Nostalgia is no bad thing and, despite what some folk think, it’s nice to drop into the past now and again and wallow in bygone memories. We are the sum of those memories after all, they are the shiny red Lego bricks of our souls.
Not long after the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago The Sex Pistols tried to do the same thing and wipe out the dinosaurs of rock, sadly it wasn’t a complete success but they did thankfully cause major extinction events and the likes of Mike Oldfield and his concept album compatriots were forced into a rearguard action.
TV Smith
The Pistols did not work alone, in that first heady punk rush of 76/77 they had many inspired and inspiring allies notably The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks and The Adverts, seismic occurrences in the music scene ensued and things were never quite the same again (thankfully).
Like The Clash, The Adverts were overtly political, due in no small part to frontman TV Smith, whose acutely well observed lyrical spleen was expertly vented on those early albums. This was especially on their the debut, Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts, a cornerstone of the scene that still retains firepower to this day.
So here’s the man himself, playing perhaps the smallest but certainly punkiest bar in Nottingham.
Foremans has been here for two decades, trapped inside a concrete jungle of chicken outlets, pizza restaurants, a casino, a cinema and various other signs of the last days of humankind.
The bar is an architectural middle finger to the corporate inner city infrastructure. With a capacity of less than sixty it is always rammed, no more so than tonight when we get the opportunity to see a founding father of a movement that still resonates today. Incidentally he has a compilation out called Useless: The Very Best of TV Smith. How can you not love this man?
Looking lean and mean but with a mischievous grin on his punky face, he kicks up a human tornado of anger. A solitary battered guitar and a bag of fantastic lyrics, he’s a one man socialist stormtrooper.
A nice mix of new and (very!) old tunes including: I Delete, Expensive Being Poor, Runaway Train driver, Bored Teenagers, No Time To Be 21, The Lion And The Lamb, The Great British Mistake, One Chord Wonders and Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.
All have two things in common, absolute passion for the subject matter and a healthy portion of sing-a-long. We smashed the system but tunefully.
Support tonight was from Static Kill, a local three-piece comprising bass and two acoustic guitars. There’s was a short set of frenetic, angry songs of suburban despair and disillusion.
Louise Distras
As for Louise Distras, well, this Wakefield singer should be a star.
She has a voice that could sink enemy ships (but in a good way!). You cannot help but be impressed by her confidence and commitment. A solo exercise in how to engage and win over a restless crowd with some extremely well played guitar, some mighty tunes and all sung with such conviction and vigour that by the end she had us all eating out of her hands.
With a set list mainly drawn from her heartily recommended 2015 album Dreams from the Factory Floor, she combines spoken word and angry polemic to great effect. Loved her.
Shock horror, punk still relevant.
Words by John Haylock, pictures by Arthur Hughes
For more information about TV Smith visit here.
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