Best of the Fest

The yearly punk festival in Blackpool has a tendency to come around quickly, although this could in part be to do with the fact that I’m not getting any younger and the hands of a clock now seem to spin faster than the dials on an Npower customer’s electricity meter.

Having only done one day of the weekend last year, I was looking forward to seeing how much of the four days I could manage this time. Mark was the only one of the usual crew who was coming for the full duration, so I would have some company for the usual game of Punk Rock Bingo. With only six bands that I was particularly bothered about seeing all weekend, my fingers were well and truly crossed for some new discoveries.

Thursday didn’t disappoint on that front.

I started with the Scumbrians, they’re from Cumbria and...oh, you probably get it. The band are staying in the same hotel as me and I’d sort of promised them I’d go and watch them. Although they were that drunk when I said it that they probably wouldn’t have remembered. They were pretty decent though.

They were followed by Face Up! – yes the exclamation mark is part of their name – a female-fronted hardcore band. Certainly a band for blowing the cobwebs away at the start of the day. Old (er than me) guys The Eddies were next and then it was horror-themed and possibly slightly Misfits-esque Headstone Horrors. It was so hot in the venue, it’s amazing their Jack Skellington facepaint didn’t just run clean off.

The Svetlanas were next. A curious band as only one of the four is a woman and I don’t know if her name is Svetlana. They’re a kind of Russian mix of metal, punk, hardcore and general shouty rage. Recommended.

I took a short break for food and fresh air and then returned to watch American bands The Lawrence Arms (quite passable) and The Menzingers (not really that passable). A crazy British hardcore band, Sucker Punch, were observed on the new bands stage before being disappointed by TSOL – the singer looked like Boris Johnson from a distance and was wearing a red suit and he seemed like he really couldn’t be arsed.

The Queers were up next. I’ve no idea about their sexuality, but they certainly like the Ramones. They played at least 20 songs in half an hour without pausing between any of them and even chucked in a Ramones cover for good measure.

And finally it was The Vandals. They’re getting quite long in their collective teeth, but they’ve still got it. With a stand in drummer they might have been a little limited when asking the audience for requests and they perhaps took too long in between songs with silly banter, but what they did play was excellent – I’ve Got an Ape Drape, My Girlfriend’s Dead and Cafe 405 were particular highlights. The guitarist and singer swapping roles for the encore of I Have a Date was a bit of a disaster as the guitarist was either off his head or just an idiot – trashing a fan (a device for cooling you down rather than someone who liked the band) next to the stage, climbing on the drum kit, throwing the mic to the floor, hurling himself to the ground and generally acting like quite a knob. All in all though, an excellent first day.

The second day was always going to be a bit more sedate, but there was a bit of a Brazilian invasion in the works. And it had nothing to do with painful pubic hair removal.

Before that there was the lunchtime ska of Millie Manders and the Shut Up, the folk punk of Headsticks and the madness and nostalgia of Spunk Volcano and the Eruptions.

Grippers from Spain served up some ferocious hardcore tapas before I went to sample the first of the Brazilian acts, an oi band called Subalternos. Within seconds I discovered that “oi” in Portuguese is “oi” and I’d seen enough.

The next Brazilian band were the absolute highlight of the day. Angry political hardcore screamers, Agrotoxico, had been shown to me in a pub on someone’s phone the day before and I knew they would be right up my street. A lot like fellow Brazilcorers RxDxPx, Agrotoxico create a wall of aggressive noise devoid of too much melody and it’s absolute perfection. 25 years they’d been around and I’d known them for less than 24 hours.

The next Brazilian band, Dedo Podre, would normally have been seen as quite an aggressive and hard band, but coming after Agrotoxico made them sound like Blink 182. That’s not to take anything away from them because they were actually brilliant – well-crafted fast, short songs. Did these bands teach me anything in Portuguese? No.

