The Counterforce - CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective

Crimethinc's Top Ten Punk Movies We Watched in 2024

2024-12-16T20:42:30.000-05:00

Can’t get out of bed because you woke up drunk and your back hurts from too much pogo? Or maybe you’re about to host a rock’n’roll benefit for Palestine and need some cool retro reels to project behind the bands… whatever the occasion, we are pleased to bring you the CrimethInc. Ex-Worker Podcast’s year-end top 10 punk films we watched in 2024.

In addition to consuming dozens of hours of punks on screen, we made our own film this year. Fell In Love With Fire is a full length documentary about the six months of anarchy and chaos that reigned over Chile after triumphant rioters took control of the streets. Check it out!

10 - Good Vibrations [2012]

A true story, and the name says it all. At the height of The Troubles, Terri Hooley—an indomitably idealistic reggae lover—opens up a record store in the middle of Belfast’s bombed out city center. The scene of rebel rockers that crops up around the shop doesn’t fit into any of the social or political binaries of its environment. As Joe Strummer put it, “Between the bombing and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, [Belfast] punk gave everybody a chance to LIVE for one glorious, burning moment.”

John Peel plays THE UNDERTONES’ “Teenage Kicks” on the BBC, and its so nice he plays it twice.

Royal Ulster Constabulary pigs are confounded when they pull over RUDI and THE OUTCASTS’ tour van to find a mix of Protestant and Catholic kids.

At a big-occasion, beyond-capacity benefit show to save the Good Vibrations record store, the shop’s accountant confronts Hooley because his NOTAFLOF guest list has resulted in financial loss. “The whole point of tonight was to raise money for your shop.” Terri looks out over the crowd of kids singing along with arms over each other. “No, it wasn't, not the whole point. Money couldn't buy what we've just done.”

I’ve always felt like stories that begin before punk existed and show its genesis are particularly well-poised to capture its spirit, and this film does a good job of showing how DIY gave punk its power from the very beginning.

A feel-good flick you could watch with your fucking grandmother.

9 - El Pico [1983]

Gritty, grey, and morally ambiguous. NOT a feel-good flick.

Just a few years after the fall of Franco, the teenage son of a fascist police captain befriends his opposite number, the son of a left-wing politician in the Basque Country of Spain. However, the friendship isn’t based in a love of punk or any of the wholesome idealism found in Good Vibrations. The pair lie, steal, and kill in pursuit of their
accelerating heroin addiction.

Be warned—the syringe shots are slow, intense, and sleazily seductive. A “police kill and torture” banner at a city-wide street festival gives you a sense of the social force that the Basque freedom struggle commanded during the film’s era. There’s an artsy gay sex pad and a ménage à trois in the gorgeous, groovy mod apartment of a beautiful Argentinean dope queen. A public park tagged up with ETA graffiti hosts a gaggle of Bilbao punks all hanging out, including one of the dudes from ESKORBUTO.

El Pico is representative of the Cine Quinqui (“kinky”) genre of raw films about derelict Spanish street youth from the 70s and 80s.

8 - Never Mind The Baubles - Christmas '77 with The Sex Pistols [2013]

In 1977, SEX PISTOLS were a forbidden band, literally. “God Save the Queen” was banned by the BBC (making it the most censored record in British history), the band was forced to tour under a fake name to avoid cancellation, and its members were regularly targeted on the street and beaten up for being punk. In spite of the hardships, the Pistols set out on a “Never Mind the Bans” tour of Britain in December 1977. The last show of the tour was in Huddersfield, where they played a Christmas Day ball for the children of striking firemen and miners. The tour would turn out to be the PISTOLS’ final performances in the UK.

The shots of a blank-stared, spikey Sid Vicious banging out the bass in front of jumping, smiling children is priceless.

As with countless more of his endeavors, Malcolm McLaren was a fucking genius for putting this together.

7 - Intrépidos Punks [1988]

A gang of cave punks live up in the hills, only descending into town to rob, kill, and accost.

Purely aesthetic motorpunk eyecandy, much like…

6 - Crazy Thunder Road [1980]

Written and directed by Gakuryū Ishii, Crazy Thunder Road is the film school precursor to his widely acclaimed motorpunk epic Burst City. Like Burst City, Crazy Thunder Road is more of a frantic, chaotic opera of leather and chains than much of a compelling narrative, but there is more of a storyline than Intrépidos Punks.

