Former Lost Prophets singer Ian Watkins is now a found pervert. His deviance and depravity makes Jimmy Saville and co's sex crimes seem socially acceptable.

JAMES KING AND THE LONE WOLVES - Article / Review / Download.

With all the current media interest about JFK, I was recently moved to play James King and The Lone Wolves rather brilliant Texas Lullaby. I didn't really fancy blowing my head off with the Dead Kennedys, I was more in the mood for something slightly more laid back and mellow. Back in the early eighties James King and The Lone Wolves were jangly swamp blues rockers; Mean, moody and menacing, they could have been contenders, but tales of drunken and violent excesses and a no compromise attitude meant major record companies were afraid of the big bad wolf and went for the easy soft options like Lloyd Cole and The Commotions and Aztec Camera instead, and mainstream success eluded the Lone Wolves. The band split in 1985 and their legend faded into obscurity, or did it?

Anyway to cut a story short, after playing the 5 track Texas Lullaby 12”, a record I've held dear since 1984, I did an internet search on James King and The Lone Wolves, and found out that my radar had missed the fact that the band had reformed in 2011, to play a couple of tribute gigs and haven't looked back due to the positive reaction they received, they also started recording, and the four track Pretty Blue Eyes E.P was released earlier this year, available as a digital download from Amazon.

The opening track Pretty Blue Eyes, recalls the sound of the Velvet Underground, while Fun Patrol is a neo Rockabilly rumble, a re-working of an old song of theirs, now with added harmonica. Guitars reverberate as James spits out some of the wickedest lyrics ever written; “Would you crawl on broken glass for me?....Would you blow your fucking brain out with a gun for me?” Even Beatles Die is a swirling and sweeping statement with Thunders style guitar licks. Happy Home finds feedback infused guitars dropping in and out creating an atmospheric anthem of alienation  “I don't want to crawl in your world I want to take a walk in mine.”

Has age mellowed James King and The Lone Wolves? No! They sound far darker and deeper on their walk to hell. The off kilter country vibe is still there, but there's more of a chugging and chopping three pronged guitar attack going on behind James's distinctive drawl which is akin to Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders and Lou Reed having a fight on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. If the devil has all the best tunes, he got another four missing from his collection.

The Pretty Blue Eyes E.P is a haunting, emotional, intense and uneasy listen at times, the very essence of Rock'N'Roll; a groove that moves, an impassioned howl while wrestling with demons. These are twisted and tortured tunes of anguish. Tales of emotional turmoil and torment, broody and buoyant songs to drown in. This is life with all its beauty and ugliness affirming stuff! Single of the year? Definitely! Can't wait to hear their reworked Texas Lullaby which they are in the process of recording and mixing at the moment.

While I was on my internet travels I also found a couple of videos on youtube, from which I've ripped the audio (Thanx to the original uploaders) for your enjoyment. Here's Happy Home, Even Beatles Die and Fun Patrol. Live @ The Glasgow Glasshouse in March 2013, and there's Fly Away and Fun Patrol live on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1985. Enjoy! or Destroy!

  

Just another no good politician!.

Words: Dead Kennedys / Image: Times Newspaper / Juxtaposition: Nuzz Prowling Wolf.

KILLING A SACRED COW; Monty Pythons Flying Cash Circus!

So that Great British institution Monty Python have teamed up and got back together. When times are hard animosities and differences have been put aside. A sell out tour, DVD's etc will no doubt follow, and fill the bank accounts of all concerned. This isn't unfinished business, this is just.... business, and the joke is on anyone who buys into it.

I'm so glad The Clash never reformed, and so disappointed that The New York Dolls did, the dead can never, or should never be replaced. When Joe Strummer was still alive offers were turned down, which is why for me The Clash unlike the Pistols were the only band that mattered, but hey at least the Pistols had the honesty and decency to call their comeback tour The Filthy Lucre Tour.

For me the only reasons acceptable for re-unions and reformations are when the bands or artists have unfinished business i.e. ones that never realised their full potential, or feel they still have something relevant to say. I have no gripes about bands like The Fits, James King and The Lone Wolves, The Mob, Chelsea or The Outcasts all becoming part of the 20^th Century retrolution circus.  Perhaps they have a part to play in destroying the present obsession with the passive consumption of the past, which is giving us no future.

