Gig Review: Wonk Unit + Laserchrist at The Star & Garter, Manchester

 

Sometimes a night out just escalates.

Saturday 8th December 2019 was one of those nights — when Wonk Unit and Laserchrist took over The Star & Garter in Manchester, and everything descended (or maybe ascended?) into a sweaty, glorious mayhem. I went with Rich and Garry (always a recipe for something), catching the train from Rhyl, and by the time the night was over we were moshing, drenched in beer, and... maybe a tiny bit tipsy.

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🚂 The Journey

We kicked things off catching the train from Rhyl — excited, fresh from our yoga session and drinking herbal tea, and ready for whatever Manchester could throw at us. The Star & Garter, nestled behind Piccadilly Station, is already a venue that feels like it’s held together with spirit, electrician's tape and sweat — the perfect backdrop for what was to come.

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🔊 Wonk Unit: Punk with a Personal Touch

Wonk Unit don’t just play gigs. They create punk-powered parties that blur the lines between performer and audience — just don't ask to be on the guest list. We somehow ended up chatting to Alex, the band’s charismatic frontman, and when he heard we’d be bailing 20 minutes before the end to catch the last train, he literally rewrote the setlist on the spot to include the songs we came to hear. Absolute legend.

The set was chaotic, funny, loud, and full of heart. Moshing broke out, stage-diving kicked off, and somewhere in the madness, someone dressed as a man-sized pigeon started dancing in the pit. There's apparently video evidence out there... unless the herbal tea was a hallucinogen one (Tesco's finest).

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💥 Laserchrist: Angsty Hardcore Fire

Laserchrist were a perfect support act — pretty well spaced out songs, as in, good spaces within their songs (does that make sense?). Their American-style hardcore sound had a dogged punch with memorable tunes. Definitely worth checking out their ‘DIY-Bother EP’ if you like fast, emotional, raw (almost) hardcore punk. They had the crowd riled up early and set the tone for the night ahead.

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🍻 The Aftermath

Did we get too drunk? Yes. Did someone throw up? Probably. Did we care? Not one bit.
This wasn’t just a gig — it was an experience: part punk show, part social experiment, part drunken odyssey. It had heart, laughter, bruises, beers, and a pigeon. Everything you want from a proper underground show. Somehow, I don't know how, we caught the last train home.
When you wake up the following morning and you can't see properly, you know it's gonna be a pyjama day.

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Would I do it again?
In a heartbeat.
With water next time.

Countryside Alliance 0, North Wales Punk Rockers 1

 

Civilised Society?, Piss Kitti, Mike West and Crapsons played The Pot in Rhyl tonight – a DIY event beset with problems.

It was first scheduled for the Marine in Old Colwyn – until the landlord there started receiving threats from the Countryside Alliance, fucking fox hunters, the Conservative Armageddon, Tories on horses. (cunts basically).

The venue pulled it. The Pot in Rhyl hosted it instead. Yvette stepped up – she too got threats, but she’s made of tough stuff, has a knuckle-duster for a wedding ring and cage fights bears. The gig goes ahead – despite Emissaries Of Gwyn crying off, so promoter MWJ is frantically scouring North Wales for a 'house' drumkit. Even the cops turn up looking for a drunk to issue a fine to.

Rich said 15-20 people there, half a great night…

Videos look great – awesome photo of Piss Kitti. Crapsons invite MWJ to sing 42 Wheelie Bins!
(not sure if link will work as FB is an arse - but try it - click here)

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Not sure if I saw Civilised Society? back in the day… the day being © 1987 in Peaceville.
They were/are an anarcho-punk band that originally formed in the mid-1980s, emerging from the same raw, politically charged scene that birthed bands like Discharge, Amebix, Antisect, and Conflict. They were part of the Peaceville Records roster—one of the key independent labels in the UK underground punk scene.
Check 'em out on YouTube Music

#NWPR #punk

Keeping it Rhyl

When I was seventeen I used to make the nightly pilgrimage from my tiny flat on Bath Street to The Bistro in Rhyl. Every night except Tuesday, because even scenes need a day off apparently. It was a punk and alternative hangout without any bands to speak of. No live music, no stage, no grand ambition. Just a jukebox, cheap pints and a cluster of teenagers determined to make one drink last an entire evening. Pete Bethel supplied the soundtrack, spinning indie and alternative records while we danced, loitered and generally treated the place like a second home.

