Rebellion Festival 2015

It was the most important weekend of the year for punk rock. This write-up doesn’t include every single band I saw. It’s just a selection of highlights and lowlights.

Day Minus One. Yes, you read that correctly. I’d heard about fringe events happening around Blackpool associated with Rebellion, but never attended one before.

This one, in a pub near the station and completely free, was a chance to see what was dubbed as the Kent Invasion.

The Half-Wits, All Flags Burn and Drop This had all turned up without any other gig commitments in the north west and were desperately pleading with people to buy their merch so they could pay for petrol to get back home to the south east.

Ted Dibiase and the Million Dollar Punk Band and Skaciety were under less pressure as they were booked to play at the main festival.

Due to a scrumpy episode, I can tell you that Ted Dibiase were fantastic and Skaciety played for about three minutes before I decided to throw in the towel and go to bed. The three minutes sounded pretty good from what I remember.

Day One is usually fairly quiet and the new band stage is a great place to start. It’s a chance to see some great up-and-coming bands and also some you wished you’d avoided.

The ball got rolling with the first act at lunchtime. No Cross had travelled from Sunderland. It would be very easy to compare them to another, more famous Sunderland band, Leatherface. So easy, in fact, that I will. They sounded very like Leatherface and I’m not sure how much was influence and how much was theft.

Salem Street sounded too generic. It was as if they’d never listened to punk and bought a book called Punk Rock for Dummies and followed its instruction to the letter.

Mick O’Toole were hipsters. They turned up with their waistcoats, pointy shoes and moustache wax before tearing up and pissing all over the blueprint created by Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly. Absolute twats.

Mutiny turned things around. They were a band of older men and they played stuff which sounded like it was from the old school. They were very well received.

Popes of Chillitown made the room bounce with their energetic ska, while B Movie Britz were another old school band. Their songs were crammed full of riffs that could have been found in GBH or Discharge numbers.

Besserbitch, Pussycat Kill and Hearts Under Fire were all adequate, but not outstanding. All three bands were quite melodic and by being so far up the bill they were able to play to a much bigger audience. The venue was getting quite full.

The one we’d all come to see, at the top of the pile, was Ted Dibiase and the Million Dollar Punk Band. Their act basically relies on the audience believing that they are posh, wealthy criminals. Their music is frankly amazing. It’s full of fast, screaming bits and slower, more melodic bits. The theatre of throwing “money” into the audience, along with “cocaine” and, at one point, a body wrapped in bin bags makes for a good laugh and doesn’t distract from the music. Even when the guitarist puts on a balaclava, grabs what I assume was a replica gun and pretends to rob the bar, the music marches on. This band are destined for bigger things.

Hardcore band, Strike Out, were a pleasant surprise on one of the other stages. Despite looking like American skaters,  even though they’re from Preston, they seem full of promise and could be one to look out for in the future. I bumped into the bassist afterwards and told him I’d enjoyed their set. He looked so chuffed, I thought he might cry.

One of the bands I was most looking forward to was Sick Of It All.

Sick Of It All are never bad. Sick Of It All are usually very good indeed. Tonight Sick Of It All were excellent.

The room opened up into a colossal circle pit pretty much straight away and the band forged through a set of their hits.

Clobbering Time, Scratch The Surface, Death Or Jail, Built To Last, Sanctuary, Call to Arms and Busted were all delivered with precision.

Lou’s on-stage banter was the best I’ve ever seen. “People told us that Blackpool is a shit-hole,” he barked. “Well last night, we sat in the hotel lobby and played bingo with some 60-year-olds. It was the best night on tour ever!”

Sick Of It All belted out a good 20 songs in the 40 minutes they were on stage, but it didn’t feel like enough. They really should have been further up the bill and allowed to play longer.

Even a youth vomiting on the floor, which one man then slipped and fell on, couldn’t spoil the show.

Day Two started with a bang. Darlington’s finest, In Evil Hour, started proceedings in the ballroom. They get better every time I see them (this was the fifth time) and their new material is their strongest yet. The new EP was released today and they sold out of the copies they’d brought with them within minutes.

Dirt Box Disco followed, with their snappy woah-oh and na-na-na singalongs. The venue was pretty much full to capacity and the vocalist needn’t have bothered turning up, as at least 2,000 people sang every single word. They might need to save some of their money in case they ever get sued for ripping off the Hard Rock Café and Carlsberg logos for their t-shirts though.

Bishop Auckland’s Gimp Fist played their last ever show next. Although they did point out “never say never”, which strongly hinted at the fact that it wasn’t their last ever show. Again the crowd helped them sing most of it and it was a little emotional as they left the stage for the “last” time.