The film centers around Jin, the leader of a biker gang who are, even by the standards of the other biker gangs featured, totally out of control. It takes the discipline of a right-wing paramilitary group to break the gang… but only briefly, until Jin declares war on the rival biker gangs and nationalist forces alike.

As in Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia, Ishii got real life bikers to act in the film’s roles.

“Every day, my assistant would go into town to find bikers to appear in the film. Usually, even if they had agreed, they wouldn’t show up on set because they had been arrested by the cops in the meantime.” —Gakuryū Ishii

The best scene is a long, unbroken shot of Jin, grumbling motor sounds with the distant, deranged stare of a madman in his eyes. The shot pans out to reveal both of Jin’s arms in casts, reducing him to self-simulate the thrill of the open road.

Crazy Thunder Road provides perfect action-packed, chaotic background reel for a party, bar, or show. Trying to follow the storyline, however, may leave you with the whiplash of a high-velocity motorcycle accident.

5 - Smithereens [1982]

One of the few early punk films out there with a female protagonist and a compelling plot.

Smithereens captures the fashion and general grittiness of early New York punk rock, with breathtaking scenes of urban decay on par with Sid & Nancy or Style Wars.

Wren, a runaway from New Jersey, hitches her star to a one-hit wonder rocker played by Richard Hell, who entices her to travel across the country to Los Angeles, where the promise of New York’s waning punk scene is supposed to be more rockfully fulfilled. Throughout the film, the characters narcissistically use each other in varying degrees of parasitic relationships, a dynamic of early New York punk that will be familiar to anyone who has read Please Kill Me.

The urban vanlife scenes fill me with aspirations for an American punk “wagenplatz” community, even though the vanlifer in Smithereens is just a solo maverick parked in the middle of a failed urban industrial desert.

4 - Dinner in America [2020]

Patty, an unrespected, unremarkable suburban loser dork escapes the oppressive ordinariness of home by burying her ears into headphones and masturbating while blasting the demo of PSYOPS, a local punk band shrouded in mystery.

One day, on a break from work, an on-the-lam punk uses Patty to evade police capture and convinces her to take him home for dinner, where he persuades Patty’s parents to let him stay a while… and her whole life falls into place.

I don’t want to give away too much because it was a true pleasure watching this film unfold. If you can get over the unneeded, gratuitous use of homophobic slurs, this movie rocks.

3 - How to Rob a Bank [2024]

“This is real. This is a robbery. Step away from your cages.”

The best documentary you’ll see for years. From 1992 to 1996, the Hollywood Bandit committed 19 known bank robberies in Seattle. He used the money to finance his off-the-grid Ewok village, fund Earth First! forest defense campaigns, and travel the world in an existential pursuit of his Self.

A confession: I actually re-watched this one determined to fit it into the top 10, convinced that there must have been some mention of the grunge scene that would qualify it as a punk-adjacent film. Sure enough, a bizarre interview has a square-as-fuck FBI agent describing Seattle’s nascent grunge scene, while one of the Hollywood Bandit’s friends explains the scene’s anti-establishment and anti-corporate ethos. However, what makes this movie punk isn’t the brief history of grunge; it’s the uncompromising individualism, the balls-to-the-wall adventure as a way of life, and its decadent anti-materialism.

With 2024’s upswing in armed attempts on those in power, I’d tell you to take inspiration from this film… but it’s just impossible not to.

WATCH. THIS. MOVIE.

2 - Verlierer [1987]

Not a happy story.

Two motor-rocker gangs, the Getto Sharks and the Rats, achieve a fragile truce over the urban industrial wasteland they cruise through. The younger brother of the Getto Sharks’ leader wants in, but the older brother doesn’t want to see him falling down the path of gang life. On a fateful night, after his drunken father kicks him out, the younger brother joins with a Rat who is being hunted by a xenophobic nazi psychobilly gang. The two strike up a heartening friendship, until the younger brother discovers his new compatriot’s membership in the rival Rats.

This movie is evenly weighed on both of the scales I have been rating this top 10 with: plot and aesthetic. While the Rats are solidly heavy metal rockers, the Getto Sharks have punks, skins, and biker-looking members, affording a sense of authenticity to the gang aspect of the film: it’s not about what scene you’re in exactly, it’s about how hard
you roll. The nazi psychobillies are as terrifying as they are fucking ridiculous to look at, and their appearance in the movie was one of those things that made me appreciate that there must have been a strong fad happening in the German 1980s underground rock scene that has not remained in the popular imagination or history of that scene. Like, usually the lazy go-to stereotype for a street nazi is a skinhead (as utilized in Good Vibrations), but here the skinheads are mixed in with the politically ambiguous Getto Sharks as just criminals, and the organized racists are psychobillies. Fuckin bizarre.