Eventually, someone with a calculator realised the flaw in the business model: staffing a venue all week for twenty punks sharing a single pint between them wasn’t exactly a path to financial glory. Midweek doors closed. The weekend survived. And that little chapter quietly slipped into memory.

In the years that followed, dance music swept through town and flattened what little guitar scene existed. For a while it felt like bands had simply vanished. There were flickers of life here and there — a few names, a few sparks — but nothing that really caught and spread. Without money or momentum, any sense of unity fizzled out as quickly as it appeared.

Then something shifted. The Breeding Ground arrived and suddenly the pieces started falling into place. Young bands who’d been hidden away in pub backrooms found themselves with a proper stage, a real PA, lighting, and — most importantly — an audience that had come specifically to watch live music. Those audiences didn’t just watch; they picked up instruments themselves. One wave fed the next. Add in support from nearby scenes and a growing sense of connection across North Wales, and for the first time in years it felt like something genuine was forming.

Gigs filled up. Some even sold out. Bands from outside the area started coming to play and, crucially, coming back. It felt like momentum — the kind that makes you think it might actually last.

Of course, nothing that good ever lasts forever. The Breeding Ground fell victim to the familiar logic of local bureaucracy: teenagers gathering unsupervised on the street was acceptable, but gathering safely inside a venue was not. Before long it was gone. The building itself eventually disappeared too, but its reputation didn’t. Like The Bistro before it, it passed into local folklore.

The gap it left didn’t stay empty for long. A new chapter began when gigs started popping up at Bar Blu. The idea of regular midweek shows in Rhyl — in a venue better known as a trendy nightspot — raised more than a few eyebrows. But against the odds, it worked. Wednesday nights became the new Friday. Week after week the place filled up, proving that the appetite for live music hadn’t gone anywhere after all.

Then came the next leap of faith: a new venue, The Metro, a new night, and an even bigger question mark. A Monday night launch in Rhyl, in the middle of a damp October. Optimism or madness, depending on who you asked.

The venue itself had everything going for it: good sound, decent size, plenty of space, even a slightly seedy charm courtesy of a lap-dancing bar upstairs. On paper, it ticked every box. But the real challenge was never the venue. It was the audience.

Because Rhyl is still a small town. And no matter how enthusiastic the scene becomes, no matter how many bands emerge or venues open their doors, there’s a simple economic truth that never changes: people can only go out so many nights a week. At some point, the calendar fills up, wallets empty out, and something has to give.

There’s a saturation point for everything. And in a town this size, once a week might just be the limit.

The (Non) Events Arena Festival, Rhyl

What a total farce. I should’ve known from the start, really. When the production manager, told me there’d be “10 to 15,000 people” there, I took him at his word. What I didn’t realise was that he actually meant ten. Not ten thousand — just ten. That’s about how it felt when we rolled up to the so-called “festival.”

The gig was supposed to be a charity event, raising money for Shelter. A good cause, which is why we’d agreed to do it. But the pair of tossers organising it insisted on handling the advertising themselves, instead of leaving it to someone who knew what they were doing. The result? The only poster I ever saw was a scrappy A4 sheet taped up in a Chinese chippy. It looked more like a college enrolment form than a festival flyer, and our name was buried at the bottom like an afterthought. That was their masterstroke in marketing.

When the Sons Of Selina turned up at 7pm — two hours before we were due on — the site was dead. No bands playing, maybe a hundred people milling about looking lost. Just as a few coachloads of people began arriving, the council showed up, locked themselves in the control room and pulled the plug. Their excuse? “The decibel levels are too high, residents are complaining.” This from the same bunch now under investigation for £7 million worth of fraud.

To make matters worse, the whole arena had been designed back-to-front in the first place. The stage faced the town instead of the sea, so any noise went straight into people’s living rooms. Years of local taxes wasted, and for what? An arena that now only gets used once a year, for the bloody Radio One Roadshow.

