Courtesy Cheap Perfume
Audio By Carbonatix
Michelle Webb is the operator of Longmont Punk, a group that aims to unite the Boulder and Longmont punk scenes. She and several other volunteers have been hard at work running punk and adjacent shows in Longmont since August, and the kids are showing up in droves, to say the least. And soon, Webb will be throwing her biggest show yet to cap off a whirlwind eight months of shows.
On Saturday, May 16, Denver femme punks Cheap Perfume will headline a Longmont show put on by Webb and Outlaw Production Collective, joined by Boulder’s Diva Cup and Longmont’s own Monkeypaw. It’s a real full-circle moment for the emerging Longmont punk community, according to Webb. The show will take place at 801 Main Street in Longmont, in a building owned by Recovery Cafe. The organization eventually plans to renovate the space and make it its new home, but for now, it’s an empty building that it was kind enough to rent out for the upcoming show.
A Cheap Perfume show in Fort Collins was what sparked Webb’s interest in bringing more punk bands to Longmont.
“I think it was March of 2025, [Cheap Perfume] played at Surfside 7, and me and one of my friends went. It was my first time seeing them, first time to Surfside 7, actually, but we had the absolute best time,” she recalls. “We talked with them and said, ‘Hey, if we did a show in Longmont, would you do a show?’ And they were super sweet and nice, and laughed and said, ‘We’ll talk sometime.'”
Luna Rose Wolf / Lunar Lux Entertainment
Having lived in Boulder County for over two decades, Webb says she’s always had to go to Denver or Fort Collins to catch shows. This led her to start the Longmont Punk Instagram page, as a way to shed light on Longmont and larger Boulder County alternative events.
“It’s called Longmont punk, but it isn’t only punk music,” Webb notes. She says the shows it has promoted or been involved with span quite a range, including genres within or adjacent to metal, goth, hip-hop, reggae, ska and more.
“It’s very easy to find bluegrass and Americana and folk music in Boulder County,” she says, “but it is not always easy to find the other stuff, and we want to make it easy.”
A True DIY Effort
Webb would go on to throw her first punk show in Longmont in August with the help of Outlaw Production Collective and a team of loosely-organized volunteers, all with a desire to bring more punk to all-ages spaces in town. That initial show took place at Summit Tacos, featuring Monkeypaw, illFrame and Poisoning Politix.
The group has continued throwing events and promoting shows from other like-minded groups and spaces in Boulder County, such as the Boulder DIY venue Unit 5. She says all of the Longmont Punk by Outlaw Productions shows have been community-led efforts with help from multiple volunteers, though she says they remain strongly motivated to ensure bands and sound engineers are paid well.
“It’s not formal; we don’t have an organization,” she says. “There’s no one person who’s leading what’s happening here. It’s all of us together.”
Webb also saw Cheap Perfume multiple other times since that first show at Surfside, and she says she continued asking each time, “Hey, when are you coming to Longmont?”
Talks continued, and in early January, Webb says the band finally reached out to set up a show in Longmont, the one slated for this weekend. This will also be the most femme-represented show it has had yet, with seven women taking the stage across the three bands.
The Importance of All-Ages Events
Crucially, the upcoming show and the other shows have all been all-ages, and mostly in non-traditional venue spaces where selling alcohol isn’t the main profit driver. Longmont Punk has also been super-focused on ensuring the concerts embody inclusive, safe, “third spaces” for everybody, and the message has been resonating heavily with the town’s youth.
Luna Rose Wolf / Lunar Lux Entertainment
“It’s a significant number of people that are showing up,” Webb says, “and everyone who has been part of organizing these shows shares a commitment to doing all-ages shows. And I think that’s one of the notable things that we’ve seen, is that the young people are actually showing up in significant numbers.”
She talks about a recent Punk Prom event put on by some of her friends, which sold more than 200 tickets, mostly to attendees in the high school or early college age range. Webb also points out that multiple members of the opener Monkeypaw are under 21, including one who is just graduating high school this month.
Additionally, parents have been at many of the shows, something Webb notes likely wouldn’t have been the case in her own youth. Many of the parents at these shows have been just as positive about the community- and identity-building elements of the concerts as their kids.
“I remember one mom was like, ‘It’s so great to see my daughter finding herself at these shows,'” Webb notes.
Michelle Webb / Longmont Punk
To be sure, the punk ethos has long celebrated young people and shed a spotlight on community and solidarity, and it’s these kinds of themes of resistance that run deep throughout Cheap Perfume’s music. In a fall conversation with Westword ahead of the release of Don’t Care. Didn’t Ask., Cheap Perfume guitarist Jane No talked about the importance of direct action and mutual aid, but also of things like art, community, and holding space for joy, noting that punk itself is an important vehicle for resistance.
“I love the power of punk rock in particular as a way to speak out, to express our anger against harmful systems, to challenge the status quo, and just maybe get people thinking in a different way,” No says. “And maybe at times, punk seems over the top and it’s in your face, and I think it’s the perfect way to bring up these topics and dismantle those harmful systems.”
It Takes a Village
Although Longmont’s devoted punk community has been selling out many of the recent shows, and Webb expects the same for this weekend’s, she also notes that it’s taken a lot of persistence to make them happen, especially with rising property costs in Boulder County. Despite that and other major barriers, however, she highlights how local businesses and organizations such as Summit Tacos, Recovery Cafe, The Timi Collection, Bizarre Electronics, Firehouse Art Center, and others have stepped up to offer their spaces to the punk community, embodying this punk ethos of community and solidarity.
In the case of this weekend’s show, for example, the Longmont Community Foundation (LCF) agreed to donate funds to cover the rental cost for the space, in partnership with the Longmont Underground Music Initiative, which Webb and others started as a partnership with the LCF.
She says she dreams of a time when the Longmont punk community can open its own space, and she’s also quick to highlight that other small cities can replicate exactly what Longmont has been doing.
“One of the pieces of advice I would offer is, if you really feel that inspiration of, ‘I want this for my community,’ and if it happens to be music, punk shows or otherwise, you can actually do it,” Webb says. “And the second part of that advice, I think, would be go tell somebody. Because as soon as you take that first step, that first action, to go tell somebody that this is what you want to do, people will show up to help.”
Cheap Perfume, Diva Cup and Monkeypaw, 801 Main Street, Longmont, 6 p.m. Saturday, May 16. Grab tickets here.