Scenes and genres are a funny old thing. We’ve seen hundreds of them come and go in our time, and will see hundreds more, but where do they come from? Who decides when one has come into being? And who chooses what it’s called?
For the first time I can remember, Joyzine has been invited to the birth of a new one: Ultra-Punk. A fully improvised, live only movement, rooted in the DIY spirit of punk and centred, for now, around a handful of London musicians and non-musicians with absurd pseudonyms playing in rotating line-ups, each iteration named with a take on the same pun, bearing an open invitation for all to join in.
We caught up with one of the original Ultra-Punks, Shian Smith-Pancorvo (aka Bluebell Flutebottom), to find out what it’s all about.
What is Ultra-Punk? Is there a manifesto/philosophy/rulebook that underpins it?
The Ultra-Punk (U.P) guidelines are:
1. No composing or songwriting. (all U.P pieces are 100% improvised)
2. No rehearsing. (U.P bands only play live shows, albeit small or open mics – an audience of at least three people qualifies, staff included).
3. U.P pieces are constant sound. Certain musicians may stop but someone must continue. (The idea is to build atmosphere and prevent applause until the end).
4. No studio recordings are produced, the only releases being videos of the gigs.
Obviously people will do what they want but we, the first wave, endeavour to achieve all this in order to instill the aesthetics and energy necessary to spread the movement. One might argue that musicians must use learnt habits and language to play even an improvised show and we are aware of this. But the direction and basis is the point.
What are its antecedents and influences, whether musical or otherwise?
We are the tribesman drummer in the village who is cast out (or perhaps celebrated) because they refuse to play in any known time or rhythm.We are the Stravinskys, the Harry Parches, the Sun Ras, the Yoko Onos, the Cans, the Sonic Youths, the Punk musicians across time. We are also the many improvised theatre waves through history and feel akin to the Dadaists and YBAs in attempting to wake up humanity from its shared arbitrary concepts and dream-state.
How did it start, who was involved and where did the idea come from?
Other Ultra-Punks might have differing perspectives but to boil it down, I came back to London from Colombia after a decade in the year 2022 and tried to form an improvised three-piece called Kare Bares with Killa B. Quilled (Julius Naidu) which never quite got going. The third man went travelling and it was shut down. Then in 2024 while studying film at Royal Holloway University I met Skyla Balls AKA – the Swiss Anna Knife (Anna Vershkova), a budding film-maker and philosophy student at College of Kings. We hit it off and eventually got round to making our first feature length – Banned From London, which also featured Killa. The film was based on ideas I had about a fictional improv Punk band active in the late 80s/90s who think they are the only good band in the world because they are the only ones playing in the moment, truly from the heart. It’s a comedy with live performances using a Spinal Tap blueprint.
Where and when was the first Ultra-Punk show? How did it go down?
When we finished shooting the film it was so fun that Skyla suggested we play at the Open Mic at the Dublin Castle the following Monday as Banned From London, two days later. We couldn’t resist and the movement was born on Monday 27th January 2025.
The audience was generally confused. What happens quite a lot, and on this occasion too I believe, was that about half way through a few people started to laugh and then when we stopped we got quite an enthusiastic applause. There are usually one or two who have an epiphany of sorts and they tend to shout with glee at the pure human chaotic catharsis. The experience for the musicians is understandably exhilarating. The full improv aspect initially creates a wall of fear and tension but ends up relaxing us as there are no mistakes in U.P, and bombing is a success because we know we’ve achieved something that wasn’t understood or believed because of how real and honest it was.
How has the scene developed since then? Who are some of the key bands/players/people behind the scenes involved?
Ok, so far we have had 15 Ultra-Punks – interesting characters that have played live in U.P shows. One of the latest recruitments was Pheonix or Mo (Maura Bird), who played a bit part as a gang member at the end of 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025), and so will star in the next installment, by the by.
But the original 4 musicians and U.P creators are Skyla, Killa, me and celebrated writer/performer Shark Attack! (Tom Moody). Tom Moody was a massive Stony Sleep fan, and a Serafin and French Car And The Bulimic Wizards fan subsequently. Then he ended up playing guitar in my last band GENRE18 – and also in my brother Ben Fox Smith’s last band, FIRST.
The main two U.P bands are Banned From London and Band From Earth. Band From Earth came about when Killa went to the Himalayas and so Sklya and I created BFE with Shark on vox to replace Killa. However the vibe changed with Shark on vox. It became less comedy jazz and more dramatic noise. The fifth key member is a mentalist from Manchester, Atticus (AKA Tommy O’Stuff). We just call him Beau. He is head of meta-marketing and also endgame – save the world – management. The nuts and bolts of this revolve around counter-conditioning techniques to free people from their mental cages, if they wish. We predict that enough of them will and that this will eventually achieve world peace. Beau is the first Ultimate Ultra-Punk (U.U.P) as he is not a musician.Other than BFL and BFE, key speciations have been Band From The Brick Road (Skyla, Killa, Shark) and Banned From Bed, Bath and Beyond (Beau and me). So far the hive-band have gigged under 12 different Band/Banned From…guises.
Are there any venues/localities that have become central to the scene? Has it yet spread beyond London?
