Blang October residency at Hope & Anchor
Blang takes over the legendary Hope & Anchor venue in Islington every Wednesday in October to finally celebrate the release of five lockdown albums.
Blang Blang Baby every Wednesday in October at
Hope & Anchor, 207 Upper Street, N1 1RL (4 min walk from Highbury & Islington tube)
Details & ticket links below.
October 6th
Sheepy 10 pm / Trailer Crash 9 15 pm / Blang: 16 Years Of Outsider Music (film screening) 8 15 pm
Liverpool's punk-pop earworm merchants Sheepy released third album Get Out My House on Blang in late 2019. "There is no doubting their ability for writing short, punchy hook-laden songs that will have the mosh-pit bouncing" (Norman Records). Trailer Crash are Blang-man JJ Crash's new Hitchin-based garage groovesters. Vagrant Lovers are Glaswegian electro-punk musician Gil De Ray and poet/novelist Kirsty Allison, who Irvine Welsh has called 'the greatest cultural beacon this planet has produced'. Enjoy living up to that one Kirsty!
Tickets £7.50 in advance from Dice (no hidden extras). £ more on the door.
Doors 7.30 pm
October 13th
David Cronenberg's Wife / Jellyskin / Nat The Hammer
Scalpel-wielding post-punk surgeons David Cronenberg's Wife released 4th album The Ship (Necrologies) in 2020. "Staggering brilliance" (Louder Than War). "I won't hear a bad word against them" (Indiependent). Jellyskin are a fantastic electronische duo from Leeds. Nat The Hammer fronts The Reverse who released the Which Way Out album in 2020. "At times as humourous as Brit-pop once was, at others a hard to swallow overview of adult life" (Recless (sic) Reviews). "A dash of darkness and a lot of sardonic humour 9/10" (Alt Together).
Tickets £7.50 in advance from Dice (no hidden extras). £ more on the door.
Doors 7.45
October 20th
Sergeant Buzfuz / Lucy's Diary / Slate Islands
Sergeant Buzfuz released the Fox Pop album in 2020. "A host of melodies that recall the wistful observations of The Kinks" (God Is In The TV). "Fills your head and heart with joy" (Angry Baby), "Wrapping a fiery political core inside layers of charming, playful psychedelic folk-pop" (Joyzine). "A perfectly crafted antidote to chart pop" (Beehive Candy). Lucy's Diary return after a long absence with more entries from the post-punk journal. Celtic noirists Slate Islands preview songs from long-awaited debut album The Corner Of Your Eye.
Tickets £7.50 from Dice (no extra booking fees). £ more on the door.
Doors 7.45
October 27th
The Awkward Silences / The Faux Fibbers / Pink Eye Club
Paul Hawkins, the Alan Bennett of outsider pop and his merry band of wonk-pop provocateurs The Awkward Silences released their eponymous album in 2020. "Their catchiest, most unusual work to date" (Joyzine). "Daring instrumentation...daring lyrics...5/5" (Alt Review). In the same year The Faux Fibbers released Learn To Lie, an absurdist blues-pop album to lose your trousers to. "Like a less bitter Half Man Half Biscuit, serving up slices of gentle absurdism in a way that's altogether charming" (Freq). Electronica mischief-maker Pink Eye Club is newly signed to Blang, expect the unexpected from him!
Tickets £7.50 from Dice (no hidden booking fees). £ more on the door.
Doors 7.30
Les Becasses: 'Bloody Winter' album
From the French underground squat circuit, Paris-based Les Becasses - Marion (vox, guitar), Christophe (bass) and Aurelie (drums/bvs) - visited England for a mini-tour in 2019, playing with Liverpudlian-based Blang Records band, Sheepy. Blang planned to release its first European record on January 1st in response to Brexit, but Brexit and Covid intervened. They are now excited to announce the UK vinyl release of ‘Bloody Winter’. The album is in shops on June 4th but avalable now from the Blang shop.
For fans of The 5.6.7.8’s, The Ramones & Les Wampas, ‘Bloody Winter’ is an eight track mini-album clocking in at twenty minutes and was recorded in just two days. The band named the record in the Autumn of 2020 as they braced themselves for the bloody winter they saw coming to Paris.
The title track borrows from The Rock-A-Teens 1959 rockabilly classic ‘Woo Hoo’. All tracks are sung in English. The record makes us look forward longingly to a summer of bloody loud gigs where we can jump around and spill beer to sounds like these two minute nuggets of female vocal-led razor pop energy.
“For this disc, we decided to print our lyrics as we thought they were rather fun and French people generally need to have them written down to appreciate and understand English texts. Les Becasses’ songs use very classical themes in the pure tradition of Pop music (love, parties, freedom…) although we like to use a bit of humour especially in these dark times. Brexit is a sad thing to us and our friends in general as we love the UK and want to think a part of her loves us back!! It seems that Boris Johnson would have been a perfect prime minister in a Monty Python movie, not real life. Anyway, after Brexit we now have to face the Covid restrictions. We really hope we can come back to the UK, we all had such a great time and were very proud of the English audience's response to our shows!”
Marion, Les Becasses
Flying Chaucers Single
All together now: "you need a personality sir, to go with that disorder".
Fasten your seatbelts for The Flying Chaucers, the new solo lockdown project from Joe Murphy of Sergeant Buzfuz and Blang. During lockdown Joe has been learning to record on an 8-track portastudio at his home in Sheffield. ‘Down With The Creeps' is available across all the usual platforms, including
Spotify Apple Music Deezer Bandcamp
Watch 'Down With The Creeps' video here.
"The title is from four words an autistic girl wrote on a piece of paper in a class I was supply teaching in. She was non-verbal and could barely produce any written work but had produced these four words. I figured she must have got the phrase from a TV show or book, but I couldn't find any reference to it. It's kind of a goofy phrase but I like it and was amused by the idea of using it for a song about various bosses I've had in day jobs over the years. Writing the song in lockdown, politicians kept barging into it as well as college managers. So the characters are fictional mash-ups of various real arseholes." - Joe
'Down With The Creeps' is an addictive brass-driven earworm made with the help of two other members of Sergeant Buzfuz. Joe's wife Polly MacLean (Slate Islands) sang bvs and Ian Button (Papernut Cambridge/Gare du Nord Records) remixed and mastered.