Ska Punk Legends Spunge Celebrate 30th Anniversary With Career-Spanning Show

LIVE REVIEW | SPUNGE | Retro Bar, Manchester 16/11/2024 by Craig Harston

Celebrating 30 years as a band, Tewkesbury’s Spunge have long been a staple of the UK ska punk scene. Along with many of their contemporaries such as Capdown, King Prawn and Sonic Boom Six, they got most of their recognition in the late 90s/early 2000s and 2024 also sees them celebrating a quarter century of their debut album, 1999’s ‘Pedigree Chump’.

Forgoing the traditional route of playing the album in full, Spunge instead played what was essentially a greatest hits set – in more or less chronological order! This also meant the band were fully aware their later stuff is less popular, pointing out that if people wanted to leave early, they could!

Kicking off with the classic ‘Lyrical Content’, this was quickly followed by ‘Whitehouse’ and the worlds smallest circle pit! Singer Alex Copeland then engaged in some banter with the crowd and after a bit too much information about bassist Chris Murphy holding in a shit for the entire set they got the crowd pogoing along to the extremely fast ‘Live Another Day’. Their cover of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ followed, a song that shouldn’t be touched by most but Spunge’s version has always been respectful and unique and the crowd responded enthusiastically, dancing and singing along.

The next few songs got the crowd bouncing again, with plenty of arm-waving, clapping, huge singalongs on the ‘Ego’ and ‘Change Of Scene’ choruses (with Murphy lamenting that he shouldn’t have played and needed to poop at the same time). After talking about how it had been a great eight days on tour, Spunge rattled through the next few songs, skanking through ‘Skanking Song’ and raising the roof on ‘Jump On Demand’ before moving on to the ‘new stuff’, including the excellent ‘Some Suck, Some Rock’, their cover of ‘Centerfold’ (which received huge cheers and got everyone bouncing on the “Na-na-nana-na-naa’s”), ‘One More Go’ and ‘Backstabber’ (with this song and the rest of the set dedicated to Tina on the merch stall!). Getting to the really new stuff, they back-to-backed early days of Spotify single ‘Just Sayings’ and brand new song ‘Bad Decision’, with a promise on the latter that more new material is coming in the new year.

Recognising that everyone needed to get out of the increasingly hot basement (“It’s fucking raining in here!”), Spunge finished strong with ‘Monkey Man’ and the absolute classic that is ‘Kicking Pigeons’.

It was a great way to spend a Saturday night, hanging out with old friends and ska punk in a sweaty basement, and Spunge’s anniversary tour ended on the highest of highs.