Hi Everyone,

The bad news is that the "No Sympathy Nights" at Firkins Bar in Falkirk are finished.

Once again corporate greed and a desire to make everything on this fuckin planet bland and identical has forced our gigs to stop.

This decision has been taken at senior level and not at local manager level as we've always had total support from the current Firkins team.

I have always tried to do right by the bands that we got to play, our soundguy and anyone who came to the gigs. We tried to have somewhere that put the music first and respected the bands enough to ensure they always got paid, had free beer during the interviews and somewhere to crash if necessary. We tried to look outside our own healthy scene and along with putting on local Scottish bands we managed to entice quality bands from England, Ireland etc to come here and play to what was always a good crowd. I really hope there's someone else in Falkirk who will take up from where we left off and do something similar for the right reasons.

I am genuinely sorry to the bands who we had booked for January and February and also gutted that all the bands that we had lined up to play future shows will now have nowhere in Falkirk dedicated to DIY punk and the ethics involved in it. I am truly pissed off that I cannot continue to run these nights and hope that the bands understand that I have at no time messed anyone about. I take this news personally and feel I have let people down.

The only plus side is that for 7 months we managed to bring to life, one of the few places willing to support our scene and get live music back into Firkins which had been dormant on the gig scene for too many years. It may have been a brief interlude but it proved to me from the reactions of punters to the overwhelming number of cd's from bands wanting to play, to the rapid rate we sold the compilation cd over the bar and the positive feedback from all the bands who played, that punk is truly not dead and more importantly the spirit, the genuine spirit of punk is flourishing somewhere behind the glossy mtv veneer of commercialist punk by numbers and vacuous meaningless drivel that is packaged and sold as "punk rock". We are still here in the pubs and venues throughout the uk and hopefully the real message of punk will outlive us.

Goodbye and Sorry

Thanx to everyone who helped or came to one of the shows.

Stay Punk,

Tosh