Bob Short calls himself "the last man standing" from a band most people have never heard of, which is exactly the joke.
Blood and Roses formed in Stoke Newington in the early Eighties, when Short was living in a squat and playing guitar through amplifiers wired together from spare parts. Singer Lisa Kirby fronted a group so plainly of its moment that Richard North, writing in the NME on 19 February 1983 under the headline "Punk Warriors," named them playing London's Moonlight Club in the same piece that put a name — positive punk — on the whole loose movement of bands trying to make something ecstatic out of punk's wreckage.
They never got much further than that. A John Peel session, write-ups in Melody Maker, a scattering of singles for tiny labels, and then, in 1992, Short left London for Sydney, the year his son was born.
He never stopped making things.
Something like two dozen releases later — under his own name, as the punk trio the Dead Rabids, in a band paying tribute to Iggy and the Stooges — Short now runs his archive out of a Bandcamp page he calls Full On Noise, which is where Life After Death lives. It isn't a studio album. It's a document: rehearsals, gigs at the Clarendon Hotel, demos cut on whatever cassette recorder was to hand, all of it remastered by Short down to eighteen tracks culled from a much longer original tape.
The reissues sit alongside other Full On Noise releases — a soundtrack-styled record called The Scala, named after the London cinema Short says was safer to spend a Saturday night in than the squats were, and a self-published three-part graphic novel — which makes the Blood and Roses archive one strand of a wider, restless practice rather than a nostalgia project running on its own.
The results are rough on purpose. Kirby's voice cuts through the hiss on "Paradise" over guitar that sounds like it is arguing with the microphone rather than working with it, and covers of the Velvet Underground and the Kingsmen sit next to originals with barely a change in fidelity. Sounds magazine gave the tape five stars when it first circulated, and the description still holds: what's buried in the noise is danceable and urgent, closer to the first wave of London punk than to the polished deathrock the positive punk scene eventually curdled into.
Kirby died in 2013, which turns Short's continued stewardship of the archive into something closer to caretaking than nostalgia.
He describes what he does as outsider art rather than punk. "I was an outsider before and after I was a punk," he has said, and Life After Death is the proof: a scrappy document kept alive by one person, on the other side of the world from where it was made, because nobody told him to stop.
