Junkie Brush have supported punk legends Discharge at the Zodiac, headlined the Riverside Stage at Cornbury Festival and co-organised MusicInOxford.co.uk’s inaugural 5-a-side football tournament. Despite a Spinal Tap-esque revolving door of drummers, they finally found one alive and breathing after a 2two-year search and started gigging again at the end of 2008. They’re currently recording new material for a mini-album due for release in mid-2009.

1. What do you think you sound like?

Dragging an iron bath full of loose scrap metal uphill, while someone shouts obscenities and outrage at you. In musical terms I guess we’re loosely hardcore punk. Someone called us ‘secret prog rockers’ once. We didn’t like that.

2. What do you do when you’re not making music?

Create or recover from hangovers, wrangle computers, take pictures of light refracting through crystals.

3. Recommend us a good band or album and tell us what’s good about it.

Our musical spectrum of tastes and influences is too vast to sum up in a pithy one liner. The fact that we choose to ignore most of them and play nasty punk is neither here nor there. We’d never come to a consensus on one album: however Rabid would say ‘anything by the Ruts or Killing Joke’, Big Tim is a closet hippy and would probably say something by Primus or Frank Zappa, and Jim doesn’t care as long as it’s horrible, loud and aggressive – try Napalm Death’s Time Waits for no Slave.

4. Where did you get your band name from?

A misunderstanding that turned out to be better than the original idea.

5. What do you like and dislike about Oxford and its music?

Great scene, great bands, lots of diversity, but no-one seems to own their own gear and never asks, but assumes, they can use yours.