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Glasgow Times
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
19 photos from Glasgow's Summer Sessions Punk All Dayer
The all-day festival, an explosive celebration of punk music, featured a stellar line-up of legendary acts, including The Sex Pistols members Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock, alongside Frank Carter, The Stranglers, The Undertones, Buzzcocks, The Skids, and The Rezillos. Fans immersed themselves in the raw, defiant energy of punk, creating an electrifying atmosphere in a city renowned for its vibrant live music scene. READ MORE: ScotRail issues advice ahead of Summer Sessions in Glasgow One of the highlights of the day was the thrilling collaboration between the former Sex Pistols and modern punk icon Frank Carter. This union fused the Pistols' anarchic legacy with Carter's ferocious stage presence and contemporary edge, resulting in a truly unforgettable performance. Originally debuted at Bush Hall last August, the collaboration launched a short tour and earned glowing five-star reviews from outlets including The Glasgow Times. READ MORE: The Sex Pistols and Frank Carter in Glasgow - my verdict This unique pairing of punk generations set a new benchmark for live performances, uniting fans old and new in celebration of the genre's enduring power. The Stranglers lit up the stage with their unmistakable blend of punk, new wave, and rock. The Undertones, known for their classic anthem Teenage Kicks, delivered a lively, nostalgia-fuelled set that resonated with fans of all ages. Pioneering punk/new wave outfit Buzzcocks thrilled audiences with their signature fast-paced sound. READ MORE: All the banned items from Glasgow's Summer Sessions this year With hits such as Into the Valley and Masquerade, The Skids captivated listeners, proving their music still holds deep emotional and cultural relevance. Meanwhile, The Rezillos injected a playful, retro vibe into the festival with their high-octane performance. Bringing together generations of fans and legends, the event cemented Glasgow's place as a punk stronghold and reminded everyone of the genre's timeless power to unite, energise, and inspire. So, were you there? Dive into our 23 incredible photos and see if you can spot yourself in the crowd! (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry) (Image: Robert Perry)
The Herald Scotland
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Sex Pistols and Stranglers draw Glasgow's pensioner punks
"I've been enjoying seeing all the old punks in town," the driver laughs. "They've got all the gear... well, everything except the hair." Yes, it's probably worth noting at this stage that it is not, in fact, 1978 and both on stage and in the crowd the passage of time is evident. The line-up offers the first clue: Skids (without Stuart Adamson, deceased), Buzzcocks (without Pete Shelley, deceased), The Undertones (without Feargal Sharkey, campaigning for clean rivers), The Stranglers (without Hugh Cornwell, estranged, also without Dave Greenfield and Jet Black, deceased), Sex Pistols (without Johnny Rotten, legal troubles). Read More: The second clue is the number of camping chairs deployed for the occasion, something you probably didn't get in the Bungalow Bar back in the day. At this point it would be easy to just start riffing on pensioner punks: age against against the machine. Granarchy in the UK. No future? You ain't kidding. It's clear though that there's a real sense of community here. Fans at Bellahouston Park for the punk all-dayer (Image: Newsquest) At the bar, someone catches another punter's Belfast accent and strikes up a conversation. "I'm William," the Irishman says. "... or Liam depending on your point of view!". The two men laugh and offer hearty backslaps. Punk is famously prone to gatekeeping but there's little of that on display at Bellahouston Park, where just about every punk or punk-adjacent band is represented in t-shirt form, from The Stooges and Television all the way through to Green Day and Rancid. One man, sporting a Bauhaus 'Bela Lugosi is Dead' t-shirt, has overcome follicular challenges by gluing a mohawk to a swimming cap which bears the legend 'Glasgow punk all-dayer 2025' in sharpie on either side. You'd be hard-pushed to detect revolution in the air. This is, after all, an outdoor mega-gig where a pint will set you back £7.30 and a t-shirt £35: I am an antichrist/please buy our merchandise, to borrow a quip. Quibbles aside there are lovely moments wherever you look. A girl who can be no older than 12 at the barrier with her parents, all three in matching Sex Pistols t-shirts, a young