The media are lying to you. They’re telling you that the era of the protest song is over. They’re telling you that folk music is what Mumford & Sons do; cuddly, commodified, unchallenging and sanctioned by the Prime Minister, no less.
They are wrong.
Steve White & The Protest Family are East London’s favourite folk punk political sing-along band. We may not be safe enough for the major labels, but we’ve definitely got something to say, and we’re going to say it, with wit, a certain brash charm, guitars, banjos, mandolins and, dare we say it,
moments of four-part harmony. Ours is a revolution that’ll have you tapping your foot and smiling from ear-to-ear. Thinking too, if we have our way.
Led by Steve, whose unplugged sessions have become something of a feature of the Tolpuddle Festival in recent years, the band features Funky Lol Ross on mandolin and electric guitar, and veteran of the East London music scene, Doug E Harper on bass. Meanwhile banjo duties fall to award-winning player and co-ordinator of the renowned Walthamstow Folk Club, Russ Chandler. Folk who’ve heard us make comparisons with Billy Bragg, Ian Dury and even The Clash.
Girobabies give you baffling grunge soul music with a dollop of psycadelic dystopian elbowgrease and a pinch of gutter-rock utopian lyricism.
The Glasgow based band have just released their offical debut album ‘Who Took Utopia?’ to critical acclaim. This was a self-produced and self-released follow up to Two mini LPs ‘Bus Stop Apocalypse’ & ‘Social Not Working’ and a secret album called ‘Taxi Driver Rumour’ where the Girobabies used an indie/grunge, almost punk, backbeat to deliver pertinent political/social observations akin to the likes of the Sleaford Mods, The Streets & The Fall.
As well as being the frontman with the Megaphone, McG is a renowned poet, writer & spoken word artist under his alias Jackal Trades. Guitarist Robbie Gunn (also performing solo under the guise of Sun Dogs) is a leading Glasgow producer. Drummer by trade, Gordy Duncan JR is also a well-respected solo artist (releasing his debut album in 2015). Recent additions of Jess on Keyboards and the Bass of renowned DJ & Producer Jo D`arc (also of the Twistettes) has refined the balance is this multi-talented band of artists.
Self-funding everything they do, in the truest DIY spirt, the Girobabies have made a name for themselves be being stalwarts of the summer festival scene and gigging the length and breadth of the UK – culminating in a co-headline slot at the legendary Barrowlands. Appearances on STV, airplay and BBC 6 Music continues to propel the band into the consciousness of music lovers everywhere.
Milton Star’s wonderfully atmospheric guitarscapes paint vivid images of love, loss and regret lived out in one no-hope town to the next, in the bars, in shady motels and the highways and byways inbetween. Like other plumbers of emotional depths, The Bad Seeds, Mark Lanegan, Elliot Smith, Alex Chilton, even the darker side of Edwyn Collins, whose combination of lyricism and sound in their occasional promotional videos take you to ‘that’ place – Milton Star go that bit further. Every single composition is accompanied too by a visual interpretation – every release becomes a mini-vignette of sound and vision.
Milton Star are a record company’s dream – totally self-sufficient, writing, recording and producing the music, and slick videos in a converted church in darkest Fife, which one half of the band, Alan Wyllie is lucky enough to call home. Alan and co-conspirator Graeme Currie have collaborated on countless musical projects over the years, stretching back to Post Punk band Thursdays who recorded for the highly influential Fast Product label in 1979. Since then their sporadic bouts of productivity has been overshadowed by years of musical inactivity, but 2010 saw them once again picking up the mantle, dissatisfied by the plethora of insipid modern music being made, to produce a hybrid of intelligent Independent and Dark Country compositions. The resultant sound being a stunning collection of songs characterized by sweet structured melodies propelled by an expansive tremolo wall of sound, a dark soul and rich orchestration.
In their own words;
“The thing that feeds the ideas and make the sound are the environment and acoustics here in the church and setting of the surrounding countryside. To have that on tap every day is just wonderful, we’ve been writing together for maybe 30 years and nothing before has come close. We tend to work independently on songs initially, bouncing ideas back and forth and then come together to flesh things out, but there’s no set pattern, sometimes it’s the words, sometimes the music, sometimes a story or a visual, it’s a pretty fluid process once we get going though.”
