Saturday 12 May 2012

The Vibrators @ Pontypool Review


The Vibrators
The Hog and Hosper, Pontypool. 
30/03/12

Image credit - YRV* photography

‘MARKY’S JUST PASSED OUT ON THE BOG THE MAD OLD GIT’ bellows a swaying Farringdon clad lad. Punk might not be dead, but its’ followers aren’t faring so well.
 The year is 2012, and in a Welsh pub 50 miles south of somewhere, punk77 legends, The Vibrators, are playing a selection of their 36 year old back catalogue, to a moderately sized audience consisting of punks that never grew up.

Highlight of the set comes in the form of the bands most notorious hit ‘Baby, Baby’ with frontman Peter Honkamaki, who this evening has shown he is more than capable of taking the egotistical frontman duties from Knox, howling in the unsuspected crowd’s faces and saluting his Epiphone Thunderbird to the sky, simultaneously knocking over the venue’s Christmas lighting décor. How’s that for anarchy in the UK?
The set takes a downward turn when the band showcases songs from their latest album ‘Under the Radar’.  Sweaty group photos are taken, old punks stumble over their trashed Dr Martens to the bar and a colossal sized gentleman, which could have well been a senior Vyvyan Basterd, heckles ‘PLAY SOME OLD SONGS YOU FUCKING HIPPIES’.
Punk might not be dead, but I could probably drink it under the table. 

Critical Evaluation
As my review was on a gig of a punk band, plenty of mentions to the bricolages of punk subculture are naturally in my review, such as references to ‘Dr Martens’ and ‘Farringdon clad lads’. (Hebdidge quoting Ernst. 2008) The gig itself was exactly what a punk gig is expected to be like with its “high energy…and abundance of audience participation” (O’Hara, 2000) so I tried to convey this with aggressive adjectives such as ‘howling’ ‘saluting’ and ‘sweaty’, to attempt to recreate the gigs atmosphere. Although I am pleased with my review on a whole, I admit I did not think about my target audience when writing it. The use of taboo language in my review rules out the possibility of it being used in a mainstream magazine/webzine and the fact that the gig was a small event in a small venue further rules out this possibility. The most appropriate place for this review to be published is a blog, and alas, that is where it is.

References
HEBDIDGE, D. 2008. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routeledge
O'Hara, C (2000). The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise!!. Birmingham: AK Press.


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