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.