Nite Songs

  Time for the third part of our end of year countdown as we reach the Top 40. As always, feel free to cue up the old chart rundown music from Radio 1 if it helps enhance the experience for you... *** 40. WET LEG - "Wet Leg" Yes, it's easy to be cynical about Wet Leg but the truth is that when all's said and done they came up with a bit of a cracker for their debut album. It's quite simply fun music with a lot of the songs having an endearingly gleeful vitriol to them. Yet there's a serious undercurrent there as well with the likes of Wet Dream  and Piece Of Shit  having a genuine anger underpinning the playfulness. For once, a case of the hype being deserved. *** 39. KAE TEMPEST - "The Line Is A Curve" Kae's first album since coming out as gender neutral is all about seeking solace in tough times, be that their recent struggles or the recent struggles all of us have had thanks to lockdown etc. Backed up by lush orchestration and with Tempest...

  2022 seems to be the year of punk bands saying adieu and in the wake of both the UK Subs and the Vibrators putting out their final albums this year, this new effort from streetpunk veterans the Cockney Rejects is also being billed as their last. When the Rejects first broke into the charts, they were tipped as the band to pick up the torch from the then-on-their-last-legs Sham 69 but after two albums of brutally raucous streetpunk, they made a bit of a left turn as the oi well started to get poisoned by far right boneheads, going full on Motorhead-style headbanger metal before sliding into inactivity in the mid-'80s and eventually making a comeback around the turn of the millennium. I was a bit sceptical about which version of the Rejects we'd be getting for this album but on the evidence of the shoutalong We Were Never Bothered  and the full on assault of Paper Tiger , the answer appears to be taking the best bits of each with Jeff Turner's unmistakeable East End bark be...