1979
Of all the crimes committed in the name of music, few deserve a capital sentence more than this 1979 performance by Punishment Of Luxury. As you would expect from a group who had the truly terrible idea of marrying punk to its polar opposite, prog.
Two members of The Blockheads were responsible for the biggest gaffe of my entire career at Dury’s funeral in April 2000. Well, them…. and me.
In that early post-punk universe of new sounds and new ideas, Bela Lugosi’s Dead was an important landmark. The nine-minute single was the first recording Bauhaus ever made – as a demo – just six weeks after forming in Northampton in 1978.
Of the three or four times I saw Joy Division, oddly the occasion I remember most is the time I didn’t. Because I couldn’t get in.
The Glaxo Babies may be the most underrated band of the immediate post-punk era; or all time. They certainly deserve to be celebrated in the pantheon of Bristol bands alongside The Pop Group, Portishead and Massive Attack.
I don’t normally go for novelty songs because they quickly get on your nerves even when they’re not awful in the first place. In this case that’s true of the former but not the latter; probably because it was on Stiff Records.
In the summer of ’77 Skids formed in Dunfermline, which is in Scotland and not to be confused with Dumbarton.
Does anyone remember The Freeze? Probably not unless you were living in Scotland in the early days of punk.
Here’s another of those great first-wave postpunk bands from Edinburgh. I’ve still got their debut single, Horrorshow, and their only album, Author! Author!
Flowers were another of the Scottish postpunk bands that blossomed briefly, recording only 11 songs over the course of their short career.