12. MinutemenThe Punch Line
JB: Everyone likes the Minutemen. Double Nickels On The Dime is fantastic, but I’ve gone with The Punch Line because I hadn’t heard many records that had bass that present, right up there in the mix. Mike Watt’s clearly a great player, although I have a hard time remembering Minutemen song titles, because there are about 27 songs on each album and they’re two minutes long. JA: Mike Watt champions indie and punk bands to this day. There are a lot of great groups associated with that period in the American underground. Minor Threat, Rites Of Spring, but even Swiz, Dag Nasty and Ink & Dagger.
JB: That story about Ink & Dagger on tour with Earth Crisis is priceless. They’re on tour together, and Earth Crisis are serious vegans, straight-edge, whereas Ink & Dagger were a bunch of clowns and jokesters. Apparently one night, the Ink & Dagger boys go up while Earth Crisis are onstage and throw yogurt on the frontman! I have no idea why they’d do that but some people just can’t help that level of mischief. We used to find bands online that were called Palehorse in the USA and send them terrible YouTube footage of us playing and say, ‘That’s what a real fucking rock show looks like’. One American Palehorse got in touch and claimed rights to the name but we said, well, it doesn’t matter if you clamp down because we’d change our name to Pale ‘orse. We’re from London. We can afford to drop the ‘h’.
