This is an archived post from our old website. Please excuse us if it looks a bit off, we are working through old posts and making sure they look tip top!
The Anti-Nowhere League at Vivaz, Scarborough, Friday 8th November.
With support from local Scarborough band, Snatch.
Snatch photos: © Simon Smithson
Anti-Nowhere League photos: © Lisa Rocket
The Anti-Nowhere League Ignite the Night at Vivaz
It seems far-fetched that an American kid growing up in 90’s suburban America could relate to a bunch of motorcycle straddling punks from Tunbridge Wells. However, years later, it all seems to make sense now.
In the mid-nineties when everyone had long purple hair and spent the day looking at their feet (which they could not see because BIG jeans had swallowed their shoes) I was an angry little beanpole with short hair, a shorter temper and big black combat boots. At the time, I needed music that provided maximum energy and immediate release for my adolescent angst, and I was kicking against grunge after all the cheerleaders pretended to be upset about Kurt Cobain’s death.
One day, I was poking around my teenage girlfriend’s dad’s record collection and stumbled upon The Anti-Nowhere League’s self-titled first album. Funnily enough, he was the tour manager for Metallica at the time and they had been playing the classic ANL shock rock anthem ‘So What’ for years. I can remember riding home in his Porshe 911 (he won it in a bet with Kirk Hammett) and hearing the growling powerful anthems for the first time. Everything was in there for a teenage lad. Snarling power chords, lyrics from the lavatory, biting wit and sonic savagery delivered in short bursts of catchy cacophony. I was hooked.
Fast forward two decades and I find myself, pint-in-hand, eagerly awaiting my boyhood anti-heroes at Vivaz in Scarborough, UK just down the road from my flat (funny where life can throw you.) There is a lively bunch of biker punks and moon-stomping miscreants gathered around the stage and club owner Paul Murrey is spinning some classic Stranglers, Specials, Buzzcocks and all the right aural appetizers to wet the appetite for a blitzkrieg night of Biker Punk Rock.
When Animal and company hit the stage we are assaulted with a host of high wattage fist pumpers and everyone is part of the action, shouting along to such classics as ‘Streets of London’, ‘I Hate People’, ‘Woman’, ‘We Will Not Remember You’ and of course, ‘So What’.
After all is done and we have been cleansed by noise and showered in lager it is time to go home and do a little research for this anarchic essay. After watching some interviews with the band, I find that their spawning ground of Tunbridge Wells is not so different from my own neighborhood in Tennessee. Singer Animal details his misspent youth amongst affluent, aged retirees and his boyhood fantasies of biker gangs and rock n’ roll. Some songwriters wear their heart on their sleeve, but fittingly Animal wears his on his crotch. A gleaming Triumph belt buckle is his badge of honor and The Anti-Nowhere League roars on like a 650 Triumph between your legs.
Fletcher Stewart also writes for his own blog, http://tonetribune.com/
Snatch…
Anti-Nowhere League…
