Penrose Web
The Least Of Our Concerns
Allan Crockford and Ian Button probably first nodded a cursory "Alright?" to each other in 1986 when their respective bands - The Prisoners and Thrashing Doves - were on the same bill supporting a late-era Ramones at Hammersmith Palais. Their histories from that point are fairly well known. Crockford moved on after The Prisoners into the James Taylor Quartet, The Prime Movers, The Solar Flares and beyond, while Button followed up Thrashing Doves with 10+ years as guitarist for Death In Vegas before moving more into production, drumming (currently for Heavenly, Swansea Sound, Louis Philippe), and his own projects. The two current bands they lead - The Galileo 7 and Papernut Cambridge - have been operating out of Kent for the last decade or more - paths have crossed...gigs have been done together... records have been exchanged. In summer 2023 they began working on some songs together, swapping backing tracks, song skeletons, lyrics and ideas, and very quickly had enough raw material for an album, and a project name - The Penrose Web. As you'd expect, they both bring items from their own musical wardrobes to this: their own takes on sunshine pop, psych, garage and indie combine: Crockford's Medway credentials and Button's SE London via Kent Coast retro pop chops merge geo-musically somewhere along the M20. Their first EP 'It's... The Penrose Web' was released in January 2025 (the first 7" to be pressed on the new non-plastic compound Evovinyl) and earned the band comparisons with the likes of The Seeds, Martin Newell, The Who and The Scars. Louder Than War called it "A genuine cult classic." The Penrose Web's debut album 'The Least Of Our Concerns' is released on Spinout Nuggets, and lays out their stall wider - think Paisley Underground meets Stiff Records, Medway meets glam, dark garage meets acid folk. There's macabre trash rock ('Hexapod Scene') baroque soul drama ('In Her Darkened Room'), suburban ennui ('Mr Chance'), as well as more prosaic introspection and pop-psych optimism tinged with regrets ('Never Too Soon,' 'Tuesday The 6th Of November'). While the album was made essentially by Button and Crockford as a duo playing everything between them, for their live debut in May they have expanded to a full live band including Viv Bonsels (The Galileo 7), Robert Rotifer (Papernut Cambridge, Louis Philippe) and Charlie Hannah (Mozart Estate). Limited to 300 copies on vinyl.