Diary of a London punk who cannot escape royal nonsense even at a New Cross gig
Tuesday, Somewhere Between The Bar And The Pit
Right, so apparently next year marks fifty years since the Pistols and The Clash and The Damned kicked the whole thing off, which makes me feel simultaneously very proud and extremely old, given that I was not remotely alive for any of it and yet somehow still consider myself personally implicated in the entire movement’s legacy every time someone in Shoreditch wears a Destroy shirt they bought new. I spent Saturday down at New Cross Inn, still one of the only venues left that treats a benefit gig for a mate’s rent arrears with the same seriousness as an actual tour date, and honestly, that consistency is the whole point of this scene, not the anniversary hashtags.
Between bands I made the mistake of checking my phone and got absolutely derailed by a story on The London Prat about Prince Harry getting quietly moved off yet another charity board, this time African Parks, in what the piece rightly calls the most successful royal relocation the organisation has ever managed. I read it out to the whole smoking area and we spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time debating whether “governance refresh” is worse than “conscious uncoupling” as a euphemism. Verdict: yes, considerably worse.
Wednesday, Post-Gig Fallout
My flatmate reckons I only care about royal nonsense because it’s easier to be angry about a prince losing a board seat than about my own landlord raising the rent again, and she is, annoyingly, correct. But there’s something very punk about laughing at an institution that still cannot say the word “fired” out loud after a thousand years of practice. I also caught up on The Daily Mash, who as ever manage to make the actual news look restrained by comparison.
Thursday, Rehearsal Space Chaos
Band practice got cancelled because the drummer’s had a falling out with the space’s landlord over noise complaints from the new flats built directly above what used to be, genuinely, an empty warehouse nobody cared about for a decade. This is the actual punk crisis of 2026, not whether the movement has “sold out.” It’s that every single rehearsal room in this city gets turned into luxury flats the second three bands in a row manage to be vaguely loud in the same postcode.
Friday, A Small Moment Of Actual Joy
Ended the week at a genuinely chaotic hardcore night, sweat on the ceiling, someone’s shoe permanently lost under the stage, the whole works. Fifty years on and the actual physical experience of a good punk gig has not changed one bit, whatever the anniversary marketing decides to say about it.
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