Leatherface never courted recognition. They didn’t fit in the tidy categories that music magazines love to draw, and they never bothered to chase trends. They made jagged, melodic, furious, and tender music that mattered. For those who stumbled upon them, Leatherface felt like a band and a revelation, all at once. Chris MacDonald’s Days and Days finally gives their story the careful, resolute treatment it deserves, reminding us how the important voices like them were forged far from the spotlight. The achievement of this book lies in its thoughtfully assembled balance of intimacy and range. MacDonald writes like a wise critic who knows the terrain and the empathy of a fan who lived through it. His prose is taut, unadorned, and urgent, qualities that echo Leatherface’s own aesthetic. There are no sweeping generalizations, no empty mythologizing. Instead, he takes Leatherface seriously as artists, locating their music within the social, cultural, and political currents of Thatcher-era Britain, while also treating their songs as works of raw, enduring beauty. Leatherface were outsiders, even on the punk rock scene where they unquestionably belonged. Frankie Stubbs sang with a voice that sounded like it had been dragged through gravel, yet inside that abrasion were flashes of startling lyricism, lines that could break your heart even as the guitars fiercely roared. Dickie Hammond’s guitar work rewrote all the possibilities of the melodic punk rock sound, shifting between walls of distortion and delicate flourishes, pushing songs into places few bands dared to explore. They created a sound that resisted simplification, harsh and melodic, despairing and hopeful, grounded in grit yet always reaching for something transcendent.
From the opening pages, MacDonald makes it clear this isn’t a dry biography or a catalog of facts. Instead, he weaves two narratives together: a coming-of-age story set against a backpacking odyssey across England, Scotland, and Ireland, and a parallel tribute to Leatherface, their sound, people, and enduring influence. This dual structure works beautifully because it mirrors how music embeds itself into lived experience. We don’t remember songs in isolation, we remember them in subway stations, in dive bars, on ferries across the Channel, playing through cheap boom boxes in cramped basements. That is exactly how Leatherface’s music lives in this book, inseparable from the moments it soundtracked. The book’s strength lies in its intimacy. We see the band not just through their records but through small, human gestures, jam sessions in Sunderland bunkers, conversations at bars, fleeting encounters on tour. These fragments are stitched into the larger quilt of MacDonald’s own life, nights spent lost in foreign cities, friendships forged in the fires of adolescence, grief at the passing of band members who meant more to him than distant celebrities ever could. The narrative insists that punk is not an abstract idea but a lived practice, a way of surviving the days and days. The writing itself deserves praise. MacDonald’s sentences are clean, rhythmic, and purposeful. He knows when to move quickly through anecdote and when to pause on detail. His voice is never burdened by academic distance or fanboy excess; instead, it occupies the middle ground where criticism becomes art in its own right. Reading him, one feels both informed and moved, the way the best cultural criticism should make you feel.
Importantly, Days and Days never overstates Leatherface’s place in the canon, but it never understates it either. MacDonald reminds us, through testimonies from musicians like Brian Fallon, Laura Jane Grace, and Chuck Ragan, Chris Wollard, Duncan Redmonds, Simon Wells, Austin Lucas, Sergie Loobkoff, and many others, that Leatherface shaped entire generations of punk and post-punk songwriters. They may never have filled stadiums, but their DNA is incorporated into bands across continents. To ignore them is to misunderstand the lineage of modern punk. MacDonald’s prose has the clarity of lived memory and the weight of reflection. At times, he writes with a punk’s blunt force; at others, with a novelist’s lyricism. This combination makes the book read like a memoir and oral history, a zine and literature. It is not a definitive biography of Leatherface, nor does it try to be. It is something rarer, a document of how music seeps into a life, shaping, saving, and haunting it. MacDonald’s book is more than a biography, memoir, collection of testimonies, and interviews. It’s an act of preservation, rescuing Leatherface from obscurity and affirming their continuing relevance. At these times, when so much of the punk rock scene’s past is repackaged as nostalgia, Days and Days insists that Leatherface’s music is not a relic but an acknowledgment, still capable of cutting through noise, still vital for anyone who believes music should be more than background entertainment. MacDonald refuses to blindly romanticize Leatherface’s past, making Days and Days more beyond than just another fan tribute book. There is violence, addiction, despair threaded into these stories, but also strength, connection, and transcendence. In this sense, MacDonald captures what made Leatherface unique: their ability to marry the bleak with the beautiful, the industrial with the intimate, the scream with the melody. Also, this book carries a gratitude for a band that never stopped pushing, even when the world refused to pay attention. And gratitude for memory itself, fragile and flawed, but still capable of carrying the fire forward. Chris MacDonald preserved the spirit of Leatherface not in amber, but in a breathing, sweating, and bruising narrative. Days and Days is more than a necessary book for anyone who cares about punk rock and for those who have ever found themselves remade by music. It is an elegy and celebration, and it leaves the reader convinced of one thing: that Leatherface mattered, still matters, and always will.
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