PUNK OFF!

Dominion Theatre

★★★★

“the energy of Ged Graham’s production is infectious”

Punk. You had to be there, surely. The snap and the snarl, the shocking offence to culture as an alien youth brandished guitars as weapons and donned pins and chains as armour for their assault on stale values.

Amid the cultural explosion and outrage – all those yards of spit! – it’s easy to forget the sheer throbbing excitement of the sounds.

Half a century on, Punk Off! puts that right. The title has changed from its touring name of Pretty Vacant, an alternative might be Now That’s What I Call Mucus.

The show shouldn’t work, it really shouldn’t, but it just about does for most of its two-hours, and then brilliantly does in the last quarter.

The staging is key. This is essentially a juke box musical – a live band, rotating singers, and the sort of literal Pan’s People dance routines which punk was specifically designed to destroy.

But its heart is in the right place.

It has Kevin Kennedy (formerly Curly Watts of Coronation Street) adding a storming narrative – as well as the occasional song. (His Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick a crowd pleaser).

And most of all it has an audience.

It’s playing to the home crowd. It knows who is listening and why.

Legions of now sixty-somethings, stately grandparents in many instances, dusted down their Damned T-shirts, buffed up their back tattoos, tanked up on fish oil to get their limbs moving and decided to have a party.

They still have the spark of anarchy within them, yelling out No Future! not because of a 1970s post-industrial malaise but because, well, the days ahead are fewer in number now.

They gleefully hurl themselves back to the days when they did mind the Buzzcocks. The band (a rotating mix of Phil Sherlock, Ric Yarborough, Adam Evans, Reece Davies, Lazy Violet) oblige with banger after banger – God Save The Queen, Gordon Is A Moron, Oliver’s Army, Hanging on the Telephone, White Riot, Lust for Life, No More Heroes, Teenage Kicks…) It is a surprisingly rich and varied canon, and each one a foot stomper. The band does a bang-up job emulating the feel of each of the now iconic three-chord collectives. Even the dancers (Louisa Clark, Joshua Fowler) find their feet, presenting little illustrative tableaux, such as Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road shop Sex.

Kennedy takes the audience on a whistlestop tour of their youth when the fire of revolution burnt bright. Yes, there is some confusion over whether this is a tribute band gig or a stage presentation, but the energy of Ged Graham’s production is infectious and by the tumultuous climax – a romping trio of My Way, God Save The Queen, 2-4-6-8 Motorway, the walking sticks and inhibitions have been flung aside and everyone is on their feet, attempting a token pogo for the first time in half a century.

They’ll pay for that in the morning. But, in the meantime, cobwebs cleared.

What a blast.