Brigandage – Gung Ho Records – 1986 / John Peel session – 1983

Pretty Funny Thing / One Touch / Ripped And Torn (DOWNLOAD)

Horsey Horsey / I Need Something Part 1 + Part 2 / Angel Of Vengeance (DOWNLOAD)

Brigandage were a band that I enjoyed listening to from the earlier 1980’s until the mid 1980’s. The Peel session that I had taped in 1983 and the ‘F.Y.M’ *** cassette that was released a year later were never far away from my cassette player. The Brigandage performances were not too shabby either.

*** Not sure if it just a coincidence but the original Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzine was going to be called Fuck Your Mother. It might not be as the members of Brigandage would rub shoulders with the Puppy Collective in the early 1980’s. Brigandage also had a track entitled ‘Ripped And Torn’. The moniker for Tony D’s original fanzine from 1976 to 1979.

I waited patiently for this album to be released, and with some anticipation, after I got the vinyl from Ugly Child Records (after Small Wonder Records had left the same premises in Walthamstow) in the mid 1980’s, I played it and ended up having some reservations about the album.

I realised that the band were not a garage band any more.

There was more sensitivity throughout the seven tracks with (in my mind at least) a huge spoonful of Patti Smith circa ‘Radio Ethiopia’ as an inspiration for the sound coming off the grooves stamped onto the vinyl. I heard subtle Velvet Underground guitar styles on several of the tracks, this was no bad thing. It was just a little too different to what I was expecting at that time.

Similar to the Blood And Roses album released at a similar time, I felt that nothing was as good as the cassettes and the Peel sessions, or would ever be.

The Brigandage album grew on me after a few weeks (as did the Blood And Roses album incidently) and both those albums got to sit nicely alongside the cassettes and the Peel sessions by the end of several weeks.

Geoff and his F.O / Gung Ho Records were based on the floor above All The Madmen Records at 97 Caledonian Road in Kings Cross. All The Madmen Records moved into the area after departing from Brougham Road in Hackney. I got to see various members of Brigandage every now and again, going up and down the stairs passing our rather unimpressive office space towards Geoffs rather unimpressive office space.

As an aside, in early 1989 when I started working at the Southern Studios base along Myddleton Road in Wood Green, I used to spend a fair amount of time with Harvey Birrell who had engineered the tracks that appeared on this Brigandage album. This was one of his first ever engineering works that he had applied his attention to he told me. Harvey was engineering full time at Southern Studios after John Loder took more of a back seat in engineering affairs.

Many albums have been released by many bands who had recorded at Southern Studios, that have the Harvey Birrell ‘touch’ stamped into the grooves of the vinyl.

Thanks to Richard Cabut A.K.A Richard North A.K.A Richard Kick for supplying the two essays below and for the transcript of the N.M.E article from 1983. Thanking Richard also for supplying some of the scanned material. I supplied other bits and bobs.

Thanks to Paul May for supplying the Brigandage John Peel session in a rather roundabout way. My original copy got lost one sad day, some decades ago.

PRETTY FUNNY THING

Ciao Brigandage! Pretty Funny Thing was Brigandage, or at least the Brigandage that I was a part of disappearing into the night like the detail on a fading picture. But what a vivid picture it had once been!

Full of cocky swagger, spunk and self-regard – all very appealing I know.

We had successfully fended off approaches from a succession of record companies that we felt we were far too cool for. We made the common mistake of believing time to be imaginary. One year was like another. Eventually everything would fall into place. And in a way, I suppose it did.

I had close ties with Geoff Pitts at F.O Records who, prompted by the relative success of our cassette only release F.Y.M, insisted that we record an album. He even paid for it.

The Pistols’ punk that had characterised the tone and lustre of the band’s former incarnation (circa the John Peel session and, to a certain diminished degree, our very own FYM cassette) was gone. Pushing out the Steve Jones chord progressions had, by the mid-80s, become a little too embarrassing even for Michelle, although these things go in cycles.