The evening was spent milling around and waiting for Sham 69 at 1am - another band I was really looking forward to seeing.

Right before them were The Damned. I never really liked them and I think Captain Sensible is a bit of a prick. They all wore shades indoors too, adding to their overall twatness. However, they were very good. Frontman Dave Vanian (not according to his birth certificate, but Dave Lett doesn’t sound theatrical enough) might think he’s better than everybody else in the whole world, but he and the rest of the band really put in a good performance – good enough for me to rethink my opinion of them.

Sham 69 were a massive let-down. From the start they had sound trouble as feedback squealed out into the room from the guitarist’s amp. They all looked as if they didn’t really want to be there and the songs were performed half-heartedly. I left after 20 minutes and the feedback problem still hadn’t been solved. It was one of the worst sets I’ve seen in my four years of the festival, but with The Damned pleasantly surprising me, it was a decent night.

Day Three was mostly a whirlwind of checking out as much stuff as physically possible whilst waiting for MDC at 1:10 in the morning.

I started the afternoon with the Louise Distras Band. I’d seen and heard her acoustic stuff a few times, but her songs work even better with a full band. There was quite a decent turnout for an early start and she proved that not everything that comes out of Wakefield is shit.

There was time for a bit of loud hardcore, courtesy of Anti System and then on to Goldblade, who managed to make one of their songs nearly fifteen minutes long with pointless audience participation and an over-prolonged ending.

I saw there was a film about Minor Threat in the makeshift cinema, so I went along. Perhaps 20 people were there watching a concert from 1983 that someone had unearthed. The quality was terrible.

MDC were meant to play an acoustic set, but hadn’t turned up. I was concerned for their headline performance before I checked their tour itinerary. The Blackpool show was sandwiched in between one in Brighton and one in Norwich. They simply hadn’t made it all that way by 4:30 on what must be the worst thought-out UK tour any band has ever done.

There were quick peeks of Culture Shock, Hardskin, The Adicts, Barstool Preachers, Resistance 77 and Chaos UK along the way.

An unlikely highlight came in the form of Surfin’ Turnips, a band from the West Country who were a cross between The Ramones and The Wurzels. All of their songs were about cider and they even encouraged a weird sort of maypole dance/circle pit hybrid which had to be seen to be believed.

MDC (Millions of Dead Cops to the uninitiated) came on to the stage at ten past one in a covered car park. It was cold and wet at this point and water was dripping from random points of the ceiling. They tore straight into classic material and allowed a Norwegian to come onstage and propose to his girlfriend. The romance was celebrated by the dedication of Dick For Brains to the happy couple. Five quick songs back-to-back in as many minutes was my personal highlight. The next hour passed all too quickly and they had the plug pulled on them as their last song over-ran the 2am curfew.  I bought an £8 t-shirt before witnessing a drunken man outside singing the chorus of John Wayne Was a Nazi. He’d clearly enjoyed MDC a lot too.

Day Four was here before I knew it and the previous days of standing on a hard floor for hours on end were beginning to take their toll. There were only a handful of bands I was looking forward to and they all delivered the goods.

Random Hand from Keighley are a great skacore band, but referring to their hometown as K-Town does make me dislike them a little. They played to nearly a full house which is quite an achievement for so early in the day.

Too many people left afterwards and missed out on fellow skacorers, Victims of Circumstance. They were way better than the former and even did a good version of a One Direction song – something I would have previously claimed impossible and proof that sometimes turds can be polished

Ignite played to a relatively small crowd for such legends of hardcore. They played some stuff from their upcoming new album, which has taken them something like 9 years to get around to, but it was the songs from Our Darkest Days that were best. A cover of a song by The Business was abandoned after one verse and they admitted they’d never rehearsed it and had attempted to learn it on their bus on the way to the venue. Their version of U2’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday more than made up for it though.

Snuff had the place packed to the gills and rattled through an hour of fan favourites. The banter was good in between songs and they could easily do a five man comedy show instead of actually playing. Arsehole and covers of the old cricket music and the theme from The Likely Lads were the highlights.

Citizen Fish rounded off my weekend and were the day’s best band by miles. Playing in the car park venue, it didn’t stay cold for long as people bounced around to an hour of social commentary and ska.

And that was it for this year. The most important lessons I learned are to never drink scrumpy again and not to stay in a hotel in the same area next time. Apparently some of the disturbance that hindered my sleep on one of the nights was due to some stag do twat tearing a sink off the wall and throwing it, and pretty much everything else in his room, out of the window. And they say punks are troublemakers?