Nite Songs

So your correspondent finally makes it back to a festival a mere decade or so after his last one (well, if you discount a few trips to the Bishops Stortford Music Festival when I lived down there). Kubix Festival is now in its seventh year (discounting 2020 where Covid put paid to it) and this is your correspondent's third attempt at attending - as I mentioned, the 2020 attempt was wiped out by the pandemic and the 2021 version ended up moved back to October for the same reason. And maybe this is just a sign of me getting older but the prospect of sitting at the bottom of Penshaw Hill to watch some bands in the freezing autumn rain didn't appeal somehow. Still, better late than never... Local lads Crashed Out  are pretty much a perfect band to open this festival and draw an impressively large crowd for this point in the day. With a barrelling punk energy, they even manage to get a small moshpit going as old favourites like The Town That Died  and Jarrow Song  rub shoulder...

  Playing cleverly on the title of their 1978 debut Hymns From A Haunted Ballroom , this new album from the Skids sees them going down the covers route. The band's first album since reforming, 2018's Burning Cities , was a solid comeback effort and with an interesting selection of songs in here, I was certainly intrigued when this one landed on my review desk. As you'd maybe expect if you're familiar with the Skids' back catalogue, a lot of the selections here lean towards the artier end of punk and glam with a storming rendition of Ultravox's Young Savage  working well as the lead-off track while their take on Magazine's The Light Pours Out Of Me  is given the necessary reverence and enough of the band's own stamp to make sure it works. The group's take on David Essex's Rock On  also shows off the band's post-punk credentials as they capture the haunting minimalist nature of the original to good effect adding some sinister synths to enhance ...