woman with pink and green hair helping her father, who is traversing Bellahouston on a crutch, to the bar. As Buzzcocks take the stage a man to my right lights up a frankly ridiculous Cuban cigar. His t-shirt, an homage to the two buses promotional poster for 'Pretty Vacant' reads "punk's not dead but I'm not far away". As the band launch into opener 'What Do I Get?' two of his companions begin dancing enthusiastically and, despite the heat, they keep it up all the way to the one-two closing punch of 'Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've?)' and 'Harmony In My Head'. Between acts the screens alternate some punk favourites with adverts for TRNSMT, which it's probably fair to say is a different demographic altogether even if I do spot a grey-haired woman in a 'Free Mo Chara' Kneecap t-shirt. The Undertones are next up, and in the front circle someone even indulges in a spot of crowd surfing for 'Teenage Kicks'. "You should know better," guitarist Damian O'Neill chuckles. The Derry group are known for two-minute pop-punk tunes and singer Paul McLoone admits they've miscalculated how many it'll take to fill an hour - they play an extra three which weren't on the setlist - and perhaps it wasn't a joke when they declared, two songs in, that they'd just do 'Jimmy Jimmy' twice. Fans at Bellahouston Park for the punk all-dayer (Image: Newsquest) After a half hour break The Stranglers take the stage to the strains of 'Waltzinblack'. Before their entrance I speak to some punters in 'Rattus Norvegicus' shirts, some have seen the band more than 50 times while one, Tom, has never had the pleasure at the age of 47. Some use the break to visit the facilities, one man declaiming: "See at ma age, if ye want a pish you need to plan it 20 minutes in advance - then ye get there and ye don't even need wan anyway." Bassist JJ Burnel is the only original Strangler left but singer and guitarist Baz Warne has been playing with them for 25 years at this point and they sound tight. Their set is mostly built on their early output - 'Duchess' is an early highlight - but Warne gives a knowing smile as they run through 2006's 'Relentless' and he delivers the line: "I saw my love today/she's looking old but so am I". They finish, of course, with 'No More Heroes' and then it's time for the Frank Carter fronted Sex Pistols. The former Gallows man does a pretty good Johnny Rotten, and the band make enough noise I'm reliably informed it could be heard as far away as Bearsden. They may be, as Steve Diggle noted earlier in the day, "all the pensioners" but it turns out these bands can still create an almighty racket. Fill in your own hearing aid jokes...
The Herald Scotland
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Buzzcocks on how punk went from Glasgow ban to Bellahouston
On Saturday though a star-studded lineup of the scene's progenitors - Stranglers included - will headline Bellahouston Park, capacity circa 35,000. Buzzcocks were there from the beginning, as Britain's youth turned to spiky hair and safety pins, and they'll be there in Glasgow on Saturday when the combat boots are dusted off by the city's elder punks. Read More: Who better, then, to chart the journey from banned to Bellahouston. Guitarist and last suriving original member Steve Diggle tells The Herald: "We brought the Sex Pistols to Manchester when it (punk) was kind of unknown, really. "That's where we all met, the next day me, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley plugged into an amp and a terrible beauty was born, to quote Yates. "A couple of weeks later we opened for the Pistols in Manchester, we got reviewed and that put it on the map. So we were there right at the beginning. "We were doing that in Manchester and The Clash and the Pistols in London and we got to know them well, there was a connection between us because all of this was kind of new at the time. "The landscape was kind of dead, really, you had prog rock bands but they'd run their course and nothing was happening for a few years. "Suddenly you got this excitement, and everybody came alive." The Britain into which punk was birthed was one of high inflation and unemployment, of industrial unrest and a shifting political climate. It was famously referred to as "the sick man of Europe", with unemployment reaching 5.5% in 1978, the year the first Buzzcocks album was released. Diggle says: "Britain was black and white and grey - it was just boring, you know? "I was coming up to 20 and you kind of wanted some excitement. I'd been playing guitar since I was 17 and for three years I'd been trying to write songs and all that stuff and then suddenly this punk rock thing