Squat gig

Mill Road Social Centre, Cambridge
With Yo Yo Yo! Litvinenko
Saturday, July 12
First ever 'matinee' gig at 5-7pm. It's the way forward!

Set:

Tapes, Shoot to Kill, Little Miss Hitler, Idiot Box, We Spend the Money We Make, Disco Ringtone, Pop Sluts, Locusts, Stevie Smith: Teenage Terrorist, God Loves Us and He Hates You.

The perfect setting for a Bomb Factory gig - an abandoned shop acquired by Tesco but taken over by squatters. No need for such luxuries as a PA or stage - we set up on cold slab and blasted noise out through two guitar amps, three bass amps and a megaphone. That caught the attention of the afternoon shoppers outside.

Good times!

David.

Daylight streaming through shop windows plastered in posters saying, 'No Tesco on Mill Road'. Grafitti-covered boards over the broken panes shouting,'Smash the state, not our windows.' Dust motes floating around the interior, past the 6th form common room sofas, curious shoppers, mates, punks and squatters. Amps on the old shop floor, wires trailing past the box of cast-off clothes marked 'help yourself'. Too many plugs in too few extension leads. Three bass amps for the vocals. Then, noise. Raw, ugly and beautiful noise, propelling us out on to the shop floor, pulling the mic lead taught like a dog straining at its leash, the megaphone adding to the racket as we crash through ten songs. It feels like driving a car at 80mph through a saucepan warehouse. It feels like your first drag on a cigarette. It feels like living. Then it's over. People shout for more but there isn't any more - we're spent. There's a brief pause, the crowd caught momentarily in a bubble of uncertainty and expectation. Then it bursts and they're all gone, back out into the afternoon sunlight and the traffic and shops. There's a 'party' on in the park up the road. Pop bands and barriers, burger vans and policemen and all the neatly ordered bordeom of organised fun. Here, there is an empty shop unit with the memory of din and of fleeting joy impregnated into the walls along with the spray paint. Beer and laughs in the White Swan follow.

Jack.