I actually tried to reason with Councillor David Davies. Asked him what he thought his actions meant for the bands, or for the people who’d travelled miles to see us and Primitive Faith. His reply was smug, priggish, almost gleeful. His colleagues sat there sneering, gloating in self-satisfaction. I felt violence bubbling under my skin, but I held back. Better to let it fester and save it for the music. Besides, I knew the fraud scandal would catch up with them eventually. Big boys in prison, with fallen men for company — I almost look forward to it.

We never played. Primitive Faith never played. Nobody did. What could’ve been a decent night for a good cause was smothered by a mix of incompetence, arrogance, and amateurism.

In my frustration I wrote to the papers. I called out the council for their hypocrisy and the organisers for their half-baked advertising. I even urged anyone left out of pocket to claim back their expenses — and, if by some miracle they ever saw a penny, to donate it to Shelter anyway, since that’s what the whole thing was meant to be about. I ended the letter with one final lesson: never use council property, and never trust anyone whose posters look like car boot sale adverts.

That’s what we were left with. No gig, no sound, no stage. Just another farce in Rhyl — the kind of small-town mess you couldn’t make up if you tried.

Sons Of Selina - The Bistro, Rhyl

 

It only took four years, three singles, one album, and a Radio One session before Sons of Selina finally played our first hometown gig. People always asked: why not sooner? The truth is I never wanted to get caught up in the local band mentality that swirls around Rhyl like bad weather. Every town has it — the rivalries, the gossip, the back-slapping with knives hidden behind backs — but when it’s your own patch it feels toxic. We kept our distance. We avoided the sycophantic local press. We didn’t want to be part of that small-town scene. The only local band I’d seen and genuinely enjoyed recently were The Fluff.

Still, sooner or later you’ve got to face your own doorstep.

A few days before the gig I’d floated the idea of projecting a video I’d put together with Dave the Rave (ex-PSST) over the stage while we played. On a Delerium Records budget it was wishful thinking. Luckily, Bonehead came up with a cheaper, brilliantly daft alternative: six TV sets wired up behind the stage, all running the same footage. With Roger Bickley’s (ex-ZODIAQUE UK) handy wiring skills and a £37 booster amp, it worked. A DIY multimedia extravaganza.

Steve Jones (of White Tygerz, Heroes on a Beach, Picture House, and nearly SOS himself at one point) handled the PA. We’d finished soundcheck by 9pm, but weren’t due on for another two and a half hours. That gap worried me. Robin was on his second pint, and I couldn’t shake the memory of the infamous PSST incident that ended in him facing seven charges. So I did the only sensible thing: I marched the lot of them back to mine to kill time.

When we returned to The Bistro the place was heaving — over 250 people, jammed into every corner. At £2 a head, that’s about £500 through the door, with £170 making its way into our pockets and the rest lining the Trehearns’ tills. Whatever my misgivings about playing Rhyl, that sight of the room buzzing with our people, our town, was special.

The set blurred past in a rush of noise, screens flickering behind us, all of us throwing ourselves into it. This was the Sons of Selina line-up in full: me on vocals, Robin, Martin and Bonehead wielding three guitars between them, Ken Maynardis on bass, Steve on keyboards, and Cumi on drums. It felt like a proper homecoming, even if it had taken us years to get there.

The next morning there was no time to bask in it. Delerium hauled us out of bed for a photo shoot, and those bleary-eyed pictures are now plastered all Kerrang!. Around the same time, the NME ran an ad for us in their small-ads section:

SONS OF SELINA: AVAILABLE FOR WEDDINGS, FUNERALS & CHILDREN’S PARTIES (WE NEITHER).

It still makes me laugh.

The Bee Hotel Massacre – 4Q in Rhyl

 

The Bee Hotel in Rhyl was never a great gig. Cumi and Matt didn’t want to do it, and I couldn’t blame them. Bee gigs were usually more trouble than they were worth — dodgy sound, small crowds, and an atmosphere that felt less like a venue and more like a waiting room. But a gig’s a gig, and in those days, we didn’t say no to playing.

At first it looked like we’d made the wrong call. The room was empty until 9:45pm, then suddenly people began streaming in — mostly Matt’s clan of family, friends, and admirers who’d come en masse from Colwyn Bay. By the time we were ready, the Bee was packed and already brimming with trouble.