Those that ignore the past are condemning us to a future that has been written. Those that use the past to condemn the present can help write the future. I wonder what new material Monty Python will come up with?

"....a mist comes down and blinds my eyes, as I hear all the same lies." - Out In The Dark - The Lurkers.

THE RAMONES - The Cretin Hop (Unofficial/Bootleg album.)

This recording captures The Ramones in front of an enthusiastic Ann Arbor audience in February 1979 during their Road To Ruin tour, and months before they started recording End Of The Century. The set is a great selection of tunes from their first four albums plus a couple that would appear on the aforementioned End of The Century. It's fast, furious and frantic full throttle pedal to the metal Rock'n'Roll. Raw, rough and raucous even by Ramones standards. As a bonus there are also 7 tracks from various TV show appearances the band made between 1982 and 1995. Hey, Ho Let's Go!

LIFE INTIMIDATING ART.

Some musicians us the term 'art' to describe their work, because as music, it's shit. However art defines any old shit because it is....art, and anything seems to pass for art if people are told it is art. Music doesn't need definition because people can hear it is music. When it comes to what people see, they have to be persuaded and seduced into looking at something for what it isn't when it is what it is....a pile of bricks, a dead cow or a floor covered in seeds, they are what they are until people are told it shows humanities darker side....blah, blah, blah. It's another case of the emperors new clothes, and all the media and service industries are in it all together; selling people more shit they don't really need by telling us it is something that it is not. The whole world is just gaga!

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE.

Modern life discarded in Portmadog, North Wales Oct/Nov 2013

Fuck holidays abroad! The beach at Morfa Bychan, North Wales Oct/Nov 20130

Ahoy! Ahoy! The Land and The sky!  Cwm Croesor, North Wales Oct/Nov 2013

UNTITLED POEM/SONG #?

Looking in the mirror craving attention,

another love child of a narcissist nation.

Look out of the window, cannot see anything

another blinded child who always wants something.

Celebrity kills, creating a death culture,

bones of the past picked at by capitalist vultures.

Bought and sold, the new and the old.

By all the taste makers trend setters, movers and shakers.

Down from the hills comes a thundering sound.

A thousand marching feet across the ground.

Tattered and torn flags, flapping in the field.

There will be no surrender because no one will yield.

The blood runs over England’s green and now unpleasant lands,

everyone fighting something they don't understand.

Two world wars and one world cup,

a dead empire, who gives a fuck?!

British soldiers give Nazi salutes.

Fingers on the triggers, there are Muslims to shoot.

A grey mist covers a land with no hope or glory,

history tells a different story.

A storm is coming, a real rain will fall

knocking all the Humpty Dumpty's from off the wall.

REMEMBER, REMEMBER....

LOU REED - R.I.P

"EVERYTHING YOU SIGNIFY / EVERYTHING YOU REPRESENT....

I RAISE MY FIST AND I SING MY SONG FROM THE DAWNING OF THE LIGHT UNTIL THE SETTING OF THE SUN / I'M A THORN IN THE EYE OF THE CURRENT CONTENT. RISE UP!"

Rise Up! Is the throbbing and tuneful new single from reluctant Anarcho Punks, The Mob. After thirty years they're back to the battlefield with a real call to arms anthem to blast from the barricades. Available from All The Madmen Records or as a digital download from Amazon.... RISE UP!

BABYSHAMBLES / DEADCUTS - Live @ Cambridge Junction (*A Review / Article*)

Last Thursday (17^th) between them Babyshambles and support band Deadcuts blew the roof of the Cambridge Junction. It was a night of Pure Rock'n'Roll at its most riveting and exciting, certainly the best time I've seen Babyshambles. I wont go into detail of the songs they played, but it was a well selected cross section of the old'n'new, borrowed'n'blue, because Babyshambles are more than just Pete Doherty, as a listen to their latest album Sequel To The Prequel will testify. Pete was at his playful and prancing best, at one point, with scant regard for health and safety he launched the micstand and microphone into the adoring throng of 'shambles crazies. Earlier in the evening Deadcuts had shaken the foundations with a post punk, post brit pop sonic assault on the senses. From the opening guitar noise and the first few chords along with their glam scruff look something told me that Deadcuts might be quite good. Thirty minutes later and my initial reaction had been proved wrong, they weren't quite good, they were fucking great!

