| Location | Glasgow |
'A smacked up version of Dexy's Midnight Runners and some fearsome spivs playing bal-musette while gathered around the gates of hell in a noirish 50's Montmartre' - Bluesbunny
http://www.myspace.com/punchandtheapostles
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Asylum Appears on The Police Box October '08 » Wild, frenetic, yet underpinned by a probing sense of existential doubt - Asylum is pure P&tA genius. Log in to download tracks |
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Music Hall Appears on The Police Box November '08 » If you crossed Sparks, Jacques Brel and Al Bowlly, you'd probably go mad faster than you could say 'Frankenstein disco'. But it'd be a whole load of fun, and sound a bit like this. Log in to download tracks |
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Tie Me To The Mast Appears on The Police Box December '08 » One of Punch's earlier works is re-mastered by the Edinburgh Recording Company for your listening pleasure, if 'pleasure' is quite the right word... Log in to download tracks |
A cast of predominantly human degenerates, Punch & the Apostles are a riotous, wilful seven piece, with accordions and horns to the fore, led by the wild creativity of 'spindle-framed chaos-merchant' Paul B Napier. Utilising traditional styles while subverting their predetermined, anachronistic associtations they display obscurely the luminescent, deathless forms of a time-drowned epoch through a cross-pollination of jazz, blues and classical punk. The songs (such as they are) are brilliantly rousing and gloriously anarchic, indeed almost Rabelaisian in their bawdy torrent of ne'er changing superfluity. Contemporary influences are at most reminiscent of Tom Waits, Albert Ayler or Moondog. Having already scraped, scooped, blasted, gouged and gashed a niche for themselves with outstanding live performances (a vaudeville-inspired delivery of waltzes, tarantellas, polkas and swing music, peppered with poetry and orchestrated chaos) this band is totally absorbing, egregiously exciting and fastidiously provocative.
Conceptually, the agenda is to take traditional, inherited forms of music and rejuvenate them (after decades of abuse and indifference) by placing them in new and contradictory contexts. Folk music presents a particularly powerful tool in that it exhibits the collective cultural (un)consciousness of a specific social group. The soul of a people can be discerned through their art. Our interest is in the human soul; therefore, in search of it, we must be led ineluctably to the examination of the popular aesthetic product. Totalitarianism is the universal spectre of recent history. It has irremediably coloured the human consciousness. In the regions subjected to Stalinism, this phenomenon can be observed in its purest form. Hence Eastern European sounds have a particular significance within the music of Punch & The Apostles. However, they never attain precedence to the detriment of other artistic traditions: the wolrd is a ripe pear, whose browned, unappetising integument must not be allowed to divert the hungry diner from the succulent rarity of the juicy flesh within.
The tools of sonic production are: vocals, guitars, perscussion, keyboard, violin, accordion, trumpet and saxophones.
They make me want to rock out with my... accordion out. Awesome.
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