Soundcheck was a nightmare. Levels wouldn’t sit right, feedback screamed, and then someone called Boz decided he was the star of the night. He picked up Robin’s guitar like it was his, and when I told him to put it down, he mouthed off, slagging us off like he had some divine right to any instrument in reach. I’ve never had time for musos like that — the type who think playing a few chords entitles them to anything they want.

If the saying’s true — that a bad soundcheck means a good gig — then this night was determined to prove otherwise. We opened with LSD, only for both Robin and Gumpsh to snap strings almost simultaneously. Absolute carnage. And there I was, trying to impress Martin Trehearn, hoping he’d consider booking us for The Bistro, while our set collapsed around us.

Once the guitars were restrung, Gumpsh’s lead gave out. Cheap gear will always betray you at the worst time. While he fumbled about, the rest of us tried to keep the crowd alive with a chaotic rendition of Purple Haze. It was shambolic, but at least it bought us time.

From there, the set lurched forward: Nein Werk, Video Party, Bat Gooch, VD, Poo On My Shoe, Burn in Hell, I Hate TV, We Want You, Imagine, 4Q Blues. It was raw, loud, and messy — a typical 4Q gig. By the end, the Bee looked like a scrapyard: smashed glasses, puddles of beer, debris of a night too wild for its four walls.

The image that’s burned in my mind, though, isn’t the broken gear or the broken glass. It’s one of Matt’s endless girlfriends, slumped unconscious in a chair, her head thrown back, vomit tangled through her hair and streaking her face. That sight was the punctuation mark on the whole night — ugly, tragic, unforgettable nad really fucking funny.

We’d rolled in from Colwyn Bay and trashed the place. It wasn’t a triumph. It wasn’t a disaster. It was 4Q: chaos in motion, leaving wreckage in our wake.

Bath Street, Rhyl - The Corridor of Doors

 

He opened the book on his bare lap, fingers tracing the flavescent page, bent and creased from some forgotten moment of distraction. The story itself was about patricide — grim, unsettling, and yet he couldn’t look away. The words reached into him like an infection, twisting something already restless inside. It was a kind of perverted perversion, a fascination that felt alien and yet entirely his. Power radiated from those sentences: the power of imagination, of annihilation, of mutilation, amputation, and ultimately… of contemplation.

Closing the book, he rose and found himself walking down a corridor. At first it seemed ordinary — long, sterile, clinically clean, the sort of place where echoes linger long after footsteps fade. But something was wrong. Something shifted. At the far end loomed a door, heavy and waiting.

He paused, listening. Nothing. The air hummed faintly, as though alive. With a breath that caught in his throat, he turned the handle.

The world on the other side wasn’t right. The corridor continued, yes, but now its walls pulsed with a fuzzy purple light, static and liquid at once. The surfaces moved yet remained still, a contradiction that defied reason. He reached out, hand trembling, and the material resisted like gel, then rippled away into silence.

And then he saw it: the void. Where one wall should have been, there was only blackness — infinite, hungry, bottomless. The purple corridor clung to existence on the edge of that abyss, as though straining against being swallowed.

Along the single remaining wall stretched countless doors. Closed, identical, each one humming with unseen possibility.

A chill ran through him. Each door, he knew without being told, contained a future. Not a metaphorical choice, but a literal one. Only by opening a door and stepping through would he discover which life awaited him.

He hesitated. His hand hovered at the nearest knob, sweat beading at his temple. What if he chose wrong? What if the wrong door led only to deeper voids, to darker corridors? What if none of them led back?

The silence pressed in, thick and suffocating. His heart raced. For a moment he almost turned back — but when he glanced over his shoulder, the clean corridor was gone. There was only purple static and the infinite dark.

No retreat. Only doors. Only futures.

His hand touched cold metal. He drew a breath, braced himself, and—

—suddenly, awareness hit him like a crash of light.

The corridor dissolved. The void melted. The doors vanished. He was back on the threadbare carpet of his first flat in Bath Street, Rhyl. The book was still in his lap. The walls were still nicotine-stained. The buzzing wasn’t cosmic energy — it was the fluorescent strip light.

It had been an acid trip. One of many in those days, when his experiments with LSD carved out strange journeys through his own mind. That night, 1984, he had wandered corridors of choice and stared into black voids of possibility. And though the drug had rattled him with visions of futures unknown, somewhere in that trip — and in the years that followed — he’d like to think he chose the right door.