Make some merch!!!

There is a special kind of heartbreak reserved for the moment you walk up to a band after a great set, wallet already in hand, adrenaline still fizzing, and say the magic words: “Got any CDs?” only to be met with the musical equivalent of a shrug. Maybe a sheepish grin. Maybe the drummer rummaging through a backpack like he might find one if he believes hard enough. Then comes the line we’ve all heard: “We’ll have some next time.” There is no next time. There is only the slow, tragic deflation of a sale that died before it was born.

Merch matters. It matters more than most bands seem willing to admit. Especially at the level where you’re being paid somewhere between petrol money and a bag of chips. Punk gigs, indie gigs, DIY gigs — whatever you call them — are not exactly awash with cash. Nobody’s getting rich from the door split. Half the time the “fee” is a handshake and a free beer (and you're driving!). So the idea that bands still turn up with nothing to sell is baffling.

Because here’s the thing: if someone has just watched you play for 30 minutes, they already like you. You’ve done the hard part. You’ve convinced them to care. Their brain is buzzing, and they are ready to spend money. That is the precise moment you need to place something in their hands. Not next month. Not at the next gig in Rhyl. Right now, while the ears are still ringing.

CDs are the easiest win of all. We’re not talking jewel cases and glossy booklets anymore. A card wallet CD can cost as little as £1.50 to produce. £1.50. That’s less than a bottle of water at a gig. Sell it for a fiver and suddenly you’ve got fuel money, string money, maybe even “we can afford to eat something that isn’t beige” money. More importantly, the punter goes home with something tangible. Something physical. A souvenir. A memory that lives beyond a blurry phone video and a hangover. That CD might sit in a car stereo for months. It might get played on the drive to work. It might get lent to a mate. That little cardboard sleeve is doing marketing work long after the gig has ended.

T-shirts require a bit more commitment, sure. They cost more upfront, and you have to gamble on sizes and designs and whether people prefer black or “vintage charcoal”. But a good band tee is a walking billboard. Someone wears it to another gig, another pub, another festival, and suddenly your name is travelling without you. You’re not just a band anymore; you’re a logo in the wild. You exist beyond the stage.

And stickers. Oh, stickers are the true punk currency. Cheap, cheerful, and endlessly creative in their deployment. Every scene has its unofficial sticker galleries: lampposts, toilet doors, the back of road signs, urinals, occasionally a police car if someone’s feeling ambitious. Stickers are guerrilla marketing with glue. You sell a handful for a quid or give them away for free with the sale of that CD, and within weeks your band name is popping up in places you’ve never even played. It’s entrepreneurial, it’s scruffy, and it’s perfect.

Vinyl, yes, vinyl costs a king’s ransom. Pressing records isn’t for the faint-hearted or the faint-walleted. But for bands who gig regularly and travel beyond their own comfort-zone, vinyl absolutely shifts. People who buy vinyl want vinyl. They want the ritual, the artwork, the physical thing. A record feels like a milestone. A badge of legitimacy. You don’t press vinyl for your mum; you press vinyl for the people who already believe in you and want proof that you’re real.

All of this matters even more when the gig itself pays next to nothing. The reality of grassroots music is brutally simple: there isn’t much money. Funny that, eh? Venues struggle, promoters scrape by, and bands often leave town with just enough cash to stop the petrol gauge screaming at them. Anyone who has ever toured at this level knows the feeling of being stranded in a godforsaken town, the bank card is dead, pooling coins for chips while praying the car makes it home.

Which is exactly why merch isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.

When someone asks for a CD and you don’t have one, that’s not just a missed sale. That’s a missed connection. A missed chance to turn a fleeting gig experience into a lasting relationship. People want to support bands they like. They want to hand over money. They want to leave with proof that the night happened.

So bring the CDs. Bring the shirts. Bring the stickers. Bring whatever you can carry in a battered suitcase and pile onto a rickety table next to the stage. Because the gig ends when the amps switch off, but the band doesn’t have to. Merch is what keeps the music travelling long after the van has left the car park.