happened. "It hit the country like a carpet bomb, it was an explosion of the imagination - people thought things were possible, including ourselves, it was like an exchange between the bands and the crowd. "There wasn't any rivalry then, because we all started at the same time so if I run into a member of The Clash, or the Pistols, or The Jam we know where we come from so there isn't any rivalry. "It was great, we'd put a record out and they'd acknowledge that, then we'd acknowledge theirs. "It seemed like every week a single from one of those bands was coming out, it was a magical time." The poster for the punk all dayer (Image: DF Concerts) As punk was booming in the UK a similar thing was happening across the Atlantic with bands like The Ramones, Dead Kennedys and Television. However, Diggle doesn't feel there was a great deal of cultural overlap. He says: "The Ramones released their first album just before we released Spiral Scratch (the first Buzzcocks EP) and that was kind of a big influence, that first Ramones album was great. "I think it inspired The Clash and really everybody, it was fast and furious and straight to the point - all the music was direct in those early days. "So we had The Ramones and in the past MC5, Iggy Pop, The Suzies and all that stuff, and obviously The Velvet Underground. "But me and Pete grew up as kids of the 60s really, with The Kinks, The Beatles, The Who. "So we were aware of the American part but this was more of a British thing, all those bands were very British and thinking about things more over here, the stuff we were all going through at the time. "Actually when we first went to America, The Ramones came to see us. We got off the stage and they were all there, and they were kind of saying, 'we do that straight ahead stuff but you guys take it somewhere else' so they loved that about the Buzzcocks." Buzzcocks in 1978 (Image: Newsquest) British punk also carried a more political bent, though Diggle's band were less overt than contemporaries like The Clash. He says: "The Buzzcocks sang a lot about the human condition, you know? "There were political ones, Joe Strummer loved my song 'Autonomy' on the first album. "We had distorted guitars and we had that attitude, we had things like 'Orgasm Addict' (which was banned by the BBC). "The Clash were a bit more externally political but a lot of my songs are political underneath. Songs like 'Why She's A Girl From A Chain Store', we had a lot of complexity with it as well, we had a bit of existentialism about us. "It wasn't as simple as going 'the government's wrong', it was dealing with other complexities as well. We knew the government was wrong but it's not a case of thinking the crowd is so simple they don't understand those kind of things. "When we all started it was all under this umbrella of punk, initially no-one could particularly differentiate between any of them. "But then as we kept making albums each band got its own identity, so even within that movement we were all different." Though bands like The Clash and the Sex Pistols had their pop chops too, Buzzcocks were perhaps the most melodic of the first wave bands. Their influence can be heard in the lineage of punk and its offshoots, from Nirvana and Green Day to Supergrass and the Manic Street Preachers. L-R. Steve Diggle, Steve Garvey, John Maher, Pete Shelley (Image: Fin Costello/Redferns) Diggle says: "It's quite amazing, at the time you're just making a record you don't think you'll be inspiring other people. "It's a great compliment, Nicky Wire from the Manic Street Preachers said 'when we started we were playing 'Autonomy'. REM, U2, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and loads of other bands you've probably never heard of will say 'we used to do a Buzzcocks song when we were starting out'. "You can hear a lot of echoes of Buzzcocks in other people's records, Green Day and people like that, which is not something we ever set out to do." The group has somewhat come full-circle, and will once again play alongside the Sex Pistols at the 'punk all-dayer' at Glasgow Green on June 21, as will The Stranglers, The Undertones, Skids and The Rezillos. Punk's not dead, as they say, though admittedly some of those groups' former members are. Diggle says: "They still do Shakespeare and he's a lot older than us, so we've got time! "We were supposed to headline Hyde Park twice and were banned because we were a punk band, but we've gone full-circle here. "It'll be a great day playing with all those bands. It's still alive and well, you know? Still rolling on." The Punk All Dayer takes place at Bellahouston Park on Saturday, June 21. Tickets are available here.