Verlierer was apparently made for German television in the 80s, and I could only find it with Spanish subtitles. If you don’t speak German or Spanish, you may need to put in some extra effort to produce an intelligible viewing experience… but it will be well worth it.

1 - The Legend of the Stardust Brothers [1985]

Spoilers: I cried. No shit.

I almost don’t even know what to say about this movie. I don’t actually want to give any of it away. I’ll say this: it’s a zany, low budget Japanese musical with touches of Rock’n’Roll High School, but narratively more elaborate. At its core, Legend of the Stardust Brothers is a story about sacrifice, love, and remaining true to yourself against the sisyphean machinations of the capitalist music industry. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

L-O-N-D-O-N BOOTS!

Honorable mention: Studio One Story [2003]

An oral history of the legendary ska, rocksteady, and reggae recording studio and label responsible for THE SKATALITES, DELROY WILSON, ALTON ELLIS, HORACE ANDY, THE HEPTONES, and many other Jamaican recording artists whose influence on early UK punk cannot be overestimated. The two-and-a-half hour running time betrays the amateur chops of the filmmaker, but as the interviewees are discussing events that took place nearly half-a-century ago, its understandable that he would want to pack in as much as possible. The result is a true document, in the fullest sense of the word “documentary.”

What makes Studio One Story so good is it’s no mess, no fuss editing. Each chapter opens with an interview about a different aspect of Jamaican music (sound systems, studios, toasters) and seamlessly weaves into a song that closes out the chapter with the iconic Soul Jazz Studio One frame. The rhythm of the film matches the rhythm of reggae: steady,
solid, and boss.

We’re always on the prowl for excellent underground punk movies. If you know of any, please drop us a line: podcast [at] crimethinc [dot] com

CY FEST 2024 REPORTBACK

2024-10-04T09:54:52.000-04:00

Brought to you by CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 19 – CY FEST KICK OFF SHOW

We rolled into LA like the Beverly Hillbillies: our whole life upon the wagon: sustenance, wardrobe, equipment, furniture, and even another vehicle for local transport—not to mention not one, but TWO recently stitched buttflaps. On the way up we discovered THE TOASTERS’ “Weekend In LA” track, which became our anthem for the trip. “How will you check me later if you don’t dig me now?”

We slept at two different apartments over the coming days, and even had a third we could have fallen back on, but our first stop became our true home for the weekend: Descontrol punk shop, an establishment that earns the name. Within the dusty, leather-laden walls of this dank smoke dungeon we found a world where time receded, punks relaxed, and rockers reached out from punks’ past to remind you: “I too recorded a fucking demo once and it’s better than your pretty record store day 180 gram collectable special pressing you pretentious pus-ey pisshead fuck!”

A siiiiick ass international exhibition curated by Mala Influencia and Osiris Ramirez was on display when we walked into the shop, with gorgeous, large, screenprinted posters from all over the world—at least four continents—and well-balanced on the dis-cartesian plane formed by the chain to egg and anarcho to chaos axes.

After finally unloading all our DJ equipment for the weekend, we somehow grasped ourselves out of dungeon Descontrol and puttered over to First Street Pool & Billiard Parlor for the CY Fest kick off show. This spot seems to have shows often—including LEFTÖVER CRACK just under a month prior WHY DIDN’T ONE OF YOU FUX TELL ME—in case you’re in LA someday, which, legit, not a bad idea… LA is mad punk if you can swing.

I can’t really explain it—that would take too long and compromise the privacy of others—but I’m not lying when I say that my buttflap got us into a completely sold out and PACKED AF show. Turns out a good buttflap can get you far in this town. Buttflap comeback and total DISCHARGE font homogeny punk trend predictions for 2025 lfg lock it in. Speaking of DISCHARGE, THE VARUKERS were about halfway through their set by the time we stepped through the door. That fucking singer is a mad man! Two mohawks up all the way for THE VARUKERS in 2024!!! House was packed and hot but it kinda felt like no one gave into the slumped-over-each-other sloshy-moshy sweat pits of my southern punk rock youth. Was hoping for a little more movement, maybe CONFLICT will deliver. Just a small pit for them. However, CONFLICT’s new additional vocalist, Fi, fuuucking lets it rip. Bravo! APPENDIX closed out the night even though they weren’t on the flyer, officially turning them into the band I’ve seen most—and on the most coasts—over the past year. Last chance for a dance punks… and there was plenty of boppin’ and rockin’ along to the old ‘PENDIX. “Hej! Hej! Hej!”

