Engine Punk

Regular followers may remember I saw The Creepshow at the White Rabbit last year. One of their support bands was The Rocker Covers, a trio of automotively literate songsmiths who makeover pop hits to devise the most happily subversive covers of songs you might know. Some might be favourites given The Rocker Cover treatment and others might be on your most hated list that have also been given a similar work over to become simply brilliant! I am assured Poker Face is a Lady Gaga hit but am more familiar with The Rocker Covers version. I know - I have so much street cred. But listen to the way it starts off! That's from Brand New Cadillac by The Clash! (Except theirs was a cover version of some old bloke...) The point is, some versions can't be beat and are the ones you carry with you as your favourite. That's happened to me and so many of these songs on Revved Up. There are so many songs I think would benefit from The Rocker Cover's treatment. I could do qui...

I once met John Graham Mellor, y'know. It was in a club in Brighton (name now forgotten) along with something like 300 other people watching Joe Strummer and guests. He played a two part set, the first consisting of his latest material and the second half of Clash standards. Thatw as what people had come to see. The second half rocked. I particularly remember Brand New Cadillac , which has always been a favourite of mine. I can't say that it influenced my life greatly but meeting Joe Strummer often had that effect on people. It's the impact he made on two young men that's the subject of Meeting Joe Strummer , which played recently at The Drum Theatre in Plymouth. I thought it was a great show with just the two narrators and no set. I could relate to everything they said and so did my gang of friends in the audience, The Usual Suspects of punk rock inclinations plus some more high brow types. Some of us were practically euphoric at the end and when one of the characters...

Don Letts introduced punk to reggae and was a member of Big Audio Dynamite with ex-Clash rocker Mick Jones. He was in Plymouth last night, where the Arts Centre showed two of his films, and participated in an all-too-brief question and answer session as part of the Flipside film festival. My main interest centred on his Grammy award winning documentary on The Clash, Westway to the World , but also showing was Dance Hall Queen . The patois on this Jamaican film was so difficult for my west country ears that sub-titles would have been useful but by the end of the film I could pick up the gist of it. It's a kind of West Indian Calendar Girls but instead of stripping off the central female character empowers herself through dancing - provocatively. Don revealed how he wasn't at the Rock Against Racing gig thirty years ago. Methinks we could do with another of those. He said Joe Strummer had just stolen his girlfriend so he was sulking. He read extracts from his autobiograph...