VERY very busy couple of weeks coming up. Five shows in three days at the brilliant Rebellion punk festival — happening at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool right now — and then straight up to Edinburgh for another 16 in 14 days at the PBH Free Fringe.

Rebellion Festival expands in size and scope every year: it now has a Literary Stage, and I am appearing there just before the headliner, pop composer and Wombles mastermind Mike Batt. Fine choice. The Wombles were total punk rock heroes, and Batt’s August 1975 hit Summertime City was the soundtrack of my first drunken camping and fishing holiday with my mates in Cornwall aged 17, when Strummer was still in the 101ers and his musical revolution just around the corner. I am also doing my Early Music Show on the Almost Acoustic stage: all testimony to a brilliant punk fest now increasingly genre-fluid.

I have already waxed lyrical in this column about how Peter Buckley Hill’s donations-based, free-to-enter DIY collective of alternative performers and venues has challenged the corporate cartels and restored the original vision of the Edinburgh Fringe. It’ll be a pleasure to be back.

My daily hour at Bannermans is called Fiery Words For Hellish Times and I also have two Early Music Shows at St. Cecilia’s Hall across the road. As always I’ll be attending plenty of others and doing a few reviews in my next column.

And talking of reviews: in these days of ubiquitous streaming it’s perversely refreshing to find a band releasing something you can’t just listen to on your phone and — wait for it — have to buy a CD player for. I haven’t listened to CDs for ages: my last player broke, and it’s vinyl and streaming for me these days.

I got a new one to listen to Evidence Based Punk Rock, the new Steve White & the Protest Family album, and it is worth the money on its own: it’s an absolute tour de force. They’re another great example of genre-fluidity — think Chas n Dave meets the Tom Robinson Band with a magnificently militant Ian Duryish manic street preacher on lead vocals. Hearty singalongs interspersed with Steve’s sharp, witty performance poetry: an incredibly incisive, thoroughly enjoyable CD which sums up our battered country in 2025 to a T. Definitely my album of the year so far.

It starts with Put Up Shut Up Britain, a litany of just about everything that’s wrong with the UK — a tale of an unequal, unhappy nation literally swimming in shit, set to the riff of No More Heroes by the Stranglers. How apt. Then Nick the Jolly Capitalist tells us “It’s not that bad, actually” (ha!) before the story of Noah is given a modern rewrite. “Oi, Noah, let us on the ark — it’s 21 miles and we’re sinking fast...”. The ark gets stormed, everyone works together, the rain story was a false alarm, everyone’s saved, a lesson about community action is learned. The horrible Tory Old Testament made socialist.

And the centrepiece of the album is the New Austerity Inn, where Rachel the barmaid says: “You can’t have it if you can’t afford it” and tinkers haplessly — while across the road Farage stands outside the Wetherspoons, his glass of Chablis hidden behind a pint, and waits. Dark clouds gather over Clacton (been there, seen them) and the useless royal family (no capitals here) smile as things fall apart and they open a food bank without bringing even a single tin of beans.

And then comes the tour de force. The Poppy & The Cross is, lyrically and musically, a work of genius reminiscent of The Men They Couldn’t Hang at their very best. It sums up soldiery through the ages.

“Don’t confuse sacrifice with being sacrificed.” And don’t confuse being patriotic with believing racist billionaire media owners’ lies.

There’s loads more in the same wonderful spirit. It’s anger inducing, uplifting, thought provoking: everything a great album should be. And it finishes with You And Me Against The Billionaires, set to a classic roaring T Rex riff. The first download/stream is Oh, Noah released to time with this column.

Get it on.

Rebellion festival tickets from www.rebellionfestivals.com 
Free fringe dates and times can be found at freefringe.org.uk