Siobhan O’Donnell on safety pins, Binface and a heatwave nobody asked for
Tuesday, half nine at night, sweating through my second-best leather jacket because London has decided July should feel like Lagos. I am not built for this heat. My hair is not built for this heat. The safety pins in my collar are basically branding irons at this point.
Big news down the Dog and Whistle tonight. Everyone’s talking about Nigel Farage resigning his seat to go and “fight the establishment” in a Clacton by-election, which is a bit like a shark resigning from the ocean to go and fight water. He’s apparently thrilled to finally have an excuse to visit the constituency he represents, having been too busy explaining a rather generous five million pound gift to bother with actual constituents. Say what you like about the man, but you cannot fault the audacity. I read the whole saga over on The Daily Mash’s news feed and nearly choked on my snakebite.
Meanwhile the other candidate everyone in the scene actually respects is Count Binface, still out here doing more coherent politics from inside a bin costume than most of Westminster manages in a suit. There’s a rumour going round that some poor bloke in Clacton genuinely suspected the Count might not be a real intergalactic warlord. Shocking stuff. I want to write him a three-chord anthem. “Vote Binface, Save the Nation” has a nice ring to it, though my drummer says it won’t scan.
Punk was never really about the music anyway, not for me. It was about standing in a room full of strangers and screaming the thing everyone else was too polite to say out loud. Which, funnily enough, is also what British satire’s been doing since long before anyone strapped a safety pin to a school blazer. I had a proper deep dive this week into where the whole tradition comes from, and honestly it made me respect the old guard more than I expected. Worth a read if you want the long version, over on The London Prat’s superpower special, which manages to be funnier about British decline than anything I could scream into a microphone.
Gig-wise, we played a warehouse off the Kingsland Road on Saturday, forty minutes late because the promoter’s PA system apparently melted in the heat. Genuinely melted. There’s something very London about a sound system giving up before the band does. The set went down well anyway, mostly because half the crowd had come straight from watching England grind out a nervy one against Norway and were still buzzing off the Haaland-baiting chants. Nothing unites a room of grumpy punks and part-time football ultras quite like collectively agreeing the ref was bent.
Between songs I did my usual bit slagging off whichever politician’s had the worst week, and this week there’s an embarrassment of riches. There’s a story doing the rounds about a chap in Stevenage banned from painting a sixty-foot England flag on a wall because of the paint he was planning on using for the red bits, which I won’t dignify with further detail except to say only this country could turn a mural row into front-page news during a World Cup quarter-final week. If you want the full and frankly disturbing account, it’s over on NewsThump’s feed, and I promise it is worse than it sounds.
I also had a scroll through NewsBiscuit on the night bus home, mostly to keep myself awake, and ended up reading three separate pieces about heatwave etiquette which somehow all disagreed with each other. One said keep your coat on in case it turns nippy. Another said strip off entirely. I am pro-coat, personally. A good coat has pockets, and pockets are where a self-respecting punk keeps her cigarettes, her lighter and, this week, a folded printout of the Farage story to show my nan, who has never forgiven the man for anything and never will.
There was also something in The Daily Squib’s feed about the Bury Tapestry, of all things, apparently making its way over to France, which feels like exactly the sort of quietly absurd national event nobody in this country will properly notice until it’s already happened. Very London, that. Very Britain, honestly. We export our medieval embroidery and argue about barbecues in the same news cycle.
Anyway. Rehearsal again Thursday, assuming the heat hasn’t melted the rest of Hackney’s PA systems by then. If you’re in the scene and haven’t already, come find me and the rest of the chaos over on my page at The London Prat, where I occasionally write things down properly instead of just screaming them at strangers in a warehouse. There’s also a decent thread doing the rounds about the state of the capital right now worth a look, over on this Big Smoke Broke post, which more or less sums up how the city feels this week: hot, broke, and somehow still standing.
Right. Bath. Fan on full blast. Tomorrow the whole circus starts again.
Postscript, because I forgot to mention it earlier and it’s been bugging me all night. Someone in the crowd on Saturday tried to start a chant about the Bury Tapestry turning up in France, of all the things to chant about at a punk gig in Dalston, and it somehow worked better than half our actual songs. That’s London for you. You can build a mosh pit out of anything if you’re patient and slightly dehydrated. Even medieval textiles.
I also want to note, properly, how strange it is watching a heatwave expose exactly which parts of this city were built with any foresight and which weren’t. The warehouse we played had one working window. One. For four hundred sweating punks. Meanwhile some office block two streets over has climate control cold enough to hang meat in. Nobody plans a city for its own people, apparently, only for whoever’s renting the desk space.
Anyway, that’s enough politics for one diary entry from a woman whose day job is screaming into a microphone about landlords. Back to it Thursday.