Show #218 on Louder Than War Radio

Show #218 arrived fuelled by new releases, tour leftovers and the very excellent artwork from Colleen Villamor that I spotted while reading the very excellent Gutter fanzine #11.

We kicked off with Uncivilized and Bicycle from the brand-new Let Rip LP on NBQ — still hot off the press and already making a racket. Sticking with the two-wheeled theme, Be Your Own Pet blasted in with Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle, a reminder that their 2006 self-titled debut still sounds like sugar-rush garage punk perfection and I see they released a third album in 2023.

From there things got predictably unpredictable with some brand new Salt The Snail and Big Dog, proving once again that doing everything the wrong way can often be exactly the right way.

Bristol’s Split Dogs then tore through Rock N Roll Business, the first taste of their upcoming album Nice ‘N’ Rough. Fresh from Manchester Punk Festival and mid-tour, it sounded like a band in full throttle mode.

Righteous fury arrived courtesy of Bags Of Blood and the perfectly titled If You’re Not Fucking Angry (You Haven’t Been Paying Attention) — a track that pretty much sums up the mood of half the world right now. The temperature stayed high with Pittsburgh’s Blood Pressure and Kick The Ladder, before The Mistakes previewed their forthcoming album Die Laughing with the world’s second play of Life’s Too Short. (fucking love this song!)

Scouse chaos returned with The Social and Dirty Deeds, still buzzing from their recent Outpost appearance, followed by Dropping Like Flies delivering the gleefully bleak Failure Is Always An Option which I picked up courtesy of Nifty 50 Records.

Big international anger came from Dead Pioneers and No Kings, ahead of their upcoming third album Wagon Burner, while Slund and Thronk kept the DIY engine running with fresh noise and upcoming releases.

Italy’s Thunder Bomber brought a change of flavour with Until the Morning Light, previewing Boys Alive, an album promising synths, harmonica, sax and zero genre boundaries.

A darker post-punk turn followed with German band Panikraum, while Siyahkal bridged continents with Farsi-language fury from Toronto via Tehran.

The tempo picked up again with Simple As! (featuring Jim Pizzatramp), which naturally led into the man himself and Pizzatramp’s gloriously feral debut album track, Crackula.

Modern darkness rolled in with Banshee, before the triumphant return of Mclusky reminded everyone why their comeback has been such a big deal.

We closed out the night with new noise from Search For Autonomy from their eponymous album on NBQ Records and the soaring, cinematic sound of Holy Coves, whose new single Hole lands alongside the upcoming Hiraeth LP.

Full Playlist

Uncivilized – Bicycle
Be Your Own Pet – Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle
Salt The Snail – Big Dog
Split Dogs – Rock N Roll Business
Bags Of Blood – If You’re Not Fucking Angry (You Haven’t Been Paying Attention)
Blood Pressure – Kick The Ladder
The Mistakes – Life’s Too Short
The Social – Dirty Deeds
Dropping Like Flies – Failure Is Always An Option
Dead Pioneers – No Kings
Slund – My Song
Thronk – Bombay Bad Boy
Thunder Bomber – Until the Morning Light
Panikraum – Anfang
Siyahkal – Time To Hunt
Simple As – Credit Card You Got It
Pizzatramp – Crackula
Banshee – Death Of A Predator
Mclusky – As A Dad
Search For Autonomy – Protest Song
Holy Coves – Hole

The night I saw Green Minge

I remember being 15 when fun required effort. Real effort. You had to earn your teenage angst. It wasn’t available in neat retail units with soft lighting and loyalty cards. You had to go out and find it. You moshed to thrash bands in sticky-floored pubs, drank White Lightning in fields, and occasionally crashed parties in suspiciously wealthy cul-de-sacs. There was grit. There was danger. There was the constant possibility of being chased by someone’s furious dad in slippers.

