Furry Little Fuckers

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Chicken Squawk pricked my conscience but not enough to make me change. My quiet admiration for vegan friends didn’t push me over the edge. The road to “ethical” meat-eating had been taken via organic and healthy, but the route abandoned on financial grounds. In the end it was a dog, and I stopped looking the other way.

He really loves you, but he’s just a dog
His love is real, as real as analogue
But the pigs share complex emotional responses too
And the cows to do much more than just go “moo”
So before your conscience recovers
Let’s kill and eat the furry little fuckers

Her name’s Daisy and she’s a sheep
The lucky one the farmer decided to keep
Bringing joy to the kids visiting the petting zoo
Who don’t associate her with being food
So before you think about her sisters and her brothers
Let’s kill and eat the furry little fuckers

Or you could tread a little lighter through this world

Her name’s Frankie, his name is Smudge
Grateful for the culture, the home, the love
But the goats and chickens ain’t got that kind of luck
They’re food not friends, their short lives kinda suck
So before your dinner ups and does a runner
Let’s kill and eat the furry little fucker

He likes pork chops and a steak or two
Maccy D’s and KFC too
Shrink-wrapped, pre-packed, juicy, meaty, fleshy food
Doesn’t think about a time when it had hooves
So before he starts to think about his suppers
Let’s kill and eat the furry little fuckers

Or you could tread a little lighter through this world

Furry

Steve

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Workers Memorial Day and May Day

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“Comrades,

We are here to remember the dead and fight for the living.

We are here to talk about work. Work that defines, unites and sustains us; work that defiles, exploits and destroys us. We are here to talk about hard work; the language of the working class, co-opted and corrupted by those who would rule over us. We are here to reclaim our words and our work, in the time-honoured, traditional way.

And it goes like this…..”

Join us in Abbotts Park, E10 on Sunday for our combined workers’ memorial and May Day celebration. The event starts at 1:15pm and runs to 5pm. We’ll be lighting the blue touchpaper around 4:00.

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The Fish & Bicycle Club

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“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” said Irina Dunn, and so it is that the Fish & Bicycle Club sets out to bring intimate singer-songwriter nights to Kikirocs in South Woodford featuring a monthly bill of whom at least half are women.

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Luke Fairhead

My views on music not as competition notwithstanding, on May 3rd, in the blue corner, we have me, and London-based folk singer Luke Fairhead, described as having “upbeat acoustic optimism in a Frank Turner-y kinda way”[1]. Frank Turner, fuck me that splits opinion. I know a song about him.

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Geri Van Essen

In the other blue corner will be Geri Van Essen who learned to sing in the choirs of her Dutch childhood before tripping over a banjo in Bethnal Green and becoming an East London-based folk singer. Cerys Matthews on BBC R6 said of Geri that “her voice stood out”[2]. Better that than the banjo, Russ.

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Jax Braithwaite

The final member of the quartet is singer-songwriter, theatre performer and London Underground busker Jax Braithwaite. We know a walking project about that. She’s not afraid to admit to being born in Essex, nor to being infused with a “quirky sense of style and smooth melody”[3].

A sapid evening of singer-songwriteriness therefore awaits, spoiled only by my brutish poetry and three-chord political dogma. There are songs left unsung from the Wanstead Tap show and poetry left unsaid. I should also explain more about the born in Essex connection and the Peasants Revolt. I shall make a list.

Kikirocs can be found in George Lane, a few short steps from South Woodford tube station. If you can’t see the Railway Bell, you’ve come out of the wrong exit.

Steve

1. amazingtunes
2. Folk On Monday
3. Winter Sun

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The Appraisal

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Me: “I thought we’d have sold more advance tickets by now.”

The band: “Well, the poster you designed isn’t very good.”

Me: “You didn’t say anything at the time.”

The band: “Yes, but it’s not very good, is it.”

Now we all know that an appraisal should be a shit sandwich; say something nice at the beginning and the end, fill the middle with your criticism. Next time, perhaps we should try:

Me: “I thought we’d have sold more advance tickets by now.”

The band: “Actually ticket sales are encouraging this far from the date of the show, but the poster you designed isn’t very good.”

Me: “You didn’t say anything at the time.”

The band: “Yes, but we do like your hair.”

Here’s another poster.

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Wanstead Tap

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In front of me is a list of songs that is too long.

Some say that’s a good problem to have, that the converse is worse, but I want to tell a story of a couple embroiled in modern British life under the shadow of Brexit. I want to visit their past and future in happier and sadder songs. I want to sing a pop song about the struggle of our trans comrades. I want to laugh at debate without experts and rage at a system that burns people in their homes. I want to play punk for the animals and tell the tale of a revolution in a small Essex village that grew legs and marched on the capital. I want to mock an institution with its boot still on our necks, and genuinely laud their gardeners.

And I haven’t even started on Little Tommy and his crew.

A bill this good requires compromise, there’s only so much time and some crossing out to do. What gets left behind will get carried over, more on that later.

Steve

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Jason Ringenberg

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Pictures or it didn’t happen.

Well there aren’t and it did. Hanging out with Jason Ringenberg after the show was too precious to sully with an awkward request for a selfie. Brave enough to open for The Ramones in Texas, it’s his decency that’s most striking. That and the determination to tell the tales that nobody else is telling, like the story of the Tuskegee airmen.

