Photo by Ben Rayner
The death of Liverpool’s legendary HARDCORE AND punk club Planet X neartly coinicided with the mid-90s raping and murder of the UK underground by major label A&R men, beady eyes fixed on signing the new Green Day.
Even the hardcore bands from Southport with only six songs were being offered five album deals by labels like Roadrunner. The evil seeds of emo and metal were being sewn into the scene, wiping out things like normal-guy-angry-hardcore that the whole genre of music was based on in the first place. For some reason though, the real shit is starting to resurface.
Last New Year’s Eve, Liverpool’s best new hardcore band Walk The Plank, made up of the city’s staunchest hardcore skate gang and Lecky, ex of Durham’s Vorhees, broke into Planet X and played a show for all their friends. Over the last couple of weeks they’ve been touring the country. Most shows involve emo eyeliner kids having beer crates thrown at them, or something like that.
VICE: So what happened with Planet X?
Howard Cook (bass): It was closed down, got flooded to fuck and then lay abandoned for years at the mercy of smackheads. Our mate The Beard broke in there one night last year and the building still seemed okay. The two stages were still there but there was a big hole in the roof. We had the idea about doing a word-of-mouth gig there on New Year’s Eve.
We parked a van outside right up to the wall of the place, opened the side doors and got to work on getting in the place. We got in quick enough and set everything up and we even had the old doorman Pek, ushering people in. We ended up with like 80 people in there.
A lot of people didn’t come because they didn’t want to risk ruining there stupid fucking New Year’s night by sitting in a pig cell, but for those who made the effort, it was a fucking good laugh.
So why did you decide to make a band that sounds like it split up in 1983? In Boston…
We originally wanted to be a kind of sensitive emo metal band, but Lecky’s vocals didn’t cut it and we simply weren’t good enough to play metal.
What do your parents think about the band?
They think it’s a load of shit.
Have you got any songs about parents?
We just wrote one. It’s about it being okay to fuck your friend’s mum, as long as his dad doesn’t find out.
Nice. Are any of you still SXE? What happened?
When you have loose nuts, sometimes the wheels fall off.
ANITA CRAPPER