For me, what makes an LA show an LA show is the vendor scene out back. We drank beers with a cool ass old vendor who had 40-year-old skinhead photo books for sale and lives in his van. I didn’t see their distro until Saturday, but every pool table had a copy of D.I.Y. ZINE ISSUE #2, an excellent Bay Area anarcho-punk newsletter with a 4,000-count print run. My favorite article was the interview with Israeli crust band HOLOCAUSTS. I fucking wish my town had a rag like this. Oh yeah, I live in my van and travel from punk festival to punk festival… punk is my town. Solidarity to all the van punx across the world reading this.

I wish I had caught: TENSO, ANIMALS REVENGE, and FINAL CONFLICT.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 20 – PRE-CY FEST AFTER PARTY

Friday had the most shows: the Pre-CY Fest Show, which was a festival of its own right, a CY Fest Presents Oi! show with THE TEMPLARS and RIXE, and a Pre-CY Fest After Party. The multiple similar names made it difficult to describe to cool punks you just met which event you were going to, excited about, or who was playing where or when. But I actually liked the disorienting aspect of too much to see, and I hope the billing chaos extends further next year with a Pre-CY Fest Kick Off After Party Pre-Show and a dozen indistinguishable Post-CY Fest Show After Parties, each with its own dozen of indistinguishable grind bands.

We woke up rough, made up our mugs, and asked each other “whattya wanna?”

“Descontrol.”

Back in Descontrol and this time…we didn’t escape. It’s too good. It’s too fucking good there. You’re Aladdin in the Cave of Wonders but made out of old porn, motorcycles, studs and spikes and a cool cat you haven’t seen in a minute who drops off a few copies of the ELECTROCUTAME ZINE COMPILATION TAPE, a benefit for CHICXS ROCKERXS, an inclusive girls rock summer camp in southeast LA.

We hang out so long that we miss both the TEMPLARS show and the pre-fest fest, where I would’ve liked to see HEZ, GOLPE, RESISTANT CULTURE, and WHO KILLED SPIKEY JACKET. Specifically, if I had seen RESISTANT CULTURE, I would have asked what fucking movie the scenes in their “runaway” music video are from. If you know, e-mail me: podcast@crimethinc.com

Oh well, why not roll back around to the pool hall? Literally APPENDIX again. We groundhoggin'? But this time, with even more rockin' and boppin' in the pit! Hej! Hej! Hej! A decent neo-crust outfit with good musicianship played before them, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was KIRA or AGE OF FEAR.

The scene at the pool hall was cool as fuck. Punks reconnecting and racking up balls and sharing horror stories just cuz. Everyone was a hot LA punk and me and my girlfriend discussed letting them all run a train on us in the bathroom, however 2 days in LA and still (?!) no other buttflaps in sight! Punk descontento.

I alllmost got to see one artful fucking smooth operator shark some punks at billiards, but the goth DJ had it swirling and swaying so we got on the dance floor until the night ended.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 21 – CY FEST

We showed up early and grabbed a vendor spot next to a cool punk flag distro. They had like, FRAMTID and DISCHARGE flags. Yeah, flags. Another punk trend prediction for 2025? We were there before doors so we got to see DETESTATION’s sound check, which already got me excited for what was to come. Apologies to the homies in PIG CITY for not snapping a shot off when the production dudes rolled your logo behind DETESTATION during sound check.

At our table we gave away free CrimethInc. zines surreptitiously produced at an ex-worker’s ex-workplace. We got a lot of compliments and curious customers and got to talk to other cool print-passioned punks like Burn Barrel Press.

“Don’t Rock the Vote, Vote with Rocks”

I took a walk around to check out the other vendors, scored some sick records, found out my friend who drummed for RAMBO wasn’t there (miss you love you Dave) and was pleased to encounter not one but TWO other anarchist literature tables: Anarchist Black Cross Federation Los Angeles and DIY ZINE (good luck finding the zine I’m talking about by searching “DIY ZINE” on g00gle.) The DIY ZINE table had bricks and bricks of their newsletter to distribute around the country. Unfortunately neither anarcho-punk table featured buttflaps anywhere in sight.

