The Wonder Kids

Every local scene has at least one. The band who’ve barely tuned their guitars before deciding destiny has already pencilled them in for stadiums. They’ve got the stance, the statements, the social media bio that reads like an acceptance speech, and the absolute certainty that all they need to do now is sit back and wait for the phone to ring.

It’s a beautiful kind of optimism. Dangerous, delusional, and oddly adorable.

You can always spot the moment the hype begins. Usually it starts innocently enough: a strong first gig, a packed room, a handful of people saying “you’re going places.” Someone posts a gushing message the morning after. Suddenly a star is born. A frontman is proclaimed. The band are “gonna make it.” Within hours, the narrative has formed: last night was an I was there gig. History has happened. The rocket has launched.

The band read this, of course. Their mates read it. Their parents read it twice and forward it to relatives. And from that moment on the machine starts pumping smoke up their arses at industrial levels.

The early stage hype is intoxicating. It feels like momentum. It feels like inevitability. It feels like the universe has quietly nodded and said, “Yes, you lot. You’re next.”

But here’s the problem: hype is loud. Reality is quiet. And reality takes ages.

There’s a lyric that nails it perfectly: all of the luvvies are blowing smoke up your arse / the A&R men are knocking at your door / played on the radio it’ll be a hit for sure. That’s the fantasy. The romantic version of the music industry where success is just a phone call you haven’t received yet because it’s probably stuck in traffic.

In the fantasy, your mum and dad love the single and keep saying they’ve given it a play. Your mates say they’re buzzing for Record Store Day. Seventy-five people click “going” on your event page and suddenly this is it. This is the big time. This is rock and roll. All you have to do is exist and wait for destiny to finish loading.

Meanwhile, in the real world, seventy-five people clicking “going” means maybe twenty-five show up. Half of them are in the band after you. The A&R man is not knocking at your door; he is ignoring 300 emails from other bands who were also told they were brilliant. And the radio station? They have never heard of you, but they wish you all the best.

Believing your own hype is one of the most dangerous phases a band can go through because it replaces hunger with expectation. Why graft relentlessly if success is inevitable? Why rehearse twice a week if the industry is already circling? Why play tiny gigs in terrible towns if the big break is surely just around the corner?

It’s the moment a band stops chasing and starts waiting.

And waiting is fatal.

Every scene has watched it happen: a band bursts onto the radar riding a self-hyped wave, everyone talks about them, the buzz grows, the expectations inflate like a paddling pool in July… and then nothing happens. Weeks turn into months, months into years, and the only thing that lands in their lap is their own dinner when they spill it.

The brutal truth is that hype is a spark, not fuel. It gets people talking, sure. It gets bums on seats once or twice. It gives you a head start most bands would kill for. But hype cannot rehearse your songs. It cannot tighten your set. It cannot write the next single. It cannot drive the van at 2am after playing to twelve people and a dog in a town you’ll never visit again.

Only work does that.

The bands who survive the hype are the ones who treat it like a starting pistol, not a finish line. They read the praise, smile, then go straight back to the rehearsal room. They gig relentlessly. They improve. They learn. They graft. They understand that momentum is something you carry, not something you inherit.

Because the music world is littered with bands who thought the phone would ring and quietly forgot to keep dialling themselves.

The final lyric says it best: the publicity and stardom, it gives you thrills — but all those likes and followers won’t pay the bills. And that’s the part nobody puts in the press release. The applause fades, the comments slow, the next hot band appears, and suddenly the hype machine has moved on to its next victim.

The dream isn’t the dangerous bit. Every band needs the dream. The danger is mistaking encouragement for arrival. Thinking the journey is over when it’s barely begun. Believing the story people are telling about you before you’ve actually written it.

So by all means enjoy the praise. Bask in the buzz. Celebrate the good gigs and the packed rooms and the mornings when someone calls you a star.

Just don’t sit by the phone waiting for it to ring.

It won’t.

Not unless you keep making noise.

GIG - The Dry Retch / Spam Javelin / Grenades / MRI @ Swinging Arm, Birkenhead

 Sunday night in Birkenhead, and instead of doing something sensible like preparing for Monday, we pointed the car toward The Swinging Arm for a charity show in aid of the Clatterbridge Cancer Charity. Punk garage rock, shaved heads, packed room — the sort of wholesome community event your grandparents definitely didn’t imagine when they said “get involved locally.”

