A Rebellion Festival based chance encounter over a shared booth in Blackpool’s best kept secret eating and watering hole Dirty Blondes reveals that we are in the presence of half of a piece of post-punk history – Hildenborough’s The Klingons. The geographical distinction is important because, as they point out, there were a lot of bands sharing the name back in the day. These Klingons rose and flared briefly in the immediate post-punk frenzy between 1978 and Thatcher, harnessing the Zeitgeist and throwing a bit more fuel on the dying embers of the first wave’s iconoclastic dustbin fire. Together about a year, the band followed what they call the ‘standard Icarus-like trajectory of a thousand teenage bands that formed in the wake of Punk’ and then fell from the sky, leaving a legacy of five gigs and a demo EP.

That EP, thrust into our disbelieving hands in the murky booth in a Blackpool bar, is a bona fide piece of cultural history. It”s a snapshot of the greying musical landscape  in which individuality and creative vision had not yet been pureed into corporate, mainstream new wave culture shakes. What you get from The Klingons, from their suburban English ilk, is a kind of bleak optimism that their highly individual artistry would trump commercial concerns. It was not to be. Crass, who feature prominently in the ghastly tale of one of The Klingons‘ more noteworthy public appearances, kept the faith and made a go of this model. Most of the rest did not.

As for the EP – it’s a muddy time capsule unearthed from some kind of alternative Blue Peter garden. These four tracks capture the paradoxes of a brief cultural moment: a languorous urgency or frantic ennui. Determinedly under-produced, self-consciously musical and hinting at what might have been, this EP is very much of its time and indeed place, evoking a very specific moment in English cultural history. The underground metropolitan/suburban scene was big then. John Peel was our king. We could have done anything. If we could have been bothered.

The Klingons’ EP is available as a Limited Edition 7″ vinyl via Inflammable Material. There are only 50 EPs left at the time of writing, if you want to bag a desirable and evocative slice of a lost time in Post-Punk culture, get yourself over to the Inflammable Material Bandcamp now.

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