Then somewhere along the way, angst became commercial.

By 2007, you could buy it in bulk. Emo was available nationwide. You could pick up a starter pack in almost any town: haircut, eyeliner, luminous drink, geometrically improbable ear piercings. Teenage misery had gone mainstream and picked up a bar tab.

Which brings us to the night I saw Green Minge at Bar Blu in Rhyl. A set that lasted twenty minutes and somehow managed to feel like a small geological era.

Walking in, the room glowed with the soft blue luminescence of drinks that looked less like beverages and more like reactor coolant. Teenagers shimmered under UV light like exotic sea creatures. You could only wonder what strange worlds they’d seen. What knowledge they possessed. What Pandora’s Box Green Minge were about to open.

The answer, as it turned out, was utter chaos.

The band kept the masses bemused, amused, unamused, ashamed and aghast — often simultaneously. Any longer and I’m fairly certain someone would’ve introduced a bottle to the stage at high velocity, but for those twenty minutes it was a mindless, yobbish spectacle that lodged itself in the brain like an unpaid parking ticket.

There was once a hippy band in the 70s who let people wander on and off stage and improvise mid-set. This felt similar, except without the improvisation. Or the structure. Or the sense that anyone knew why they were there.

The opening “song” — and I use that term with the generosity of a saint — featured a drummer who spent most of his time texting on his phone. Not playing. Not even pretending to play. Just casually wandering around the stage, drinking, occasionally joining in on the microphones like a man who’d accidentally wandered into the wrong room at a house party. Eventually a “guest drummer” appeared, which is never a sentence you want to hear during the first number.

What followed resembled a triple bad-acid interpretation of psychedelic noise rock. Aggressive vocals, thundering bass, laptop-generated drums and effects. It was loud, chaotic and utterly baffling. The kind of performance that leaves you unsure whether you witnessed a gig or a minor public disturbance.

Trying to describe how it felt is difficult, but I’ve settled on the most accurate metaphor available: treading in fox shit.

Not when the dog rolls in it — that’s obvious. That’s visible. That’s manageable. No, the real horror is when you unknowingly bring it home on your shoe. That sweet, meaty, utterly vile smell creeping into your house while you wonder why your eyes are watering. The slow realisation that this is entirely your fault. You could have taken your shoes off. You could have avoided the park. But no. You brought this upon yourself.

And in this case, you paid for the privilege.

The fox turd does not care. It cannot be reasoned with. It listens to terrible music and drinks fizzy raspberry for fun. The only solution is to go outside, find the roughest patch of pavement, and scrape furiously until the nightmare is gone.

And yet — here’s the infuriating bit — it was memorable. Ridiculous. Absurd. A story that refuses to die. Because sometimes the worst gigs are the ones that linger the longest, like a smell you can’t quite eliminate.

Twenty minutes. That’s all it took.

Proof that you don’t need a full set to leave a lasting impression. Sometimes all you need is a phone-obsessed drummer, a room full of glowing drinks, and the overwhelming sensation that you’ve just stepped in something you’ll never fully scrape off.

Micro-beery

There is a particular joy in the microbrewery and/or pop-up pub. A fleeting miracle of hops and optimism that appears in a small town industrial unit, or old shop promises artisanal enlightenment, and dares you to pronounce half the taps without embarrassing yourself.

And half the adventure is getting there.

I’ve been rediscovering the joys of alternative transport. First it was the bike — heroic little expeditions out to Llanfairfechan or Felinheli — but lately the trains have become the chariot of choice. Trains, it turns out, are the perfect vehicle for microbrewery exploration because they remove the tedious burden of responsibility. If you’re not driving, you can drink with the carefree abandon of a Victorian aristocrat. Even better if you don’t have to pay; but I always pay (in case the fascist railway police are reading this).