You can find out more about Milton Star on their website
The Tuts are an indie punk trio from West London. Live they seriously pack a punch and are noted for their impassioned songs about sexism, feminism and everyday life-isms. The Selecter’s Pauline Black describes The Tuts sound best: ‘infectious guitar led pop wrapped around fiery drums, sharp tongues and splendid harmonies’.
Founding members, Nadia Javed (guitar/lead vox) and Beverley Ishmael (drums) recruited Harriet Doveton (bass/vox) in 2011. The following year they were spotted by Kate Nash and supported her UK and European tours, building up their fan base of ‘Tutters’ wherever they went. Kate Nash raved ‘they are currently the best UK band I’ve seen live in a really long time’. These tours were notably an all-female rock experience that celebrated feminism in the unapologetic 1990s ‘Riot Grrrl’ tradition.
In 2014 Billy Bragg invited The Tuts to play his LeftField stage at Glastonbury. The effervescent appeal of Nadia’s irreverent stage persona and, as Billy himself called it, the ‘fabulous cacophony’ these three women conjure up every time they play makes for an unforgettable live experience. Pauline Black was in the crowd and soon after The Tuts joined The Selecter on their 2015 UK tour.
The Tuts’ music owes something to the Libertine’s brash, devil-may-care aesthetic but they are not fashionable, and hopefully never will be. This is not beautifully crafted gloss for the latest hipster market – the tunes are too good for that. Their timeless three and four chord rants sung out in authentic working class accents carry the X-Ray Spex and 70s New Wave mantle onwards. The Tuts are ‘indie’ indeed, but not in some generic introspective sense: here is a band that possess that irrepressible spirit unique to independent DIY bands. There is no escaping it, ready or not, The Tuts are coming…
Uxbridge indie-popsters Colour Me Wednesday are the young and angry musicians the Guardian says don’t exist anymore. Their hook-laden material explores experiences of SAD and depression, as well as outlining their vegan, feminist, anti-capitalist politics – all through timeless pop structures, infectious melodies, and backed up by a fearsome DIY punk ethic.
Colour Me Wednesday have played throughout the UK, as well as touring the US and Europe, picking up new fans at both New York Pop Fest and Madrid Pop Fest. They’re also the darlings of the light-railway-centred festival set, having played Indietracks twice, to wild acclaim.
Colour Me Wednesday hand-print t-shirts, self release records, and make music videos through creative collective/extended family Dovetown. They’ve already seized the means of production, and they’re gonna seize your ears next. Listen up! ‘Anyone and Everyone’ is their brand new 4 track EP co-released with Dovetown (UK), KROD (FR) and Wiener Recordstheir music (US).
In little under two years since their formation, Barnsley band The Hurriers have blazed a trail across the UK’s festivals and fundraisers. Fast gaining a reputation as the ‘go-to’ political band of the moment.
The Hurriers now release their debut long player ‘From Acorn Mighty Oaks’ working with Sheffield producer Alan Smyth (Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Richard Hawley).
The South Yorkshire five-piece comprises Tony Wright-Vocals, Jamie Walman-Bass/vocals, Sam Horton-Guitar, Jim Proud-Guitar and Zak Wright-Drums.
The band called themselves “A proper socialist punk band” and since their formation in 2013 they’ve made a pretty deep impact. Billy Bragg invited them to play Glastonbury, they’ve played festivals with New Model Army and secured support slots with The Sleaford Mods, including at Sheffield’s O2 Academy.
It seems appropriate that a band steeped in the long history of working class struggle should also be a band that crosses generational lines (singer Tony and drummer Zak are father and son). Having some younger blood in the band seems to ignite The Hurriers and infuse them with an energy and pace that belies their combined ages. This is an incendiary band with guitars, SKA rhythms, harmonies and singalongs. You can hear echoes of bands like The Clash,The Redskins, The Jam, Gang Of Four and The Specials.
And their manifesto? Nothing short of “contributing to the overthrow of the corrupt capitalist system through the power of song”. And what songs they are!
