TMTCH Present The Wave

The Men They Couldn't Hang are a London-formed folk punk band whose forty-year career began in a Camden Town festival set alongside The Pogues in 1984, with founding bassist Shanne Bradley having played in Shane MacGowan's first band. Driven by Paul Simmonds' songwriting — songs built from Napoleonic mutineers, Industrial Revolution labourers, and Cable Street antifascists — the band carved out a body of work that trades on historical narrative and social conscience, instruments ranging from bouzouki and tin whistle to electric guitar crashing together with a punk band's disregard for tidiness. Their 1989 Silvertone album *Silvertown* remains their sole UK Top 40 chart entry, though the band's reputation rests less on chart positions than on the kind of live following sustained across festival stages from Glastonbury to Estonia and four decades of touring. Co-lead singer Stefan Cush died in February 2021; the surviving core of Phil "Swill" Odgers, Paul Simmonds, and Ricky McGuire continue to record and perform, with a new album project, *The Wave*, launching in 2026.