Your Silent Radio correspondent for the tenth Manchester Punk Festival didn’t have a press pass and came home with more bruises than notes. My interactions with bands were limited to thanking them for their performances (and occasionally “bumping into them” in the pit or physically supporting them while they crowd-surfed!). I’ll just have to do my best to recount my experience.
Representation for Manchester bands seems sparse, with appearances from Minimal Faff and WYRES, but locals The Latchkey Kids, amongst others, here only as spectators. What we do get, thought, is a truly international festival, including bands from Italy, Ireland, Spain, the former Yugoslavia, Croatia, Germany, Japan, North and South America. My highlights include southern-Caribbean band Anti Everything, who communicate the anti-fascist and anti-globalisation message with an exceptional mix of laser-pointed rage, powerful music and thoughtful persuasion; Brazilians Abraskadabra picking it up (and putting it down) with the best of them, and London punk multi-tool The Restarts delivering a punchy mix of hardcore, ska and straight punk with a strong inclusive message.
Others preach from the same gospel, with an outpouring of support for trans women, for civilians in Palestine and Ukraine and anger at the lack of progressive politics in the UK and the exploitation of the global South. Los Fastidios bring a stage-full of women up from the audience to join their song Rude Girl in a rousing moment, and both they and Telco work hard to send a message of love, tolerance and community to everyone in the audience. Gender inclusivity felt core to my experience of the festival, I was lucky enough to see all sorts of women play, including Faye and Nooch of the delightfully outlandish Bossmags, Millie Manders and the Shutup, GIRLBAND! and Derry trio Cherym, and many more. This marked a huge and somewhat unexpected improvement compared to my (ancient) history – for example, the Vans Warped Tour at Leeds festival in 1999 or the Deconstruction Tour 2000, when I don’t recall a single woman on stage.
It’s said that you can’t be what you can’t see, and most musicians I know can point to the moment they knew they wanted to be a musician and to exactly who inspired them. Back then, in ‘99-2000, I was in a band led by four vibrant, empowered women who found inspiration in Gwen Stefani, L7 and 7 Year Bitch as well as the feminist, anti-racist punks of the time. I’m genuinely so pleased to be inspired again by
what I see here: people who pour their time, their hard work and their souls into something they truly believe in, and into trying to make the world a better place.
Good music communicates a band’s feelings to other people; great music reaches something in the soul of other people and allows them to understand and express themselves in a way they otherwise couldn’t. It elevates us. If the only music we ever hear comes from educated, privileged, insulated white neurotypical and heteronormative artists too constrained by image management or commercial concerns to engage with political action, too afraid to use their platform to speak for what they believe in or too afraid to even believe in anything in the first place… or worse still, if we only hear what’s chosen for us by an algorithm or what’s recycled and regurgitated by AI, then how will music ever elevate us or bring us to understand those different to ourselves?
While you might have to travel further afield to find such a beautiful variety of voices, to meet such a diverse, inclusive, welcoming community or to experience such a level of energy and inspiration on a regular basis, you can certainly find it once a year at Manchester Punk Festival.
I've been playing bass guitar and guitar for over half my life. I last played bass in in a band called Electromotive and as a singer-songwriter I have written songs about cheese and vajazzles (separate songs!). I started out listening to 60s, 70s and 80s rock as a kid and I was in to grunge and U.S. punk and ska in the 90s. Since then, I've broadened my tastes and I like the best of all styles of music, even country. I've been writing for Silent Radio since it started.