Recent excursions have included the noble towns of Rhyl, Llandudno and Colwyn Bay, all of which now play host to the modern phenomenon of the microbrewery taproom: part pub, part laboratory, part optimistic social experiment.

I used to work in the Bay, and my memories mostly involved daytime scenes that resembled a nature documentary narrated by someone deeply concerned about society. Watching junkies and chavs arguing in broad daylight does tend to colour your expectations of what an evening out might entail. But microbrewery pubs have a strange superpower: they can make an industrial estate or an old shop feel like a cultural destination simply by installing fairy lights and charging £5.80 a pint.

Inside, the atmosphere is always the same in the best possible way: small, busy, slightly chaotic, and spilling out onto the pavement because the concept of “capacity” is more of a philosophical suggestion. You’ll find people earnestly discussing yeast strains while standing next to someone who just wants “a normal lager please” and has accidentally wandered into a dissertation.

Then comes the tasting.

Rows of taps with names that sound like rejected indie bands: Hazy Comet, Angry Otter, Post-Industrial Sunrise. Every beer has a paragraph attached. Every paragraph contains the words citrus, notes, and finish. Suddenly you’re expected to have opinions about mouthfeel.

We tried the Czech lagers first, hoping for something familiar. A comforting baseline. A linguistic safe space.

Instead, we discovered that our senses are either broken or have quietly resigned from service. Pint after pint arrived with indecipherable names and subtle differences we were assured absolutely existed. If we were proper connoisseurs, we’d be detecting delicate fragrances and poetic undertones. We’d swirl the glass thoughtfully and murmur about balance and body.

In reality, the tasting notes sounded more like this:

Hints of cheap prostitute.

A bold tractor factory finish.

A lingering afterglow of communist oppression.

Instead, we nodded gravely and said, “Yeah, that’s nice,” before ordering another one we couldn’t pronounce.

And that’s the joy of the microbrewery pub. It’s not really about refinement. It’s about the journey. About trains rattling through the dark to towns you wouldn’t normally visit. About discovering a tiny room full of people who have collectively decided that this industrial unit is, for tonight, the centre of civilisation.

Because the best nights out don’t always happen in famous places. Sometimes they happen in converted warehouses, down side streets, under fairy lights, surrounded by tanks full of experimental liquid and people pretending they understand it.

And by the end of the evening, whether you’ve tasted citrus, pine, grapefruit, or absolutely nothing at all, you’ll agree on one thing: you definitely need another one. 🍺

Crud fanzine - the sequel

Crud #2 slithered into existence in April 1987, propelled by enthusiasm, naivety, and a heroic shortage of imagination. True to form, it contained the standard fanzine ritual: interviews with the usual suspects—the bands who were permanently mid-sentence in everyone else’s photocopied pages too. Still, there was method in the monotony. After catching Chumbawamba at the Boardwalk in Manchester alongside Anhrefn, I fired off a postal interview to the former and cornered the latter for a chat as well. Anhrefn were riding a small wave of excitement at the time, thanks to their anthem Action Man landing on the 7” compilation The First Cuts Are The Deepest on Words Of Warning Records.

The issue’s cultural gravitas was further elevated by Young Bowler’s Garfield cartoon, which depicted the lasagne-loving feline in a state of profound psychedelic exploration. Meanwhile, Jill The Ripper packed the margins with her razor-sharp doodles. One of these—featuring a punk sheep riding a skateboard—caught Anhrefn’s eye. They promptly commissioned her to design their album cover for Defaid, Skateboards A Wellies (Defaid meaning “sheep,” in case you're Welsh-not). Released in October on Workers Playtime Records, the album softened their live bite into something closer to punk flirting with new wave, but still a great debut all the same. Jill’s reward for her artistic breakthrough was being credited on the sleeve as “Jill The Kipper,” which she did not, for one second, believe was a charming linguistic misunderstanding ha-ha!

