B-Side Sunday

Hurdling expectation like a pogostick rammed with coke, it’s B-Side Sunday! The weekly ritual that’s as thrilling as an 89th minute free-kick bouncing against the ref’s elbow and going in off the underside of the bar. The sabbath-day ceremony that’s as satisfying as shoving Paris Hilton’s fortune back up her ass, one dollar at a time. The bi-fortnightly formal that’s civil enough to charm your maiden aunt on a visit to the care home but still dirty enough to want a fumble in the carpark afterwards; as kinky and debauched as Boy George hooking up for one night of fun with the Marquis de Sade (but with much better hair, obviously).

Whilst some have expressed concern that regular pilgrimages to the B-Side Sunday church result in birth defects, the vicar assures us that all B-Sides have been extensively tested on a range of the youngest, cutest animals at Huntington Life Sciences to ensure that each and every one will lustily hump your cerebral cortex as you gibber contentedly beneath the speakers. So open your hymnals to page 3,634 and we’ll begin…

Whilst CA towers is united in the belief that most punk should be left buried under a mountain of dust at the back of rock’s wardrobe until sometime after the Apocalypse, this week is the turn of those hardy lads VER CLASH. Bopping into view with ‘Straight To Hell’, Joe and co offer up a B-Side stuffed with all their usual embittered observations and incendiary clarion calls that causes the angry semi-politicised fifteen-year-old in all of us to want to stick on some bovver boots and kick over a bus stop. It’s hardly a riotous slice of axe-waving’, ear-splitting’, tit-tearin’, church-burnin’ gutterpunk from the darkest corners of Hades, but it still crawls all over your brain like a prescribed opiate as your ears flutter like Dumbo’s.

Featured as part the 1994 release ‘Super Black Market Clash’, it’s a sound so sexy that it could throw you onto the sofa and make you weep with joy, but doesn’t cos it’s too busy looking and sounding as kewl as fuck. Yeahyeahyeah, so Joe was an ex-public schoolboy and the others were about as punk as cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off – that stuff only matters if you’re the sort who owns every Exploited single ever released and wept when the Sex Pistols reformed; everyone else will have a grand old time. So settle by a delicately frosted window and watch the seasons change as this spittle-flecked B-Side from yesteryear soundtracks those falling autumnal leaves. Sure, it won’t solve any of your problems, but then, what will?