16-02-2025
REVIEW: Punk Off at the Lighthouse, Poole
IF you want to see a great show full of energy and some of the best live songs ever written then this is the gig for you.
Talking to people before the start I asked what songs they would expect to hear as part of an evening that documented the history of punk, various people went through their list with The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Stranglers and the Ramones being common answers.
Well tonight they played them all and plenty more besides. This is not a show that uses punk favourites to tell a story rather it is a spoken narrative interspersed with all of the punk favourites of 1976 to 1979.
The show starts in the New York clubs with the band pumping out The Ramones Shenagh Is A Punk Rocker and then moves to London where Malcolm McClaren and Vivian Westwood rebrand their shop on the Kings Road that attracted Chrissy Hynde and various Sex Pistols.
(Image: rockstarimages)
From then on it is an excellent retelling of a brief history of punk narrated by none other then Kevin Kennedy who also straps on a guitar and joins in the fun.
The songs come thick and fast and include classics from Sham 69, Blondie, Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Pretenders, Elvis Costello and a pretty good version of In The City from The Jam.
The three-piece band deliver spot on versions of these classics whilst the rest of the cast move the story along with a mixture of singing and dancing to a Camden Lock background.
The lights and sound are excellent and the pretty well sold crowd lapped up every second of it.
It would be fair to say that the majority of the crowd were around to enjoy these tunes first time around and loved hearing them played live again nearly fifty years later.
An excellent show that keeps the story alive with the crowd heading out into the night feeling like the teenagers they were when they originally heard these songs.
