"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.!