So, before recording the tracks that eventually appeared on the album, we asked guitarist Glen Cahalin to play in any way he liked, as long as it didn’t sound like Steve Jones and The Sex Pistols.

Besides, Michelle and I had new loves and obsessions that fuelled our rock ‘n’ roll dreams. Namely, Warhol’s Duchampian or Baudelairian sensibilities (yeah, well…); the Velvet Underground archetype that spoke of viciousness, lust ‘n’ hate and leather (a fantasy of style); life as film noir, existential, nihilistic and a little apocalyptic, I guess; silver art; white heat; pale, frail glamour; the sheen of squalor that spangles; downtown slow dive lowlifes; and other cheap throwaway thrills.

You get the idea. It was bound to end in tears. But before that we had an album to record.

This was the Uptight Brigandage. Clean, hard and laced with layers of acerbity and disdain, although not to be mistaken for some sub – Thunders wasted glam crew of the time. We had a clear understanding of the here and now, and a desire to get out of it. Rather than just get out of it.

We cared with unflinching sincerity.

The album was recorded in some toilet (literally – great acoustics) called Globe Studio, and mixed at Terminal 24 near the Elephant by Harvey Birrell, a nice guy then and now.

I mostly remember the anxiety and paranoia, the speed, suspicion and delirium, the insomniac insouciance, the psychic fallout, the melodrama and the mania. Sophisticated cool well and truly blown, and ‘the buzzerama and the acrylic high’ (quote from Edie Sedgwick that we nicked for the sleeve notes).

Yes, it was all fun and frolics!

In this light, and listening almost thirty years later, the resulting vinyl seems weirdly commonsensical, slightly frigid (that’s speed for you I suppose). But it does have blood and bones and enough emotional jolts and poetic suss.

There’s some small sparks of beauty and genuineness, and perhaps a few little blazes of spectacularity to boot. Even if I do say so myself…

Unsurprisingly, the band split shortly after the album was released. The magic was elsewhere, but some of it remains here, in this vinyl, too.

RICHARD CABUT – NOVEMBER 2014

Mint copies of the Pretty Funny Thing album are available directly from Richard Cabut. £3.99 each plus 3.75 postage. Orders from outside the UK, please contact for postage rates.

Paypal is good – payable to richard.cabut@btinternet.com

Richard is also contactable via twitter @richardcabut

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD CABUT – FEBRUARY 2014

Q: Could you tell about the bands with which Brigandage made the “scene” in the early 80’s? How did you all feel about the situation around punk at the time?

Richard Cabut: I liked the punk scene in the early 80s. I liked it in the mid Seventies, too. The late 70s, though, were like the third Monday in January, officially recognized by the medical profession as the day on which more UK citizens wake up depressed than any other. The reality of another grinding year kicks in, the horror of the Christmas credit card bill bites, and the misery of another rain dashed day dawns. It was like that.

But the early 80s were another punk Spring. Punk at that time became a way of life for an increasingly large and motivated group of people. Moreover, folk were, to paraphrase Malcolm McLaren, creating an environment in which they could truthfully run wild. We were making scenes that took people away from the confines of school and work. Instead of just listening to records in isolation and going to the odd gig, people were having life adventures.

Obviously, Brigandage and positive punk inherit a lot from the anarcho punk scene and shares a lot with the Batcave scene. But positive punks didn’t do much drugs and alcohol whilst, for example, we can read about Crass’ Autonomy Centre that “the place quite rapidly became a drug haven where the majority of people would just get pissed, stoned or worse” and on the other hand, contradictory to anarcho bands, you did cared about the image, but seems not to the extent of creating your gigs “glamorous art-house events” as Andi Sex Gang described the Batcave gigs.

Q: So what ideas you shared with anarcho and gothic scenes, and what ideas made you different to them?