My band, Spam Javelin, played this event last year and were kindly invited back to fill the slot left by local heroes Sonic Assault, who have apparently imploded. Not completely, mind — two of them resurfaced long enough to jump onstage with a borrowed rhythm section and chug out a single song like a brief and touching punk rock séance.

After a gentle ninety-minute scenic tour of the North Wales coastline (translation: driving and talking nonsense), we arrived just in time to see Decibel finish sweating through their set. I’ve seen them five or six times, so I knew exactly what we’d missed — and besides, I’ll catch them at Curiad Pulse Festival soon, conveniently located near my sofa.

Next up were punk-psychedelic explorers MRI. They admitted to being under-rehearsed, which in our terms just means “rehearsed enough.” Their short, snappy songs were a blessing — proof that not every psychedelic band needs to wander off into a ten-minute jam and forget where they parked. Also, I remain deeply envious of Richie’s Gibson SG, which is frankly doing more for my guitar jealousy than any therapy session could.

Grenades followed and immediately triggered a debate among our camp. Two guitarists, slightly understated volume, and a vibe our Dave described as Pavement. A quick YouTube Music investigation the next day confirmed this was both accurate and complimentary. They may have played one song too many, but when it’s for charity you’re hardly going to wave them off mid-chorus. Their singer also took one for the team and had his greasy mop shaved off, raising £200 in the process. Venue meets barber shop: a winning formula.

Meanwhile, earlier that morning I’d been at home wrestling my battered Marshall amp into harmony with my Boss GT-6 pedal. It’s only taken me about ten years to achieve this technological breakthrough. Standing on stage, basking in the glorious sound of equipment actually cooperating, I couldn’t help wondering why I hadn’t done this sooner. Probably because I’m an idiot.

Spam Javelin did what Spam Javelin does. Loud, fast, job done. People seemed to enjoy it, which is always a relief.

The Dry Retch closed the night with their gloriously filthy, Stooges-tinged, cosmic garage punk chaos and dodgy guitar leads. Unfortunately, although desperately wanting to be their dogs, by this point we were an hour behind schedule and still had a long drive home. So we caught the first five excellent Stalingradient songs before quietly slipping out at 10pm like responsible adults and cursing the fact none of will be in bed before midnight.

All in all: loud music, shaved heads, a room full of people raising money for a good cause, and only mild hearing damage. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday night.

You're a cog in the machine

The employment contract never says “we own the best hours of your life.” It prefers softer language. Opportunity. Career pathway. Competitive salary. It feels less like surrender when it arrives in a branded folder.

The first day is full of optimism and ergonomic chairs. You sit up straight, open a fresh notebook, and imagine the future as a staircase. Promotions. Raises. Recognition. A version of yourself with sharper clothes and fewer worries.

You don’t realise you’ve stepped onto a treadmill until the view stops changing.

Work introduces itself as purpose, then gradually reveals itself as maintenance. Maintenance of rent. Maintenance of bills. Maintenance of a lifestyle calibrated precisely to require the next pay day. The machine hums gently, and you discover your job is not to build it, but to keep feeding it.

You become a cog, but a very professional cog. A cog with performance reviews and a branded mug.

The language shifts subtly. You are not tired; you are “experiencing pressure.” You are not unhappy; you are “seeking new challenges.” You are not trapped; you are “valuing stability.” Words rearrange themselves until exhaustion sounds like a personality trait.

Stress becomes background noise. A faint ringing that follows you home, sits beside you on the sofa, and climbs into bed with you. You wake up tired because even your dreams have deadlines.

There is a peculiar pride in being busy. The busier you are, the more important you must be. The calendar fills, the inbox swells, and somewhere in the chaos you begin to measure your worth in unread emails. You tell yourself this is temporary. A busy season. A demanding year. A short sprint.

The sprint quietly becomes a marathon with no finish line.

Your identity begins to merge with your role. “What do you do?” people ask, and you answer with your job title, as if it were your species. Hobbies shrink. Weekdays blur. Sundays develop a nervous twitch around 4pm. The office creeps into your vocabulary, then your thoughts, then your bloodstream.

You are told not to be bullied, not to be pressured, not to be manipulated. The posters say so. The training modules confirm it. The corporate intranet celebrates it in cheerful fonts. Yet the pressure arrives anyway, disguised as targets. The manipulation arrives disguised as incentives. The coercion arrives disguised as teamwork.

