I didn’t even know the Rebellion Festival existed until last year. A chance look on a forthcoming concert website for a band, I can’t even remember who, said they were playing at the Rebellion Festival so I checked it out. Wow, that’s a spot to me, I thought and I resolved that I go this year. My wife and I are booked into a hotel. I have four days of tickets, she has none.
I can get her vaguely interested in folk punk, Mark Chadwick from the Levellers lives three down from us, and she likes the Alarm, but not enough to buy a day ticket for. The visit to see the Dead Kennedys last year was not well received. Although our first real date as partners was the Damned in Hastings, she really is called Eloise, and she was very pissed so found that manageable, I digress, so she has no tickets but is coming as the Macc Lads put it, ‘to see the lights.’
Funnily enough the last band I ever saw at festival was the Sex Pistols. Headlining the Phoenix Festival in 1996 it was generally agreed by the large posse who went that they had indeed blasted the likes of the Foo Fighters the Manic St Preachers and David Bowie off the stage.
I was 30 then and as much as I enjoyed the music I didn’t really enjoy festivals very much.
Until I found out about Rebellion. I’m someone that got into punk as a young teenager and still love it. First gig, the Stranglers 1983 Brighton Centre, just too young to see the Clash there in 1982 on the Combat Rock tour. Although my brother went.
I assumed all the great bands I used to like in my teens and early 20s would be replaced by a new wave of amazing music but apart from I sporadic brush with a decent fresh musical movement with Britpop, nothing’s ever got close to the pure energy add the mountains of creativity that’s punk and post punk spawned.
To be honest if Rebellion was one of the in a field efforts I’d swerve it. I’m probably like a lot of people who are going who like the idea of a festival where you sleep in a hotel room, you don’t get wet watching a band and all the bands are located in one place is perfection. Oh and the toilets are convenient!
This year and so many of my old favourites are playing and a few of the last bands remaining I’ve never seen, the Anti Nowhere League, Sham69, The Outcasts and The Ruts, well DC, spring to mind, as well as the two big beasts SLF and the Stranglers, two of the five bands I coveted the most. Other three the Damned, the Clash and the Kennedys.
I saw the Kennedys last year in another seaside haunt near me the De La Warr pavilion. Either side of the main auditorium are 30 or so rows of 6 seats. The front six seats were occupied by Charlie Harper and a friend, sitting resplendent in the punk equivalent of a royal box.
What was so noticeable was the absence of the drinking and merriment we all enjoyed so much when we were younger, hardly anyone was drinking. Well I put in a good account myself.
To me that is one of the reasons I really want to go, to just people watch and observe. As a newbie discover new bands, see the Dead Boys. Reflect on how so many of us have evolved from a group of herberts to what Justin Sullivan once beautifully summed up…’till older defeated.’ I hope I can see the energy is still there. The energy of punk is still with me and I hope it will be live and well in Blackpool. I hope to see indeed that punks not dead. At my local football club, where I write the fanzine blog we sing ‘Lewes ‘til I die’ and I’ll be a punk in spirit until I drop!
I’ve read great things about it and am going to relive my days forty years ago when I discovered punk and had so much curiosity and adventure to discover new acts as well as worshipping the old acts as we all did then.
I’ll be writing blogs about the bands and the people, Rebellion at Rebellion 2024. Before and after the festival as I’m going to enjoy myself for 4 days!
The Rights of Fans. 