DEATH TO TRAD ROCK BOOK OUT ON CHERRY RED AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER
 

"Death To Trad Rock", John Robb's book about the noisy late eighties underground art riot is due out at the end of September on Cherry red.

500 pages will cover nearly 50 bands in that defiant, discordant DIY underground of bands, fanzines and venues that sustained a remarkable and highly original scene of bands in the mid to late eighties. Perhaps the last stand of DIY culture in the UK, the DIY bands were recording some of the most extreme music ever in the UK whilst some of them were making wilfully awkward pop. For the first time the bands have been pulled togther into a book and the scene examined.
Nearly 50 bands are covered in depth including Age Of Chance, the Membranes, A Witness, the Nightingales, Big Flame, the Very Things, Stretchheads, The Ex, Dog Faced Hermans and the attendant fanzine culture and the idiosyncratic style of the scene and the attendant Thatcherite politics of the day that the bands reacted against coming to head during the Miners Strike...

'The music, the fanzines even the song titles were cut and paste collage rhetoric...like someone had gone through the situationist manual with a pair of scissors and glued it all back together in a different order and added letraset to it...'