Notes - The music blog
Notes: Exploring Sheffield: Marta visits... The Stockroom
Every Wednesday, Marta brings a slice of the Mediterranean to Sheffield to see if the music scene really differs at all.
Stockroom is a lovely club. I know that “lovely” is an adjective that fits better a tea-room but still, Stockroom is lovely. And cosy. The black floor, the worn out carpets and the random displacement of furniture make it the perfect punk venue.
It’s a tiny little hole in the middle of traffic where you can have some genuine punk time. There is even toilet paper in the loo. It is a real sign of civilization, when in the dirtiest club in town there is toilet paper.
I went to the club for the very first time a couple of weeks ago, to enjoy a gig on the corner stage where a few punk bands kept banging on the drums and screaming their guts out at the mic. Cars were passing fast outside the window, giving the impression that they would crash the corner and actually enter the building (an event which might easily turn into tragedy, but also such a Dadaist expression that no real punk could 100% wish it didn’t happen for real….).
During a pause, this guy comes up to me with a very big yellow box. “Hi, I’m from Mutiny Plot - he says without preamble – We are trying to raise money for a proper demo, would you like to buy our album?”
Now, I must confess that I am usually stingy beyond belief. I think Scrooge Mc Duck was the greatest economist of all time and that spending money, under any circumstances, is perversion. But I liked this young guy and I liked the caring way he was holding his box, like it was a little child. I liked that he was selling his music, creating a micro, self-regulated market.
Talking about independent music, ideally this is as good as it gets. Then of course, the total cost was only £1. So I decided to buy the album, and I did well. It’s powerful, straight punk, with good lyrics and a very cool band name. It’s one of those genres that either gets you in the teenage years or never conquers you, for it’s teenage music - with this I don’t want to say it’s childish, but it nourishes itself in the teenage, dada aesthetics and joyful careless anger.
I was into new wave, grunge and hip hop as a kid so I was never conquered by pure punk – yet it’s good to find a band which represents for real what it sings. In a market dominated by post-Avril Lavigne ‘punk’, what Mutiny Plot is doing should be imitated right away, by whoever wants to make music for real.
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