Kevin Bronson on November 17th, 2008

2

David Newton, guitarist in the British quartet the Mighty Lemon Drops (1986-92) and now a local producer, loves to dust off his old 7-inches. His turn as one of the guest DJs at Sunday’s Part Time Punks Festival at the Echo and Echoplex gave him to spin a few tracks from some of the great bands of his youth. Newton [pictured with fellow guest DJ Eddie Argos from Art Brut] holds forth, briefly, on post-punk:

“It’s mad, isn’t it? All the music these bands are playing today was ignored for 20 years,” he says. “It wasn’t until the early ’00s that they were noticed. The angular guitar thing went away — punk never went away, power pop never went away, but this totally did.

“For years I told my wife that this stuff was going to come back. … I remember saying in 1995, ‘I can’t believe nobody’s copying Gang of Four.’ Then along came bands the Rapture, Erase Errata and the Liars, all around the same time. And the Strokes arguably brought it to the mainstream — they had that angular-guitar, skinny-tie, New Wave thing.”

Of course, a whole newer wave of indie bands has embraced the music — some of whom probably were introduced to the post-punk style, however homogenized, by the Strokes. But with Joy Division becoming a household word over the better part of this decade, the dots are being connected, and on Sunday the lines reached the likes of A Certain Ratio.