Another satisfied customer

The venue was a three-floor building with a stage on each floor and multiple staircases, making it a kind of maze to navigate. Each floor had something: the basement floor had the best vibe, the top floor had the best sounding stage on one side of a carpeted entryway and, on the other, the balcony seats overlooking the ground floor auditorium, which had the biggest and busiest moshpit.

I only caught one song of PIG CITY on the big stage but it looked like she had the microphone all the way in her mouth? Whoa. Went back upstairs to tend to the zine table and take it easy before everything got wild. Too late! SOH was on and wild fucking foxy pogo boot in your face punk!!! What is up with three letter punk bands right now? In the past year, I’ve seen SMT, AFK, was supposed to see DHK but Mexico denied them at customs, and now SOH. Singer told me it stands for Sippin’ On Hennessy.

SOH

BATSCRATCH was next, our generation’s OLD SKULL. Ok, maybe not an apt comparison given that the only 10 year old member of BATSCRATCH is the vocalist, but it was still equal parts adorable and thrilling. The pit around BATSCRATCH was super tender and goofy and seemed to mostly be carried by the singer’s cousins or brothers or something? That what it looked like to me.

BATSCRATCH

VERBAL ABUSE were the first band to truly pack the house to the point of latter ripple moshpit vibrations into our table. Nicely done.

VERBAL ABUSE

LIFELESS DARK were my first basement band and FUCK do I wish I set up our table in the basement! Basement was anarcho lair with fine fabric booths, different levels of banister, behind-stage platform, and understage pit from which to see the band. The house was packed for LIFELESS DARK and it was like there were punks posting up on every available surface that allowed for direct eyesight and ear damage. Not to be missed! The basement also had dope ass anarcho style banners proclaiming solidarity with Palestine, migrants, and our furry friends. Cheers to whoever put those up.

The previous day I saw this gloomy ass punk who had a “Sadness Is Rebellion” bag, a “Feel The Darkness” backpatch, and a “DOOM” pin—the next time I saw them was at LIFELESS DARK, go figure.

Punks in search of something while LIFELESS DARK speaks out against genocide

anarcho banners

R.A.M.B.O. had moshpit antics with props and costumes as you would hope from them. Did you know Tony Pointless founded the Birdpunk subculture?

The Revolutionary Anarchist Mosh Bike Overthrow in action

THE PIST were playing in the basement while I caught up with an old pal and sounded way more fucking Oi! than I had remembered but it was GOOD. Like catchy as fuck. Sadly I didn’t get to realize my 13-year-old Napster dream of seeing THE PIST play “Textbook Salvation” because I had to run upstairs for RIXE.

RIXE

RIXE was where the festigue started to kick in, where all of the loud bass and drums and guitar and shouting starts to sound the same and my back hurts. Went to get beer but a beer was 15 fucking dollars. Fuck Live Nation for real.

Wandered down to the basement and caught PARANOID. Good, but did not wrest me from my slumbergrump.

PARANOID

HABAK heavy. Ugga ugga.

I finally succumbed to the $15 beer prices (not punk. Fuck you Live Nation) to shake the festigue. Ordering took so long that I basically saw all of HELLSHOCK from the bar line. Not the way I’d prefer to see HELLSHOCK, but not the worst way to spend time waiting for the bartender!

Glug glug glug and we’re back! (also not punk, kids.)

But you know who IS fucking punk? Mother fucking DEATH SIDE!!!!! Finally, another fucking buttflap in the building! Despite his constant insistence that he does not speak English (a claim that punctuates almost anything he says) the vocalist’s broken-english banter captivated the audience almost as much as his band’s show, which was world class. “West Coast is wasted coast!” I’ve seen him fronting his other band, FORWARD, and it was a similar deal, his speeches from the stage sucked any dead air out of the room and launched the crowd into laughter and chant-a-long pogo. Sometimes, I like to imagine him speaking perfect English and having a hardcore routine of vocal exercises and Shakespeare soliloquies before taking the stage and that every slurred, barely intelligible sentence that sounds like he only learned English from crust lyrics is actually the cold, calculated execution of a perfect showman.

Houston, we have a buttflap

SKITSYSTEM followed. Apparently two of them were denied entry at the airport. Fuck borders!!!

Back to the basement for QLOAQA LETAL, a Spanish punk band from the 80s whose singer is still going at it. LA punks were fucking stoked for this band.

Fist pumpin’ to QLOAQA LETAL

When we got back to our literature table, which we had abandoned hours ago, we found that ANTISECT had squatted it to sell merch! I hope they sold some of our free zines too, just for a laugh.