There’s a fleeting moment in tonight’s show, as Jason is describing the Tuskegee fighter pilots’ 100% record of protecting Allied bomber flights over Germany, when the expected applause doesn’t come. Maybe this crowd is particularly anti-war. Maybe the looming large of exit from political union with our European neighbours engenders some reticence. The power of the story remains.

To be in a band, you think, is to exercise mastery over your instrument and the art of performance. The reality is transport logistics, rigging stages and PA systems, rudimentary sound engineering, manual handling. Tonight I’m running Jason’s merch stall. There’s an unintended consequence in so much as before the first set I’ve met and exchanged pleasantries with half the audience making the shared experience of the show all the sweeter.

We reminisce about a time when I did take a fan photo: My now adult son posing with Farmer Jason in this club close to twenty years ago. We quietly ponder the swift passage of time. Don’t meet your heroes, they say. Sometimes their humanity can only render them more heroic.

Steve

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Barnstormer 1649

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I first saw Attila the Stockbroker’s new-look Barnstormer playing semi-unplugged* in The Schooner in Southwick and it was such a great show that I caught up with it again at the Dublin Castle a few days later. It genuinely is early music meets punk, with recorders, crumhorms, cornamuses, guitar, bass and drums and songs about the English civil war, ranters, levellers and fiery flying roll Abiezer Coppe. (And you really need to hear about him!).

So we’re really pleased to bring the show to Walthamstow, complete with The Protest Family in support and a bonus spoken word set from Attila.

You can get advance tickets from WeGotTickets or if you’re local there are some for sale behind the bar in Ye Olde Rose & Crown. Or, if you think you’re likely to bump into me between now and then, I’ve got a few for sale too.

Don’t miss this one……

Steve

Ticket (business card) 2 (no background)

*Well, you’ve got to plug in a bass guitar somewhere really.

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Snowflake Reviewed

Snowflake – reviewed by Kai at Yeah I Know It Sucks

kainobuko's avatarYeah I Know It Sucks

Artist: Steve White & The Protest Family
Title: Snowflake
Keywords: punk folk protest singer-songwriter United Kingdom

Steve White is the protest artist that gives it to you raw and in your face. With a sense of humor, but not with the laughing laughers as he is certainly no comedian. He apparently is one of those special ‘snowflake’ people in the United Kingdom that got a lot of things to say, probably accumulated things that angered him and gladly found the right way to get it all out of his system and off his chest. A great thing as worrying too much about stuff & keeping it all in might be an invitation to get the cancers.

Here these worries and cases of social commentary are punching out songs with strong meaning, as if they are fists that want to beat some sense in the all-round senselessness of the times that…

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Far Right Round Up

Well if you were hanging around with us the weekend before last, then you were hanging around with some of the Hope not Hate crowd because they were behind the Billy Bragg/The Wakes gig at Islington Assembly Hall and our show with The Wakes at The New Cross Inn the following night. And what a weekend it was! Uncle Bill was on fine form on the Friday and if you enjoyed The Wakes that night then their extended headline show was even better.

You may also have noticed our good friend Matthew trying to upstage Billy Bragg with his intro and, um, dancing on tables at the New Cross Inn. Here he is, in slightly more serious mode, introducing this month’s Far Right Round Up. We know songs about quite a few of them…..

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The Wakes

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So, who are your influences?

I hate that question and it catches me out every time even though I know it’s coming. Answer that and stay fashionable. I’m a songwriter and I write about what’s going on around me, politically often,  from experience usually,  trying to see things through someone else’s eyes occasionally. I want to write a song with an opening line that tells a whole story in a few words (influence: Billy Bragg), I want to write a song with a clever, funny, persistent rhyme scheme (influence: Ian Dury), I want to write a song that the whole band comes in with a bang right at the beginning (influence: The Clash), I want to write a modern acapella folk song (influence Chumbawamba), I want to write a song about Brexit (influence: David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, EU directives, the electorate), I want to write a song that exorcises my rage and frustration (influence: Future Of The Left, Christian Fitness), I want to write a song with a killer hook and an immediate singalong chorus (influence The Wildhearts),  I want to write a song about the second-fastest milkcart in the West……

But enough about me.

The Wakes cite The Pogues, Dick Gaughan, The Clash, Dropkick Murphys and Bob Dylan, wisely using the word “including” to avoid making an exhaustive list, which should be enough to give you some idea. Proudly Glaswegian and anti-fascist, I was blown away the first time I saw them live and they come highly recommended by The Family.

You can make your own mind up at the end of the month. The Wakes are opening for Billy Bragg at Islington Assembly Hall on the 25th, and we’re lucky enough to be opening for them on the 26th at the New Cross Inn. If that wasn’t tempting enough, we’ll be joined by our good friend and Bragg favourite, Paddy Nash.

Philosophy Football are already calling it the gig of the year, and you can still get a ticket here.

I suspect that The Wakes’ and Protest Family’s influences Venn diagram has actually got more than one name in the bit where the circles intersect, so who’s going to edit their Wikipedia page and add Uncle Bill?

 

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