Chubby And The Gang / Savage Beat

Za 23 april 2022
20:00

Chubby And The Gang

Charlie “Chubby” Manning Walker learned to play guitar after being hit by a car. He was 15 when the car popped the pavement, slammed into him from behind, and left him with a broken arm and shoulder. Confined to a bed for a couple months, there was little he could do. But he somehow had just enough range of motion left to hold a guitar, make chord shapes, and strum. “Fuck,” he figured, “I’m just gonna practice guitar.” Some 15 years later, Manning Walker found himself confined again, this time to his London flat during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the U.K. The band he fronts, Chubby and the Gang, had released their debut, Speed Kills, in January 2020 on the local punk label Static Shock Records; there was good chatter at home and abroad, the kind you could spend a full year touring off of, until that became impossible. Not all momentum was lost — the band signed a new deal with Partisan Records, home of Idles and Fontaines D.C., last spring — but Manning Walker, who’d spent well over a decade touring in bands from London’s punk and hardcore scene, was now holed up at home unable to do any of that. He couldn’t even fall back on his day job as a union electrician on film sets. “I had six weeks to just fucking… I don’t know,” the singer, 30, remembers on a recent Zoom call. “I was lost for six weeks — like, ‘What am I gonna do?'” The answer was obvious when it came along: “Fuck,” he figured, “I’ll write some songs.” Direct, demonstrative, restless, reckless, and wry — that’s what Manning Walker is, and that’s the kind of music Chubby and the Gang make. Speed Kills melded his deep punk and hardcore roots with a love of early rock & roll. The guitars grooved like buzzsaw teeth, the drums beat down in swinging blows, and Manning Walker roared tales of street brawls, speed binges, crooked cops, and systemic rot. The songs on the band’s second album, The Mutt’s Nuts, out August 27th, hit just as hard, but with a far more expansive sound that bolsters Manning Walker’s dispatches on work, heartbreak, racism, inequality, and the grace and grit of London.

Savage Beat

"Amsterdam based rocknroll band combining punk, oi, garage, glam and more. Come boogie with us!"

i.s.m The City Is Dead

Tickets: €14 via https://chubby-and-the-gang-hetbos-antwerpen.eventbrite.be