Punk in the Park

Madam President opened the day while I was still finding my way in, so this is the record from No Clue onward, the four sets I caught end to end. In the midst of all this chaos, a band fittingly named No Clue were in the middle, soundchecking. Some people may not have had a clue who they were, or how they managed to get the whole scene standing for them, but in a few moments, all the people right there, right then, would know what they meant. I had a clue long before. I’d seen them play at Paddington Skatepark back in September 2025 for Findaway’s Left For Us single launch. I heard them play, multiple times a week, in the school rehearsal room next door; one of my bandmates dismissed them as just ‘Green Day shit’, and he was wrong.

No Clue got people moving, and clearly, rehearsing their asses off worked. They were a stronger live act than back in September; they’d gone from sounding like some garage band that needed to find their identity and sound, to being a band that did just that. Just straight, no trying to flex pop punk or alternative rock. As soon as they started, the crowd walked over to the ring and started warming up; their faster songs got the crowd truly going for it. Their songs right now are straight up songs, they get the job done for a good set, though it felt like at times those songs could become anthems; they just need more experience, and to get there, more recognition. They’ve already done a great job at getting there by playing support slots and already being better than 90% of school bands by actually rehearsing, and rehearsing properly. Someone also got out glowsticks and handed them around, which made this feel even more like a festival for the scene.

Strange Days Indeed were up next, and they’re a new name. They had their own brand of numetal, nice and bouncy, the way rap rhythm with metal instrumentation is, and being a new act playing to a punk crowd used to sped-up breakdowns and fast tempos, they did well, though the crowd response wasn’t as energetic as it was for the other bands. You could tell they’d worked on their stage act and practised it, though it felt like they were performing to the audience at times, not the place where the band and the audience are just in a trance. You could hear the System of a Down influence; their sound felt like a comb going through your hair and hitting your scalp, just out there, though it didn’t land as loud as it should’ve.

Could’ve been their tempo, their genre, the crowd, them being a new act, a mid-gig crowd dip, or the real explanation, which is that their set got cut short and marred by anxiety as the rain started to trickle through it and then fully pour down. Definitely a respectable, high-quality set, tight and dissonant; the rain just happened at the wrong time. If they’d been able to finish as intended, maybe they’d have left a lasting impression; maybe they planned for their last few songs to do just that.

Brax announced that the gig would have to be paused due to the rain, and the PAs and speakers were literally covered with plastic bags and whatever pieces of cloth they could find; apparently two guys donated their shirts for the cause. And everyone wondered whether this was going to be it, just two bands to what could’ve been a canon event. The ‘stage’ lights went off and everyone waited in trepidation for what was going to happen next. And right before anyone could even consider going home, Brax got up and stood alone in the circle while the entire crowd was up on the elevated concrete rings, and announced that we’d found a way, which got the entire crowd screaming to the point where you could feel your eardrums contract, but that everything would have to be routed through a single speaker, and he asked if the show should go on. The entire crowd went ballistic again, and some of us shouted DO IT.

This was right in time for Delphic Afterparty, who absolutely nailed it. The sound was stunning. They’ve gained a reputation as one of the strongest live acts in the scene, and at this gig, with the glistening of the rain just suiting their sound, you could hear why. They played songs from their EPs and a cover of Bieber’s ‘Baby’ that had no business working and absolutely did, metal and emo’d into something that genuinely rocked instead of the usual ironic-cover gag that dies on the floor, and I don’t know how, but they’d just gotten better at their craft. In this setting their sound projected in that grand manner, on a scale beyond that of when I saw them at Echoes.

Their songs were all moshable pretty much, except for maybe one slower, more personal one, and the pit went off even though the concrete was soaked, a proper punk pit on a proper scale, the kind that demands caution the way a wet floor does, except nobody was being careful and that was the whole point. Their lead guitarist was on fire. They’ve been described as emo and they absolutely are, and you can see why they’re so popular; it’s because they just meet what every average emo kid and mall goth wants. They combine metalcore, pop punk, emo, you name it. They were fucking awesome, blew ‘the roof’ off and were on another level. Their last song was Backup! Backup!, and they asked the crowd to sing the ‘woah oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh’ back as a call and response; the crowd this time around was off the charts, and it was epic.

