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Live Reviews

NoMeansNo live at the Lexington, London

NoMeansNo
The Lexington, London
May 31st 2013

Ph/Video: Steve Cotton

nomeansno_liveOnly last October Canadian oddball punk trio NoMeansNo headlined The Underworld in Camden to a sweat-drenched, heaving crowd of rabid fans hanging onto every note and word. Fast forward seven months and the band are back in the capitol, doing it all over again for yet another (mainly repeat custom) crowd, crammed into the smaller confines of The Lexington, waiting to be barraged yet again with two-hours of the jarring, inventive high-energy punk rock that the band have made their own. And it is for this reason that NoMeansNo continue to pull crowds across the world well over thirty years since they formed with almost no help or awareness from the mainstream media. NoMeansNo are far too original and forward thinking to fit in the tidy, neat easy-to-understand boxes that the mainstream media like their artists to fit in.

Once again, NoMeansNo don’t disappoint, thrilling with a set that cherry picks from their whole back catalogue – peaking with ‘The Tower’ and ‘Oh No Bruno’ from what is wildly regarded as their finest work, the 1989 album ‘Wrong’. Sometimes they are unhinged and freeform (“It’s not polite to wank in public,” shouts bassist Rob Wright to his drummer and brother John Wright when he goes one step too far with his jazz drumming! “I learn’t the hard way,” he laughs.)

And then, at a complete polar opposite, they end the set with a trio of stripped down, high-energy Ramones covers!

Musicians of this calibre can do anything, and that’s what NoMeansNo do. After all of these years they are still as inventive, humorous, sarcastic, awkward, energetic and punk rock as they were when they started in 1979. Not bad for a trio of grey old men!

James Sherry