Dead Men Walking – Live In Belfast

“Yes that’s right, punk is dead/It’s just another cheap product for the consumer’s head.” Thus spake Crass at the zenith of their anarcho-contrarian fury. And they were partly right. The scene that they were pouring their vitriol onto had given us Sid Vicious, Plastic Bertrand and their cartoonish ilk, and was well on the way towards making the iconography of the scene into High Street retail fashion statements. While you can debate endlessly – and we do, don’t we? – about what ‘punk’ was and if it ever truly existed, the ideals and energy that fuelled that massive nuclear fusion burst of creativity were already dissipating by the time The Ruts, Stiff Little Fingers and Spear of Destiny were firmly in the public eye.

And yet Crass were also quite wrong. Punk never died. When you stripped out the commerciality and the hangers-on, the real punk rock wars were fought in the hearts and minds of the thinkers and the doers. Punk was a rebellion against control and mindless conformity. The revolution was internalised, resistance was individualised and became persistent, encapsulated in a mindset that would not tolerate that ‘the norm’ had to be accepted. Whatever your politics, the punk mentality gave you a set of tools with which to pursue your agenda. That’s why Dead Men Walking is a necessary postscript to those times. Punks not dead or even unwell. It’s alive – wiser, more cynical but just as vital as it ever was. As someone else from around these parts once said of something else entirely, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’

Belfast’s Empire Music Hall is an appropriate venue for this particular evening’s communion. Its walls speak of former glories. Support for tonight is the affable Joby Fox, formerly of late-80s local favourites Energy Orchard. His is a short set interspersed with good-natured banter that plays well to the audience (mostly men of a certain age and similar girth, it has to be said) and sets the tone nicely for what’s to come. While Energy Orchard were arguably always Bap Kennedy‘s band, it was Joby Fox who wrote their bestseller ‘Belfast’ and it’s fitting that he plays it for the home crowd tonight.

Almost before you notice, Jake Burns has ambled onto the stage and taken his seat, followed by Kirk Brandon and the Ruts DC rhythm section of Segs and Ruffy. They’re greeted warmly by an enthusiastic (and seated) crowd. It’s a charmingly intimate experience, more conversation than sermon. As Segs quickly points out, they all have form for writing protest songs and there you have the true spirit of punk rock. What you get from Dead Men Walking is a flavour of the punk rock lives these veterans have lived. It’s a mix of (mostly) acoustic versions of songs you know well, often bracketed with context and meandering stories that may or may not have any relevance to those songs.

These guys are born raconteurs, easygoing and natural storytellers, moving from dark humour to touching empathy and all the while engaging and engaged. And there are surprises too. Jake Burns is an excellent mimic. Who knew? Kirk Brandon is still chiselled and oddly self-effacing. Segs and Ruffy, fresh from their stripped-back Ruts DC Electracoustic albums, are completely at home in this environment. And to nail another punk rock myth, these guys can play. The musical interchange is natural and instinctive. Maybe that’s not such a shock round these parts, where every other bar seems to offer musical magic most nights of the week. It also underlines the truth that a good song is a good song. Fact. The fire of the originals may not burn as fiercely this way, but this is a deeper, more layered and personal experience.

The set is partly what you might expect and partly not. What it isn’t is acoustic punk rock karaoke. And all too soon it’s over. Ruffy breaks the encore illusion by asking us to imagine they have been offstage and have come back as the logistics of moving from the stage and back again are not helpful in this venue. We’re complicit in the charade and it’s all the more fun because of that. The ‘encore’ is a three-song set of arguably the guys’ greatest hits. Fittingly for Belfast, and without giving anything else away about the playlist, the guys close with an almost wistful, almost haunting and stripped back ‘Alternative Ulster’. It’s a fitting close to a wonderful and affecting set.

Dead Men Walking, me arse. They’re not dead. And they’re sitting down.