Robyn Writes

Thirteen Hours Of Hell – The Road To Reading 2009

6.45pm, 30/3/09

I am staring at my computer screen, eyes wide in anticipation. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach, the ambient I put on is not helping me to calm down and my mouse finger is just itching to click the refresh button. In fact, I do that several times on each site I have open. MSN is closed down; unnecessary distractions need to be gone. Facebook remains, purely for outside assistance. My sister is doing exactly the same in the other room. I have my mum’s credit card on standby, mobile phone at my side… just waiting. I am trying to be zen. It’s not working.

6.58pm, 30/3/09

In two minutes, tickets for Reading Festival will be released. I am ready for the bloodbath. I refresh my four ticket sites and the official page, waiting for the lineup and praying that Blink-182 and The Cure are somehow miraculously in there. I have everything I need except an open ticket site. I think.

6.59pm, 30/3/09

Ticketline.com has released tickets prematurely by one minute. I click and I click, but my connection keeps timing out. Too many fucking people trying this. In about 30 seconds, I find that Ticketline either a) isn’t offering weekend tickets or b) just can’t display them any more. Either way, I cut my losses. I’ve got three more shots.

7.00pm, 30/3/09

Lineup is released, and I am both excited and disappointed. No Blink, no Cure. However, there is Radiohead, AFI and Brand New, and the idea that AFI might be playing new songs from Crash Love makes me an excessively happy girl. Seetickets.com and Ticketmaster are now open for sale and I am clicking my ass off to get these tickets. I’m still feeling relatively okay, but my nerves are already starting to become frayed.

7.10pm, 30/3/09

I am through to the order form on Seetickets! I feel like how Ash Ketchum must have felt when he became a Pokemon master – triumphant, yet disbelieving. I enter in all the details, but there is a crisis; we don’t know the license plate for the campervan. I scream down at my father, the only logical choice, but he doesn’t know it either. He runs upstairs and finds the folder with the MOT certificate. I frantically type it in. My hands are shaking like mad. It’s in, and I click the ‘order tickets’ button…

…and then it times out. I scream out at the computer in anguish. This is not going well.

7.30pm, 30/3/09

Lastminute.com have sold out, and Ticketmaster is being sporadic in its release of tickets. At this point, my parents are trying as well, both on the phone and on the other computer. My boyfriend calls and has to listen to me ranting about my state of mind. I go on Facebook and growl in envy at the people who already have theirs. Lucky bastards. My sister reveals that the friends we’re meant to be meeting there got theirs in the first ten minutes. My blood starts to boil.

7.50pm, 30/3/09

Still no luck. I can’t even get onto the home page for Seetickets because there’s that much traffic. ninthandash texts me, revealing that she’s got hers for Leeds. I’m a bit jealous. At this point, I could cry. My sister tells me to give up. I reply, ‘never’.

8.15pm, 30/3/09

My friend Tom comments me, asking if I’ve got my tickets yet, because he has his. I reply no, sadly. I don’t believe what happens next. He gives me a link to the order form he had open for his. It’s completely legit. I almost cry with happiness. I book three tickets and a campervan permit successfully. I scream with joy. Life is good.

8.25pm, 30/3/09

After thanking Tom and collapsing with relief, my mum reminds me that we haven’t had the confirmation email. I’m fraught with worry again. Thanks, mum. I check the page we printed off after we successfully ordered. Five hours before a confirmation email could come through. Shit.

8.20am, 31/3/09
After lack of sleep through worrying about whether we actually did get the tickets or not, I turn my computer on and what do I find? A motherfucking confirmation email. I sit back and smirk. I’m going to Reading Festival this summer.

Why posicore is the perfect summer music.

I’ve done a list of my top ten favourite summer anthems before, so this isn’t another one of those. But instead, I want to talk to you about potentially the greatest subgenre of punk. Posicore, or positive hardcore, is awesome. And with my carefully written guide, some of which will most likely be from Wikipedia, you’ll come to appreciate it too. Posicore, as the title of this article suggests, is the best summer music ever. Even better than 90s pop punk and that’s hard to beat. So, first of all…

…A Brief History
Posicore, as a separate subgenre of hardcore, came into play in the 80s with the formation of the Youth Crew movement; a bunch of bands who wanted to play a little differently to their contemporaries. In time, this then became posicore, but first up, who were these Youth Crew bands? Youth Of Today were the forerunners, and their music was optimistic, moralistic but still heavy as fuck. Others included Gorilla Biscuits, Cro-Mags and 7 Seconds. Even today, there isn’t that much difference musically – while you may be expecting something a little more melodic, that’s not necessarily the case, considering Comeback Kid can be counted as a posicore band. And Gorilla Biscuits, one of the first purported bands of the subgenre, were not quite atonal but definitely not as slick and poppy as the latest Descendents offering. This is still all about raw power – but not aggression.

