“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.
Dreaming about teeth, teeth falling out specifically, is supposed to represent anxiety and transition. Already this year The Hold Steady have based an album around the concept and now, on his own band’s fourth album, Greg Barnett of Pennsylvania punks The Menzingers seems to be wrestling with similar visions. “Dreaming that my teeth are falling out,” he sings on “Bad Things”, the album’s second track; “I’m driving, there’s no steering wheel.”
From the balcony overlooking the mosh pit you get a good idea of how long a band has been going. Last night at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, The Men They Couldn’t Hang celebrated their 30th anniversary while a small kinetic cluster of mainly bald 50-year-olds pinged into one another like shiny billiard balls. A fiver says a sheepish accountant or two will have had some explaining to do this morning in A&E.
For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.
It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.
Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. The HBO-Storyville documentary by double directors-producers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin tells the brave story of the Russian conceptual art, feminist punk collective.
The expected curveball came an hour in with a completely unfamiliar 14-minute song. Based around a pulsing bass riff, it was a deconstructed merger of The Rolling Stones’s “Paint it Black” and the Spanish side of Love’s Da Capo. A large contingent of the audience used it as handy toilet break.
Thirty seven years since first breaking into the public consciousness and following a period being regarded as punk’s pantomime dame, John Lydon is now finally reaping wider musical recognition and kudos. Recent times have seen a revitalisation of Public Image Ltd (albeit in the guise of a cottage industry and completely on their own terms) with extensive touring and the muscular return-to-form album, This is PiL.
The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating and touched with despair, as Moodysson confronted how truly terrible lives can be.
National Wake: A Walk in Africa 1979–81