Sham 91: Benjamin Myers on his teenage punk band, Sourface

Neo-Nazi skinheads, frozen turds, Richard III and magic mushrooms – Benjamin Myers recalls his apprenticeship as a teenage hardcore punk for The Quietus:

"All bands are idiots. Having spent twenty-five years trailing them as a music journalist – from the height of Britpop through to the COVID pandemic – I do not make this judgement flippantly.

In fact, I knew that all bands are idiots long before I talked my way into the position of staff writer at Melody Maker literally the day after I sat my last university exam, long before I was bouncing around Hollywood squeezing coherent sentences out of two-bit, multimillion selling nu metal bands for Kerrang!, and way before I spent five years co-running an independent record label in the 2000s, at the very same moment that physical sales began to plummet and the commercial end of the music industry fixated on a few safe bets.

I know all bands are idiots because from the age of fourteen to sixteen I played in one."