One of the most exciting hours I’ve spent in ages: Turnstile at O2 Forum Kentish Town

Even leaving aside its origins as prison slang, punk has always meant different things on either side of the Atlantic. Forty-five years ago, in New York, no punk band sounded like the next one: the only thing that linked Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Suicide, Blondie and Television was that they played the same club, CBGB. Over here, by contrast, punk was rapidly codified into people shouting angrily over buzzsaw guitars. These days, it can seem as though the opposite applies. It’s the American punks who stick to a formula, while in the British Isles, the punk label seems to apply to any band with a guitar and a modicum of attitude.

Both Turnstile (from Baltimore) and Fontaines D.C. (Dublin) have been called punk. And they have about as much in common as trifle and shepherd’s pie: from a distance they might look roughly similar, but up close there’s nothing to tie them together. Turnstile are one of those bands for whom precision and discipline are everything — they put one in mind of those stories about Black Flag in early-1980s Los Angeles, rehearsing for hours on end every day regardless of whether they had any gigs coming up. Fontaines D.C., by contrast, are slovenly (not sloppy; their rhythm section is electrifying), and have a very distinct air of being too cool to care hanging over them.

Turnstile have come through the American hardcore punk scene, hardcore being a genre built on velocity and rage, but they’ve became rather more than yet another band of lightspeed thrashers. Their third album, Glow On, was one of the triumphs of last year, attracting attention from outside the insular hardcore scene, and propelling them to two big and rammed London shows.