We were blessed last month to get out to London to see a festival with Iggy Pop, Queens of the Stone Age, Run the Jewels, The Hives, Brody Dalle and some others. That festival, put on by Festival Republic, was too crowded to be worth the cost of admission, and Iggy had to play in the sunshine, which seemed to have slightly diminished his stage powers. But sleepy London town did offer us plenty of its rock and punk history, much of which we absorbed via the Soho Punk walking tour led by Aidan McManus of FlipsideLondon Tours. On a warm Friday afternoon, he walked a group of about six people through the crowded streets of London to show us the music stores where the Sex Pistols worked and stole from. We also saw lots of buildings that used to be famous clubs (The Roxy, The Marquee) but are now existing as lofts or Speedo stores. Aidan had an iPad full of pictures of the way it was, and told a few stories from shows he attended at each spot back when punk was just beginning. 
He took us to a courtyard in front of a long-gone record store where The Jam played an outdoor show, and was quite surprised that most in the group of Yanks knew who that band was (which makes us wonder about his usual clientele). The tour ends at the 100 Club, which is the only place on the tour that’s still a working venue. McManus gave us a card for All Ages Records, a great little shop in Camden that specializes in punk and other good music. It’s just a few blocks away from where The Clash shot their first album cover — which is now just across from a Dr. Martens store where you can buy £200 boots so you can be just like Joe Strummer. Anyway, unlike that oversold/understaffed Festival Republic gig, the walking tour was well worth the money.
Speaking of bands from London’s mid-’70s, there’s a documentary about The Slits called Here to Be Heard, the (originally) all-female band who started in ‘76 alongside The Damned, The Sex Pistols, and all of those other punk bands that have become household names in any properly rocking home. The Slits’ punk rock energy was wild and could have gone places. The doc, however, reviews the entirety of the band’s time together, so it clearly shows the dangers of white people playing reggae music, as The Slits went from poorly played but fun punk, to slightly better played but totally generic reggae, to just godawful artsy world music (and then, of course, the reunion tour in the mid-2000s). The Slits do deserve to have their story heard, and there’s the sad death of the free-spirited singer to rue. The documentary is quite good at showing another angle of an important time in musical history.
The Damned are touring the US and UK behind their newest album, Evil Spirits (which was reviewed right here in our last column). Original Damned drummer Rat Scabies and current bass player Paul Gray have joined up with former Adolescents and D.I. members Alfie Agnew and Sean Elliott as a band called Professor and the Madman. This cross-continental collaboration of punk veterans should have anyone salivating, and the album Disintegrate Me is solid enough when it rocks, and, well, it has some slower songs, too. Here’s one in the middle called “Space Walrus” for your consideration.
Ignition records is releasing a compilation called Joe Strummer 001, which features rare and early takes from all of Strummer’s work outside of The Clash (though the deluxe sets do have some Clash outtakes, and there are a few songs that ended up re-worked on Clash albums). The archiving of this material and compiling of Joe Strummer 001 was overseen by Joe’s widow Luce and Robert Gordon McHarg III. More info, and a cool Andalucia football-style Strummer kit here at joestrummer.com
Dig Mick Jones’ Stussy beret in this informative MTV Rockumentary on The Clash.
Coincidentally, as we’re here milking the subjects of the Brits and Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk got together with British techno group Underworld and recorded a four-song EP called Teatime Dub Encounters. It’s the beginning and ending of Trainspotting come together at last! The two songs we’ve heard are Iggy telling stories over Underworld’s tripping synths and club beats. Entertaining enough for a listen.
Here’s a couple of album reviews that don’t have much to do with London:
The Coup
Sorry to Bother You (2012)
Boots Riley of the vastly underheard group The Coup has written and directed a fun and funky flick called Sorry To Bother You that is out in theaters this summer. Like his band’s genre-bending music, the movie doesn’t fit neatly into one style. Without giving too much away, it’s the only corporation-questioning movie we’ve ever seen that uses horse dicks appropriately on multiple levels. So there.
A soundtrack is coming soon, and there’s this great single, but we figured now would be a good time to remember the 2012 record by The Coup which has the same name as the movie, which was obviously written with many of the same themes (and even one of the characters) in mind.
Beginning with the high-pitched schoolyard chants in the chorus of “The Magic Clap,” The Coup puts its power-to-the-people platform behind some boisterous sounds. This is the first record the group has done with all live instrumentation, and they lean heavy on ‘80s electrofunk and grooving wah-wah-pedaled licks of guitar rock, but then will often giddily wig out with kazoos, late ska-style trumpets, or 8-bit computer soundscapes. It makes for fun that could be a bit of a mess were it not for Boots Riley’s storytelling and rabble-rousing lyrics holding it all together like one of those mythical social safety nets.
