The DeRellas and The Healthy Junkies, Rockaway Beach, The Hope and Anchor 27 August 2021

The Derellas and The Healthy Junkies, Rockaway Beach at The Hope and Anchor 27 August 2021

The Healthy Junkies are a mixture of edgy fast paced Punk and Hard Rock and innocence, a potent combination of fragility, sweetness, madness and unpredictability, like the film ‘Carrie’ where the pretty girl meets modern life and loses her mind in the process. So there’s a demure dress and crocheted cardigan with striped nylons that are very soon laddered and torn with singer Nina’s descent from skipping in a world of her own to tortured rocking on her knees on the floor. It reminds me a bit of Blondie who also managed to combine the attractive and demure with something disquieting and edgy. The fact that Nina is French also brings a kind of Bardot or ‘Je T’aime’ sixties feel of which they are totally conscious and mine blatantly with a Punk’d up cover of ‘These Boots are Made For Walkin’. A millennial kind of angst also keeps the band relevant to today’s troubled times. There’s plenty of variety in the set from punk rockin tunes, a bit of ska, but also heavier rock numbers with Hendrix like distorted guitar like ‘Theft’ and stoner influences . ‘Mayday’ a recent single, catchy and original switches things up with Phil Honeyjones on guitar taking over main vocal duties.  They finish with their take on T Rex’s ‘20^th Century Boy’. This is the first Healthy Junkies gig with their new drummer Raph Bouchara and it goes just like they’ve been playing together for a while.

The Derellas are also a mixture of old skool Punk and rock with comparisons like the Ramones and even Motörhead coming to mind. The look is a mixture of the Sex Pistols mixed with Dennis the Menace and Johnny Ramone, but they remember the Soho of the seventies and eighties and they also have a glam rock heart and there’s definitely a bit of Bolan in there too, so like the Healthy Junkies they also straddle Punk and Hard Rock comfortably and would be at home in either type of venue. Indeed the attitude and pace may be Punk, but the guitar solos are soulful and 100 percent hard rock. Songs like ‘Underground LUV’ have all the big riffs you could ever want and ‘Stick It To the Man’ reminded me of the glory days of Slade and family style singalongs choruses which even granny could enjoy. Whereas songs like ‘Pressure’s Gonna Get Ya’ are highly strung in the extreme in more than one sense of strung – see what I did there- with a kind of alarming guitar which is 100 percent designed to unnerve and reminds me of the days when Johnny Rotten hit the same vibe with his staring intense eyes on TOTP. They do in fact have a song ‘Strung out in Sin City’ which makes a similar pun. They’re already playing material off their new album like ‘Emergency 2020’ and recent singles like ‘Inner City Rock n Roll’ showing that they are living and breathing and not living on past glories, but they play older material too like ‘Freak Show’ which gets the audience pogoing and reminds me a little at times of the Last Great Dreamers. There’s definitely a hint of a cockney rebel in songs like ‘Sweet Fatal Attraction’ about revenge and “birds that do you over”. The DeRellas were here tonight like their drummer’s t-shirt said to show Punk’s not dead, nor is rock and nor are thankfully bands like this bill tonight that combine the two.

Dawn Osborne