Meet Glitchers, the band playing punk where you’d least expect it

There’s a rack­et being made on Britain’s high streets. Walk through your near­est city cen­tre on the right day and you may stum­ble across a man with a gui­tar, scream­ing into a mega­phone strapped to a mic stand, with a woman pound­ing away on a drum kit behind him. They attract a mot­ley crowd: old punks nod­ding their heads, briefly trans­port­ed back to their youths, teenage emo kids game­ly mosh­ing in the mid­dle of the after­noon, and plen­ty of passers-by drawn over to find out what on earth is going on. They’re in for a break­neck set of rough and row­dy polit­i­cal punk songs, usu­al­ly end­ing in a song built around a chant of ​“Fuck The Tories.”

These aren’t your aver­age buskers. Their names are Jake and Sophie, aka Glitch­ers, the viral punk duo who take to the streets and play for dona­tions. In the process they’ve protest­ed against Kill The Bill and pup­py farms, advo­cat­ed for the grow­ing of hemp to com­bat the cli­mate cri­sis and fought the patri­archy by donat­ing the pro­ceeds of their anti-misog­y­ny rager ​“Your Moth­er Taught You Bet­ter Than That” to the Nor­folk-based Sue Lam­bert Trust, which pro­vides sup­port and coun­selling to vic­tims of sex­u­al or domes­tic abuse.

Their sto­ry began in March 2020, when Jake taught his fiancée to play the drums as a way to pass the time dur­ing lock­down, which pro­gressed into writ­ing their own songs togeth­er. It was­n’t Jake’s first attempt at launch­ing a band, but for a while there was a ceil­ing on how much they were able to do. Glitch­ers start­ed, after all, at a time when venues were shut­tered, live music was off the cards and the thou­sands of indus­try work­ers whose lives were upend­ed with no end in sight were encour­aged by the gov­ern­ment to ​“retrain” instead of being offered any mate­r­i­al sup­port.

As with every­thing Glitch­ers do, their USP of per­form­ing on the streets, using a bat­tery-pow­ered amp for Jake’s gui­tar, start­ed off as a ​‘fuck you’ to the peo­ple in Par­lia­ment. “[The gov­ern­ment] said that artists should retrain, and we thought, ​‘Well, hold on a minute, I’ve worked out how to play a gui­tar out­side, let’s show him we don’t have to retrain and play out­side until they let us back in [to venues] again,” says Jake. ​“We’ve nev­er looked back, and it’s grown from that into this mag­i­cal thing.”

When gigs did come back they also began play­ing ​‘after­par­ty’ sets, i.e., turn­ing up and play­ing out­side larg­er rock and met­al bands’ shows as the fans are leav­ing. The most thrilling aspect of their oper­a­tions is that you can seem­ing­ly stum­ble across them any­where, from the beach­es of Corn­wall dur­ing the G7 sum­mit to the streets of Mil­ton Keynes dur­ing My Chem­i­cal Romance’s come­back shows (to which they were invit­ed to play per­son­al­ly by Frank Iero). They even rocked up and played out­side Wem­b­ley Are­na as alter­na­tive music’s bright­est lights walked the red car­pet at May’s Heavy Music Awards.

As part of their punk-for-dona­tions ethos, they put out a buck­et for fans to put mon­ey into – much like tra­di­tion­al buskers would, with an addi­tion­al twist. All of Glitch­ers’ music and mer­chan­dise, as well as tick­ets for head­line shows they play indoors in the win­ter, are avail­able on a pay-what-you-want basis. Legal­ly, you can’t put a price on items sold in the street, but for the band it’s a pro­found state­ment on remov­ing art from capitalism’s chokehold.

“I sat there for hours and hours think­ing, ​‘How can you be anti-cap­i­tal­is­tic as a band? Is it pos­si­ble?’” Jake explains. “[I thought] it’s like an auc­tion, peo­ple pay what they think the art is worth. Let’s flip it around and let the peo­ple that are com­ing to the gigs decide how much they think the art is worth.”

​“We grew up real­ly poor,” Sophie adds. ​“When we went to gigs, we couldn’t real­ly afford any­thing like merch on top of the tick­et price. Now, if, for argument’s sake, some­one chucks in a ten­ner to see us live and two quid for a t‑shirt, that’s fine.”