We evacuated anything we really cared about from the table and abandoned it to the anarchy of the top floor stage, hoping we’d at least see the table again.

DROPDEAD spoke out against vivisection. Cool. Sitting on the balcony I met this punk who was the right age and location and style to have known my dead friend who coordinated Maximum Rocknroll, and they did. Nice of you to show up, Jen.

DETESTATION closed the night and boy oh mother fucking boy were they the band to do it. First show in a quarter of a century and an absolute class act. The vocalist spoke out from the stage against colonialism, selling punk out, and white supremacy. They were the only band to even recognize the consumption of alcohol, let alone question it, and thanks to their sound check they had the bounciest, locked in mix where every instrument came through clearly and moved you more. Hooray for DETESTATION!

Não mais prisões, não mais heróis

For their encore, DETESTATION played their classic cover of REPUBLIKA’s “Não Mais.” To aid in maximum singalong, the vocalist brought out two giant cardboard prompter boards with the lyrics. The boards had their intended effect and the final song of CY Fest was an adorable, anti-establishment, hardcore sing along. I wish she had told us to all put our arms around each other or some cheesy shit like that, “nao mais!!!” At the very end of their set, the band threw both boards into the audience. The boards could not have come to two more different ends. One was gently received by an appreciative woman who posed with it alongside smiling friends. The other square of cardboard was wrestled over between two dudes in the pit who tugged it back and forth for so long that they both ended up on the ground…and kept going at it. It was taken by one guy, then wrestled out of his hands, then his friend got in it, next thing you know five security guards came over and stood around like, unsure what to do because they weren’t exactly fighting but it was fucking weirding everyone else out like it’s just a sign bro? By the time one of them walked out with the sign it was mangled and unrecognizable. Lame, but entertaining!

Although we had succumbed to $15 beers, we never even ate so we rushed out of the theater and beelined it to the Rainbow before the kitchen closed. Weekend in LA!

At some point we also saw BEHIND ENEMY LINES and the VARUKERS, again. I don’t recall when this happened.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 22 – DESCONTROL PUNK SWAP MEET

Turns out DJing an event with a soundsystem is a whole lot of fucking work. But it pays off. It was an honor to bring the boom in the first free and semi-guerrilla (sidewalk takeover?) punk event of the weekend. Loved the crowd that filled the shop. A Chilean punk with tattooed mohawked studded up dolls, some leather and steel smiths, a punk rug maker, graff, tattoo shit, just a big ass punk street party with endless cool gems to hold and behold. Had there been bands, it would have been a riot. Also, I learned some local LA punk riot history about the 2006 San Bernadino punk riot at British Invasion 2k6 fest. There were fresh tacos and we drank ice cold micheladas on a hot day. Some punks with old ass records shared their shade with us. Sharing!

While we unloaded, every stand I passed had a different little boombox with a cool song on it. I shazzammed some of these songs but at no point did I turn up any artist… what we do is secret. I felt bad drowning out the lots of little speakers, but as I got props and whoozats on the selection the vibes increased. During the golden hour, I made a risky transition to skinhead reggae, and suddenly we got sing alongs, we got boogie woogie, we got rabbithole conversations about LEE SCRATCH PERRY producing SUSAN CADOGAN, we got hoots and hollers from where most of the punks are playing a funny game.

For me, the Descontrol punk swap meet was the high point of the weekend. It was just a little more wild. The fest was fun as fuck, and next year’s looks like it will deliver once again with DISORDER, FUCK ON THE BEACH, TAQBIR, INYECCION, and INFEST already announced to play. But legit, whoever is playing, you should just go and hang out being a cool LA punk. If punk taught me anything it’s that the good stuff is always on the margins, in the shadows. Enjoy CY, but do the random other cool punk weekend shit that’s just punks being punks.

your ticket to a world free of charge

Fusion Festival XXV Scene Report

2024-07-06T10:07:52.000-04:00

Contributed By CrimethInc. Ex-Worker’s Collective

A few legendary, long-running, DIY festivals dominate the summer tour circuit for hardcore punk in Europe: K-Town Hardcore Fest in Copenhagen, Fluff Festival outside of Prague, and Monteparadiso in Croatia. However, there is one towering midsummer festival that punks often overlook despite its grandeur—Fusion Festival in Lärz, Germany, near Berlin and Hamburg. With an attendance of 70,000 and a crew of 10,000 Fusion is Germany’s largest techno festival, so it’s understandable why touring bands might not understand it as a thriving mutant underground for pedal-to-the-metal rock’n’roll. However—for any freedom-loving, fist-pumping, snotty rotting pogo punker—this is a mistake. Bands: by hook or by crook, get booked at Fusion. Here’s why…