That’s where the posi comes in. Posicore bands don’t want to sing about how they hate everything from your mother to your mohawk. Posi in itself is a slight misnomer; not every posicore song is happy and upbeat. But it’s all about change and getting off your ass and doing something, which is something I’m more than happy to listen to. Youth Crew and posicore aren’t quite the same thing; Youth Crew was the movement, posicore is the result. But both are/were progressive and exceedingly rad. You just have to look at the lyrics of bands like Crime In Stereo and well… even H2O, no matter how much they suck. You can’t deny that they’re either celebrating or denouncing something, and generally for the right reasons. A lot of posicore bands are straight edge, and the majority of the Youth Crew movement was. I suppose that’s one more reason for me to love it, but we’ll come to that in a bit.

The key thing to remember is that posicore is all about change, optimism and pretty much keeping your shit together. But how does this have anything to do with summer? Well…

…Summer’s about positivity, right?
Summer’s the best time to be getting into stuff. Whether that’s papercrafting, starting up the band again or starting up kick ass punk zines on the internet (that’s what I chose two summers ago), you’ve got all this sudden energy and enthusiasm for new stuff! That probably has a lot to do with the fact that the majority of people that read this are still in education, or thanks to my mother, work in the education business. Even if you’re not, you probably still remember summer as the time when you had all the time in the world to do anything you wanted. Posicore has that same spirit, and there is nothing more inspiring than driving around, singing along to songs that make you feel awesome about the world. Feeling lazy? Why not stick on some Stretch Arm Strong (I swear I am the only person in the world who still likes this band) and get inspired!

I don’t know about the rest of you, but when it gets to summer, I just feel so much better about the world. As a result, I want to listen to stuff that gets me pumped, gets me inspired. That’s why every time I go running, I stick on Set Your Goals (well, that and the fact that their cover of Put Yo’ Hood Up makes me giggle inside every time) and think of what I’ve got to do to change. For the better. In fact, in a summer a long time ago, I started thinking about…

…That whole straight edge angle
I became straight edge when I was 13. We’ve had the story before, several times. I’m not going to carry on about it. It can’t be ignored that a lot of posicore comes from straight edge bands though, and bands that aren’t afraid to talk about their edge. Good Clean Fun even have it in their name. While I don’t listen exclusively to straight edge bands – hell, one of my favourite bands is Steel Panther and they’re all about the sex and drugs – I always feel a certain affinity with them and I tend to stray more towards straight edge bands when I’m picking out my hardcore. Partly because I can identify with them and their lyrics a lot more, but mostly because it makes me think about why I’m straight edge. Even if you’re not, posicore isn’t exactly pushy about the subject in a lot of places and generally picks up on it subtly. Unless you are in fact Good Clean Fun and then comedy angles on straight edge can be found a plenty off the starboard bow. That said, I always associate straight edge with summer and that whole previous section about positivity, making posicore my soundtrack of choice in these months. And, I guess not all of it’s that heavy…

…It’s kinda fun as well!
While the older Youth Crew stuff was hardcore to the max, the majority of posicore coming out these days is in fact reasonably melodic. At least, to the point that hardcore punk can be. A lot of posicore bands have noticeable pop-punk influences, best seen in bands like Four Year Strong and Set Your Goals. And let’s face if, if you completely reject my argument that posicore is the best summer music, you can’t deny that pop-punk is where it’s at – let’s see you have a summer where you completely ignore Millencolin. But posicore is so much more than pop-punk, because while pop-punk is fun and probably better for parties, it just lacks that passion that posicore does. It has less drive, probably because it’s wanting to get laid at the party but is throwing up on the way to the bedroom and posicore’s trying to make sure everyone else is having a good (and responsible) time. Pop-punk is easy, posicore is less so because it requires a bit of thought. It’s possible to enjoy both at face value, but if you care about music and you care about the true worth and messages that music can bring, then posicore is where it’s at.

Check out a list of posicore bands here to get started. Get involved! Just don’t listen to H2O, it’s bad for your health.

