What's it like to spend a weekend in New York with punk band Show Me The Body?

I wore them down, by Stuart Stubbs. Photography by David Cortes

I’ve always loved this photo of New York hardcore band Show Me The Body, taken in June 2016 by photographer David Cortes for issue 79 of Loud And Quiet magazine. I wish I was the guy at the front taking his own photo, the one with ski goggles on his head and his left hand flexed for balance, but I was stood just out of shot when this was taken, over there on the right, just behind the woman with dark, curly hair.

A year earlier I’d written the Loud And Quiet A-Z of Printing a Music Magazine. B read: “B is for Bands. Presumably you’re doing this because you like bands and music so much, and the good news is that, overwhelmingly so, bands are a good lot, who appreciate that you are a fan more than anything else, which is why you’re at the venue four hours early to ask them how it feels to have an admirer in Alex Kapranos. Still, you can never tell them you love their record now and have them believe it. You are an evil, snooping journalist and no one likes you.” I was being overly dramatic. Then I went to spend a weekend with SMTB.

That room is the Imperial Ballroom Dance Studio. The occasion was the launch of the band’s debut album, Body War, a fiercely DIY punk record that combines Death Grips style noise, industrial punk, early Beastie Boys staccato vocals, hip-hop, sludge rock and drone, where the band’s one guitar has been swapped out for a piercing banjo. The venue itself was not a live music room at all, but a latin dance school situated in Chinatown above a row of restaurants and markets. The band, who to this day cultivate community via a seat-of-your-pants approach to throwing parties in unexpected places, found the Imperial Ballroom on Craigslist, so that’s where I met them for a cover feature that you can read here.

I’ve come to realise that I think about that trip more than others precisely because of how exciting and spiky it was. When you’ve got a resolutely DIY band like this one launching their album in a salsa studio to a few hundred dissatisfied kids – where they’ve set up a bar on the flat roof of the building and a graffiti wall for fans to tag – how couldn’t it be? As I suspected though, of a band who’d denied almost all other interview requests until that point, and who had never allowed a photoshoot, they didn’t exactly welcome me and photographer David with open arms.