“Halloween” is a recording of a Grey Hairs live gig on October 31st 2019 at JT Soar in Nottingham. Gringo Records are releasing it on purple vinyl. It is limited to 300 copies and that’s it: no re-press, no deluxe edition. Grey Hairs guitarist Chris Summerlin takes up the story: “When the idea of recording a live album was put forward, our film-maker friend David Lilley suggested he film a song too. He wanted to experiment with using as many cameras and vantage points as possible and that’s exactly what he did here – cameras on heads, cameras on guitars, cameras on cameras. We hope you like it as much as we do.

People occasionally tell us we’re a “good live band”. I’ve never been sure – some bands we’ve been in have always been fairly predictable in their quality, always able to do a good show but this one is different and elusive somehow. You just can’t tell how something is going to go, even when you’re in the middle of it. So, in the name of balance and trust, before I tell you to buy this live record, I’m going to first tell you about the 3 worst Grey Hairs gigs to date, in no particular order.

Which brings me neatly back to plugging this record to you. We’ve resisted the temptation to do a live album because we always felt this unpredictability was both our secret strength and our clear weakness. We could never guarantee any live record would capture us at our best and maybe putting us under the microscope would just be upsetting. I’m pleased we were convinced otherwise, the record captures the good and the bad of what we do perfectly, maybe even more so than the studio albums. We really hope you like it. Maybe we *are* a “good live band” after all?”

TRACK LISTING

01 Hydropona
02 Serious Business
03 Ghost In Your Own Life
04 Red Paint
05 Backwards
06 Kernels Of Eyes
07 Piss Transgressor
08 The Chin (Pts I & II)

Having spent 2018 touring with Sleaford Mods, Hey Colossus and Brooklyn's SAVAK, Nottingham punk rock lifers Grey Hairs have announced their third album 'Health & Social Care' - a scorching reflection on balancing your creative impulses against the commitments of impending middle age. Their first output since 2016's 'Serious Business', released via Nottingham's esteemed Gringo Records, 'Health & Social Care' is an expansion of the band's sound that recalls elements of The Birthday Party, Laughing Hyenas, The Jesus Lizard or of a downer-fuelled B52s and what surf music sounds like coming from the most land-locked part of the country. In the video for new single 'Tory Nurse', directed by David Lilley, we're taken on a sloped and queasy trip through rural Derbyshire that sees the band tasked with delivering a body (later revealed to be a clown) to an undisclosed location. The fate of the clown is never revealed beyond disappearing into a hole in the ground, in a droll and absurd attempt to address the core ideas behind ‘Health & Social Care’ and the inevitable mystery of things to come. 2016’s 'Serious Business' saw a clear sharpening of the band’s focus.

The clue was in the title. What started as an offshoot to the members’ proper bands reached that wonderful point where it becomes an entity all of its own and steers the ship as though an invisible 5th member. And that member was steering things in directions none of the others had ever anticipated. 'Health & Social Care' expands on this. Its rage is tight and deliberate and its themes more explicitly stated. This is not a bunch of guys mimicking their youth (or other people’s youth) and balancing their weekend anti-establishment anger with their job as a software developer, or vintage furniture dealer, or credit check specialist. If 'Health & Social Care' has a theme (and again the clue is in the title) it’s “how can someone be a public sector punk in 2019?”. Commendable though most political music is, it’s perhaps easier to articulate your rage at the system when you don’t spend over 40 hours a week working in it. But what if you do? What if your punk rock ethics extend to your occupation? This is a record about balancing your creative impulses with your life as you get older and the time to do either squeezes in on you. It’s a record about aesthetic punks, Dunning-Kruger syndrome in the Health service, extreme 360 degree cognitive dissonance and – most crucially – a confusion and inability to tackle these external problems because you’re so f*cked by your own personal ones

TRACK LISTING

1. Hydropona
2. Piss Transgressor
3. Ghost In Your Own Life
4.  Capable Man
5.Tail To Teeth
6. Tory Nurse 
7. Breathing In Breathing Out
8. Kernels Of Eyes 
9. The Nag 
10. Glugs