Punk in the Park

Madam President opened the day while I was still on the highway, so our story starts after I found my way. Night descends, daylight ends, and in the middle, a band fittingly named No Clue were soundchecking. Some people might not have had a clue who they were, or how they got the whole scene standing for them, but in a few moments everyone right there, right then, everyone would know what they mean.

I had a clue long before. I’d seen them play at Paddington Skatepark back in September 2025 for Findaway’s Left For Us single launch, and I’d heard them multiple times a week through the wall of the school rehearsal room next door; one of my bandmates wrote them off as ‘Green Day shit’, I’ve got no clue what he means now, all I know is that he sounded like a bitch. No Clue got people off their ass, and that started with them rehearsing their asses off first. They were a stronger live act than back in September, gone from a garage band still hunting for its identity to one that had found it. Just straight, no trying to flex pop punk or alternative rock. As soon as they started the crowd walked over to the ring and warmed up. Their faster songs got everyone truly going for it. Their songs right now are straightly said songs. They get the job done for a good set though they were straining towards being absolute angsty anthems. They just need more experience; they’re already 90% above other school bands by actually rehearsing, and rehearsing properly. Someone got out glowsticks and handed them around, so gather round.

The new name you now read, is Strange Days Indeed. They had their own brand of numetal; nice and bouncy rap rhythm over metal instrumentation. For a new act playing to a punk crowd used to sped-up breakdowns and fast tempos, their songs were just a different duration. The crowd response didn’t respond as heavily to this blast of metal feel. They had decent swagger and didn’t flinch when it got real. You could tell they’d worked on their stage act with preparation. Though it felt at times like they were performing for their brothers and mothers instead of getting into that trance where the band and the crowd feed off each other. You could hear the System of a Down in them; their sound was a comb going through your hair and hitting your scalp, just out there, trying to work its way in, though it didn’t land as loud as it should’ve. Could’ve been the tempo, the genre, the crowd, them being new, a mid-gig dip, or the real reason, which is that their set got cut short and marred by nerves as the rain started to trickle through it and then properly pour.

We were waiting in trepidation while Brax gave us education in the rain. The PAs and speakers got covered with plastic bags and whatever cloth anyone had; apparently two blokes donated their shirts for the cause. Everyone wondered whether that was going to be it, three bands of what should’ve been a canon event, not because anyone expected it to fall over but because you just knew this was the moment. The ‘stage’ lights went off and everyone waited in trepidation. Right before anyone could even think about going home, Brax got up and stood alone in the circle while the whole crowd was up on the elevated concrete rings, and announced that we’d found a way, which got everyone screaming to the point you could feel your eardrums contract, but that the live mix would all have to run through a single PA speaker, and he asked if the show should go on. The crowd went ballistic again, and some of us shouted DO IT. The whole thing was now going to run on one power cable.

This was right in time for Delphic Afterparty, who absolutely nailed it. The sound was meaty and the opposite of gormless. They’ve got a reputation as one of the strongest live acts in the scene, and at this gig, the rain glistening and somehow suiting them, you could hear why they are so hearty and hard to get enough of. They pulled out a cover of Bieber’s ‘Baby’ that had no business working and absolutely did, metalled and emo’d into that was kicking up a storm from the day that it was born instead of the usual ironic-cover gag that dies on the floor. Their songs turned into anthems off that soaked concrete, amps pushed to breaking and the rings throwing the sound back at us, every track moshable bar one slower, more personal ballad, after which the pit truly let it out. A proper punk pit, soaked floor and all, the kind a wet surface is supposed to make you careful on, except nobody was, that was the point. Their lead guitarist played leads that soared like a fucking bald eagle. They’ve been called emo and they absolutely are, and you can see why they’re so popular; they hit exactly what every emo kid and mall goth wants, metalcore, pop punk, emo, all of it; they could call themselves My Chemical Addiction but even that diction doesn’t capture their affliction until you’re get what you get given; out cold afterwards, the wet floor and full force, a bloody cold assassin. They were whole different grade; discerning, hall of fame in my QCAA. They closed on Backup! Backup!, the crowd singing the ‘woah oh oh oh’ back as a call and response; those who were there got to live it, those who weren’t wish they were.

The last set was Brax’s new band, Bleed the Freak, playing their first ever gig, and they had the closing slot to do it in. Brax is a drummer by his roots, so it threw a few people that he wasn’t the one out front; the vocals were someone else’s, and Heath McTegg, who used to front The Amphetamines and turns up in the Complete History at the School’s Out gig, was over on bass now. Brax had gone quiet the back half of last year and into this one, the kind of quiet I knew the shape of because I’d been in it too, and somewhere in there he’d been missing the days when he started all of this back in 2023 as an emo kid, the same way I’d spent a while missing 2024, when I was still an emo kid myself and didn’t start calling myself purely punk until the end of it. Two blokes who’d dropped off the map; and there he was, putting his own band on for the first time, on the night the whole thing came back.

Before a note was played, the singer said the whole masterplan out loud, the thing everyone there already understood. That you don’t need shitty bars to have a good gig. You don’t need the lies of the politicians and the establishment. You can just go down to your local park and play. That’s the entire Subscene in three sentences, the thing The Saints worked out fifty years ago and the thing I’d been reaching for with the Big Break this magazine ran, said straight into one working speaker without a rehearsed script, by a band nobody had heard yet, in the rain, with the lights out. Everyone there knew what it meant.

The crowd was mostly the alternative lot, scene kids and emo kids and mall goths with punks scattered through, and a couple of years ago I’d have made a point of telling you which one of those I reckoned I was. I don’t bother now. Punk, emo, rock and roll, they’re three heads of the same holy and unholy trinity. Standing there I felt like that emo kid again, just feeling the moment before all the bullshit became the only thing my head could hold. Everyone had been holding something in. There were dark clouds over the park and there were the ones we’d all been carrying, and the pit was where both got let out. The scene had been asleep, and everyone there had been waiting for someone to give them permission to call it alive again. It was supposedly just punk in the park, the way Oasis were supposedly just a rock and roll band, and it fit the people standing in it so exactly that it was never going to come out as anything less than what it was.

Nearly every band on the bill was new or barely known, getting its big break on that concrete, which is how the scene keeps going when the old names fade out, sell out, or break up for good. Deadtrigger didn’t only pull itself out of the dead, it pulled the trigger on a new stage of the Subscene, and the night read as a signal flare more than a homecoming, a flat statement of what’s coming. More of these, soon, all ages, easy to get to. There’s already another one a fortnight off. I want them weekly, and I reckon a lot of us walked to the bus stop wanting the exact same thing. We believed there was a scene, so we put one on; we kept the belief when the power died and it ran on one cable and a sick kid carrying on; and it went beyond all of us the second a hundred soaked strangers took the outro off one speaker and made it their own. We all knew what it meant. It’s going to be.