New Year’s Day 2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of Scarborough-based punk duo Active Minds. To mark the anniversary they released their latest album, Things That Cannot Be Unseen, in November, with a local launch event at The Cask Club Scarborough. Kath Dunn-Mines caught up with them mid-rehearsal to find out more.
Now and Next:
Taking a break from rehearsals at a space shared for music purposes with a small number of other bands, Bobs and Set sit across from me as we start to chat about their upcoming album. It turns out that the songs have been ready for about two years but, due to delays with getting the release date sorted, these songs have never been played live in performance yet. November 21st at the Cask and Keg’s downstairs Cask Club saw that change, with support from Serial Killer Glasses and Bear Away.
The new album, Things That Cannot Be Unseen, is based on the world we see around us now, locally and globally, a very different world, they note, to the eighties when they set out – “There was no social media then … and we don’t want to still be singing about Thatcher”. As to what album number this is, Bobs confirms they consider it as full-length album 7. It sits alongside a number of ten-inch mini-albums and collaborative releases covering the course of their career, albeit some of those early recordings are no longer available.
Where it all began:
New Year’s Eve 1985 marked a point where their previous band had run its course and they decided to become a two-piece; the 1st Jan 1986 saw them pick a name and start writing songs ready for their first rehearsal, with a space that had been booked in the previous incarnation! Researching former interviews, we laugh at a line where they had said they’d probably still be doing this when they were 40; Bobs laughs, “We started when we were teenagers…” and Sets rounds up, “ But we didn’t think we’d be doing it for forty years”. So what has kept them going for this long? Set says it’s partly the relationship between them, as brothers. Bobs likes the creativity and rehearsing, “probably more than Set does! You like playing live…” Set agrees; “And when we’re travelling around meeting new people, seeing new bands.” They both still get excited about it, about hearing new music.
Something that would stop them enjoying it, they agree, would be playing the same songs over and over. They tend to play their newer stuff for a while, retiring it as they add more. “A lot of bands do play the same songs for years, they have stuff that’s well known; but I couldn’t play the same song for forty years” explains Set. Bobs relates how on an American tour a few years back, some YouTube videos from their early sets in 1987 had circulated and gained attention ahead of their visit, but they were thinking, “we aren’t going to play any of this stuff!”. Set adds that if someone occasionally refers to them as ‘an eighties band” their response is, “No we’re a now band… we don’t play stuff from the eighties!” They’ve never really had a nostalgia moment, always moving forward, but then again, Bobs laughs, maybe forty years is a good time for a bit of a retrospective?!
Over the years:
Touring Europe in the late 80s was a formative experience. They were very interested in European music, and wrote to a lot of bands and swapped records with them; before email and mobile phones, this involved writing to everyone to organise a tour; it took months! Their first tour was 1987, aged twenty and eighteen, but they’d been in touch with people since 1983. It was the first time seeing that scene, and it was eye-opening; for example, most UK gigs were in pubs, with the very limited opening hours, opening 7pm-11pm only, no food, no self-managed places; “we went to Europe and found all these self-managed, self-run clubs that had been set up in squats and what have you, they fed bands, bands were travelling a long distance, expecting food, and it was all part of that thing…” describes Bobs; Set continues, “It was very communal, you’d play the gig and stay in that building on some mattresses, then the people who lived there would come down…” and Bobs finishes, “You’d have thirty or so people at breakfast.”
They’d also, for example, send a list of their favourite twenty or so German bands, asking if there was any possibility they could play with any of them. And on the first two tours, they did in fact get to play with loads of them. I mention it must have been like having pen pals, and they agree, it absolutely was; and they are still in touch with many of them. Bobs says “there is one guy I’ve been in touch with for forty years, I still trade records with him now, and I’ve just sent him a parcel this week! He actually arranged a gig for us on that first tour back in 1987.” They had also been to Spain on tour again earlier this year, and the person who organised their first ever Spanish gig was there. They clearly relish these longstanding relationships.
Local Scene Then and Now:
The Scarborough scene was barely there back then; a few indie bands were coming through, they mention playing with India Dream; but it was a weird time for punk, most people were into bigger bands like the Damned – “they certainly weren’t going to play in Scarborough”; but scenes do ebb and flow over the years. Bobs mentions the first time he met James (Koppert, currently frontman of Jenkem Revolt); “they were kids, but they had a band [Our Own]; we went to see them, but they had friends who’d come along and knew other bands, so we set up some gigs with them, people were interested.” Set mentions a friend from Leeds who got in touch about a tour, and asked to gig in Scarborough, but Set felt there was little point, there’d be only Set, Bobs and maybe Ade (from local band Satanic Malfunctions) there; and he just said, if there’s three of you, that’s fine! We’ll come through and play to three people!” So they organised a gig at the Talbot and got Our Own along, and actually a load of people came. Because Scarborough isn’t big enough to have strict music sub-groups, people can just come out and enjoy bands simply because there’s something on.
“Now is another one of those times, where you’ve got quite a few young bands, and they’re not necessarily into the same stuff we’re into, but they haven’t necessarily been exposed to it, and they’re into other sorts of stuff, and if I were that age, that’d be my route into it again, because you don’t suddenly find some underground stuff from Norway in the 80s…! You don’t find that stuff unless you’re somehow sort of broadened into it. Now there’s those possibilities again to put gigs on, because there’s quite a vibrant local scene, at least half a dozen punk and punk-adjacent bands.” Until a year and a half ago, in fact, Active Minds hadn’t played locally for a long time, but it’s been a run of more local gigs in the period since, lining up with these other young bands as well as visiting bands from across the UK.
