The London punk newsletter — October 2025 listings out now

Hello, paper punks. Another Subculture’s issue for October is out now for you to pick up, print off and put in your pocket — and with maybe the most events I’ve stuck on a single page?

You can download the gig grid as a PDF on the website, and there are paper copies in places like TOME Records, All Ages, World of Echo, Rough Trade East, WASTE! and the London Centre for Book Arts; the usual haunts in south London will have them as soon as I can get to them. Subscribers will have received theirs in the post already — join them and help with the print costs for £3 a month by upgrading here.

Thanks to PageMasters for saving me from a self-inflicted toner nightmare; listings from this month will once again be printed on riso — expect some gaudy colour combinations as we head towards Christmas; been inspired lately...

This month: photos front and back courtesy of Leigh Arthur, who reviews Bristol’s UNREST festival and ruminates on how people have the energy to keep D-I-Y going, plus Benny Lager sends a Letter from America after going to see Oasis in New Jersey, the sort of thing he should be writing for The Fence rather than this rag. Both make the capital’s punk scene better and funnier, and it’s just nice to hear what people do on their holidays, isn’t it?

The back page is there for any and all correspondence, as long as you or it are “punk”, whatever that means - so please send stuff through…

Got to give props to Halloween and the miserable fact that you’ll be going home in the dark from sometime this week, but there’s an abundance of punk-led cult film screenings across the city at the moment and I figured it was worth putting them in the listings — big up The Nickel and Video Bazaar, Token Homo and PEPCOT for filling the screens this month. I’m also wondering how to do both the Gob Nation all-dayer and the Traidora LP launch in one day (on the 24th), and considering they’re playing three times this month, I will probably end up seeing what on earth MTPL Microplastics are like. We shall see.

This month, I have been reading local gossip in FAT Studio’s Neighbours zine, Vicky Osterwil & Liz Ryerson’s conversation in TANK about The Mouse and Past Tense zines about jumping the tube in the nineties. I also went up north to play some gigs and came back glad for industrial estates that contain magic rooms. (Buy a RUBBER shirt here.) No Music for Genocide is an initiative worth following.

That’s an update, isn’t it? Thank you as ever for picking up the paper, really glad to hear it’s still a useful tool as the internet continues to collapse!

Take care, free Ola + free Palestine, GET TO THE GIG.