Punk Cafe at this year's Punk Picnic
This year's punk picnic was fab, and saw loads of people collaborating to pull it off. Three days of mayhem oscillating between the Cricketers Arms and Matilda. Each night had different crowds and different vibes. A hugh amount of thanks goes to Rich (Doing It Ourselves/Bickles cab) for pulling this off.
The second day of this three affair was held at matilda gig spaces and the collective decided to run a punk cafe from 3pm until midnight. It was hard work, but a right laugh. On the menu was (all vegan – of course):
Bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches with mayo;
Scheese and mushroom toasties;
Veggie burgers; Sausage sandwiches;
Chickpea,mushroom and pepper curry with basmati rice and naan bread;
A selection of cakes;
Chocolate bars and seseame seed bars…
and the vocal PA was playing out a storming collection of tunes, thanks to Panch's MP3 player.
The last night of the event with Bruce Banner and Fucked Up was an awesome culmination of six gigs in seven days in Sheffield....rock on! It was then one day off and back in for the punk film night!
Punks at the Pictures
Helene and Nick, under the guise of Slendermeans and Sheffield Indymedia, have been putting on film nights round Sheffield for the last few years. Punk docs made an outing for a G8 actions benefit night, showing Beyond the Screams and Ramen Days, followed by some riot porn. Following on from this the collective are going to host a series of punk film nights, and as ever with us there will be food, cake and popcorn! First up is “The Edge of Quarrel” which basically a film make by punk/hardcore kids about punks and straight edgers fighting each other and some guy who returns to his home town who is horrified to see all his mates fighting each other when the scene and what we stand against should unify us! The film is well made and fun, the diolgue is uber cheesy in places, and fight scenes will make you laugh out loud! Well worth coming down and sitting on a sofa and watching. Watch this space for more news about film screenings......
How We Rock......
After months of steadfastly refusing to book gigs ourselves and just do up an look after the spaces, we couldn't resist any longer and are putting on our first few gigs together as a collective. We started with Baracka from Hungary, quickly followed up by J'm'enfous from France/Switzerland. Our next gig is Battle Royale from Germany.
While we have the space we have been thinking about the format in which we all usually put on gigs, and how we can play around with this, and experiment with making it more inclusive and even more fun, with more time to catch up with each other instead of just between bands. We have also been thinking about how with relatively small turn outs to punk gigs compared to some other cities, we can afford to give enough money to bands, particularly touring ones. We have found with the first two gigs that we can bake cakes and use the donations given for drinks to supplement the door money. For the Battle Royale gig we will be serving a vegan dinner at 7.30pm as this may be a nice for all the bands and crowd to hand out together before hand and share some scrummy food.
We would also like to do more to support local DIY zine, book and record distros and encourage them back to gigs. Sometimes they seem so missing from gigs these days. Also do more to have an info shop at gigs about actions and the likes. While we have a free space (and quite a bit of it) we would like to do our bit to try and make gigs as much a community supporting and varied experience as possible. So come for dinner with us on the 10th April if you fancy rockin' out to Battle Royale, The Process aand Threads!
The Vocal PA Arrives
We are now the proud co-parents of a vocal PA! We have been saving up for it for the last 6 months so that people can use it for their gigs in the smaller gig spaces. After a quick session one Monday night plugging it in and randomly pressing all the buttons to figure it out – less skill share, more make it up as we go along – it was christened a few days later at the Baracka gig. It was splendid! We also have two mic stands and 3 mincrophones, including a legendary SM58. Anyway it's something we will hopefully have for years to share with the DIY music community. Also good for film nights, acoustic does and the like in Matilda.
