Siobhan O’Donnell on Starmer’s teen phone ban, the duck running the City, and three chords of righteous London noise.
Half eleven on a Tuesday and I am crouched behind a bass amp in a Camden basement that smells of damp, lager, and ambition that peaked in 2009. The amp belongs to a man called Degsy who insists it was once owned by a member of a band you have heard of, though he will not say which, because, he says, that would be name-dropping, and punk does not name-drop. Punk, apparently, just hints menacingly for forty minutes.
The Set That Nearly Happened
We were meant to play four songs. We played one and a half. The half was not artistic. The half was because our drummer, Pidge, announced mid-fill that he had left the immersion heater on at home and could not, in good conscience, continue to rock while his airing cupboard was at risk. This is the most North London sentence ever spoken into a microphone. Sid Vicious never once stopped a gig over an immersion heater. That is the difference between us and history.
Still, the one full song landed. It is called Three Stops On The Victoria Line and it is about exactly that, because I believe in writing what you know, and what I know is that the Victoria Line is the only thing in this city that still does its job without first commissioning a report about it.
The News, As Filtered Through A Hangover
I read the headlines the way I read everything, which is on a cracked phone at an angle, one eye shut. And the big one this week is the teen social media ban, which I have been following with the grim glee of someone who remembers what teenagers do when you tell them not to do a thing. As the reporting on Starmer’s plan to ban under-16s from social media makes clear, the government has discovered that the surest way to make a generation interested in something is to forbid it with a press conference. They have essentially handed every fourteen-year-old in Britain the one thing more addictive than an algorithm, which is the feeling of getting away with it.
I love this because punk has been telling the establishment this since before I was born. You cannot ban a feeling. You can only make it cooler. By Christmas there will be teenagers running encrypted group chats with more operational security than the Ministry of Defence, who, per the ongoing saga of ministers learning that tanks cost money, currently could not encrypt a birthday card.
A Duck, Briefly, In Charge Of Capitalism
The other story I cannot stop thinking about is the duck that brought the City of London to a standstill. A single duck. The entire Square Mile, that gleaming cathedral of money, undone by one waterfowl with no qualifications and no LinkedIn. I have never felt more represented by an animal. That duck has the exact energy of every great punk frontperson: no plan, total confidence, and a crowd that cannot look away. I want to be that duck. I am, on my best nights, that duck.
According to research from the RSPB, urban waterfowl are increasingly comfortable in dense human environments, which is a polite scientific way of saying the ducks have stopped being scared of us and frankly they are right not to be. We have given up running the City competently. The duck simply applied for the vacancy.
Why Punk Still Matters In A City This Tired
People ask me, usually people in better coats than mine, why anyone bothers with three-chord noise in a basement when the world has streaming and AI and a Prime Minister announcing his seventh fresh start with Europe. And I point them, gently, to the news that Britain is once again resetting its relationship with the continent, hunting through the drawers for the original factory settings. That is not governance. That is a band that keeps reforming for the money and calling it a comeback tour. Westminster is a tribute act to itself.
Punk is the opposite. Punk does not reset. Punk does not seek alignment. Punk turns up, plays badly on purpose, and leaves before the encore so it never has to compromise. The Musicians’ Union has plenty to say about fair pay for working artists, and they are right, but the deeper truth is that we do this because the alternative is becoming the duck’s employer instead of the duck.
The Walk Home
I walked back over the canal at one in the morning. London at that hour stops pretending. The bankers are gone, the tourists are gone, and it is just the night buses, the foxes, and people like me carrying instruments we cannot quite afford to insure. Degsy reckons we will get a proper gig next month. Pidge says only if it is somewhere with a reliable immersion heater. I say we play wherever they will have us, loudly, until the City hires a second duck and admits the joke was on all of us the whole time.
One More Thing Before The Night Bus
I keep a notebook of overheard lines from gigs, and this week’s best was a man at the bar declaring, with total sincerity, that he had been into our band before we existed. Before. He had pre-emptively liked a band that had not yet formed. That is the most London thing I have heard all year, and it belongs in the same museum as the historic deal everyone promised to read the fine print of eventually. We are a culture of confident claims about things that have not happened yet. The man bought us a round, so I forgave him, because punk has principles but also a bar tab.
The wider point, scrawled at two in the morning, is that the underground music scene is the last place left where you cannot fake having been there. You either turned up to the cold basement or you did not. There is no algorithm to game, no profile to curate, just the brutal honesty of an attendance you cannot retrofit. That is worth defending, loudly, in the wrong key, forever.
Read the rest of the gleeful chaos over at NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