It’s just one way in which a Glitch­ers gig is more acces­si­ble than most. Their street tours, which usu­al­ly com­prise after­par­ty shows, are par­tic­u­lar­ly exten­sive. Their cur­rent run, which began in July and will end in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, will see them rack up over 80 gigs across the UK – some­times includ­ing sev­er­al loca­tions in one day. It means that, wher­ev­er you are, Glitch­ers might nev­er be more than a bus trip away, and the cost of trav­el­ling to see them is much small­er than it might be if they were only tour­ing the usu­al inner-city hotspots.

​“That’s the beau­ty of it – we can take a punk gig absolute­ly any­where, to peo­ple who don’t usu­al­ly get to see it,” says Jake. ​“As much as we love see­ing the mosh pits and the crowd surf­ing at the after­par­ties, there’s still noth­ing bet­ter than see­ing old­er peo­ple sit­ting at a cof­fee shop down the road with a big smile, or kids danc­ing in the street when they’re too young to go to gigs. I remem­ber one time in Hud­der­s­field, [we saw] a woman in a mobil­i­ty scoot­er who said ​‘This is the first gig I’ve been to in years’.”

Glitch­ers are often met with the most fer­vour in the small­er or more rur­al towns that tour­ing acts tend not to pass through. They believe it’s part­ly due to the nov­el­ty of a band play­ing in an area stripped of many of its cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, and part­ly due to the pol­i­tics of those areas skew­ing con­ser­v­a­tive. Where they might have been expect­ed to be met with hos­til­i­ty in tra­di­tion­al Tory heart­lands, the reac­tion has been quite the oppo­site – and it is only becom­ing more positive.

“I feel like the peo­ple there are the ones that don’t have a voice,” Sophie reck­ons. ​“They think, ​‘This is some­thing I can agree with’.” It’s also put Glitch­ers at a unique van­tage point, as the chang­ing reac­tions to their music mean they’ve been able to gauge shifts in pub­lic sen­ti­ment. ​“The reac­tions for ​‘Fuck The Tories’ this year are way dif­fer­ent from when we first start­ed,” Jake explains. ​“When we start­ed, there was a lot more Tory-lov­ing from the elder­ly and those sorts of peo­ple, but now even the Tories hate the Tories. The atmos­phere has real­ly changed.”

The shift in the polit­i­cal cli­mate over the last cou­ple of years hasn’t always ben­e­fit­ted them, though. While those who might have once called them­selves true-blue Tories have warmed to Glitch­ers, the law cer­tain­ly hasn’t – par­tic­u­lar­ly after the Police, Crime, Sen­tenc­ing and Courts Act was passed last year (which Jake and Sophie were vocal oppo­nents of, giv­ing out leaflets at their shows). In their ear­li­er days, they were met with more indif­fer­ence from the men and women in blue. They’re protest­ing, they explained, they’re not out to cause trou­ble, they won’t be here long. Now, that’s no longer a valid expla­na­tion. 

​“They can shut it down at their dis­cre­tion, which sucks,” says Jake. They played out­side Down­ing Street in late 2020 and want to do it again, but are all too aware that they will have to use gear they’re pre­pared to lose. ​“They can just seize all the equipment.”

All of this – how they make out­door gigs work, organ­ise trav­el, the reac­tions, their encoun­ters with the police – is being cap­tured on video on their cur­rent tour, which will be made into a doc­u­men­tary explor­ing the highs and lows of life in Glitch­ers. ​“We want to show peo­ple that it’s fun and it’s doable,” says Jake. ​“It’ll show some of the bad bits as well,” Sophie adds. ​“Our work isn’t rain­bows and sun­shine, and we want peo­ple to see that too.”

“I hope it will estab­lish us in the scene a bit more,” Jake con­tin­ues. ​“Because we play every­where, we don’t have a local scene, so we do feel like lon­ers some­times in the music world because we’re not gig­ging with the same bands at the same time. But this is not a gim­mick. This is what we want to do.”

Fol­low Emma on Twit­ter.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Twit­ter and Insta­gram.