A trip to their facebook page the next day revealed a lot more about Deadcuts to me. It turns out singer and guitarist Mark Keds had been in the Senseless Things (a late 80's early 90's indie guitar band.) Bassist Mark McCarthy played in The Wonder Stuff, and Goth Rockers Queen Adrena, Drummer Trevor Sharpe had hit the skins for Miranda Sex Garden, while the guitarist with a look of Johnny Thunders about him was Jerome Alexander formerly of The Skuzzies. With that sort of pedigree, and a rich and varied list of influences from Johnny Thunders to Death In June and The Birthday Party to Prince. it is no wonder the Deadcuts are a....cut above yer average Rock'n'Roll band.

The piercing twin guitar attack, solid Semtex bass and the machine gun drums hammer their songs into yer head and heart, these are tunes that absorb and engulf the listener before spitting them out shaking and twitching on the floor. The throaty and drawling vocals add to the full throttle aural assault. Never mind being a breath of fresh air in the stale stagnant Rock'nRoll world of the noughties Deadcuts are like a tornado; ripping it all up with their sleazy sonic soundscapes, like a punked-up Psychedelic Furs. Deadcuts are a psyched up primal, tribal and feral howl in the face of mediocrity.

I dunno if the 4 track CD of theirs which I picked up at the gig is their new single or what, but it's well worth tracking down, but while you do that, here's a selection of songs from their soundcloud page for you to Enjoy or Destroy!  

SOME THOUGHTS FROM THE SILENCE.

Been on a bit of a downer for the last few weeks, hence the lack of posts, but I've just started writing some random shit down recently.

The nights have started to draw in streets and alleyways are engulfed in darkness cos the council have turned down the lights to save money. Fuel poverty as energy prices rise.

Turn on the TV and across the globe countries go from crisis to crisis. while the Western world still hold onto the capitalist dream of globalisation.

From civil wars in Africa that fuel the worlds wireless mobile phone addiction to chemical attacks in Syria and the news that the Red Cross are gonna be providing food parcels to Britain’s poor and needy this Christmas. This is not good. With so much wealth in the pockets of so few and others are starving....Eat the rich! Rob their cake! Don't buy the products and try to live their dream while others exist in a nightmare.

The US Government has shut down; such has been the cost of their decades of warmongering and endless space exploration McRocket Man looking for new frontiers to exploit both on earth and out in space.... ….

Two days off the wheel, and just like a hamster I'm gonna curl up and do fuck all! The phone rings, I nearly answer it as if I was at work....need a break get a way from it all. Modern life isn't rubbish, it's mundane, or is that just my life, where everything becomes a routine, as much as I love doing this blog sometimes it's hard to get enthusiastic about stuff, or summon up the energy to even think.

Frustration....freedom denied by chains that bind. Snap the shackles, raise an arm and a fist of fury. Pull down the blindfold take a look around remove the gag from your mouth and shout NO!

We need to take steps into the unknown, into the darkness. We are the light at the end of the tunnel. Just as we have made our own prisons, we can escape from them.

“I stood among them, but not of them, in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.” - Lord Byron.

All quite on the Eastern Front as the worlds biggest warmongers America and Russia decide who became the peacemaker in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis. When the reporting stops, that's the time to think I wonder what the fuck they are up to? What deals have been struck as compromises are bought and sold around tables of power.

Dunno what's worse? working in the private sector making the bosses money, or working in the public sector watching the managers waste our money!

Migrants drown as they try to reach the West...Turn around there's nothing to see here. People with nothing want something while people with everything think they are something, when really they are nothing. Cut 'em and they bleed just like the rest of us.

The ship of fools is sinking.

The times they have a changed! For the first time in a hundred years the next generation is gonna be financially worse off than the previous one, or perhaps people have developed higher expectations and demands in the instant success/failure consumer society they are living in than previous generations. There is also no incentive to save. Interest rates are low to both the borrower and the saver, thing is the more you save the less interest you receive on your savings. It's all about spend, spend, spend! People used to save for a rainy day, i.e. for when times got tough, now they just save to spend on a rainy day and carry on regardless with no thought for the future.

Kissing  China's arse to get more cash into the coffers of Ukplc. Forget human rights records or the sweatshop economy. It's all about clothing the Western consumer army in cheap clothes and arming it with cheap goods.

