The punks are coming back ... festival returns to town’s Spa
This year’s debut festival hailed a big success
Sir Joseph Paxton’s Scarborough Spa Complex would seem a rather incongruous setting for a latter-day indoor punk rock festival, yet the inaugural occasion earlier this year was acclaimed as a great success by the promoter and dates for a second event next year have been confirmed. The initial scheduled event had previously been postponed due to the Covid-19 crisis that consequently engulfed the entire live music industry into a total shutdown.
With Sex Pistols/PIL frontman John Lydon having appeared in October of last year as part of a nationwide book tour, and the forthcoming gig by From The Jam, the venue is continuing to attract a growing number of the major protagonists of the punk/new wave era.
Staged in the Spa Grand Hall over a weekend in March, the inaugural punk festival comprised a varied line-up of some 21 bands, with veteran outfits Skids and Discharge headlining consecutively.
Scarborough pop-punk band Bear Away opened the second day’s performances.
Significantly, day one of the event was sold out, with 1,200 attendees from all over the UK and Europe.
The Spa weekend also featured a full music market in the Sun Court suite that included band merchandise, clothing and accessory stalls and also independent fiction writers.
The promoter said: “I was hosting a lot of punk events in Scarborough in the lead up to Covid.
“Back when I managed a local music venue between 2017-2019, I went on to build ‘pop-up live venues’ in locations like the Scarborough Market Hall.
“I have always had ambitions to host a large music festival at the Spa, and this idea naturally followed on from past projects.”
In its first incarnation, the Scarborough event has immediately established itself as one of the UK’s leading purist punk events, behind Rebellion Festival in Blackpool and The Manchester Punk Festival.
Another seaside resortbased event, The Great British Alternative Music Festival (at Skegness Butlins), is also larger, although this presents a varied combination of punk, new wave and ska bands.
Over the subsequent decades since its rapid emergence in the mid-late 1970s punk, that most radical and revolutionary of music genres, has become widely acknowledged as an established form of “classic rock”, that still retains a large die-hard cohort of highly committed fans.
The second Scarborough Punk Festival at the Spa Grand Hall, featuring UK Subs, The Exploited and Cockney Rejects, will be held over the weekend of March 25-26 2023.
From The Jam, featuring original bassist with The Jam Bruce Foxton, are scheduled to appear at the Spa on October 15 this year with support from The Truth, fronted by Dennis Greaves of Nine Below Zero.