Legendary British rockers, The Godfathers, grace Stockton’s Georgian Theatre on Wednesday 8th November for a special performance of their beloved 1988 album, ‘Birth, School, Work, Death’ in full, along with other tracks from across their tenured career. The band are on a renewed roll after the 2022 release of latest esteemed album ‘Alpha Beta Gamma Delta’ marked their 35th anniversary since signing to Sony/Epic in 1987.
The opening title track of ‘Birth, School, Work, Death’ was released that same year of 1987 and was a hit in the college rock era, penetrating MTV and even breaching the US Billboard Mainstream Rock Top 40 at a time when significant college radio airplay and the approval of the fanzines was capable of taking an exciting upstart band almost anywhere, even from across the pond. The record also bears the single ‘Cause I Said So’ and a re-recording of the 1987 release, ‘Love Is Dead’.
With an album title highly suggestive of the contemporary hardcore scene and a stripped-back and aggressive sound developed in tandem with lionised producer and hitmaker Vic Maile, not to mention the barbed, take-no-prisoners lyricism heard on the record, The Godfathers were confrontational and acerbic in a way which seemed to have faded in the alternative rock sphere, bearing increasingly little of the DNA of the British punk explosion of a decade prior.
Cementing this status with 1989’s ‘More Songs About Love & Hate’, the band would go on to experience multiple line-up changes and an 18-year gap between albums interrupted by the 2008 reformation of the original line-up. The newer incarnation(s) of the band have picked up where the old left off in more ways than one, with new album releases, more wholesale line-up changes and generous touring of their furiously stellar live show in the intervening years, culminating in a furthering of the band’s influence and legacy and widespread acclaim for last year’s new opus.
‘Birth, School, Work, Death’ was reissued in a deluxe format in 2011 by Lemon Recordings, an imprint of a logical home for the album at master curators Cherry Red Records, and its star remains ever-ascendant as inquisitive music fans dig, discover and reassess. That makes this gig, at an appropriately intimate and thoughtful venue in The Georgian Theatre, a fantastic opportunity to experience the album embedded within a wider-ranging celebratory set, with support from Teesside’s own, Johnny Seven.
Tickets, priced at £15.00 in advance, are available from Georgiantheatre.co.uk.
