Rockaway Beach
Butlins Bognor Regis
The Skids, Sleaford Mods, The Cribs and more come together for this year’s rabble-rousing annual alt.rock festival by the seaside.
“Seagulls trying to eat my chips, the set of c**ts!” barks Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods midway through Big Pharma, batting his ears and making bird-like squawks as if having a PTSD flashback to Southend 1985. Proof right there that, somewhere in their laptop punk barrage of surrealist absurdism and foul-mouthed social satire, they have a lyric for all occasions. This one is headlining Saturday night at Rockaway Beach, the annual alt.rock takeover of Bognor Regis Butlins in the first weekend of January, intending to smack the indie punk nation out of its Hogmanay coma in an orgy of next-gen guitar thrills, competitive air hockey and vodka-laced Slush Puppies.
It’s an aficionado’s affair, where music quizzes, band Q&As and record fairs in the main pavilion fill the daytime gaps between opportunities to check out the coming year’s rising alternative big shots. London guitar-andshouty-drummer duo John
– a two-man Idles - attempt to rip a hole to Hades with febrile rant punk songs about mental health and post-apocalyptic literature. Joyeria arrive from the parallel dimension where Nick
Cave went grunge, and, later and longer-in-tooth, Dream Wife charge with celebratory “bad bitch” ferocity through their riot glam blueprint for The Last
Dinner Party. The local Bognor scene shows signs of being the new
Seattle. “My parents met in this very room,” declares Snayx singer Charlie
Herridge, child of tombola and yob-punk rabble-rouser extraordinaire, while local lads Traams deliver some magnificently motoric noise rock.
Anchoring the weekend, though, are heritage names that might have been left behind in an amphetamine daze from a previous retro-punk weekender, but here take on an air of revered elders. The Selecter headline Friday, and on Saturday, Sleaford Mods have to follow The Skids, who leave tracks of burning rubber across the Centre Stage with death-or-glory biker punk anthems Masquerade and Into The Valley, and repurpose TV Stars (the selfproclaimed “worst song in the history of punk”) to include Liz Truss and Boris Johnson in its catalogue of Z-list wannabes. Singer Richard Jobson also teaches the Mods a thing or seven about on-stage vitriol, detailing his marriage-shattering frustrations with the success of former bandmate Stuart Adamson and his post-Skids band Big Country, and firing savage blind sides at the artist who kept their 2018 album Burning Cities off the indie chart No.1 spot. “If you pulled off Putin’s mask, it’s Leo fucking
Sayer,” he fumes. “I blame him for everything, the war in Ukraine, Brexit…”
If only Hugh Cornwell’s set had half the bite. Suffering from technical issues – he has to sing the solo from Strange Little Girl when his guitar dies – and a wispish vocal with touches of Fozzie Bear in the lower end, he spreads a selection of refined but marginal Stranglers songs (Skin Deep, Strange, Always The Sun, but no Peaches, No More Heroes or Duchess) thinly across 90 minutes of surf-flavoured solo suaveness and the very Velvets Lou Reed tribute Mr Leather. Even the formative indie-pop of Kurt Cobain favourites The Vaselines feels edgier, particularly when Frances McKee asks sweetly if anyone in the audience might lend them a small cup of crystal meth.
Modern-indie figureheads The Cribs close out the weekend in typically ramshackle style, twin singers Ryan and Gary Jarman ripping fresh holes in the knees of Men’s Needs, Cheat On Me and Moving Pictures, and drumming brother Ross managing to play his kit while, half the time, standing on it. And with that a fire is lit under 2024, Mr Tumble left with an impossible act to follow, and Leo Sayer warned resoundingly. Oh we do love the scree beside the seaside…