EVERYTHING ANTIFASCIST

The shortest way to describe Fusion Festival is Burning Man if everything hippie about Burning Man was antifascist instead. The grounds are a century-old airport developed by the Nazis before its capture by the Soviet Red Army. A plurality of the dancefloors are old airplane hangars with stages built inside and camouflagingly terraformed as hills, which you can climb for beautiful vistas of the festival lights and the sunset. The official program lists just over 40 stages, but there are even more not listed, including a nudist beach (with DJs, a bar, and food) next to a canal—not to be mistaken with the swimming lake where everyone is also nude. All in all I’d say there’s probably 100 different “worlds” you can fall into… but it’s truly endless. There’s always more. There are pop-up arenas with avant garde circuses, a theater for plays and another for films (which is a great place to snag a nap when it’s too rainy or bright outside), a roller-skating rink, a few hidden saunas, fair games like slingshotting iron arrows at revolving dishware, a million cool couches and cushions and swings and rocking-horses (except they’re ostriches) to sit on, screen-it-yourself stations with patches and stickers and pins and anarchist literature, a million kinds of trippy vibey areas from enchanted psychedelic forests to dystopian concrete trash wasteland, there’s a childcare area with programming so developed that it should more properly be described as a weeklong alternative youth summer camp, and just much much much more. My favorite anarchist merch distro is an anti-border collective that provides mutual aid to migrants stuck in the kilometer-wide no-mans-land between the Polish and Belarus borders.

All the food is vegetarian, much of it is vegan. More importantly, the food is SO GOOD. Like, some of the best ever, no shit. If you work or play the festival, it’s free. Even when it’s not free, it’s easy to come by. The coffee is supplied by the Zapatistas. Workers, volunteers, and artists can double their money for alcohol.

Throughout the festival grounds enormous murals and banners proclaim the names of antifascist fighters held hostage by the state. Within a matter of days, almost all the surfaces erected at the festival are covered in graffiti proclaiming solidarity with insurrectionary people’s movements like Rojava or Standing Rock. Migrant solidarity collectives like Sea-Watch recycle left-behind camping gear for mutual aid purposes. Almost every “crew” hired to work at the festival is from a squat, or collective space, or radical project—making the whole thing a way to finance the autonomous left throughout Germany and much of the rest of Europe. The festival’s website describes itself as “holiday communism” (ferienkommunismus), but the sheer magnitude of DIY organized chaos makes Fusion a must-go-to destination for any anarcho-hedonist. ACAB and circle A’s everywhere.

Cops are not allowed inside the festival. The security is usually comprised of crews or affinity groups with experience at land occupations or other kinds of police-hostile scenarios. Polizei swarm the exterior of the festival. Much of the wheatpasted posterage you see advertises “clean drivers” who can pilot your car through police controls, because German pigs are allowed to drug test drivers on the spot. You see, one of the main draws of the festival is its open drug use, while miraculously remaining fairly free from mafia pusher bullshit.

Inside the festival, there are awareness and de-escalation teams for conflicts. There’s also the festival’s own first aid and ambulance team, with special training on drugs and overdoses. A drug awareness tent will test your stuff, explain chemical combinations, supply you with free harm reduction materials, and has a chill-out area if you need to come down with a soft landing. It also has fresh fruit.

Everything lasts from Wednesday afternoon to Monday evening, with round-the-clock music and activity while the festival is on, although there are still small performances and hidden container parties to be found for days after the festival officially ends. Fusion normally takes place the last weekend of June or first weekend of July, just one or two weeks after K-Town.

One of the larger dancefloors

ROCKIN’ & RAVIN’

