We are very pleased to announce the first ever release of ‘Defiant’ on vinyl!
Available in transparent orange and transparent green vinyl with lyric insert and re-designed sleeve.
Limited edition, only 300 copies of each colour made and we have a small number of each colour in stock now.
‘Defiant’ was released on CD in 2006 on US label SOS.
‘Defiant’ was a bit of a milestone for us in that we changed our approach to songwriting.
This was partly due to having Lars from Rancid and Steve from The Business record with us in our home studio.
Steve and Lars were demoing songs for a project called ‘The Masons’.
Beki sang a song with Roger Miret of Agnostic Front, but the Masons album was never released.
Beki: ‘The songs on Defiant came easily, but the recording process was hard. Paul and I were arguing about it to the point where I’d storm off in an inspired rage mid-vocal take and write another song on my £10 Woolies cassette player. I wrote ‘Fast Forward’, ‘You Can’t Do That’ and ‘Ordinary, Decent…?’ as a result of things going wrong in the process of recording other songs, which was quite productive.
We were still bickering about drums at 10:30pm the night before we were due to travel to Oxford to master the album.
I didn’t like the drum pattern on the chorus of ‘Britain Is Still Burning’ and managed to persuade Paul to move the middle eight pattern to the chorus, which worked really well.’
We toured the West Coast the same year with all-girl Texas band So Unloved and Ryan Mudd and the Stuff.
A guy called Ezzat ran the SOS label, and he was very kind to us, letting us hire a minibus for a knock-down price and taking us out for food and booze.
We were asked to do an in-store appearance at a record store in LA and feared that it would be a Spinal Tap moment, with no-one there except us.
We were stuck in the traffic, dreading the event, when a call came through to the driver to say that there were hundreds of kids queuing round the block waiting for us.
We were there for about two hours signing posters and CDs for hundreds of young punks.
It was a lovely end to the tour and made all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making the album worthwhile.
Around 2008 Defiant was manufactured on CD in the UK by Stu Taylor, with no label name.
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Review from ‘Punkmusic.about.com’
There are tons of great songs on this album. The melodic anthem, “Don’t Let the B***ards Grind You Down” has all of the qualities of a true old school anthem, with all of its message and energy, paired with a chorus that will easily get a crowd pumping its collective fist. “Defiant” has a catchy riff that reminds me a bit of “Summertime Blues” for a moment, and then digs deep into an ’80s-era punk hook and yet-another fist-pumping chorus.
And I’ll take this moment to admit that when I saw this album had a song with the title “The Story Of My Life,” I was mildly apprehensive at hearing yet another cover of the Social Distortion song. It’s not that song. Instead, the song is a driving dark tune described by the band as “almost a Christmas song but without the goodwill”. Indeed, it’s a dark powerful tune, that offers a nice tempo change, and is then quickly followed up by the fast rocker “You Can’t Do That,” a song with a… questionable chorus… let’s just say that one wonders if you’re hearing a blatant four-letter word or simply Beki Bondage’s accent.
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It’s nice to hear that time hasn’t mellowed Beki Bondage, but has made her a better singer teamed up with better musicians who can keep it together as they hammer out tight thrash riffs.
While she occasionally sounds like more than a few different ’80s icons, the band always lets you know this is old school British hardcore punk – played a lot better than many of the bands did it when they were first trying it.