Enduring Spirit

On tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their eponymous debut LP, The Raincoats should be assured of its legacy if last night's gig at the Komedia in Brighton was anything to go by. Amongst the expected middle-aged audience was a healthy contingent of young people - and young women in particular - and they seemed to know the words to the songs as well as us oldies. Part of that may be down to the album's enthusiastic endorsement by the late Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love's Hole covering one of their songs; but even that was 25 years ago so I like to think it's more an enduring spirit that has been handed down through punk and riot grrrl and still has currency today.

The Raincoats were born from the west London squatting scene of the late seventies: inspired by The Slits, Gina Birch (bass and vocals) and Ana da Silva (guitar and vocals) started the band having met at Hornsey Art College. After some initial line-up changes, they became an all-female group in 1978 when they were joined by Vicky Aspinall on violin and Palmolive from The Slits on drums. They started from a point of little musical ability but were undeterred: as Gina advised last night, "write some lyrics, put them to a couple of chords - but be inventive." And The Raincoats were: at a time when so many bands were opting for rama-lama punk as a template, they were different and surprising; it was no wonder that disillusioned Pistol John Lydon was an early fan.

Only Ana and Gina from the line-up that recorded The Raincoats were present last night - Anne Wood and Vice Cooler were on violin and drums, respectively - as they played the original LP in its entirety book-ended with outstanding debut single Fairytale in the Supermarket at the start and songs from the Extended Play EP at the end. Still sounding angular and lo-fi but with uplifting harmonies, they worked through the tracks chronologically and it was a joy to hear songs such as Off Duty Trip, The Void and, my particular favourite, the Velvety nag of the discomfiting In Love, with its lyrics of turmoil: "I can't do a thing today/I can't see anyway/I haven't eaten all day." I last saw the band in early 1980 at the Electric Ballroom in Camden and it was such a treat to hear them live again, not in a nostalgic way but as confirmation that in the era of my youth there were people producing such distinctive and life-affirming music.

Charming and disarming in their interactions with the audience, the band were candid about the demands of playing live: Ana revealed the difficulty of getting their cover of The Kinks' Lola right (they did) and Gina, switching to guitar for a couple of songs, confessed that it was hard to sing when playing the bass. It was just this sort of honesty that made The Raincoats so refreshing and opened up the way in music for countless others. The honesty continued to the end of the night when Ana said, "This is the last song, we're not pretending, we have no encore, we have no more songs." And as they took a bow to rapturous applause, they were joined onstage by 'fifth-Beatle' Shirley O'Loughlin, The Raincoats' manager since the start.

Something Special

Facing a three-way clash on the Saturday afternoon at the recent End of the Road festival, I used Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man method of making a choice and ended up seeing all of Bill Ryder-Jones, most of Nadine Shah but none of DUDS. I bitterly regretted missing out on the Mancunian band, whose 2016 EPs, Unfit For Work and Wet Reduction, I had heard on Marc Riley's show. However, on returning from the festival I found out they were playing in Brighton in a mere few weeks, so all was not lost.

That date rolled around last night and I went off to the Green Door Store expecting to hear the quirky guitars and skittering post-punk rhythms of their previous output. I was not disappointed: there was clear evidence in their sound of angular bands like early XTC and Scritti Politti; but what I was not expecting was how dynamic their stage performance would be and how their music seems to have moved on in the past 12 months. To begin with, they have expanded from a band of four to a seven-piece, incorporating vocals, two guitars, bass, drums, percussion, trumpet and cornet; also, they massed on the tiny stage all dressed in identical dark grey short sleeve shirts and trousers, making them seem like a gang and creating an imposing presence; and the sheer ferocity of the playing took the breath away.

With the expansion of the band, DUDS' sound has developed into a full-on dissonant No Wave experience. Incredibly tight, the bass, drums and percussion were a rhythmic assault and the discordant guitars and blasting brass gave no let-up: with no song longer than a couple of minutes, their brief and relentless - and encoreless set - left the audience exhausted and in no doubt they had witnessed something special.

They finished with No Remark, the opening track of their just-released album, Of A Nature Or Degree (12 tracks, 23 minutes). I picked up a copy at the merch stall afterwards and, chatting to the band, it came as no surprise that their music is characterised by short bursts of rhythmical energy when they cited The Contortions, Blurt and Wire as influences.

Of A Nature Or Degree is out now on Castle Face Records.

Every Picture Tells A Story

Looking at a feature in a national newspaper at the weekend, where mere mortals reflect on being caught in the periphery of a well-known photograph, I idly remarked that I had once been in a picture accompanying a gig review in the NME. Within moments it had been found on the internet and my kids were incredulously asking if the teenager in the photo was the same person as the middle-aged man sat before them. It was.

At the start of January 1978, Siouxsie and the Banshees played two consecutive nights at the Nashville Rooms, just around the corner from West Kensington tube in London, and I was there on the second night. The Nashville was an excellent venue: small, intimate and already revered as one of the few places that had hosted early punk gigs. I would later see The Ruts there – when there was a riot caused by fighting punks and skins – and one of the Psychedelic Furs’ earliest gigs.

Siouxsie and the Banshees did not have a record deal at the time but, like Adam and the Ants and The Slits, their music was familiar to us through the sessions they had recorded for John Peel. We had already seen the Banshees a couple of times: their gigs were always full but, provided you got there early and queued, you got in; there was no advance ticketing in the punk rock revolution.

I remember the night at the Nashville, well. The Banshees seemed to have developed from earlier gigs: the set still contained favourites Love In A Void and Make Up To Break Up, but the sound was starker, more angular, especially on newer songs such as Metal Postcard and Suburban Relapse. And they looked different: Siouxsie was Siouxsie, but the band was all dressed in black; there was not a hooped t-shirt to be seen. The word ‘Gothic’ was first used in connection with modern music to describe Joy Division, but I think Siouxsie and the Banshees can rightly be credited with inventing what we now think of as ‘Goth’.

In the photograph, I do not seem to have quite caught this new mood. There I am at the front, grinning at the camera. Smiling was not something I would do much of in the following years, as I firmly pinned my colours to the mast of gloomy post-punk. I had gone to the gig with my best mate, Ian. I was 15, he was 16. We had made the cross-town trek from south-east London and it is very likely that our mums and dads thought we were at each others’ houses - that old one. Ian is to the left of the man with spectacles in the picture. I can still recall that we were puzzled by his presence: in our youthful arrogance we thought, why would a middle-aged man be at a gig like this? That I still think of the music of the Banshees, Wire, PiL and Joy Division as the most remarkable I have ever heard probably answers that question.

It is an old saw that every picture tells a story, but what puzzles me about this one is the story it does not tell. When we look at the past, we are often guilty of compartmentalising events, constructing a linear narrative. But when we look at actual dates, we realise that our lives were not like that, that different episodes were actually concurrent. This photograph was taken on the 7th January 1978; a couple of days before that, I must have had my first day of six traumatic months at a new secondary school having been expelled from my old school before Christmas. There is not a hint of that trouble in my face: I must have been full of piss and vinegar - or something else.