Who's covering the cost for the hunt for Madeline McCann? Cos I don't see why the taxpayer should cover the cost of the parents irresponsibility! If they were a family from a council estate who left their kid alone when they went down the pub, they'd have been crucified in the media and by the public. How many other families have had their children abducted, and have they received as much support from the state as the family McCann have?

A sign of the times, or a sigh of things to come? Food-banks in a nation starved of goodness but full of bigots and bullshit.

Look closer, what do you see....?

Question everything!

ZOUNDS - Live @ WFMU Terre T's Cherry Blossom Clinic 22/10/11

Zounds were lumped into the early 1980's Anarcho-Punk scene, but came from a different more Rock'n'Roll musical place than the likes of Crass and Conflict but the politics came from a similar place. The fact that these songs sound as fresh, exciting and relevant as they did over thirty years ago says as much about Steve Lakes song writing as it does about the society and the world that we are living in today hasn't changed in that time and in most respects has got worse. Everyone is looking for a little bit more, or want some demystification as to what is going on, and there is just more trouble coming everyday. We need to hit them where it hurts, subvert, and a change has got to come before to long. I can't recommend this here download highly enough. Five great songs and an interview with a rather embarrassed Steve Lake and the rather OTT presenter Terre.T. Listening to her almost pleading the band to play one of her favourite ever songs Can't Cheat Karma almost brought a tear to my eye and took me back to 1980 and the Leys Youth Club in Letchworth when I first saw Zounds and they blew me away. Their first album The Curse of Zounds is a desert island disc of mine. Their latest album The Redemption of Zounds is also a rather fine Rock'n'Rolling affair that says something. Who said music and politics don't mix.!   

UP THE WORKERS!

Trust management....I wouldn't trust the management to run a bath, never mind a hospital. I did read recently that the problems with the NHS aren't down to bad management, but due to staff shortages?!?!?! Surely that is bad management because isn't it down to managers to work out and manage the human resources, and if the services are suffering due to a lack of staff then it's down to them to manage the recruitment and retention of staff. If the budgets restrain and dictate staffing levels then surely management have been misusing our money. Problems within all areas of the public sector are down to bad management. If these managers worked in the private sector, they wouldn't last a week because their incompetence and lack of foresight would effect company profits and the shareholders would not be happy. In the public sector, it is the public that are the shareholders, and they need to know the truth is not the glossed over version which is presented by the NHS's public and media relations departments.

I heard talk on the Radio (LBC 97.3fm) this morning about whether we need Trade Unions.???? YES we do need unions, but NO we don't need unions that are prepared to compromise their members rights for their own ends, which are usually financial. Trade Union leaders are well paid and well off in comparison to those they purport represent. How can someone with a well off lifestyle possibly be in touch with someone that has to work a month to earn what they do in a week. The exception would be managers that are union members, as many of these are overpaid for the jobs they do or more than often don't do. The reality is that the unions are in bed with the management and so far up each others arses that it's the workers that get fucked.

If anything we need stronger Unions more so than at any other time in recent history, what with the Government trying to take away workers rights with changes in employment law that makes it easier to dismiss a worker if they aren't performing. I wonder if this also applies to managers? I doubt it, unless they have a lovers tiff with the unions

Someone needs to take a stand for those at the bottom, who keep those at the top in their positions of power, or have the workers been brainwashed and bought off by nice end of salary pensions that they are happy to spend their lives on their knees waiting to retire? It would appear that this might be the case, as Trade Union membership has declined over the years since the 1970's and the recent protests have all been about keeping hands off pensions, not about the working conditions and practises which are often the cause of poor delivery of services to the public.

I can see a divide developing, or should I say being created between workers in the Public Sector and Private Sector over pay, pensions and job security. Jobs in the public sector are seen as jobs for life, which is another thing wrong with the NHS and Local Councils, many workers have been there for years and years and have developed working practises and cultures over the past that are not in keeping with the present, so you get both managers and their staff going through the motions and keeping silent about bad practices through fear of losing their job. In a world where the individual rules, the powers that we let be can target and pick off smaller groups easier than they could one big union of people. The Trade Union power was reduced after Maggie Thatcher destroyed the Miners during the strikes in the 80's, then under New Labour's champaign socialist reign union leaders got fat on the profits of power and layer upon layer of middle management positions were created to reward workers ready to compromise their socialist values for, any short fall could be filled by young graduates schooled under the conservative value of competition being the only way to deliver goods and services to a self preservation I'm alright Jack society.