Blossoms are – Tom Ogden, Charlie Salt, Josh Dewhurst, Joe Donovan and Myles Kellock – a five-piece band from Stockport, who in a relatively short space of time (forming in late 2013) have become one of the hottest live bands on the circuit, performing at festivals including SXSW, The Great Escape, T in the Park, Latitude, Reading & Leeds as well as two shows in Tokyo. In 2016, Blossoms played at the iconic Glastonbury Festival and reached #1 with their eponymous debut album.
Remember what Jean Shepherd said about creeping meatballism being the passive acquiescence of people who surrender to the demands of the consumer culture and collaborate in their own manipulation? In the Great Satan back in the 1960s, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and three of their friends founded the counterculture-oriented Youth International Party whose slogan was “Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball”. It’s in the yippie spirit, in fact, that I’m now referring to America as the Great Satan, certainly not out of any respect for that chicken-fucker Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who coined the term. Uncle Sam may be the more common nickname, but in that guise America is the uncle comes to your bedroom at your parents’ house at night with its trousers unzipped.
I remember a story I heard on the radio (remember those), on National Public Radio, I think, about a couple who had this pet chimpanzee, a female they’d named Jane. There came a point when they couldn’t care for her anymore, and thinking she should be with her own kind, they gave her over to the local zoo. The first time they came to visit her, she became extremely excited, especially when they gave her a bunch of treats. They came again and did the same, failing to notice the agitation from the other chimps. When they returned the third time, Jane wouldn’t come near them, and had clearly been beaten. Asking the zookeeper what happened, he explained that they should have brought enough for all of the group.
There’s a quote going around falsely attributed to Jody Foster that was actually a computer-generated meme. Maybe machines are not as stupid as we thought. The quote goes, “Attacking the rich is not envy; it is self-defense. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty: they create it and maintain it.” That’s the end of the so-called quote, but if it had continued, the computer would’ve added that they maintain it through the power of the political state and informal means of social control such as the creation of patriotism and making the poor ashamed of the poverty inflicted upon them in order to maintain the wealth of the few, as if it is somehow their fault rather than the wankers and cunts who have thrust it upon them.
Another meme I’ve seen in relation to the suffering visited upon Greece by the European Union which should make one have second thoughts about that body, that just because Brexiters were so obnoxiously bigoted does not mean the EU is a good thing anymore than Donald Trump makes Hillary Clinton a good thing or Donald Cameron and Theresa May make Tony Blair a good thing. This meme, describing the chain of events leading to the crash of 2007 and the ongoing Great Recession, quite accurately describes austerity.
It goes like this: Rich people cause economic crisis. Rich people demand bail out from state for causing the crisis. Rich people do better than ever before. Rich people demand austerity, which is a fancy word for cutting services for the non-rich, to pay for bailing out rich people. Rich people blame poor people for the crisis they themselves have created, and become angry that poor people think they deserve better, calling for more sacrifice…sacrifice from the poor, that is.
So, the answer to the age-old question of why is there so much poverty in the world, as answered by a computer no less, is that there is poverty because there is wealth. Wealth is, in fact, is the sole cause of poverty. Without a greedy few amassing hoards of resources out of the reach of the rest of humanity, there would be more than enough for all. The needs of the many should outweigh the greed of the avaricious few.
Much is made of the divide between the basement dwellers who supported Bernie Sanders and the deplorables who support Donald Trump. The truth is that both sets of us are driven by the same underlying motivation; less and less available for the many as the few, the 1%, hoard more and more to themselves. Like the grassroots of the Occupy movement vis-à-vis the rank-and-file of the Tea Party movement in its early days. The differences are superficial and ephemeral, just like the illusory divide between grassroots supporters of Brexit and grassroots opposers of Brexit. The more we buy into this division which is as artificial as any national border, the more we collaborate in our own manipulation and allow the meatball to creep on until it rolls over us like a boulder. We can’t abandon the creeping meatball unless we first rise up and demand what all of us deserve, a cooperative commonwealth of the many, by the many, and for the many, even the then formerly wealthy whose hoards have been more fairly distributed.
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