RTÉ News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Sanders' unveil 'Johnny I hardly knew ye' plaque in Athy
Wife of US Senator Bernie Sanders, Jane O'Meara Sanders, has called for an end to "sending our sons and daughters to war" during a visit to Athy, Co Kildare. The couple unveiled a plaque commemorating the song 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye' at a war memorial in St Michael's Cemetery outside the south Kildare town this afternoon. Ms O'Meara Sanders can directly trace her ancestors, the Coyles, back to Athy, of which some are commemorated at the graveyard having fought during World War One. Written in the 19th century, 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye', an Irish anti-war folk song, tells the story of an Athy woman who reunites with her lover Johnny, now unrecognisable after returning from war. Speaking at the unveiling, Ms O'Meara Sanders said the song was often sung during protests during the Vietnam War. "We sang it at every march, at every rally, sadly at home. "But what we need to do is take these words to heart and not send any more of our sons and daughters to war," she said. Watch: Jane O'Meara Sanders says it is 'wonderful' to be in ancestral home of Athy Before the unveiling, Senator Sanders and Ms O'Meara Sanders gave an address to the public in Athy Library, where she was gifted with local artwork and a recreation of her Irish family tree. Ms O'Meara Sanders said she never expected "such an incredibly welcoming homecoming. "I met the Coyles, our extended family, the Sheridans, the O'Mearas, the Murphys, the Lees and the Donovans, we've got them all over. "Athy has a wonderful approach to arts culture and music in Ireland, and I saw it just in the hour I've been here. "I'm incredibly impressed," she added. The Sanders' visit was part of the 'Made of Athy' campaign. Established in 2018, the campaign has seen the town erect some 26 plaques in honour of notable figures with a connection to the town. It includes guitarist of The Smiths Johnny Marr, Buzzcocks drummer John Maher, and Stones Roses bassist, Gary "Mani" Mountfield. Colm Walsh from 'Made of Athy', who invited the couple to today's celebration and joined them for the unveiling, described the event as a "full circle" moment. "This piece of music became popular during the Vietnam war, and it's very fitting because that's when the Sanders spent their apprenticeship doing peace activism. "They're much more familiar with the song than the Irish people are. "So, it's great that we can come full circle and have them here," he said. Mr Walsh added that the song remains relevant almost 160 years later. "This song never goes out of fashion unfortunately. "It's as relevant to Gaza and Ukraine as they were almost 200 years ago." "It's so important that the Sanders came here and recognised the connection between music, conflict and culture," he said. Senator Sanders is due to meet President Michael D Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin tomorrow. President Higgins previously met Senator Sanders during his visits to Ireland in February 2024 and June 2017.
RTÉ News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Sanders to unveil 'Johnny I hardly knew ye' plaque in Athy
Bernie Sanders and his wife Jane O'Meara Sanders are due to unveil a plaque commemorating the song 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye' in Athy Co Kildare this afternoon. The US Senator's visit is part of the 'Made of Athy' campaign, which, since it began in 2018, has seen the town erect some 26 plaques in honour of notable figures with a connection to the town. Senator Sanders' wife Jane O'Meara Sanders can directly trace her ancestors, the Coyles, back to the south Kildare town. Written in the 19th century, 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye', an Irish anti-war folk song, tells the story of an Athy woman who reunites with her lover Johnny, now unrecognisable after returning from war. A plaque commemorating the song will be officially unveiled at 3pm at St Michael's Cemetery - followed by a traditional music session in the nearby O'Brien's pub. Before that, Senator Sanders and Ms O'Meara-Sanders will give an address to the public in Athy Library at 2pm. They will be joined at the event by Made of Athy founder Colm Walsh, and the Mayor of Athy, Cllr Aoife Breslin. Other musical figures commemorated by the Made of Athy campaign include Johnny Marr, guitarist of The Smiths, Buzzcocks drummer John Maher, and Stones Roses bassist, Gary "Mani" Mountfield. Yesterday Senator Sanders delivered a keynote address at the Robert Tressell Festival at Liberty Hall in Dublin. The event brought together trade unionists and labour activists from Ireland and abroad. Senator Sanders is due to meet President Michael D Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin tomorrow. President Higgins previously met Senator Sanders during his visits to Ireland in February 2024 and June 2017.
