postpunk

Jonathan Ogilvie is the New Zealand film-maker who made the gangster drama The Tender Hook (2008) and also Lone Wolf (2021), a postmodern spin on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Now he hits a lighter, gentler and much more personal note in this coming-of-age comedy, which opens the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) – a nostalgiafest romance from the 70s post-punk era about a kid in New Zealand mooching around in his uncool school uniform, hanging out in the local record shop (which still has its prog-era name of…

Dan Carey’s studio is notoriously hectic at the best of times, but today takes the biscuit. The air is thick with hangovers, the tabletops strewn with empty champagne bottles and Carey’s head has been freshly shaved bald. His new musical project Miss Tiny, a duo with Warmduscher’s Benjamin Romans-Hopcraft, played at Pratts & Payne in Streatham last night, before stumbling the short walk back to the studio with a few select friends in the early hours.As we retrace those steps back to the venue, Carey rightly strides…

In September 1978, the NME put a band made up of teenagers who had yet to release a record on its cover. It was the kind of dramatic, impulsive move to which the music press was occasionally prone, the sort of thing that invariably led to accusations of overheated hype or reckless desperation. By the autumn of 1978, punk was clearly winding down, or at least being co-opted by less artful practitioners than those in its first wave – the big new noise in that area was the terrace-chant choruses and political populism of…

In 2014, the Irish Times ran a profile of the film-maker Vivienne Dick with the headline: “Stifled in Ireland, celebrated in New York.” As an encapsulation of her formative years as an artist who found her calling in exile, it was blunt but pretty accurate. “There was nothing for me in Ireland back then,” says Dick of her youth in the 1960s and early 70s. “It was not an attractive place because, as a woman, you were essentially treated as a second-class citizen. You could train as a teacher, but that was about it. I…

When a record label contacted her wanting to reissue her 35-year-old debut single, Kate Fagan thought it was a prank call. She had released the track, I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool, on her friends’ DIY imprint; it had made the rounds in the underground clubs and bars of Chicago’s punk scene before fading into obscurity. Now, Fagan is based in New Orleans, where she still performs and plays shows – but she says that nobody knew who she was when she got the call in 2016. “The call stunned me, it tickled me,” she laughs. “Who…

It starts with a constellation of synthesiser drones and a piano riff that sounds as if it’s being played on crystal chandeliers, and ends with a sample of smashing cups. In between, the Associates’ Party Fears Two is five and a half sweeping minutes of art-pop perfection – a song commonly hailed for the vaulting, otherworldly vocals of mercurial singer Billy Mackenzie yet every bit as much a testament to the songwriting and musicianship of multi-instrumentalist Alan Rankine.Formed by Mackenzie and Rankine between…

From London, EnglandRecommended if you like Ought, Broadcast, SquidUp next Finishing up their debut album, hopefully due 2023Blue Bendy singer Arthur Nolan is discussing the band’s early days. “Before post-punk got so lethargic and landfill we were trying to be like Wire,” he says. “We wanted to do stuff like them on the weirder side of guitar music. Pop was a dirty word at the time.”In 2017, Nolan arrived in the capital from Scunthorpe with guitarist Joe Nash “at the tail end of that whole Fat White Family and Windmill…

From: Vermont, USRecommended if you like: Psychedelic Furs, Future Islands, Simple MindsUp next: UK dates in February, supporting Dry Cleaning in MarchPlenty of artists felt compelled to write and record during the Covid lockdown, but few did so in quite such intense circumstances as Thus Love. The band’s three members – vocalist and guitarist Echo Marshall, drummer Lu Racine and bass player Nathaniel van Osdol – had all moved to the small Vermont town of Brattleboro independently. They met in what they have described as…

Billy Nomates has always been determined to exist on her own terms. She released her first single in 2020 after a life-altering Sleaford Mods show, christened by an insult thrown at her by a crowd member who saw that she was attending alone. On that song, No, Tor Maries outlined her manifesto with an anthem of calm defiance: “No is the greatest resistance / No to your nothing existence”, the Bristolian declared, finding urgency in hollow delivery. In the vein of post-punk sprechgesang, her stark rhetoric was set in…

Who is this film for? That’s a question I found myself asking during artist and film-maker Matt Hulse’s ramshackle documentary. Aged 11, in the late 70s, Hulse formed a band called the Hippies with his older brother Toby, then 12, and sister Polly, then 8. He played drums – or rather chopsticks on cardboard boxes. In the promotional material for the film, the Hippies are described as Britain’s youngest post-punk band. But there’s no evidence here that they played gigs bigger than their mum’s front room, like hundreds of…