Joyful dance punk for joyful dancing punks
Songs for library punks from Snuff and the London leg of NOFX's long goodbye
Regular gig going is often as much a story of the concerts you missed as it is about those incendiary nights that remain seared into your memory months, years and even decades later.
On the side of shows that were suddenly unavailable, recent years have given us more than their fair share of cancellations, generally Covid-related. For me, missing Snuff, Frank Turner with Snuff, and then Turnstile with High Vis still rankle.
Even before the pandemic I had to swerve NOFX with Snuff due to training for my first Dan black belt grading in Choi Kwang Do the following day.
As you might guess, Snuff have been on my gig ticket hitlist for some time - I got close a few years back, seeing Snuff's singing drummer Duncan Redmonds on guitar and vocals in one of his other bands, the brilliant - if unfortunately named - Guns 'n Wankers.
Just before summer hit this year, I finally caught Snuff live at The Dome, a Victorian-era building in North London's Tufnell Park.
There was a swathe of bands playing post-Hüsker Dü pop punk in the early 90s, with bands such as Therapy? and Leatherface rising above the slightly generic hoard by injecting more noise rock or metallic elements into the mix.
Snuff did too, though in their case they consumed most of the periodic table to produce a multi-hyphenated compound you might label mod-hardcore-ska-folk-pop-punk, or something like that.
It’s that mutant mix that gives the band some of their boatloads of charm, along with Duncan’s avuncular geezer personality. "Things are about to get weird," he proclaims at one point, though there’s nothing strange about the supportive hometown crowd, and he introduces an instrumental track with "this one's for the mods and then the library punks".
It’s the kind of approach that inspires a friendly heckle of 'blimey' amongst the band’s blasts through newer songs ‘Lemon Curd’, ‘Go Easy’ and ‘Dippy Egg’. Once marked down by the UK’s weekly music press for ‘novelty’ covers, Snuff don’t seem like a band that would have been overly concerned about what the NME thought about them in the 1990s. They break out both ‘Soul Gumbo’ – best known as either a Booker T and the MG’s song or as the soundtrack to BBC cricket coverage – and ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’, a TV theme they imbue with pathos and a knees-up-sing-along spirit.
It really is joyful dance punk for joyful dancing punks. “You're the best crowd this side of Reading,” Duncan thanks and/or damns us.
There were even more dancing punks in attendance at the Brixton Academy for NOFX’s penultimate London gig. The pop punks’ extended goodbye has already had a visit to the UK, promising then it was the last, so who know if I really saw their last but one UK gig or not. And who cares, I was just happy to see them – and tick off the Descendents on my gig going bucket list in the process.
I don’t look like a NOFX fan, as Fat Mike told me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago, and I felt too old to be a fan when – aged 25 and with a copy of Pump Up the Vallum newly purchased on my honeymoon – I saw a teenager in the Tate Modern wearing one of their shirts, but this wasn’t a gig I was going to miss out on.
Towards the front the crowd was a seething mass of humanity, either arms aloft, surfing or dodging airborne plastic pint glasses as they came back down to earth. The atmosphere was a curious mixture of admiration and camaraderie, undercut with a bit of playground menace.
At this stage in their career, the band seem pretty much bullet proof. So, it didn’t matter that Fat Mike’s voice was shot or that he press-ganged Melvin to cover for him vocally. A croaky Fat Mike was lifted on ‘Linoleum’, when it sounded like all 5,000 people in the venue took over on the chorus, ‘Franco-UnAmerican’ was for the dancing punks, and ‘Kill All The White Men’ gave a thunderous conclusion to the night.
Looking back on the very few pictures I took on my phone it was also that rare gig where almost all the audience was actually in the moment. (And not in a Tool sense, where a week earlier I’d seen the alternative metal band’s hardcore approach to phone use – except for their set’s last song - in action as at least two people fucked around and found out in the face of prominent warning signs not to get phones out.)
Whatever the motivation for NOFX’s soon-to-conclude farewell tour, after 38 songs in Brixton, the band were everything you’d want them to be for your first – and probably last and only - time seeing them live.