Saturday was supposed to be an easy day and Jed and Mrs Jed were up for the day to share it with us. It started with Pizza Tramp, a mental Welsh three-piece outfit. Anyone with a song that lasts about three seconds and is called Long Songs Are Fucking Shit is alright in my book. They even played the also-quite-quick I Hope You Fucking Die in four different versions, changing the title to I’m Glad You Didn’t Die and I Know Your Name Is Steve on two of them. They played for about half an hour and I lost track of how many songs they played, but I’ve never laughed so much at a gig in my life. The queue for merch afterwards was insane and I secured a t-shirt which apparently says ‘Bono Is a Fucking Cunt’ on it in Welsh.

Caught a bit of 999 after this – they’ve played at Rebellion every single year since the festival began – and Gimp Fist – a Norwegian guy told me they were his favourite band and he was strangely in awe of the fact that I come from the same place as the band.

It wouldn’t be Rebellion without some kind of celebrity encounter. I’m not including seeing the UK Subs’ Charlie Harper outside a pub, because that pretty much always happens. I bumped into Pete, bassist from Acid Reign who was having a kind of busman’s holiday. He told me that when I saw them in Leeds in December that there were only 42 people there who’d bought tickets. He was very angry. Anyway, I told him I was looking forward to their new album next year and made a sharp exit.

While I was waiting for The Stupids I caught most of the set of Raw Power, a British hardcore band. Considering their shit name they were actually pretty good. The Stupids hadn’t played in about 10 years and they played some of the fastest songs you’ll ever hear. The bass player looking like, as someone said, “that fucker from Grand Designs”. The band’s drummer is also the singer and he looked pretty knackered by the end of it all.

We popped in and saw a bit of Reno Divorce, purely based on the fact that we heard them playing Ace of Spades and then it was Funeral Dress who sang songs about beer and partying. Oddly they also did a cover of Leaving on a Jet Plane.

The final act for me on Saturday was Citizen Fish, a British ska punk band whose singer is him from the Subhumans, who happens to be in about a hundred bands. The Arena was the fullest I’d ever seen it and the room was soon full of smiling, bouncy people and sweat was running down the walls. It’s odd how much you can smile while someone sings about how badly the world is fucked and what shitbastards the government are.

I also learned that I shouldn’t wear a Nomeansno t-shirt to a festival unless I want total strangers of multiple nationalities to come up to me and enthuse that they are “the greatest band in the world, bro”.

Sunday came around too quickly and there were only three bands I really wanted to see. Other mates Gaz and Kristy came through to have a drink with us and to see some bands in an off-venue pub. It was a relaxing Sunday afternoon pub session until hardcorists Sanction This (or Analyze This as I usually insist on calling them – suggesting they’re some kind of Billy Crystal-themed hardcore act) started. They’re from Northumberland and were easier to understand when they were screaming angry political lyrics than when they just talked normally. The guitarist looked like a mixture of Kurt Russell, Captain Birdseye and that Bosnian war criminal who downed poison at his trial in The Hague. Their set was excellent.

What wasn’t excellent was the Sex Pistols tribute act that followed them. Were they called The Pisstols? I don’t remember. Their covers weren’t spot on and they played a Ramones song too. A covers band playing covers of another band who they aren’t meant to be covering? Not on my watch, mate. We left.

And so to the final three acts in the Winter Gardens. Voodoo Glow Skulls were superb, even though the vocals were too loud and the horns weren’t loud enough. Dirtbox Disco woah-ohed their way through a safe set while hundreds of crowdsurfers traversed the barrier in an attempt to beat a record set by Rancid years ago. DRI rounded it off. The crossover merchants were frankly excellent and it was a great way to end the weekend. Before they played I’d bought a patch at the merch stall and played it cool as it was the band’s vocalist, Kurt, who served me. So cool in fact that I didn’t actually realise it was him until they came onstage and even then I had to Google his name. They could have just played Who Am I? and then gone home, but they treated us to a solid set of material spanning their whole 36 years.

And that was it. My expectations weren’t as high for this festival as with previous ones, but it blew them all clean out of the water. This was the best one ever. Will it be happening for me next year? Wait and see...