the evening dancing like a dervish to the infectious music of Manu Chao, who had breezed into London for a rare show last night off the back of...

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RIP Ari Up

Ari Up in 2006

Ari Up, frontwoman of The Slits from the age of 14, died yesterday aged 48 after a long illness, it was announced by her stepfather, John Lydon of the Sex Pistols. The brilliant and confrontational female-fronted Slits were one of the finest...

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Jonathan Richman, Amersham Arms

In 1985 I travelled to Madrid to interview Jonathan Richman. Two questions into our perfectly amicable chat, proceedings assumed pear-shaped proportions. The eccentric musician behind the proto-punk hit "Roadrunner" announced that he did not want to...

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The Jim Jones Revue, The Komedia, Brighton

The great music writer Nick Tosches put me onto James Luther Dickinson. In Where Dead Voices Gather, his self-indulgent but fascinating book about the obscure early-20th-century minstrel performer Emmett Miller, Tosches kept touching on Dickinson, a...

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Grinderman, Coronet

A few years ago a friend told me that Brighton resident Nick Cave had been spotted singing "The Wheels on the Bus" at a local nursery. This might have been an apocryphal incident, but it still highlights a predicament of the older rock star. How do...

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Edwyn Collins, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Edwyn Collins: A pop survivor in every sense

Just before Edwyn Collins came on, the throbbing bassline of Chic's "Good Times" rumbled out across the packed South Bank auditorium. As a statement of intent it was pretty clear. Having suffered two debilitating brain haemorrhages followed by a...

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Archaos: Circus From Hell, Bargehouse

Archaos: Fun with motorbikes and chainsaws

Archaos were the mad, bad and dangerous troupe who revolutionised circus back in the Eighties and early Nineties – their antics with juggling chainsaws, raunchy Galllic attitude and mayhem with motorbikes is celebrated with a pop-up exhibition at...

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