If you missed The Clash, wish you had seen The Buzzcocks in their prime or just hanker after some good old-fashioned (well, it is now, despite a reported renaissance!) punk rock, then you might not need to look much further than Portsmouth quartet, The Absolute Belters. What you see and hear is what you get.

Lacking the relative indie sophistication of those Sheffield troubadours, The Arctic Monkeys, is no barrier to the progress of these firebrands, who clearly do not care that their influences lie sometime back in the late-1970s, before they were even born. They are young. However, they have their own ‘Home-Made Revolution’ to crow about, as the title of the second track on their debut album declares.

With James Casey holding a respectably tight drum control, Matt Jones maintaining a driving bass beat and providing support vocals to both John Gillespie with his shredding guitar and Aaron Middleton doing a passable impression of a hybrid cross between Joe Strummer (The Clash) and Mike Peters (The Alarm), while strumming furiously on the lead guitar, there is a lot of meritorious effort being expended on their opening gambit, ‘Glorious Victorious’.

Largely consisting of fellow schoolmates, the band members eschewed the Blairite ‘Every schoolchild is entitled to a university place’ remit and went to work on building sites. While that may have honed their language and enhanced their electric energy, they remain young and raw, even though the musicality has been refined enough to encourage Camden’s Fiddler’s Elbow owner, Dan Maiden, to sign them up to his label, stating: “Over the past three years, I have dealt with over 3500 bands but none displays such enthusiasm, professionalism and talent as The Absolute Belters.”

You can tell that their work is rehearsed exhaustively. None of the eleven tracks on this debut is lacking in fire, drive or punk rock’s insouciance. There is a cheeky arrogance residing within most of the lyrics, if you can hear them, as ‘Blue Flashing Light’, ‘Dirty Carpet’, ‘Bollox to the Bouncers’ and ‘Hello London’ illuminate so stridently. I would love to hear The Absolute Belters live and unrestrained, because I reckon it would be among the most riotous and enjoyable jaunts down Memory Lane available for the money. What’s more, I believe that they are good enough to have legs.