Joseph's Well is a noisy pub and gig venue in Leeds. I'd just seen Goldblade put on a blinder of a gig with John Robb working the stage like a demon. Post-gig, he's the same. Rattling round the pub, talking fifteen to the dozen with everyone, he is Mr Enthusiastic. Eventually Peter from the band manages to pin him down for a while and we talk. John is fantastically enthusiastic and has an opinion on everything. At times he reminds me of the bloke on The Fast Show who keeps saying 'fantastic' and it's fun to listen to him pontificate, a man in love with music.

The interview starts back to front. Having admitted to no knowledge of Goldblade, John asks me about my reference points after hearing them. With some trepidation, I say 'The Clash'.
- That's a compliment - we love The Clash.
What are his terms of reference for the band? How would he describe them?
- It's pretty simple - pure punk rock band. Punk rock's such an all-encompassing thing, innit?
It's got pretty wide now.
- I like the way it's wide. I love all the new bands, I love Offspring, I love Rancid, I love that Transplant album. I guess because Rancid have got that passion. I love the way they carry the spirit of punk rock. That's what we're trying to do, to carry the social conscience and politics of it. We're not a sloganeering band (I love all that side of punk) and the DIY side of punk. We've just toured Ireland, playing 6 band bills every night and it's great to see fourteen-year-old kids playing punk rock music. See, it's folk music, innit, it's music for folks. I know folk seems like a really naff word. It's music made by the people, for the people. The Stone Roses were a folk band, The Happy Mondays were a folk band. It's communication and celebration. I hate major label music. I hate the way they manipulate the charts and people think that's all that music's about.

He tells me Goldblade's manifesto is an anti-cool one. Music isn't about fashion. - Do you think that there is some image there? Onstage there is quite a sense of what the band is. There's a black dress code, there is a way of being that is their own.
- That's style, not fashion. Everyone has a style. You have one. John heads off into a semiotic analysis of what I am wearing and my haircut…
- The worst thing about punk was that line drawn between punks and hippies and I hated that. We got to know Crass really well and they're great people. I'm a vegetarian because of Crass. I've never thought about it before. People say rock music doesn't change people's lives. Bullshit. I'm a walking talking example of it.

He's in his early forties - what has he been doing since Crass inspired him?
- I've always been in bands. In 1977 I was in a band called The Membranes, to 1981. I played in the underground noise-punk scene. I've been a music journalist for Sounds. But when I saw Nation Of Ulysses and Huggy Bear they made me want to play punk rock again. I was so excited, so adrenalised; I had to do it again. You get to my age and you think, maybe I shouldn't play these gigs, then you realise; that's what I do. It's so fantastic. We just want to play gigs, that's all we want to do. I go and see bands like New Model Army. They get twelve hundred people at a gig and you never read about them anywhere, do you? It's a tragedy the way the media focus in on these trendy bands. There's no end point in music now, when I was young, I thought when I was twenty-five I would be dead because I couldn't see anything past there. Now I realise, it's endless this game, innit? It's an inspiration when you see someone like Iggy. He's thrashing the stage and the guy's nearly sixty.

There were a lot of kids in the audience.
- It's the sixth generation of punk. It starts with Kurt Cobain. He was a genius. By the time they broke big you could see nothing was going to be the same again. The true legacy of Nirvana was Green Day and a lot of other bands like Pearl Jam. And the revival of the punk scene. Now you get little kids into it and I think it's great. A lot of old punks slag Green Day off but they're punk through and through. When we played Germany they lent us lots of gear, stood at the side of the stage, shared a dressing room. It's sounds banal but most bands won't do that.

On Joe Strummer: - It's a fucking tragedy. Why did he have to die? Why couldn't it be some fucking twat from Pop Idol? Some useless, pointless git? Why did it have to be someone who meant something, who changed peoples' lives?

Who influences the band? The answer flies straight out. - The Stranglers. We don't sound much like them but it's in there somewhere. They were winding up all the time. I like the way they pretended loads of stuff. They must be the cleverest musicians who ever came out of this country. Each one could play lead at the same time, but the songs weren't a mess
. We talk about borrowing music and he says: - some songs are ripped off. Was there a rip of Complete Control in there? Was it a quote or a rip?
- It was a quote. Hopefully people'll get it but they never do. We just love that song, it's like a homage to it. It sounds like us as well. We like that ferocious energy like The Dead Kennedys but the songs are weird and twisted.

I mention the rabble-rousing energy and the lyric - fighting in the dancehalls, fucking in the streets.
- It's about going to punk gigs in the old Victorian dance halls built by the sweat and blood of slavery. The money was made to make these beautiful ornate dancehalls from slavery and there's the radical left-wing punk rock bands playing in them. That's an interesting contradiction. This is a great country with a strong liberal tradition and we've been very kind to a lot of people but we've been very cruel to a lot of people as well.
Should people be listening to the lyrics?
- Yeah. If they want to. I think lyrics are really important but if someone just wants to come and get off on the energy of the music, that's good too.
Goldblade stick mini essays in their records, train of thought blasts of ideas. The Hometurf album had an instructional booklet called 'The Soul Manual'.

We talk about the polemical booklets Crass used to stick out with their records.
- They did some really clever stuff. But they were playing to these mad drunk people and some of it just went whoosh, over their heads. But that's quite good as well. I don't think people have to necessarily get what you are doing. If people want to come to the gigs and get drunk and jump around, I'm fucking well up for that because that's what I think you should do at a gig.

What do you think people got out of tonight?
- I think people get an incredible buzz of energy that makes them feel good? You've got that martial reggae thing that seems to belong with punk.
- We do, we love ska - it's the least fashionable music in the world. All those Oxbridge graduates who write for the music press can't stand ska music and that makes you like it a lot more!
I was saying to Peter, one of the guitarists that it was almost a nostalgia trip, having reggae played between sets, like punk bands did in the late seventies.
- It wasn't our choice. The sound engineer had the tapes. Reggae just chills people out and when you come out on stage you sound, fuck, a wall of sound.

And what have the band been up to?
Gigging. Gigging hard. Playing festivals. It's great - last year we played Glastonbury and the Blackpool Punk Festival within two weeks of each other so it's both ends of the spectrum. We are a Glastonbury band AND we are a punk festival band because it's all counter-culture really. The ideal with Glastonbury is fantastic, innit, the Eavises are great people. The hippies and the punks; it's great. I'm a completely unhippy kind of person.

By now I'm wondering at how much energy John has. He's still going strong and takes time to launch into a tirade against the NME and to offer tips on interview writing. In fact, I end the interview and his energy still doesn't flag - rattling on about determination, the drive a band needs to succeed, regional differences; anything and everything until the venues has to kick the band and all out. He seems to be one of those people that runs high on life. It shows in the band's performance - give them a try.

JUNE 2003