Richard Cabut: Funnily, and from an objective viewpoint, the original Brigandage (before I joined), seemed to offer an instant nostalgia. Their musical references harked back only four or five years to the rot ‘n’ roll of the Pistols. Stylistically, the focus was Johnny Rotten and other 76ers – check drummer Ben Addison (later Boys Wonder and Corduroy) on the NME Positive Punk front cover for instance. A great look. I suppose Brigandage appealed to those punks who wanted a link to a mythologized recent past, and a sense of authenticity. Also some sort of purity, panache and bravura in terms of their punk culture. I was a fan, but it was a very niche audience.

Q: Even though Brigandage is quiet now, it seems to be the longest living positive punk bands. 1983 saw the end of UK Decay, Southern Death Cult, Blood & Roses and The Mob. By 1984 there was no original Sex Gang Children any more. Brigandage (though in varying line-ups) survived until 1986 so it’s extremely interesting to hear your thoughts about positive punk whether it died by 1984 or survived and evolved (and may be still does well nowadays?).

Richard Cabut: Well, I wrote the Positive Punk article for the NME in January / February 1983. At that time there were three distinct groupings in the punk scene. The Oi-sters and Herberts, who were basic and gumby-ish punk music, fashion and behaviour. The anarchos, who were like a mass of black, in terms of clothes and demeanor. And then you had a loose, nameless collection of punks and former punks who were colourful, and full of, it seemed, vim, dash and go-ahead spirit. These folk tended to go to see roughly the same bands and attended the same sort of clubs. I wrote about many of the bands and places, ranging from the Batcave and the Specimen, to the Mob (who were sort of anarcho-plus).

It was obvious that something was going on, and the NME asked me to write a piece about it. Originally, I didn’t use the name ‘positive punk’, or any umbrella term. But the paper needed an easy hook to snag readers. Positivity, I suggested when asked, was a common denominator, so hey presto… a little alliteration goes a long way. Of course, Positive Punk was a disaster. As soon as something is named, people have a target to attack. Also, factions within the scene quickly appeared.

The style magazine The Face, for instance, did a Positive Punk piece, but the Sex Gang Children refused to become involved – because they couldn’t control it. Their noses had been put out of joint. The big wigs in the scene, your Sex Gangs and Southern Death Cults, had suddenly been usurped, or so they thought, by upstarts like Brigandage and Blood and Roses.

Overnight, the atmosphere changed from togetherness to suspicion, jealousy and loathing. This would probably have happened in any case, but the Positive Punk article greatly accelerated the process. As far as I am concerned, Positive Punk described the ‘Passage of a few People (wearing makeup and top hats) through a Rather Brief Moment in Time.’ I think it was accurate. In hindsight, the music wasn’t great, which was probably the real downfall. And then it turned into goth, with even worse music.

Q: Could you tell more about the band’s attitude towards politics? On one hand your sympathy to anarchists and situationists is obvious, but on another you always underlined that you don’t want to be locked within one particular conception like, say, Crass were.

Richard Cabut: None of us were activists, as such, or intellectuals. I think we were interested in the fantastic slogans, ‘They said that oblivion was their ruling passion. They wanted to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters of their own lives.’ That kind of thing. We didn’t give a damn whether or not the Situs were a distillation of Hegel’s abstract universalism into a totalising critique, or whether they were a mere echo of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Or, whatever. And I don’t recall attending any marches or political meetings of any sort.

I guess, in my time, the band was probably more influenced by someone like Richard Neville and his ‘Politics of Play.’ In his 1960s book, Neville stands aside from the straight Left. The straights are about working hard and supportively, while for us there was no wish to work at all. The straights wanted work for everyone (and this was a time of mass unemployment) whereas we shrugged off the very thought of routine to focus on the exciting stuff, and somehow managed to get by.

We were like kids (hence the idea of Playpower). I was positive that self-empowered, autodidactic, spiky guttersnipes were an upsurge of the future, certain to overcome the old political order – the RCPs, the SWPs, the stolid Left, the more traditional anarchists, even. I remember sneering at the people who supported the Miners Strike. Why would anyone want to work underground? I regret this attitude now. We should all have stood firm.

