Punk Under the Sun is a great, surprisingly large book–in fact, it feels much larger than its 200+ pages, split as it is in format between full-color coffee table book and in-depth, scholarly assemblage of reviews and gig ephemera a la something like Jon Savage’s authoritative ENGLAND’S DREAMING book about 70s British punk.

The clubs, zines, bands, and art galleries of South Florida’s sprawling underground 80s-to-early-90s music scene is covered in pretty ambitious detail. Despite the book’s subtitle’s reference to just punk and new wave, a lot of other genres are explored: college and indie rock, glam metal, goth, crossover/thrash metal, hardcore, and other phenomena that were all part of greater underground music in SoFlo at the time. There’s stuff about Miami’s Kitchen Club (see the photo I included in this post), and — lo and behold! — even some touring bands get mentions, like the greatest band in the world, Killing Joke, who have a brief appearance here as one of the few underground-ish bands that would play in Miami (Kitchen Club) when many other bands were avoiding Miami since it seemed too far southeast and out of the way of everything else in the US to make a tour stop worth it. (I’ve always wondered if KJ didn’t keep Miami in their tours since they once had a song appear on Miami Vice.)

One of the two authors of Punk Under the Sun, Joey Seeman, now lives here in North Texas, and he and I have even DJ’d a few events together (a very fun shock rock event with a member of Gwar as our other DJ is one standout memory). Joey’s a great graphic artist. Yet I was still utterly stunned when once he told me he’d shared an exhibit of his art back in Florida with none other than Tomata du Plenty, one of the coolest of the original ’77 punk frontmen, who’d retired to Florida after calling it quits with his legendary band THE SCREAMERS to focus on art. So the good news is that Joey’s graphic arts background is on good display in Punk Under the Sun; apparently, he designed the layout and formatting of the book for HoZac on top of doing a lot of the writing and research for it! (Not take anything away from Chris Potash’s excellent contributions and work!)

And this book is in full color. That couldn’t have been cheap for the publisher. Proto-riot grrl bands like Morbid Opera, deathrock-y bands like Agony in the Garden, and more hardcore punk bands than I can remember, all have fair showings, interview excerpts, biographical info, etc., here.

You can get PUNK UNDER THE SUN by Joey Seeman and Chris Potash from HoZac’s website, Amazon, or wherever you prefer to buy books! – Oliver Sheppard, author, postpunk.com