Promotion for the zine became a full-contact sport. I hitchhiked in all weather along the A55 and onward to Manchester and Liverpool, dropping copies on record shop counters like a low-budget Johnny Appleseed of stapled paper. Piccadilly Records, Probe, Kavern Records in Rhyl, and Cob in Bangor all received their unsolicited deliveries. Not content with legitimate distribution, I branched into covert operations—slipping copies onto magazine shelves in WH Smiths and assorted newsagents. This was the golden pre-barcode era, when a shopkeeper could simply ring up 25p and politely pretend the zine had always belonged there. Guerrilla marketing, 1987 style: equal parts optimism, mild trespass, and blind faith that someone, somewhere, might actually buy the thing... and they did! By the sackful!

First time I saw Subhumans

Dick Lucas - vocalist of Subhumans, Culture Shock and Citizen Fish

As a kid, my relationship with music involved envelopes, stamps, and blind faith in the British postal service. While other children were sensibly spending their paper-round money on sweets and football stickers, I was carefully sealing £1.50 in an envelope and sending it off to a mysterious address in Melksham. A week later, like anarcho-punk Father Christmas, Bluurg Records & Tapes would send back the latest release by Subhumans, AOS3 or Shrapnel.

I’d slap the record onto a second-hand player my mum had heroically sourced for £25, sit cross-legged on the floor, and study the lyric sheet like it was sacred scripture. Other kids were revising maths tables; I was learning how to dismantle society with a three-chord progression. I praised the lord for giving us the Subhumans — though I suspect they would’ve strongly objected to being included in any religious gratitude list.

Fast-forward six or seven years and the teenage dream began bleeding into real life. My band (4Q) at the time supported Culture Shock in Bradford, and some 30 years on their vocalist Dick Lucas actually remembered the gig. This felt like being knighted, if knighthoods involved vans that smelt faintly of damp denim and patchouli oil. A few years later in the early 90s, I caught Citizen Fish at The Ship & Castle in Caernarfon, which felt like a sequel nobody had planned but everyone enjoyed.

And then came 2008. The year the childhood circle completed itself at The Dirty Weekend Festival in Hendre Hall. The Subhumans’ first proper foray into North Wales. The band that had soundtracked my teenage bedroom finally stood in front of me, real and loud and unapologetically alive.

They’d grown out of the same early-80s anarchist soil as a whole generation of DIY punk, orbiting similar ideas but always stubbornly themselves. And there they were: older, wiser, still furious, still funny, still sounding like the world needed urgently fixing.

Ask anyone in that packed, sweaty, mohican-speckled crowd and you’d have received the same answer: what a performance. Old songs, new songs — everything landed like a stamp on the forehead. Crisp. Clear. Furious. Joyful. The kind of gig that makes you remember why you fell in love with music in the first place.

Of course, the honest truth is that my memory of the set gradually dissolves into a warm, blurry haze as the evening progressed and my liver entered negotiations with reality. By the end, my brain had quietly slipped out the back door without telling me.

But maybe that’s fitting. Because the important part wasn’t remembering every song. It was the moment itself — the long, ridiculous journey from posting coins in an envelope to standing in a room watching the band that shaped your teenage worldview.

A big, fat, juicy tick on the life list, and I've ticked it several times since seeing Subhumans again and again. And I will again.

Welcome to your dystopian future

They didn’t announce the takeover. There was no dramatic midnight broadcast, no marching boots, no flag unfurling against a storm. That would have been crude, theatrical. Instead, the shift arrived softly—wrapped in convenience, padded with cheerful marketing, delivered by subscription.

The first sign was the letter that never came. The job that vanished without ceremony. No redundancy meeting, no awkward handshake, just a quiet disappearance into a statistical column labelled “efficiency gains.” You weren’t fired; you were optimized. The language was kinder than reality. Reality was a shrug.

It turns out mass unemployment is easier to swallow when it feels like a software update.