Perhaps I was, I hesitate to say ‘we’ in case it offends, arrogant with a sense of entitlement. My impression, to quote from a piece I more recently wrote for 3ammagazine, about Brigandage life at that time, ‘We were certainly not poets of the dispossessed. We strutted our Billy-the-Kid sense of cool — bombsite kids clambering out of the ruins — posing our way out of the surrounding dreariness. We were living in our own colourful movie (an earlyish Warhol flick we liked to think), which we were sure was incomparably richer, more spontaneous and far more magical than the depressing, collective black-and-white motion-less picture that the 9-5 conformists, or those that stumbled around with their booze-fuelled regrets, had to settle for.’

Have you ever seen the old TV show Bewitched? In one episode, the character Endora, a witch, says of humans, ‘they all look the same to me, noses to the grindstone shoulders to the wheel, feet planted firmly on the ground, no wonder they can’t fly!’ She adds: ‘It’s fine for them but not for us. We are quicksilver, a fleeting shadow, a distant sound that has no boundaries through which we can’t pass. We are found in music, in a flash of colour, we live in the wind and in a sparkle of star…’ Which is, with tongue slightly in cheek, kind of how I thought of Brigandage, at that time.

Q: Did you face aggression from skinheads and orthodox punks? Was the scene strong enough to resist the violence? Did you adhere to the “fight back” approach or preferred to solve the situations in a peaceful way by any means?

Richard Cabut: I have been badly beaten up by skinheads on a couple of occasions, but not in the context of Brigandage. The Skinhead Terror at the time was very real. But they didn’t really go to the gigs we played at or went to. However, if you were unlucky enough to be caught out on the street, you could come away with a hiding. It was difficult because most punks didn’t move in big gangs. Skinheads often did. The sense of punk individuality, as has oft been pointed out, was both its strength and weakness.

Q: “Brigandage support any politics that DOES, that stands for individuality, humanity, rebellion” – that’s what you stated in your fanzine that came with FYM cassette. Do you still adhere to this idea? And what do you think about the political situation nowadays?

Richard Cabut: These days I still like the slogans. I like the poetry of that sort of politics. I once wrote a sort of verse, which talked about the Romance of Anarchy becoming Reality. I still believe that the romance is grounded in a reality that makes clear that, on all levels, the process of daily life is based on a trade of humiliations and agro, as the Situs said. I still think that ‘alienated work is a scandal’, that so-called ‘leisure’ is an affront, and that ‘real life is elsewhere.’

Where? Well, the pertinent questions, I still think, are not about restructuring economic systems, although I admit on a day-to-day level that helps, but about how quickly the underpinnings of society – all the givens, great unmentionables, so-called axioms – the fact that it is a closed-loop feedback system which easily sops up and throws back challenges and critiques – can be dissolved. I demand that this happens. And I feel, to paraphrase the Situ slogan and Malcolm McClaren’s shirt, I am entirely reasonable in my demand for the impossible.

POSITIVE PUNK N.M.E ARTICLE WRITTEN BY RICHARD NORTH A.K.A RICHARD CABUT – FEBRUARY 1983

Brigandage John Peel session: Let It Rot / Heresy / Hope / Fragile (DOWNLOAD)

PART ONE

“Don’t dream it, be it.”- Rocky Horror Show

The boy sits before the staring mirror and ponders his clean-shaven reflection. Smiling, he selects a carefully compiled tape and slots it into his machine.

‘Fatman’ is the first track: Southern Death Cult excites him and he dances in his seat while unscrewing a tube of foundation cream.

He’s got to look good tonight and it’s becoming every night because he’s off out to a gig. He’s going to see one of his bands, one of the groups he regularly sees. Brigandage, Southern Death Cult,
Danse Society, Ritual, Rubella Ballet, Virgin Prunes, Specimen, The Mob… They’re the only ones that mean anything to him anymore.

Tonight it’s Blood And Roses at London’s Moonlight Club and all his friends will be there. One of their tracks, ‘Your Sin Is Your Salvation’, comes up on the tape and the boy remembers the last time he saw them.

