Reviews / November 27, 2023

From the Garage to the Station: Stories from the Gateshead Music Collective 1980-1988 By Sned Amorphous Press, 2020

One of the strangest things about having been involved in something, however peripherally, is watching its story get rewritten and mangled as it becomes formalized and turned into grist for the academic culture mill. As the center of psychic gravity inevitably tends to shift towards the HQs of the various industries that engage with this kind of thing, provincial scenes often end up getting overshadowed by events in the big cities, meaning that narratives about England—and the UK in general—tend to get monopolized by the southern metropolis where the money lives. It’s a shame for many reasons, one of which is the way it obscures the fact that, despite the obstacles they face, necessity often means that the provinces are actually just as creative and inventive in their existential solutions as the bountiful big cities, if not more so.

I briefly touched on the North East of England in my piece on artist James Cawthorn—it’s a lovely, imaginative, and unfairly disregarded area of Britain that bore a lot of the brunt of Margaret Thatcher’s battle to free the UK of the pesky mines, heavy industry, shipyards, unions, and jobs that were holding the country back from achieving its destiny as a services industry-based hub of global excellence in the money laundering trade. As I said in that article, the North East is completely its own place with its own strange magic, political history, and deep links both to the ancient past and to the future. Gateshead is a large town that sits across the River Tyne (immortalized by historically underrated local band Lindisfarne in my least favorite of their songs, “Fog on the Tyne“) from the better-known and larger city of Newcastle, and the self-published From the Garage to the Station is an oral history of the Gateshead Music Collective (or GMC) in the words of the (then) young people who started it, ran it, and frequented it in the 1980s, from their first small club, the Garage—an actual garage, natch—to the larger Station, lent to them by the relatively enlightened local council and so named because of its past life as a cop shop.

Both venues provided places for young people to practice with their bands and on weekends organized gigs that saw the cream of UK punk come to town. The story is told by a colorful and engaging cast of dozens of characters, from feminist collective Them Wifies to people with prototypical punker names like Keeks, Sprog, Scruff, Crazy, and Shev, and the whole thing is illustrated with exactly the kind of blurry photos that put you right in the middle of the fug of fag smoke, stale beer, and deafening punk racket. Part of the pleasure of From the Garage to the Station is that it’s a direct, non-profit product of the scene itself and is intended for the kind of people who were actually involved in it, as opposed to being another extrusion of the academia/media complex mentioned above.

The book was put together by Sned, who’s a bit of a historical figure on the UK anarcho/punk/DIY scene himself: as well as being involved in the GMC first hand, he was the drummer in seminal UK hardcore bands Generic and Pleasant Valley Children and ran the Flat Earth distro and record label for many years (full disclosure: he was also unfortunate enough to have to put up with playing and living with me for a bit). To sum up, From the Garage to the Station is a genuinely inspirational journey through the memories of the people who took part. Anyone who has been even tangentially involved in the extremely heterogeneous cultural phenomenon that falls under the umbrella category of “punk,” or probably any other kind of DIY organizing, will get chills of recognition reading it, but even those who haven’t been will come away from it feeling energized.

Copies of the book are available from Sned’s web distro Amorphous Pieces, (or from PM Press if you’re in the US), where you can also pick up an omnibus collection of every issue of beloved British punk fanzine Raising Hell published by UK anarcho overlord and punk rock Samuel Pepys Ben Sik’o’war between 1982 and 1990 that will give you a complete immersion in the mood, humor and attitude—and stench—of the UK punk scene of the time. And for anyone in the UK, running through November/December 2023 there’s also an exhibition and event organized by a collective of which Amorphous was part to celebrate the legacy of The Station and other youth-led music collectives in the North East of England.

Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.