The last set was Brax’s new band, Bleed the Freak, playing their first ever gig, and they had the closing slot to do it in. Brax is a drummer by his roots, so it threw a few people that he wasn’t the one out front; the bloke on vocals was someone else, and Heath McTegg, who used to front The Amphetamines and turns up in the Complete History at the School’s Out gig, was over on bass now. Before a note was played, the singer said the thing the whole night had been circling without saying out loud. You don’t need to rely on bars to have a good gig. You can just go to your local park and play. That is the entire Subscene in two sentences, the thing the first wave worked out in a boarded-up front room fifty years ago and the thing I was reaching for with the Big Break and the Brispunk gig that never happened, said plainly into a single working speaker by a band nobody had heard yet, in the rain, with the lights off. All my people, right here, right now, the way the Oasis song asks it; everyone there knew what it meant without anyone having to spell it out.

It started lukewarm. After Delphic Afterparty’s industrial-scale moshing the crowd was back to swaying, finding the new band’s feet with them, and a song or two in they hit one that the band’s mates all knew, something about a pie shop in Cleveland, and the floor started to come back. They never got to play it. The second guitarist’s amp died in the rain right before, so the whole set collapsed down to one guitar through the one amp that still worked, the stage black except for a single light somebody had aimed down from the merch stand bolted up on top of the skate ramp. The singer said his voice was shot, that he was sick, that he was sorry, and asked if he should even do it. The crowd answered that for him. DO IT.

The crowd was mostly the alternative lot, scene kids and emo kids and mall goths with punks scattered through, and a couple of years ago I’d have made a point of telling you which one of those I was. I don’t bother anymore. Punk, emo, rock and roll, it’s the one church to me now, a holy trinity, and I came up through all of it, played in Fucken Oath, carry the Gormless and Arran McKenzie lineage. Standing in that wet pit I felt like the 2024 version of myself, the emo kid who’d just found the thing, before any of the drama, and the whole night had the spirit of the Big Takeover at Paddington on the 4th of May two years ago, the gig that made me start this magazine, except this wasn’t a beginning, it was the culmination of everything the scene had been holding in. There were dark clouds over the park and there were the ones we’d all been carrying, and the pit was where both of them got let out.

The scene had been asleep the best part of a year, and everyone there had been waiting for permission to call it alive again. It was supposedly just punk in the park, the way Oasis were supposedly just a rock and roll band, and it was so exactly aligned with the people standing in it that it could not have been anything less than what it was. Nearly every act on the bill was a new or barely-known name getting its big break on that concrete, which is the engine of the whole thing and the same door I’d tried to prop open with mine. This wasn’t only Deadtrigger back from the dead. Deadtrigger pulled the trigger on a new stage of the Subscene, and the night read as a signal flare more than a homecoming, a flat statement of what’s coming. More of these, soon, all ages, easy to get to. I want them weekly. I reckon a lot of us walked to the bus stop wanting the same thing.

On the way out, Brax walked over to me as I headed for the bus stop, asked if I had a way home, said he was glad I’d come, told me to get back safe. The blokes from around Heatstroke and Delphic who’d been frosty since the Echoes piece said hi, said they were happy to see me there, took the piss about my outfit in the way that means the opposite. Eight months of silence and a broken amp and one power cable, and it didn’t feel like a return to form, it felt like the form had moved. This was the scene’s Maine Road, the night a thing that everyone had written off stood up in a park in the rain and was bigger and better than the version everyone remembered, and almost nobody in it clocked that they were standing in the moment until later. You missed it, and that’s the point; the ones who were there will be telling you about it, and the next one is coming. The Saints recorded their record fifty years ago to prove that some delinquents from the wrong side of town didn’t need anyone’s permission. Half a century on, in a skatepark in Thornlands, a sick kid with no stage and one working speaker proved exactly the same thing. We’re back. Expect more.