The blur of colour, the heady atmosphere, the fun, the collective feeling of motion – forward! It made him feel alive, positive, and then he formed a group the next week.

Finishing his make-up the boy turns his attention to his dyed blue hair, carefully back-combing it into disarray. Last week he’d been beaten up by some skinheads because they didn’t like the look of him. He remembers their fury but shrugs: he enjoys his appearance and is proud to look different. In a way he’s almost glad that his clothes and attitude had provoked the attack-their mindlessness wrapped in a dull, grey, lazy uniform of bitterness gives him a reason to be their opposite.

He feels bright and optimistic about the future, slipping into a pair of leather trousers, noticing he’s only got a few quid left in his pocket. It doesn’t matter though, the dole gives him time to do things, like his group.

A Brigandage number blares out: ‘Hope’, it seems to sum things up for him. With its message on his lips the boy half-dances across the room, through the door and out.

PART TWO

“I don’t like the word movement, but there’s now a large collection of bands and people with the same positive feeling.” – Andi, singer with Sex Gang Children, speaking on the opening night of Son of Batcave.

HAIL ERIS, Goddess of Discord, and pass the ammunition: as the heavy drumbeat rolls and the harsh chords crash and sometimes even tingle, it’s then that the boys and girls come out to play. Playpower!

With wild-coloured spiked hair freezing the eye, and even more vivid clothes to spice the imagination – faces, thoughts and actions – the atmosphere’s infused with a charge of excitement, an air of abandon underlined with a sense of purpose.
Something stirs again in this land of fetid, directionless sludgery, this land of pretend optimism and grim reality. Theory and practice are being synthesised under the golden umbrella of a 24-hour long ideal.

Welcome to the new positive punk.

Although it’s not the purpose of this article to create any kind of movement or cult, any easy or accessible bandwagon to be tumbled onto, it is indisputable that a large number of bands and people involved in the culture called rock, have sprung up at approximately the same time, facing their lifestyles in the same direction. Maybe unconsciously so, it’s a huge collective force that we can call the new positive punk a re-evaluation and rejuvenation of the ideals that made the original outburst so great, an intensification of and expansion of that ethos of individuality, creativity and rebellion. The same buzz that burned our streets, hearts and minds in ’76/77 is happening again.

The Industrial Revolution is over, a new era has begun, and the current mood is an affirmation of that point. The natural energy that for over 200 years has been poured into the physical, the rational and the materialistic, has now all grown crooked. The mental/magical power has been lost: it was simply not needed – steam engines, radios, electricity were so much easier and they worked.

But now the glamour is wearing off; we can see the strings and wires, the clockwork squeaks…the radiation is beginning to corrode the pretty box.

All the darkness and light, all the forces are still there deep underneath, bubbling, steaming, and fermenting. The instinct, ritual and ceremony are rising again in everyday life; many people are starting to use the tarot and l-Ching. And the new punk groups are a reflection of this feeling; their use of mystical/metaphysical imagery and symbolism is a striking common denominator. Not in the way of dumb-dabbling and superficial posturing of, say, a Black Sabbath with their (gasp) black magic kicks.

Nor is it a silly hippy Tolkien fantasy joyride, or even a Killing Joke stench-of-death gloomier-than- thou slice of fanaticism. lt is, instead, an intelligent and natural interest in mystery, rather than history, that is a sign of an open mind.

These groups are aware: UK Decay (positive punk forefathers), using the dark to contrast and finally emphasise the light; Sex Gang Children taking us into the sub-world of the Crowleyan abyss; while Blood And Roses are pushing the symbols a whole lot further, their guitarist Bob being a serious student of the Art.

The mystical tide we are talking about here refers, if nothing else, to the inner warmth and virtual energy that human beings regard as the most favourable state to live in. The new positive punk has tapped into this current.

