Punk pioneers to play free gig in Cork

It was a classic case of right time, wrong place, when the Membranes emerged growling and screaming from the English town of Blackpool in 1977. While the media fixated on the punk and post-punk explosions in London and nearby Manchester, the seaside Lancashire town was treated with neglect.

The ripples of punk were felt keenly by voluble frontman John Robb. While his band the Membranes felt inspired by the movement to make their own DIY racket, Robb could only look on in bemusement when some years later American bands such as Big Black and Sonic Youth were being idolised by the press for making a sound not too far removed from the one already pioneered by the Blackpoolers.

Robb is philosophical about the geographic handicap which fate dealt him.

“Steve Albini, who we know well for a very long time, he’s done so much great stuff, he would take the media not very seriously at all and get venerated and taken very seriously. We were thinking, ‘God, he doesn’t even have to try’,” he says with a chattering chuckle.

“Whereas if you’re from Blackpool people just thought you were a bunch of clowns if you even opened your mouth. It did make it difficult but I’m not complaining because Blackpool is a great place to come from. It’s a really odd place to grow up in: the biggest holiday town in Europe. It’s part of what we are as a band or part of what we were and that background was important.”

The feeling of being outsiders was crucial to the band’s development. Robb describes a place out on the edge of a peninsula where even the holidaymakers would attack them for looking the way they did. The frustration they felt fed in to the albums they released during the 1980s.

“We couldn’t have made the records we made if we hadn’t have come from there. And we were very DIY. It’s very homemade, the whole thing. I even made my own bass guitar out of a piece of driftwood I found on the beach. We made our own chords. We made our own music. It’s not like now you can go on YouTube and learn how to play guitar scales; we just made it all up.”

It’s an approach that continues to serve the band now as they work on their most ambitious album to date, a meditation on the universe inspired by a TEDx talk Robb did on the effect punk rock had on his life. He found himself sharing the stage with a scientist from CERN and became engaged in conversation with the boffin.

“I thought this is the most mind-blowing stuff. This would make a great gig. So we did a gig in Manchester last year. We got a CERN project scientist to join us onstage. I interviewed him. We did a Membranes set in the end and we had films explaining how life could appear anywhere in the universe.”

The idea of making an album around this followed naturally. It’s a record that has a biographical element as it features an appearance form the singer’s dad.

“He’s in hospital now; he’s 94 so he’s probably getting near the end and it’s a bit sad,” Robb reflects. “But he’s always been interested in the universe as well, so one of the tracks has got a little bit of him talking about the universe from his hospital bed. It’s kind of personal but also universal at the same time. And it does sound really pretentious, but it all works.”

nThe Membranes play the Southern Gothic festival at the Crane Lane Theatre, Cork, on Saturday. John Robb will do a spoken word show on Sunday at 2pm. All events free.