6.25°C If you’d told people a few years ago that Steve Green and Tim Young would start a podcast together, they might have paused.
Steve fronted a punk band that once made the front page of the Gazette for telling Colchester Council exactly what it thought of them. Tim works inside local politics. Steve could always be found at Layer Road and now at the JobServe Community Stadium for home matches. Tim heads up the A12 to Portman Road and has regularly done so since the late 1960s.
“It’s the 50th anniversary of punk next year,” Steve says. “I just thought – we should mark that somehow.”
“You mean you thought we should start a podcast?” Tim replies.
“Well… yes.”
It didn’t begin in a pub or at a gig. It started while a wedding crest was being designed.
Tim and his wife Nicola asked Steve’s design company to create something for their wedding at Colchester Castle during Tim’s mayoral year. Tim wanted four ‘P’s in each corner: politics, Portman Road, Python… and a safety pin.
“I said, punk rock,” Tim says.
“You didn’t need to explain it,” Steve replies.
While Nicola discussed layout with one of the designers, Tim was looking at the wall behind Steve’s desk – Ramones posters, framed singles, fanzines, Pistols memorabilia. Rebuilt after a house fire in 1999 destroyed the original collection.
“I was transfixed,” Tim says. “I don’t think I said a word. Which is unusual for me.”
They later realised they’d both been at the same Essex University gig in 1978 – Tom Robinson Band, with Stiff Little Fingers supporting, before Inflammable Material had even come out.
“I’ve never been to a better gig,” Tim says. “You can remember it clearly. But you can’t remember what you did yesterday.”
They record Alternative Colchester at the University of Essex Media Centre, with producer Luke Fitch – “another Ipswich fan,” Steve says.
Five songs each. They alternate who opens. They aim for about an hour. They don’t cut tracks short.
“These songs deserve to be heard properly,” Steve says. “We’re not fading them out.”
The rough rule is 1976-1980. One permanent exception.
“Stiff Little Fingers is non-negotiable.”
They talk about bands that didn’t quite get the recognition at the time. The Drones. The Boys. Records that still sound sharp. Steve mentions John Peel playing “Suspect Device” relentlessly. Tim remembers seeing The Stranglers on The Old Grey Whistle Test and thinking something had shifted.
“It just felt different,” he says.
You can’t talk about Steve without talking about his time fronting Colchester punk legends Special Duties – a band that carried the city’s name well beyond Essex, pressing their own records and touring internationally.
And you can’t avoid the Special Duties song, Colchester Council, with the infamous lyric “Colchester Council, full of shit.”
“At the time,” Steve says, “there was literally nowhere for young bands to play in Colchester. That was the frustration.”
He was 18 when he wrote it. It did what it was meant to do.
“We were on the front page of the Gazette for a week,” Steve says. “Letters saying we were dirty, filthy animals. That was fine at the time.”
John Peel played the other side of the single – “Violent Society” – but mentioned they’d made a few observations about their local council he couldn’t broadcast.
Tim doesn’t dodge it.
“Punk’s about kicking at the establishment,” he says. “But people who work for the council always care and do their best. And Colchester has improved.”
The conversation shifts to football. It always does.
Steve talks about Colchester United with the tone of someone who’s been there through everything.
“When the highs are high, it’s because there have been so many lows,” he says. “The pain’s just as intense as any big club’s. There are just fewer of us.”
Broadcaster Steve Lamacq, one of the club’s most recognisable supporters, has often said the same thing – that the highs only feel that high because of the lows. Steve nods at that.
“That’s exactly it.”
Tim has supported Ipswich Town since his first game at Portman Road in 1968.
“I wasn’t born in Colchester,” he says. “I’m not betraying anyone.”
Steve says it’s a rivalry. Tim says it’s one-sided. They both laugh about it.
“In the modern world,” Tim says, “everything feels black and white.”
There are other memories. The 1999 house fire that wiped out Steve’s collection – records, fanzines, programmes. The promise not to collect again. Then the slow rebuilding.
“My Ramones collection’s nearly back to where it was,” he says.
And in 1998, Steve played CBGB in New York.
“That was it,” Steve says. “Cup final.”
He remembers American kids with mohawks singing every word of Colchester Council back at him.
“I was thinking — do they even know where Colchester is?”
Back in the University of Essex studio now, they’re only a few episodes in. There are still records they haven’t played. Guests lined up. Requests coming in. The 50th anniversary of punk is still ahead.
Episode four features a poem from Colchester musician and writer Stephen Munson – a six-minute piece about Layer Road that Steve says nearly had him in tears when he first heard it recorded.
Their first guest is actor Tony Gardner – Fresh Meat, My Parents Are Aliens – a fellow punk fan who got in touch after listening and asked to come on. “Yes,” Tim says. “Straight away.”
For all the looking back, neither of them thinks it’s finished.
The Meffs get mentioned – loud, sharp, uncompromising.
“They’re absolutely a punk band,” Steve says.
What stands out, though, isn’t just the records. It’s the way they talk to each other. A former punk frontman who once wrote “Colchester Council full of shit.” A sitting councillor who still heads to Portman Road when he can. They don’t avoid disagreement, and they don’t fall out over it either. It’s part memory, part argument, part shared ground.
Alternative Colchester is now streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and other major platforms. A dedicated website is due to launch later this month. However, it develops from here; it feels like a conversation that won’t stop anytime soon.
Rated Punk Tracks (as chosen by Tim and Steve)
Tim Young’s top five:
- Hanging Around – The Stranglers
- Alternative Ulster – Stiff Little Fingers
- Pretty Vacant – Sex Pistols
- Down in the Tube Station at Midnight – The Jam
- What Do I Get? – Buzzcocks
Steve Green’s top five:
- Complete Control – The Clash
- What Do I Get? – Buzzcocks
- Alternative Ulster – Stiff Little Fingers
- Rockaway Beach – Ramones
- Shadow – The Lurkers