And if all this sounds a touch heavy, let’s consider the humour, style and inherent fun that are essential parts of the movement. Let’s look at groups like Specimen, who are more Rocky Horror than Aleister Crowley, preening themselves in a glam-soaked traipse among the ruins. Or The Virgin Prunes’ cheeky onstage oral sex send-up. The real humour is intermixed with the sheer sense of joy de vivre present at such gatherings.

Here is a glow of energy and life that overcomes the need for artificial stimulation. Unlike the heroin or barbiturate sodden club scene or the glue-swamped Oi / punk arena, the emphasis here is not on drugs. Although illicit substances are not unknown, the desperate desire to nullify boredom is not present, and therefore there is no narcotic edge to the scene. Members of several groups (such as Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children and UK Decay) do not even drink.

For perhaps the first time, an active and flourishing dissenting body will not go down with its hind legs kicking as the drug takes over.

Money and time are tight: so both of them are being spent on something far more enjoyable and important: style. There’s a veritable explosion of multi-coloured aestheticism. So different from the bland, stereotyped Oi boot boy punk fare of jeans, leather jacket and studs, this is an individualist stance even if it tends towards a common identity. A green-haired spike-topped girl wearing a long black pleated skirt, white parachute top and bootlace tie passes a tasselled, black-haired mohawk in creepers, white socks, red pegs and self-made, neatly-designed T-shirt. Something clicks. They smile in acknowledgement.

We are fireworks.

PART THREE

“I think that our influence comes from the fact that there are so many negative bands around. We’re not – so away we go!” – Bob, guitarist with Blood And Roses, Stoke Newington

If the bands absorb, reflect and present (not necessarily in that order, it’s a give and take thing) the attitude of their fans and the tone of their surroundings – and I think that the important ones do – then we can trace the whole thing back to its roots, travelling through the erotic politics of the influential Doors and the tense dusky danger of The Velvet Underground, then we come to The Sex Pistols, who operated under a vicious amalgam of style and direction.
Projecting a perfect combination of distorted but relevant aesthetics, music and suss, their all-important effect was the provocation of thought.

Then, veering away from 1002 misdirected cardboard copies, we come to the Banshees and the Ants. These two are important to the new positive punk: the Banshees because of their sheer power of imagination, and the Ants because of their promotion of sensuous ‘black’ style.

Both had an adventurous and rebellious air about them that cut through the regressive dross. Their outlook, musically and in angle of thought, went beyond the proscribed boundaries of behaviour at the time. They explored the edges of light and dark and some of the areas in between. They were a progression and they are the two clearest reference points to this recent outburst of energy.

Back at the tail – end of ’78 and beyond, punk spun into a tail dive of Tuinol-dazed tiredness. A pause.

Trends came and went: dead ends such as mod, new romanticism up to and including the funk craze all took their toll on the vital energy. And those who stuck with the essence of their punk were faced with the development of Oi. Punk, under the guidance of certain lobots, gathered itself around a banner of no brains, no style, no heart and no hope. Heads buried in the glue-bag of dejection and floundering away under a barrage of three-chord rubbish this was, and is, no way to lead a life.

Some drifted with the anarcho scene which at the time (1980 / 81) was the only worthwhile concern going. But by 1983, when everything is said and done, that angle seems too flat and puritan to be of much inspirational value. Crass, although anti-sexist, were and still are extremely sexless: a stark, bleak Oliver Cromwell new model army, who have sense but no sensuality.

At the opposite end of the scale, inspired by the feeling of the Ants etc, come the two groups who are the immediate forerunners of today’s flood. They are Bauhaus and, later, Theatre Of Hate, both of whom capitalised on the idea of style and, what is more, a ‘dangerous’ and sensuous style that attracted more and more fans who were sick of the bleak and macho Oi and the shallow cult with no name.

It’s these fans, reacting against the devaluation of punk, and fired by the spirit of the above mentioned mentors, who are acting now. They’ve created a colourful and thriving nationwide scene resplendent in their individuality but still linked by a progressive punk idiom, one that says go instead of stop, expand instead of contract, yes instead of no. A new positive punk.