[Pop-punk showdown!] NOFX by soufex

Probably not the best way to start off an article about how great a band is, but… NOFX aren’t really that great. They’ve been around for 25 years, although I’m not really sure why. Their live shows are hit-and-miss. Half their records kind of suck. They recently “totally sold out” or whatever and made a TV show. To quote the band, they’re kind of at 60 or so percent.

So, yeah. They’ve been around since 1983, but most people don’t give a shit about anything pre-White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean, and only give a shit about White Trash because of Bob. Occasionally Stickin In My Eye, but it’s mostly Bob. Everyone sort of likes Linoleum. I could probably go on about how people sort of maybe like NOFX the way NOFX are sort of maybe a good band, but I really wouldn’t be doing this article much justice if I did.

I love NOFX!

No, seriously, I do. I’ve been into them since I was fifteen years old, and I vaguely remember them earlier than that, but I lived in my own little personal void of weirdness for most of my early teens so I couldn’t be expected to know these things then. The first album I bought was So Long And Thanks For All The Shoes, from a record store in Amsterdam called Boudisque, back when I thought emo was an old 90s thing involving Sunny Day Real Estate and Fugazi, punk rock was ALL and No Use For A Name and I was hella into desert/stoner grunge rock. (I also bought Bad Religion’s The Empire Strikes First. Both of which are still two of my more favourite albums.) Shoes wasn’t my turning point for getting into punk rock properly, but it certainly geared on the process. That summer I saw them play Reading from fairly far back, but it wasn’t a big deal. They were still just one of those bands I liked.

In fact, it actually took a good few years for me to really realise how awesome they were. I had a handful of albums that I would listen to semi-regularly, I think I’d bought The Decline EP because it was cheap and never really paid attention to it… and then when I was pushing 18 I suddenly realised they were kind of cool. I read up, educated myself on these hapless old dudes, wow it’s so cool, Mike’s the dude behind Fat Wreck Chords and they’re an awesome record label! They weren’t really one of absolute favouritest bands until I started art school, listening to The Decline to pass the time on a train trip, and I got hooked like crack from there. That year, Naja was staying with me, and NOFX were playing shows in the UK, so we went and saw them a bunch of times, got to know the guys- band and crew- as people, made friends with some incredibly cool people that I still talk to regularly today, and Naja proposed to me onstage. (Which I actually sometimes forget and then I remember and go fuck, that’s awesome.)

NOFX aren’t so much a band but a part of my life, to be honest. It’s kind of weird. Where some couples go hiking or collect stamps, Naja and I go to NOFX shows. They’re a highly integral part of the last few years, have set off all kinds of big life decisions and events. And Heavy Petting Zoo is a really good album, seriously. I wouldn’t start there but it’s definitely worth a listen. I think the main problem with NOFX’s albums is they tend to be full of filler, but there are always a handful of really, really stellar songs, stuff that makes me warm and fuzzy when I hear it live or on record.

I’ve really forgotten where I was going with this…. uh.

NOFX are awesome. A bit shit, but awesome. And they’re really nice guys in person. (Which I have to tell people a lot because they don’t believe me.)

Yeah, NOFX are awesome.

[Pop-punk showdown!] Millencolin by Ripper

I just don’t know what it is with Swedish music and me, but we seem to have this love affair with each other that never ever gets boring. For my entry into the pop-punk showdown series, I’ve decided to look at Millencolin, Sweden’s number one export. Well, after Abba, Dennis Lyxzen and Little Gamers, that is.

So, where do we start with Millencolin? Millencolin are a pop-punk band from Sweden on Burning Heart Records. They formed in 1992 and are still going strong today, with a total of eight studio albums to their name. And other than that, Millencolin are fairly hard to describe. They’re more punk than pop, but have more energy than the Duracell bunny on coke. Their lyrics leave a lot to be desired, but at the same time, who else can write a song where their new car sounds more like their new girlfriend? While Millencolin don’t really break any boundaries, they write songs which are fun, upbeat and give you a musical punch in the face – and that’s how pop-punk is done best.

While they may not be great innovators within the scene, Millencolin are fairly well rounded for a pop-punk band. There’s all your pop-punk staples in there – love, hate, anger, joy, rejection – all wrapped up in a deliciously riffy package. However, as Millencolin get older, their albums get a little more ballsy, a little more profound and a lot more awesome. Whilst it’s not my favourite album (but isn’t far off), Home From Home is a great example for this, picking up where Pennybridge Pioneers left off but with a lot more swagger and some incredible riffs. As a (vague) guitarist myself, I love being able to pick up a guitar and breaking out into Punk Rock Rebel. It just gives me this incredibly badass feeling, and if a pop-punk song isn’t doing that, it’s not any good.