“Strange Arithmetic” exposes the misplaced priorities of educational system subject by subject. “In mathematics the children don’t get added but they count the cost of bullets coming out the automatics.” It’s this profit-over-people ideology that Boots constantly attacks with clever internal rhymes and clashing juxtapositions, all with a loose delivery that funks along with the sound. The chorus of “Teacher! My hands up! Please don’t make me a victim,” blurs the line between a thoughtless teacher’s complicit cooperation with the state-mandated curriculum with something close to the battle cry of the anti-police rallies that followed the Michael Brown murder two years after this record came out.
“You Are Not A Riot (An RSVP from David Siquieros to Andy Warhol)” channels the mad vibes (pun intended, with mild apologies) of mid-80s Fishbone (particularly the vibe of their song “Deep Inside”) as it takes down a poseur as a “fascist fashionista” who’s “hyped by the architecture of police stations…and the aesthetic of rebellion.” Havin’ fun being angry.
“Violet” showcases Boots’ storytelling in a place where “the trash cans bloom and the needles glow” with a girl who’s “kiss felt like you was payin’ me money.” The movie’s main character, Cassius Green gets a lesson not unlike some scenes in the flick, while the chorus gets draped over the beats by a hazed-out female vocal that sings the title “We’ve Got a Lot to Teach You, Cassius Green,” as Boots raps about bosses having talons and their belief that “the system is basically just.”
The world needs more music (and films) that remind us that having fun and thinking are not mutually exclusive, and this album works wonders at combining the two. You come away from this like the the guy in the song “Long Island Iced Tea, Neat” who’s getting drunk after a day of protesting a world where there are “salary caps on your birth certificate.” The party is always political, but you’re always welcome, as Boots raps on “The Guillotine”: “We want to thank you for flying with us, we know you could’ve just stayed home and cried and cussed.”
Deafheaven
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
The piano is surprising because it goes on for a while, and the guitars come in with sweeping build-ups and it begins to sound like some kind of sequel to the famous and pretty coda of “Layla” and you’re wondering if you put on the wrong music, and then, oh shit! Somebody has stepped on the cat! So you turn off the music only to realize that, oh yeah, this is Deafheaven and even if the band is reaching out to make nuanced and compelling music, singer George Clark still wants to sound like a demon. The good news is your cat is fine, it’s just the vocals. The better news is that Deafheaven can overcome all this screaming (to a point) because they’ve become just that dynamic. They used to lean more into the metal, and the simple power worked with the singular aggression of the vocals, but now the music calls to mind everything from Sunny Day Real Estate to Built to Spill to Mogwai to Radiohead, and the vocals are an albatross of simple anger while the band has moved on to expressions that are much more accessible.
The aforementioned “You Without End” starts the album, and is a bit of a standout because it is a somewhat grand rock song the likes of which would’ve been at home somewhere on many a hair metal album (you can picture the waves crashing over rocks in a video). “Honeycomb” gets back to the darkness, where the I’m-possessed vocals work in their bed of angular riffs that fly off the helicopter-blade speed of the double bass drums. Deafheaven could be someone’s gateway drug to black metal, but they’re capable of so much more. “Canary Yellow” has a sweet cascade of guitar that sounds right out of OK Computer, and the song “Near” is more of the ‘sun going down at the end of a surf movie’ than an intermission between heavy powerful darkness. Indeed, it’s not until two minutes into the next song that all hell breaks loose again and you feel that notion to check on the cat again.
Sure it’s fun, but we do feel older than our spirit as we bemoan the black metal vocals, because we still understand that much anger and that much needing to come out, and we still like black metal (admittedly we put it on less and less often), but when your band is expanding its range to sound like the kind of artists that could sell out stadiums, maybe you just want to scream like that into your pillow.
This is a powerful record of often beautiful metal and rock songs haunted by a demon. That’s probably their point, so screw us, and enjoy all of Deafheaven while our old ass waits for the instrumental version.
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The Surf City Blitz festival is bringing punk rock to Huntington State Beach on October 27-28. The line-up features Rancid, Suicidal Tendencies, Bad Religion, The Offspring, Social Distortion, Pennywise, Fear, TSOL, and many more. It’s actually on the beach, so you’ll get sand in those £200 Docs!
More info here.
And finally, if you need a gift for the weirdo crust punk fan who has everything, this GG Allin 25th Deathiversary Bust is sure to please and disgust! Order here! 
We should say that the performances at the QOTSA-led festival were adequate to good. My wife made her way to the front of the stage for a few minutes of Iggy’s set and noticed that large swaths of the crowd were ignoring his set by either just talking to each other or being on their phones. If the crowd is stupid enough to ignore Iggy Pop live, then there is truly very little hope for our musical future.
RTJ was pretty good. Hip hop’s intensity can wilt in the sun, but El-P and Killer Mike have so much of it that even from sixteen miles away from the stage (give or take) there was a power one could feel.
Queens were on autopilot, but it’s a nice plane.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — cell phones are a gigantic step backward for civilization, disguised as progress.