Q. How is sex in a canoe similar to a DIY gig next to a canal?

A. Because it's fucking close to water.

I know, I know, dear reader, you're not the first person to tell me I could have a stellar career in standup if the music blogging game didn't work out. All wisecracks aside however, this afternoon n0teeth was lured to a choice beauty spot we've raved around and cycled through on numerous past occasions by the promise of a free gig. Having seen a greyscale flier shared on social media by a pal from what we call "the noise community" n0teeth blithely assumed we were in for an afternoon of the angrily buzzing electronic variety, but arrived to find PUNK HAPPENING. Yes, that's right - at a time when noise bands and promoters are using anarcho-punk aesthetics to promote their gigs (in many cases having come from a punk background themselves) the flier we saw was in fact for an actual punk show of possibly dubious legality.

n0teeth's indifference to punk music is a matter of public record, but we couldn't fault the tactics at play here. (The potent and competitively priced cocktails from the wheelie bin "bar" didn't hurt either.) We may never fully get our heads around punk from a musical perspective let alone suppress our raging contempt for Punk as an ubiquitous British cultural export the dullest late boomer hacks alive bring up every five seconds like broken, gibbering automatons in a seawater-rotted Victorian penny arcade, but you can't help but respect the kind of rag-tag crews that put together guerilla gigs in public spaces and summon a decent sized crowd at seemingly short notice. DIY shows in any genre - punk, metal, grime, drum n bass, power electronics, gregorian chant - are the lifeblood of every town and city's music scene (mobile phone network sponsored flash mobs don't count).

This crossover of punk and noise in both organisational approach and aesthetics isn't entirely new, of course. Before joining Napalm Death, a teenaged Justin Broadrick was jamming in various anarcho-crust bands while releasing Whitehouse-influenced power electronics outbursts under the name Final. The "spirit of punk" in the sense that an ex-Melody Maker talking head on a Channel 4 documentary intends it might well be a cultural and creative dead end, a great rock n roll swindle draped in a cheap polythene Union Jack floating in raw sewage like the body of a minor Kray associate, but the spirit of DIY-everything and making a bloody good racket lives on in all kinds of music whether it's three chord punk or no-chord industrial.

Listening to a recording of a satisfyingly grotty live set by firm favourites 2nd Gen at Sick And Twisted on the ride there and back got n0teeth thinking about a more recent, yet poorly documented overlap between the creative interests of the punks and the noise heads. Well before our time, in a South London far, far away, two bands were lashing d-beat UK'82 fury to the apocalyptic tribal percussive assault of O.G. SE8 industrial dons Test Dept. Their names were Hydra and Leech Woman, one of them pushing the limits of what you could do with a no-frills keyboard-based set up and the other pushing the limits of a fairly conventional band set up respectively, and if like us you've an industrial itch that can only be scratched by the sound of metal striking metal, you need these bands in your ears and in your life.

Hailing from the Lewisham area, Hydra somewhat tellingly formed through a chance encounter between a punk and a Cabaret Voltaire fan in the 1980s. Recorded output from the band - variously a duo or a trio throughout their career - is sparse and not always easy to track down, but the persistent googler will be rewarded with the kind of whiplash anarcho-industro-punk bile that Youth Code, god love em, would burst onto the international scene with some twenty-odd years later some five thousand miles away.


The album Worship Your Diseases is definitely worth a punt, but the enraged, borderline feral Hydra of these 90s demos is where they truly fly their flag, politically and musically. Another track from around that era, "Head And Heart", gleefully samples a newsreader reporting on anti-fascist demonstrators "hurling stones and bricks at the BNP supporters" over crunching slabs of bass and faintly dub-tinged clattering industrial beats. This is a side of 90s London that has gone almost completely unremarked upon by sanitised semi-official narratives about raves, Britpop and Cool Britannia: the post-GLC, pre-directly elected mayor London of the poll tax riots, Reclaim The Streets, the Deptford Urban Free Festival, the Criminal Justice Bill and the M11 link road protest - the London n0teeth was oblivious to as a nipper wandering around the Science Museum in awe.

From a similar "love a bit of Crass, me, but quite like experimental electronic sounds as well" angle to Hydra's came the fearsome Leech Woman who - let's get this out of the way early doors - can lay claim to having one of the all-time greatest album titles in the form of Shit, Piss & Industrial Waste. Leech Woman's music is equal parts frothing punk fury and industrial-strength percussive sensory assault, the sound of the lunatics making their final stand in the asylum workshop. There's a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet etc. When Leech Woman teamed up with fellow south side canister-bashers Hydra in the early 2000s, the resulting Molotov cocktail was a snarling, seething attack on the inreasingly hypersurveilled London of the 21st century:


Emerging from the unapologetically crusty hardcore techno squat party scene of early 90s Brixton, Leech Woman also maintained their firm link to the rave scene through frontman Alex Boniwell's aforementioned Sick And Twisted parties, sound desk recordings of which he has generously shared over on Bandcamp.

n0teeth knows a musical romance is about to blossom when an album review mentions "gas canisters, washing machine parts, and angle grinders" - yours truly, about to listen to Leech Woman for the first time (Facebook, 2011)

Now defunct, Hydra have gigged occasionally in more recent years - n0teeth has been fortunate enough to see them twice, once in a pub in their native New Cross and once at Electrowerkz opening for Cocksure, where the oil drums and angle grinders were deployed to maximum capital-i Industrial effect. Frontman Nick Potts has continued making music of a decidedly more post-industrial bent under the name Solus.

Alex Boniwell on the other hand has since relocated to Australia where he's returned to what I assume were his musical roots all along: fast, furious & filthy crust punk. Music which n0teeth still doesn't have a lot of time for but, having seen firsthand how its tactics and attitudes have helped shape DIY music as a concept, will still raise a wheelie bin mojito to. Cheers!

If you enjoyed this ramble through the weeds, concrete & broken glass the good people over at Burning Ambulance have an excellent piece which goes even deeper on the "incrustrial" phenomenon I vaguely touched upon here.