No one raises their voice. The deadlines do the shouting for them.

You promise yourself balance. Work-life balance. The phrase suggests a delicate set of scales, perfectly poised. In reality it’s more like a seesaw with a concrete block on one end and a weekend on the other. You cling to Friday evenings like a lifeboat. Two days of recovery before the tide pulls you back out.

Years pass in quarterly increments.

Retirement appears on the horizon like a distant coastline. Freedom waits there, you tell yourself. Rest. Travel. The hobbies you postponed. The friendships you rescheduled. The version of life you pencilled in for later.

Later becomes the most expensive promise you ever make.

Because the body keeps score. The late nights, the early alarms, the meals eaten in haste, the stress stored in muscle and bone. By the time the finish line arrives, you are exhausted from the race you barely remember entering.

You finally step off the treadmill and discover your knees hurt. Your back aches. Your energy has a bedtime. The world opens up just as your stamina begins to close down.

You have time now. Time in abundance. Time you once imagined like a golden field stretching forever. And yet time feels different when it arrives at the end rather than the middle. Slower. Heavier. A reward that tastes of soured irony.

You realise the machine never hated you. It didn’t even notice you. Machines don’t hate their cogs. They just replace them when the teeth wear down.

And still, the most rebellious thought creeps in: maybe the lie was not that work had value. Maybe the lie was that it deserved all of you.

You were told to smile. To stay positive. To not take the blame. To not believe the lies. Good advice, printed neatly and ignored efficiently.

Because the system never needed you to believe the lie.

It only needed you to keep showing up.

Show #219 Louder Than War Radio

This week’s show started in the shadows and never really bothered coming back into the light.

We opened with Evil Blizzard and Wake The Dead In Bedlam from Death Songs & Lullabies, a perfect slab of gothic gloom to kick things off before their upcoming York date. That murky mood flowed straight into Lathe of Heaven and Exodus, a reminder that their second album Aurora has been quietly gathering momentum since last year — big atmospheres, bigger feelings.

Then the noise levels rose sharply as Mclusky crashed in with the unpopular parts of a pig, fresh from a US tour that didn’t destroy the world (yet). The pig theme spiralled immediately into chaos with Catasexual Urge Motivation and the brilliantly named Too Many Killed to Confess, before the wonderfully ridiculous Porky Vagina made sure the swine motif was thoroughly exhausted with Piggy Is My Friend.

A sharp left turn into Welsh hip-hop followed as Mr Phormula teamed up with Polish producer Flex on Mynd Fela, before punk urgency returned via Simple As and T.B.B.H ahead of their Beehive London date.

Chain Of Survival kept the political temperature high with Not My King, perfectly teeing up Riskee & The Ridicule and the huge God Tier, still riding the buzz from Manchester Punk Festival and a packed gig calendar.

The underground conveyor belt kept rolling with Chickens Call, Crutches, and Onlooker, the latter previewing their new album Cleveland — on the ever giving Serial Bowl label.

Bangor’s own Skinflick dropped Dictator, keeping things local and loud, before Irked and Raging Mabels delivered a one-two punch of frantic energy.

From there the show dug deeper into the crusty end of the spectrum with War // Plague, then slam-dunking down with Dropping Like Flies, and Cult Figures, whose new album Reports Of People lands at the end of April.

We closed by travelling back to 1989 with anarcho legends Wat Tyler and We Pledge Our Allegiance To Satan, a reminder that the roots of all this noise run deep — and are still very, very loud.

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Full Playlist

Evil Blizzard – Wake The Dead In Bedlam
Lathe of Heaven – Exodus
Mclusky – the unpopular parts of a pig
Catasexual Urge Motivation – Too Many Killed to Confess
Porky Vagina – Piggy Is My Friend
Mr Phormula – Mynd Fela
Simple As – T.B.B.H
Chain Of Survival – Not My King
Riskee & The Ridicule – God Tier
Chickens Call – Nihilisme Ignorance
Crutches – Create to Destroy
Onlooker – Peaceful Protest
Skinflick – Dictator
Irked – Settle Down
Raging Mabels – Fucking Beautiful
War // Plague – Reckoning
Dropping Like Flies – Look At The Animals
Cult Figures – Walking Disaster
Wat Tyler – We Pledge Our Allegiance To Satan

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.