Invisible government doesn’t rise through coups or revolutions. It emerges through procurement contracts, consulting firms, and pilot programs. The public face still waves from podiums, still debates passionately on television, still promises change every election cycle. But somewhere behind the curtain, a quieter administration takes root—one that doesn’t need votes, only metrics.

Their ideology is simple: the nation is a spreadsheet.

Every citizen is a cost centre, a productivity curve, a risk profile. Some cells glow green. Others flash amber. A few blink red until someone presses delete.

Of course, they would never call it deletion. They call it sustainability. Resilience. Long-term planning. Words that taste like vitamins and smell like bleach.

The public still argues about policy. They rage online about taxes, borders, culture wars, statues. The spectacle is necessary. A population must feel politically engaged the way toddlers feel involved in cooking when handed a wooden spoon. Meanwhile the real decisions are made by people whose names never appear on ballot papers and whose job titles sound like PowerPoint slide headings.

Strategic Foresight. Population Outcomes. Future Viability.

They don’t rule you directly. They shape the systems that rule you, which is far more elegant.

You notice it first in the language of burden. Burden of pensions. Burden of healthcare. Burden of welfare. A curious term, burden. It implies weight without specifying who is tired of carrying it. Soon enough the burden begins to look suspiciously like people who are old, poor, sick, inconvenient, or statistically expensive.

Then comes the miracle of crisis. A new emergency arrives just when budgets grow tight. War or a health scare, perhaps. A whisper of contagion. The public learns new vocabulary overnight and begins to monitor its own behaviour with religious fervour. Compliance becomes patriotism. Suspicion becomes civic duty.

And suddenly the idea of reducing the “burden” doesn’t sound monstrous. It sounds pragmatic. Necessary, even. A reluctant kindness.

No one needs to say the quiet part aloud. The algorithm understands subtext.

Meanwhile the high street fades like an old photograph. Independent shops close one by one, their windows papered over with pastel rectangles. The supermarkets bloom in their place—cathedrals of logistics and predictive analytics. Every purchase becomes a confession. Every receipt, a diary entry. Your cravings, your routines, your weaknesses: catalogued with loving precision.

You tell yourself it’s just convenience. It is convenient. That’s the brilliance of it. Oppression is exhausting; convenience is irresistible.

Your living room becomes the new public square. Entertainment streams endlessly. News arrives pre-digested, pre-sorted, pre-approved. Everything is on demand except meaning. The screen asks nothing of you except attention, which you surrender gladly because the alternative is silence—and silence leaves room for thinking.

Thinking is inefficient.

5G and cheap broadband spreads like tap water. A noble achievement, officially. Universal connection. Equal access. But the same pipe that delivers amusement delivers narrative. The same cable that streams sitcoms streams certainty. You never feel propagandised because propaganda now feels like ambience.

It hums in the background, like a fridge.

Polls appear constantly, glowing with reassuring results. The public is satisfied. The public approves. The public trusts. You are the public, of course, though you have no memory of being asked. The numbers look so clean, so comforting. They must be true. Numbers are honest in a way people aren’t.

And so the invisible government never needs to lie outright. It simply curates reality until the truth becomes statistically improbable.

Care homes become quiet places. Efficient places. Places where the costs taper off in neat, downward lines. Hospitals run on austerity and applause. Applause is cheaper. Applause is renewable. Applause doesn’t require funding allocations.

Remember clapping from your doorway, feeling heroic and strangely hollow?

The remarkable thing is how normal it all feels. That’s the real triumph. Dystopia, it turns out, is not a thunderclap but a background process. It installs itself while you scroll. It updates while you sleep. It reboots while you argue about something else entirely.

“It couldn’t happen here,” people say, comforted by the geography of denial.

But the invisible government doesn’t live in a place. It lives in systems, in incentives, in dashboards and quarterly targets. It lives wherever efficiency becomes morality and human beings become line items.

It doesn’t need to conquer you.

It just needs you to log in.