PART FOUR

“Stimulating thought, bringing people together, entertaining people, creating an atmosphere of sheer exhilaration and enjoyment. These are the main things.” – lan, singer with Southern Death Cult.

Andi Sex Gang twitches in the spotlight, the beam reflecting his harsh features and closely-cropped hair. He clenches his fists and spits out ‘Into The Abyss’.

lan Southern Death Cult flails his arms and chicken-war dances across the stage, a sharp youthful figure with black be-feathered mohawk. His song is ‘Moya’, the words and the power behind the words providing an insight into cultural stagnation. He howls and shrieks in defiance.

Mark from The Mob, an anarcho-renegade, with his bleached dread hair stands up straight before the microphone, growling “Still living in the English fear, waiting for the witch-hunt dear.”

All this and more as Michelle Brigandage leaps onto the amps, top hat at a rakish angle. “As we walk in the sunlight honesty protects our eyes” is her cry.

And Bob Blood And Roses, he just grins, he knows… “Love is the Law”, their tale underlining the truly optimistic undercurrent to this mood.

And the fans, bedecked in sparkling, inventive garb, they kick, they jump, they scream.

“A night for celebration, a night to unwind,” repeats the diminishing echo from the ghost of UK Decay. “For celebration, celebration, celebration…”

PART FIVE

“There’s nothing else. Everything else has been stripped from us. So now we’re just gonna do it. There’s no other choice.” Michelle, singer with Brigandage

So here it is: the new positive punk, with no empty promises of revolution, either in the rock’n’roll sense or the wider political sphere. Here is only a chance of self-awareness, of personal revolution, of colourful perception and galvanisation of the imagination that startles the slumbering mind and body from their sloth.

Certainly this is revolution in the non-political sense, but at the same time it’s neither escapist nor defeatist. It is, in fact, “political” in the genuine sense of the word.

Individuality? Creativity? Rebellion? The synthesis comes at the moment when you do the one thing, the only thing, when you know you’re not just a trivial counter on the social chequerboard. Here are thousands doing that one thing: merging an explosive and cutting style with a sense of positive belief and achievement, and having fun while they’re doing it.

The Oi-sters and their ilk may have taken punk a few millimetres to the right or a centimetre to the left, but not one damn step forward.

This is punk at last built on rock and not on sand.

THE END

SEXY HOOLIGANS CLOTHING

Michelle fronted the band Brigandage and lived amongst the Puppy Collective in and around the squats of Hampstead.

Michelle’s band, Brigandage, was a firm favourite of the Puppy Collective and to a much younger Penguin.

Previous to forming Brigandage in 1979, Michelle was in the band V.D.U that put out one 7″ single ‘Don’t Cry For Me’ on Thin Sliced records. Sadly I do not own this artefact but if and when I do I will place it up on KYPP.

Michelle is still involved in the scene in no small way after all these years. She has never really been away. Brigandage have not reformed (although that might be nice at some point in the future).

What Michelle has been doing for several years now is to create lovingly screen printed replicas of some of the original Seditionaries stock, original stock long gone now.

Michelle also creates her own clothing inspired by the Seditionaries brand from 1977 which are equally beautiful and well made for both men and for women.

These are just six examples of a huge range of Sexy Hooligans clothing for men and women, all top quality material.

Please go and check out the Sexy Hooligans website for more details HERE.

HERE for the Sexy Hooligans Face-Book page.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS TO RHIAN D WHOSE BIRTHDAY IT IS TODAY FROM ALL AT KILL YOUR PET PUPPY ONLINE.

2 comments
  1. Marco Ramone
    Marco Ramone
    November 23, 2014 at 12:19 pm

    Brilliant…Happy Birthday Rhian. x

  2. Carl
    Carl
    December 4, 2014 at 3:52 pm

    Great band, loved the album which I thought was possibly the last great punk album. Ripped and Torn was a stunning song.
    Anyway Happy Birthday as well!
    And also Happy upcoming birthday to Penguin as well! ( I know this as was born on the same day and year !!)

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