“We’re different,” the assorted members of S.CU.M. explain. “We are all teenage girls.” They’re not actually, though they like to talk a lot about shagging. Take these explanations for instance: “What does our music sound like? Like sex. How do our fans think about us? Like sex. Who is our inspiration? Girls we have had sex with.” Despite all this, S.C.U.M.’s moniker is a bound-and-gagged nod to notorious feminist Valerie Solanis’ SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto.
     This band is at once the most perfect and most repulsive one in London. If you’re the sort of person who appreciates “real” music, these guys will probably drive you nuts, picking up where PiL or, perhaps Glasgow great Josef K left off. They insist however that they’re more than that. “No, no, no, we are not punk,” they explain. “We just hate everything going on around us so, okay, maybe we encapsulate the spirit of punk, but we write songs on machines.” Over the walls of brutal noise tweaked from the depths of these machines come rumbling No Wave-type vocals, asserting (in no uncertain monosyllabic terms) just how anti-everything it’s still possible to be.