I venture that lining up gigs in this way is far from the standoffish attitude that could naturally come from forty years of experience; they’ve never been into that attitude, thankfully. Set notes about a lot of gigs they did around the time Green Day were becoming big, and how a lot of guys would ‘poo-poo’ bands and audiences as being ‘Just little kids who are into Green Day”, but they would respond that it doesn’t matter how you get into it, if it’s what starts to get you enthused. “A lot of people are just passing through… but you’ve got to find those people who are enthused, you can’t be cliquey about it.”
Ethos and Methods:
In an early interview, Active Minds relayed a quote from the band Flux Of Pink Indians: “Strive to survive causing the last possible suffering to others” – which Bobs describes as a very succinct way of summing up their approach. It’s a philosophy that hasn’t just fed through their music but other aspects of life. Bobs ran for parliament once upon a time, and was involved in local and national politics for a period; the band gigged still but didn’t tour much or record in that period. They don’t talk about politics as such on stage but it permeates their music. As we chat, we all bemoan the lack of nuance in modern political discourse; they note that they make a lot of effort on their recordings to explain what it is that they’re trying to say.
Equally they acknowledge that playing live is something else; what they hope for when they play live is that people find something they didn’t expect. Changing perceptions of what you can achieve and showing that anyone can get up and do things. But they acknowledge that shouting things on stage in a loud, busy environment is not usually going to really land the message, even if it makes a quick point; “if you want to put across a point that is challenging or new, it needs more time than someone shouting something through a muffled speaker and bad PA,” notes Set, wryly. “And we’ve never been afraid of being quite critical and pointing things back at people who might be in the audience, but they need to be able to read that and get where we’re coming from. We want to challenge the people who are going to listen to us, not just the people sat in ivory towers somewhere,” adds Bobs “Elon Musk is not going to read our stuff!”
Their songwriting method has evolved over the years and nowadays tends to work by Bobs demoing the song at home on a drum machine, writing the lyrics, sending it to Set to check he likes it; then Set will listen to it a few times at home, so when they come together, it is all but there. And the sound they make has often been described (not just by me!) as sounding like there are far more than two people playing. What is the secret? Tuning the guitar to play chords with just one finger and splitting the signal with a special pedal to a bass and guitar amp is part of it. Bobs hits the strings across two octaves, which makes a fuller sound, then coming out of two amps gives a bottom end and a top end, so there’s a lot of noise coming out for one guitar. “We used to be quite a hostage to whatever gear we could borrow, travelling around Europe, so it wasn’t always like that. We toured Poland before the collapse of Communism – and their gear was crap! So the sound was quite thin.” But a specially made pedal from a local music store, made by Jerry Bull at Mancini’s, “was the best twelve quid I’ve ever spent in my life.”
Live, and particularly in small venues, Set explains, the other reason for the fuller sound is that he hits the drums hard and loud. (And very fast). “I always hit the cymbals with the side of the stick, on the side of the cymbal, which makes a lot more noise, whereas a lot of drummers hit it on the top with the rounded end.” Then Bobs has to turn it up to compensate; they admit they confound more than a few sound techs during sound checks…
In modest statements that will probably meet with disagreement from their fans, Bobs describes himself as “ham-fisted” and that tuning to play guitar with one finger means he’s never really learned to play ‘properly’; Set says the same about his drumming; “I can play very fast and I can play our style; but there are a lot of drummers who have a lot of technique. I’m just smashing it.” Bobs adds, “We’d like to be a bit more subtle at times, but it’s not our forte!”
From an audience perspective, my feeling is that making these techniques your own and making them work over forty years is far more skill than they own up to; but it’s also reassuring perhaps to know that even after forty years, they can be self-deprecating and acknowledge there will always be more to learn, or room to evolve.
A few favourites:
Do they have a favourite album from across their forty years? For Bobs, it’s their third album, It’s Perfectly Obvious That This System Doesn’t Work. “I think that was sort of a game changer for us. What we’d done prior to that was we’d always recorded live in the studio all together, aiming for a more authentic sound, like at a gig.” Then they had a break from recording – the political period mentioned earlier – before going back to record with a friend of theirs who they’ve worked with for over twenty years, and had decided that this one had to “step up a level; it would have been easy to disappear into lo-fi noise”. This was the 2000s and they recognised that they needed to make some changes.
This was the first one recorded digitally (they don’t have the masters for anything before this time, either); they felt there had been some, albeit charming, naivety about wanting the recordings to sound like their live gigs by playing with the same set up; understanding different recording techniques actually achieved something more akin to the live sound, and that was why the experience felt like a game changer. Set is also fond of The Cracks Start Appearing album; and Bobs admits fondness for The Age of Mass Distraction, but Set recalls forgetting his snare and the studio snare sounding ‘awful’ on that one: and that sometimes the process affects how you feel about the finished product! (Even though Bobs reassures his brother that it doesn’t sound as bad as he felt it did).
And finally:
Want more details about the band over the years? Bobs knows a chap from Scunthorpe who asked him if he was going to write a book himself about the history of the band, something Bobs dismissed; so the guy started a blog chronicling each release – three releases at a time. “He’s asking these questions and he’s also writing reviews… I realised it’s like he’s getting me to write the book after all!”
Links:
Catch Active Minds next March at A Night Out By the Seaside II – Faintest Idea + Active Minds + Pivnica + Jenkem Revolt, £10, Corporation Club, Scarborough, from 7pm.
