Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine in The Button Factory, Dublin, on September 9th 2015

We’re into some heavy themes in The Button Factory tonight – abortion; The Holocaust; inequality. That’s par for the course at a Jello Biafra gig. Sure thing, but this is before Biafra has even made an appearance – instead we have Dublin trio Sissy and longstanding punk powerhouse Paranoid Visions setting the scene for the main event.

A tolling bell heralds the latter, as the imposing figure of lead singer Deko and the more diminutive – but no less striking – one of Aoife Destruction run through a meaty set. Bellum takes lead on Across The Holocaust, a more ska-inflected number than the rest, while her vocal acts as the counterpoint to Deko’s growl on Wearside Jack. Deko’s performance seems to intensify when the shades come off, the singer’s face switching from an inscrutable glower to a squint. When he roars “Come in!” midway through the final number it kicks off – bodies slam, beer flies toward the stage, he smiles and shrugs off some drink splatter. That’s par for the course at a Paranoid Visions gig

With half the personnel of Paranoid Visions, Sissy still manage to put some heft into proceedings – Not Listening comes on like a bastardised Marquee Moon before taking off, Leigh Arthur’s sparse guitar solos harking back to the earliest Buzzcocks incarnation. The singer has a glaring presence and a commanding vocal to go with it, recalling a younger Biafra at times. Sail & Rail sees them out; raw and raucous, and every bit as vitriolic as anything the headliners have lined up.

“We’re One Direction…maybe we’ll call ourselves Wrong Direction” jibes the one-time Dead Kennedy, as Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine come towards the end of a set that takes them through two albums worth of material and a handful of Dead Kennedys classics. Biafra’s invective is all-encompassing, as impassioned as it ever was…and now with added cabaret. He appears in a soon-to-be-cast-off jacket, hat and cane, commanding the stage like a manic mime artist, or as if he’s engineered his own form of frantic sign language; contorting his face and throwing everything into gestures of disgust, helplessness, and money-grubbing.

The set is interspersed with diatribes on everything from Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, through torture, racism, fascism, religion, and capitalism, with Biafra’s ‘Fuck Austerity’ t-shirt a constant reference point. New Feudalism is preceded by talk of Ireland being hit hard (“not capitalism…feudalism”), and California Über Alles is updated to the present day. The Dead Kennedys material proves most well-received, and Holiday In Cambodia is the one that finally cracks open the crowd as the mosh pit engulfs everyone within reaching distance.

The band’s onstage ‘minder’ has his work cut out, flashing a torch into the morass of the pit or policing the steady stream of stage divers, one in particular who seems to cause Biafra to flinch when he reaches out to touch him. From word one the pit is mayhem, and Barackstar O’Bummer in particular is an early set gear-changer. Three Strikes from ‘The Audacity of Hype’ album deals with the privatisation of prisons, something Jello pleads with us not to let happen in this country, “even if that jackass from Ryanair becomes prime minister or whatever.” Unfamiliarity and the marginally slower tempo calms things briefly – oh so briefly – until Nazi Fucks Fuck Off send the front stage crowd into overdrive once again.

Biafra reappears stripped to the waist for the encore, and when a bra from earlier audience madness is discovered onstage, there’s little else for it but for him to get strapped in. He’s not one to let politics get in the way of a bit of showboating.  “This is a traditional Irish song we’re gonna play next here” says the guitarist, and Too Drunk To Fuck should really have capped it all off in style. Instead Biafra goes into one last, lengthy, heartfelt tirade against religion…in a bra. Crapture then ends things on a slightly less euphoric note than “And now I got diarrhoea/ Too drunk to fuck!” but no matter. Sound as his histrionics generally are, Biafra goes on a bit – sometimes all you want is a shit-hot rock’n’roll band to get on with it. When they do, this is one crackling performance from a man born to entertain first, educate second.