2024 in Thumbnails

This year saw a song about the floods (there’s going to be more of those, I’m sure), Greene King brewery exposed, Noah as a metaphor for Daily Mail-reading middle-England’s attitude to refugees, the unluckiest street in the UK, a love song based in a factory making weapons being used to destroy Gaza, two new additions to the Put Up Shut Up Britain collection, a song about loss, your actual five-a-day, another in the collection of St. George’s Day songs, another one about your diet, a Protest Family single, kicking out your kitchen fitters, a weather forecast for the east coast, yet another song inspired by Nick Ferrari on LBC, the follow-up to Pricks In Space, Hans Christian Anderson for the modern era, the first protest song to feature Rachel Reeves as Chancellor of the Exchequer, an attempt to expose election fraud by committing election fraud, mousetraps used to try to explain how global asset managers and index funds work, and a song that started life over a failed vegan breakfast in a Wetherspoons in Stourbridge on Remembrance Sunday.

We plan to release a new album next year. Which ones do you reckon will make the cut?

Mary and Joseph

Mary

She pulled her shawl tighter around her
A mother should never have to outlive her child
Be there at the beginning and the end

She thought about her ex
A gentle man, good with his hands
Who never questioned her unexpected pregnancy
There’s nothing more working class, he’d laughed
Than giving birth in a barn

She pulled her shawl tighter around her
And remembered the starlight
The smell of fresh hay
And the warm comfort of the animals
On the day that he was born

Joseph

I’d have made a better job of that manger
He watched over his new-born son
One day, when he’s older
I’ll teach him to saw straight and to nail true
To value form as much as function
And be the master of his craft

But it wasn’t to be

They couldn’t survive the recriminations
Should they have kept him from the temple?
Who put those revolutionary ideas in his head?

He thought about her in the starlight
The smell of fresh hay
And the warm comfort of the animals
On the day that he was born

The Man Who Built The Burning House

The man who built the burning house
rubs his hands, his fingers laced
The order for a million more
is ready to be placed

He flexes fists and wrists
like he’s choking the supply
He knows the tricks that keep demand
and profit-making high

New homes for all, the promises
of ministers and kings
The man who built the burning house
is waiting in the wings

Henry and the Tractors

Henry parked his tractor in Whitehall
Turned to the camera to explain
My lifestyle is under threat, he said
It’s causing my accountant great pain

The only way to farm this land, he said
Is if your father was a farmer too
And if your granddad owned it before him
Then farming’s what you’re born to do

Like being a millionaire, I thought
The bit that was going unsaid
Why’s the right to own and work the land
Restricted to the born and bred?

Henry and the tractors were holding up traffic
Like Just Stop Oil in tweed caps
Barbour coats and green wellies
A Reform UK uniform, perhaps

Like mustard-trousered Farage
Defending the interests of his class
Henry parked his tractor in Whitehall
What a fucking arse