The band will play a London gig next week!
John Youens is a busy man. Not only the lead singer and guitarist in London punk rockers Slow Faction, he’s also something of a studio whiz, and promotes gigs under the South London Punk Collective banner. We caught up with him in advance of Slow Faction’s London gig with Claimed Choice.
John, how are you, and how are things in the Slow Faction camp?
Things are good! We’ve been taking it slow for the last year or sos, because a lot of my energy goes into the South London Punk Collective and into recording and mixing, and we’ve had a nightmare with venues these last couple of years. We lost the Queen’s Head (in Brixton), we moved into the Huntsman & Hounds, we got chucked out of there after three gigs due to a noise complaint even though they had a live license from the council!
So we were about to move into the Dogstar, and then that shut down…so now we’ve found a base at the Birds Nest in Deptford. They initially agreed to take the first three gigs we had already booked, and then asked us to do more. So we’ve come to an arrangement where they store our gear for us for free, and we put on free gigs there, but we also let them use our gear for other gigs. So it’s a reciprocal arrangement, and it’s great, but it’s all taken up a lot of our energy! It’s been a case of getting other stuff sorted out so that I can refocus on Slow Faction.
We’re fairly well known in our circles, and we do get some good gig offers, so we’re able to do one or two gigs a month without me doing much promotion. We’re a ‘mature’ band – the youngest member is 52! – so we don’t have egos, we just love what we do! It’s been four years since our last release, the ‘Culture Wars’ EP, so I need to find the time to really focus on writing music and lyrics.
What would you say are your main punk influences for Slow Faction?
Well, The Clash were definitely a big influence – both lyrically and musically, they were very diverse. And as a guitar player, I always jokingly say that the bands I like are the bands who knew what a minor chord was! Bands like them, The Jam, The Buzzcocks, and later on, bands like Rancid – bands that took influence from other genres, like ska and reggae, who played minor chords, who knew how to drop out of a song and how to drop in. Whereas bands like the Pistols and the Ramones, although both great bands, they were very much ‘ramalama punk’ – mine was a bit more nuanced.
I don’t really buy new albums much, but I’m influenced by the bands that I record and mix. In the last five years or so, I’ve recorded about 35 projects; I’m currently working on two more and have a third booked in, so I am listening to new music. At SLPC shows, we put on all types of punk – all genres, all generations. It doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 80, male, female, gay, straight, trans – we’re open to everybody, and it does mean that by hearing this music, I’ve learned to appreciate so many different styles. I’ve learned to appreciate hardcore, for example; crust, post-punk…all stuff that has rubbed off on me. Ultimately, there are only two types of music: good songs and bad songs!
Can you give us a short history of the band?
Fairly briefly, there was an incarnation of Slow Faction in the 90s, and we combusted after a few years. But I always stayed in touch with the rest of the band, and kept writing songs and buying recording equipment. So after a 13-year break, our bass player Umbi – who was always playing in lots of bands – we met up in 2012, and he mentioned that he wasn’t currently in a band, so I told him I’d written some songs and asked him if he fancied getting Slow Faction back together.
So we did, with Lee on guitar and Zen on drums, and my initial thought was “who’s going to want to listen to some old guys playing punk rock?” And then I thought to myself, well, punk is actually my blues, and if I was in a blues band, no-one would care about my age if I was out there playing blues. And as soon as you do go out there and play gigs, you realise you’re one of thousands!
We’ve changed drummers since, and then there was Covid, and Umbi went back to live in Italy, so we brought in Charlie on bass and then Gianfranco on drums. This particular incarnation of the band has been going since 2020, and we played our first gig in August 2022, at the tail end of Covid. We’ve since played a lot of gigs here, there and everywhere! We’re a very happy line-up now – there’s very good humour in the band, and that’s important, but we do also want to say something.
Our favourite song of yours is ‘You’ve Been Fooled Again’, which I believe is about Brexit? Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind the song?
It was described as a song about Brexit, but I actually wrote it after the 2019 election. So I guess you could say it was Brexit-influenced, but it’s also basically about how on earth a working-class person can think that a billionaire is on their side. How can he or she think that Eton-educated Boris Johnson, or someone like Nigel Farage, is on their side? No, you’ve been fooled again, and that’s the point of it.
Brexit was a big con-job, but it continues to this day – people getting angry about Keir Starmer getting free glasses, when Farage has been given £5 million quid by a rich donor. It’s double standards; people don’t use their critical faculties, and ‘You’ve Been Fooled Again’ is about that – so although it was influenced by Brexit, we still play it now, and it’s still relevant. I’ve always tried to write songs that I can still play ten years later, so I don’t namecheck people, and most of our stuff is anti-fascist, anti-racist – it’s about urban life, the issues that we face now, but we’ll still face them in ten years’ time. So I try not to tie a song to a name and/or a place.
Have there been any particular highlights from your time together as a band?
Getting invited to go and play in Germany a couple of times was definitely a highlight! We got together with a couple of other bands who we’re friends with, and we called it the South London Punk Collective on tour, and we had a great time there.
As the SLPC, I organised a series of annual gigs with Mat from Chelsea, where we raised about £12,000 for AIDS. My wife, who is Thai, she had a family member who died of HIV, and when I got Slow Faction back together, she said to me: “Why don’t you do something useful with your music?” So I got together with Mat and asked him if he fancied organising some gigs as an AIDS benefit, because he was doing his ‘Sex, Drugs, HIV’ project, and so the two projects segued together. We visited the temple in Thailand where they take in people who have been rejected by their families, to hospital wards where people were dying of AIDS, and it was wonderful that we were able to help in some way.
We also raised about £2000 for Great Ormond Street, and were also able to help out a friend in south London who runs an animal rescue charity. So I guess you could say that we did do something useful with our music! Like all punk bands, we play benefits, and we’re happy to do it for free, but it’s also nice to be able to do something that you can take ownership of, too. At the time, there wasn’t really anyone doing much for HIV, and people still suffer and die from it, but it’s not in the news like it used to be.
Finally, how’s the rest of this year looking for you and for Slow Faction?
Well, what I need to do is clear some space, and just sit down and write seven or eight new songs! I want to write a new Slow Faction album – I’ve got the tunes, but it’s a matter of writing lyrics, because all the bands that influenced me wrote great lyrics. So lyrics are very important to me, and lyrically, our 2019 album ‘Universal Declaration Of Independence’ is an anti-fascist record from start to finish. So I look at the world, and I think – do I need to revisit the same subject again and again and again?
I don’t think I’m a great guitar player, but whenever i pick up my guitar, I hear melodies – even if I’m just strumming two chords. So I’ve got the melodies, and it would be so easy to just write ‘fuck off and die’ ten times as lyrics! But I try to write something that resonates lyrically, that will still stand up ten years later, and to approach things from a different angle. So I guess you could say I have writer’s block at the moment! But I’ll get there.
It would be nice if, as a DIY punk community, we could catch a break. Not in the sense of just my band or personally, but you look at London, and since we’ve started playing live again, I alone can count probably about 40 venues that have shut down. Nowadays, people have so many things competing for their attention, so how do we make live music relevant again? We’ve had so many young people at SLPC gigs tell us how much they enjoyed the energy of a show, so when people take the time to go to a show, they generally appreciate it. It’s just a question of getting people’s attention in the first place!
Slow Faction play London’s Blue Monk on Thursday 28th May, alongside Claimed Choice, Hearing Tests and Let’s Av it – tickets available HERE.
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