There are a few reliable spots for rock’n’roll, all of which are relatively close to each other. The three hangar clubs where bands most often play are Triebwerke, Datscha, and Schuhkarton. It’s a five-minute walk from any of these hangars to the other, if you don’t fall into a random rabbit hole that leads you to some other adventure, which you absolutely should fall into if it presents itself to you. I’ve caught great acts like THE SUBHUMANS and VICTIMS at Datscha, while Schuhkarton is for truly underground gems like Berlin’s ECHOES. Luftschloss is a round theater with risers on the old runway that you can rely on for dark music of all kinds: darkwave and EBM outfits, stoner sludge bands, and after bands it becomes a dark techno war machine. One year I was lucky enough to stumble upon an up-and-coming BOY HARSHER at the ‘schloss. The runway outside of Luftschloss looks like a cartoon punk motor dystopia ala the parking lot in Dead End Drive-In. Across the road from Luftschloss is Tubebox, which usually has techno inside the hangar but there is a “Punk Stage”—that’s its name—outside the hangar next to the bar and the skate bowl. Then there’s Fer A Coudre, the French welder steampunk squatter tent. Usually there are heavy blues, CRAMPS-ish style bands at Fer A Coudre but the only band I caught there this year was the delightfully absurdist rap-punk-noise duo WRONG CHICKEN. There’s also Roter Platz, a regular big ole outdoor festival stage, where years ago I saw the legendary Slime.

This year there was one true champion of the rock and it was 80s deutschpunk legends TOXOPLASMA. They fucking ripped!!!! Heads were banging and chains were clanging in a pit that was as tender as it was turnt up to 11. Smiles all around. All my German friends who recommended TOXOPLASMA also told me to see BÄRCHEN UND DIE MILCHBUBIS. Classic anti-globalization era anarcho-punks ACCIÓN MUTANTE and PETROGRAD also banged out some pogable tunes. New crops EGO and SAUFKNAST played too, who I was keen to see but missed—sometimes you gotta rave instead of rock.

Other punk bands that played:
DIE ANSTALT
ELEKTROKOHLE
FINISTERRE
GIF
H.i.T.
HOARSE
SHITSHOW
SNÕÕPER
SUCK
THE GLUTS
WEAK TIES

All in all, about as many punk bands play Fusion Festival as play the other big-name DIY punk festivals in Europe, and the bands are about as punk as the other festivals too, but there is a lower concentration of punk overall because the bands are spread out among more stages and genres than those other festivals. The punk subculture at fusion is just one strain within a larger culture of resistance.

Truth be told, I love punk but I just can’t be bothered to run around a festival—especially one with 100 different little worlds where you can always fall into something good—just to hunt down the right band, especially when the schedule always gets pushed back. And, as a punk who also loves techno, Fusion is one of the few times I can rave with cool spikey punks all around. The trancefloor is traditionally the best place to find the spikiest chain punx getting stoopid to really trashy computer rock beep boop bops.

Here's just a few of the DJs I found that were good, dark, and hard—techno for punk rock tastes:
CHARLIE CHEPPERT
NÚRIA
KOLLEKTIV FISCHMARKT

And on the theme of not-punk-but-it-rocked, the Trojan Records living legend HORACE ANDY opened the festival up with an amazing set of soulful, roots reggae and angry old-man anti-police diatribes like, “Me nah like the police in Jamaica! They raid the house, they grab the chalice, they smash the chalice to pieces… No, no no, me nah like them Babylon.”

MOTOR POWER

K-Town has bike wars, but Fusion has the Fusion cars. Being a large airfield, the Fusion festival site needs to be traversed, to some degree, by motor vehicle. And being privately owned grounds, the festival accepts plenty of donated non-street legal cars that become the the trash trucks, ambulances, delivery vehicles, intra-festival mail carriers (see header photo), taxis, and other motorized transports of the festival. Each of these vehicles is a graffitied, insane mutant of a car. If you work at the festival, the garage also serves as a DIY bike repair station, and there are ridiculous spectacular tall bikes too.

My favorite Fusion car is the “punk forever” wagon, which has a mohawk of stegosaurus spikes on its roof and a huge “anti-hippie wagon” warning on its back. In a fever dream of acid futures, it’s easy to imagine having to defend the Fusion grounds from the swarms of police outside it with a Mad Max style raid, where the Fusion cars serve as our cavalry.

FULL THROTTLE INTO THE FUTURE

2024 was the 25^th anniversary of Fusion. The festival was born at the end of the century, at the end of history, the end of the world… but it continues to thrive in the afterworld because it is an underworld. If there is a solidly techno sentiment from Fusion that contrasts with punk sensibilities, it is that there is a future worth seeing. Not no future, our future. A party apocalypse that no punk would want to miss out on.

A demonstration within Fusion Festival in solidarity with antifascist political prisoner Maja https://budapest-solidarity.net/

APPENDIX:

Documentary: Fusion - Ein Festival kämpft für Freiheit ohne Polizei (Fusion - A festival fights for freedom without police)

Video: Drug Checking at Fusion Festival