While Millencolin albums on their own are pretty darn spectacular, it’s just not the same as seeing them live. Millencolin are absolutely fantastic live – energetic, hilarious and (pop)punk as fuck. See for yourself – this is some footage from a show they played in Stockholm. If you get the opportunity, I urge you to go to a Millencolin show, because the only place you would have more fun would be in a room filled with trampolines, free balloons and ice cream.

You might not know it, but you’ve probably heard a Millencolin song before. If you’ve ever played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, you’ve heard Millencolin, in the form of No Cigar, potentially one of their best songs and the one that brought them to fame in the punk scene. Millencolin, as any good pop-punk band should, have their origin in skateboarding – even their name is a variation of the skateboarding trick ‘melancholy’. They have their own skate shoes, a skate video (sort of – Millencolin and the Hi-8 Adventures is a behind the tour video with lots of skating in it) and their own skate competition. The Millencolin Open is a three day skate fest, held once a year at their own skate park, attracting sponsors and skaters from all over the world. In the words of our very own fightclubsandwich, “that is fucking sweeeeet!”

The truth is, I’ve essentially grown up with Millencolin, and I think this is why I love them as much as I do. My first foray into the world of pop-punk began with the Tony Hawk’s games, and Millencolin with that. Pennybridge Pioneers was one of the first albums I listened to that wasn’t in the top 40. Millencolin were one of the first bands I saw live, when they supported Good Charlotte in 2005. There’s all kinds of little things that I love about them, such as the fact that they did a split EP with Midtown, another of my favourite pop-punk bands. Millencolin are still going, and every new album they bring out is as good as the last, if not better. Millencolin are here to stay, so you might as well love them.

Recommended material:

Myspace
Official website
Video for Kemp (trust me, this is awesome)

[Pop-punk showdown] Green Day by ninthandash

Green Day have been my favourite band since I was nine years old. That’s a long time, and so I’m bound to be incredibly biased when I think that they are, without a doubt, one of the best pop-punk bands out there. A lot of people write them off after the release of American Idiots — “sell outs” is a term thrown around a lot.

To be honest, if Green Day have sold out, they did it with Dookie. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Green Day have one of the best discographies of any band, with barely a bad album in there. Warning is, to some people, a disappointment but I personally love it as much as any other.

Green Day have, for starters, catchy pop-punk tunes. They’ve produced classic songs known by practically everyone below a certain age. Excluding American Idiot (because Boulevard of Broken Dreams, while wellknown, was also undeniably overplayed), Green Day have Basket Case and Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).

I’m not articulating my feelings on Green Day very well, mainly because they’re a band very close to my heart. If you’re not persuaded how awesome they are yet, well, that’s okay. I’ll admit that I can — and will — do better.

With Green Day, for me, there’s nothing that can beat the feeling I got when I sat in front of the TV and heard Good Riddance for the first time. Say what you like about Green Day, love them or hate them, but there is something about that song… Haunting and nostalgic, all at the same time, it conjures up feelings and memories that you never knew you had. Billie Joe’s voice is at its best and it’s a song that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Compare that to the raw insanity of Basket Case, and immediately Green Day are not just a one trick pony. Their two greatest hits (again excluding American Idiot) are both completely different, and Basket Case encompasses the feeling that you’re going completely crazy and it doesn’t even matter. Best listened to loud.

But for me, the real gems of Green Day can be found in their albums. Take Worry Rock, from Nimrod. Another sentimal argument and bitter love/Fucked without a kiss again and dragged it through the mud. There is something about their ability to use the most rough phrases and contrast it with a catchy tune that gives their songs such an impact.

Like I said, it’s difficult for me to state objectively just how I feel about this band. Listening to their albums, I can trace different parts of my life. They’re one of those special bands which only comes along once in a lifetime. That said, I do believe that there will be at least one Green Day song for everyone.

If I haven’t convinced you of their sheer awesomeness, that’s okay. I won’t push it. But do me a favour. Pick up one of their albums and listen to it, all the way through. Open your mind and tell me there is not one song on there that you like. And once you’ve done that, I’ll call you a liar. Because I don’t think that’s possible.