Discharge, the Stoke-on-Trent punk band that helped invent hardcore and d-beat, play The Underground on Morley Street.
Discharge play The Underground on Friday 18 December, a homecoming for one of the city's most influential musical exports. They're a Stoke-on-Trent punk band formed in the late seventies, and they're widely considered among the first to play hardcore punk.
Their sound — heavy, distorted, grinding guitars and rawly shouted vocals, with lyrics on anarchist and pacifist themes — changed the face of extreme music and spawned a genre of its own, 'Discore' or 'D-beat'. The Realities Of War EP boiled punk down to its basic components and ushered in a wave of nastier UK punk that paved the way for hardcore and thrash, while their 1982 debut LP Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing remains a landmark. There's a chilling line describing a nuclear detonation on that first album — 'Can you hear the sound of an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell...' — that also works as a description of the band.
That influence reaches further than you might expect. Metallica covered two Discharge songs on Garage Inc, and the band's fingerprints are all over Anthrax, Sepultura and Machine Head. In 2016 they signed to Nuclear Blast and released End Of Days, which reached number 10 in the UK Rock Charts.
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It's a single-band bill, so the whole night is on them. The gig is at The Underground, 2 Morley Street, Hanley, ST1 4LS, starting at 7:30pm. Tickets are £15.40, which includes the booking fee.