It has not spread beyond London although there might well be Punk improv bands out there that are waiting to be taken under our wing. Maybe not. The raw movement started in January but only really got going when Skyla and I finished our second years at Uni. So it’s been going strong for about 4 months. Skyla and Shark are heads of venue research/gig acquisition together with grass-roots marketing so at first Skyla guided us to Open Mic nights at Dublin Castle, Spiritual, MAP studios and Sir Richard Steele’s – all around Camden and Chalk Farm. Later Shark started to get us gigs around the Deptford scene – Skronk, Jam Circus, Bird’s Nest etc… Then Beau and I found the Open Mic at The Brougham, Angel, run by Billy Two Hats (Ian Dury’s son) and TAM, Temple of Arts near Borough market – apparently they use their bands for AI training so maybe their algorithms will choke on Ultra-Punk. Either way, we consider that as long as musicians follow U.P guidelines and laymen follow U.U.P guidelines, humanity’s creative worth might be protected from obsoletion by A.I because people love going to live shows.
We are starting to pull small crowds, notably at The Old Dispensary, where the kids there love us and clearly recognize true communication to their hearts and minds.
Hearing the idea of Ultra-Punk for the first time, it seemed to be drawing on two contrasting, almost oppositional sources – improvised music is often seen as quite elitist, for highly trained musicians, difficult to listen to and sometimes even a bit self-indulgent or exclusionary, whereas punk is rooted in the DIY ideal that anyone can pick up an instrument with no training, bash out a few chords and get up on stage – that attitude more important than virtuosity, the blurring of the barrier between performer and audience. How have Ultra-Punk bands managed to bridge the apparent gulf between these two worlds?
I would say U.P has married these two worlds in a partnership that was destined for existence; improvised music SHOULD be played by everyone, no matter age, colour, creed, gender, race, class, religion or ability. Beyond U.P we have the concept of U.U.P: in the world of U.P, musicians are handicapped because they have learnt some degree of musical theory. Eventually we want to see Ultimate Ultra-Punks taking over. So for example, brick-layers, accountants, software engineers, utter novices and disabled people. All they would need is a little confidence transferred to them by us. It is a far reaching idea but with the world the way it is, we’re thinking go big or go home.
On the Punk side of it we feel the 70s movement encouraged beginners and inexperienced musicians, which was great, but one can see that we are also taking this concept to a whole nother level – that an Ultimate Ultra-Punk doesn’t even need to learn any chords or notes, just recognize their dormant inner artist and appreciate pure chaos as an expression of that artist. In this way they can immediately perform in front of people who are also totally chill and want to see pure individual expression.
Can anyone be Ultra-Punk? What are some of the key characteristics/components that make a good Ultra-Punk band?
To summarise, Ultra-Punk’s fundamental format of no writing and no rehearsals generates a creative space for potentially every human in the world. The methodology was built out of and for the purposes of people under extreme pressures and time constraints in a modern 21st Century Megacity. It is a way humans can win the game of successful self-expression; It is perhaps the only way we can win against the rise of machines who are, with the help of certain humans, attempting to steal our identity/human essence and sell it to the highest bidder.
One of the key tenets of Ultra-Punk, as I understand it, is that everything happens in the moment. Nothing is written down, taken into the studio and recorded outside of the live performance. Have there been any times when you’ve hit on something in a show and wished you could have taken it away and worked on it and released it in a more traditional way?
There are always great moments and tense moments alike, but perhaps surprisingly, nobody has ever mentioned that desire, and I for one have never felt it. I think we simply live in a perpetually excited state of not knowing what will happen next, and that is worth more to us than writing yet more rehashed recycled songs that would take time we don’t have and require work we don’t want. On the contrary, it would be anti-U.P. But that’s cool too. No doubt there will develop an Anti-U.P movement to bring music back down to theory, and I for one, compose and sing for an Anti-U.P band, GENRE18.
What is the appeal of Ultra-Punk to musicians and to audiences? What is the experience of an Ultra-Punk show like and what do people get out of it?
It’s about the live phenomenon and when you’re there you can feel the confusion as all present brains create and decipher pure human catharsis. Some realise we’re improvising – especially artists, actors, people with experience in improv – but they still love it because it’s kind of crazy to book gigs and actually do that in a public Rock space (it has been appropriate in public Jazz spaces for many decades of course). I think many assume we are simply a band with a unique sound that wrote and rehearsed a haphazard and changeable show because the alternative is unthinkable. Occasionally you get people dancing, listening to sound with practically no coherent rhythm or melody. This is a beautiful thing. Some people scream because they are seeing pure honest live music that they are starved of and immediately recognize. One comment we had likened us to a car crash in that you don’t want to look but your instinct gets the better of you. Others have mentioned Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart as comparative artists. This satisfies many musicians who feel we are part of something that they personally recognize.
Where can people go to experience Ultra-Punk in the coming weeks and months?
Perhaps needless to say, we encourage people to form their own U.P and U.U.P bands. In this way they will have a great immersive experience of the movement, not to mention, instantly become part of it – especially if they use the Band From…/Banned From… London seal. But if they hit the Camden open mic circuit they are bound to run into an Ultra-Punk band. We tend to confirm and publicise these gigs very late, and often the line-up changes many times, even sometimes right up to minutes before the gig as we scramble it together. This is of course very U.P, and of course, totally fails occasionally. This is the way it has come to fruition but I realise it’s a bit of a commitment and a gamble for punters, especially if they live far away, so a sure fire way is to follow these Instagram handles which tend to post most gigs in advance, particularly official, full length gigs. All non BFE and BFL U.P videos get posted to ultra.punk.london.
Instagram: banned.from.london / band.from.earth / hitrabble / ultra.punk.london
Youtube: bannedfromlondon / bandfromearth / ultrapunklondon
Interview by Paul Maps
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