Category: Steve

Pay Your Tax

Pig-Fucker in Panama Papers Pickle

Is anyone surprised that David Cameron benefited from offshore investments that paid no tax? I’m only surprised that he wriggled and tried to hide it when the Mossack Fonseca story started to break. After all this government by the rich on behalf of the rich seem to get away with pretty much whatever they want, and we may chortle at his “It’s a private matter” whining, but it’s not like he’s going to give any of it back now is it? You might call for his head too, but there will be no challenge to his leadership this side of the EU referendum, the knives are still being sharpened.

Regular listeners will know that the words to Pay Your Tax vary considerably live, giving us the chance to have a pop at the latest tax dodger du jour. If the song makes it to the set lists for either Barnsley or Brixton, Camerons junior and senior are very much in the cross-hairs. And Cameron’s the perfect target. Although the song lists corporate tax dodgers (along with the occasional dig at Gary Barlow) their “it’s not illegal, just immoral” defence holds water. The real enemy is the system of government that allows the super-rich and the multinationals to benefit from massive tax avoidance only barely hidden from public view, and Cameron is both author and beneficiary of this corrupt regime.

David Cameron, we’re coming for you.*

 

* In rhyme, with mandolins and shit.

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Glossop Labour Club

glossop labour club 2bw

“Glossop Labour Club is an independent social club. It is not affiliated to any political party, but is home to people who share a progressive outlook on life.”

Ooh, that’s interesting: setting out your “No, we’re not affiliated to the Labour Party” stance in the opening paragraph of your web site. The authors of Glossop Labour Club’s site go on to add that they’re one of the oldest Labour/Socialist clubs in the country, founded in 1906 by the ILP, two years before the national party existed.

Our kind of folk, but folk we’d mostly not met before; and though a warm and friendly audience, one that was prepared to subject our songs to some scrutiny. From the stage you could almost feel people listening, working out what we meant and realising that yeah, we are all on the same side. It’s great when that happens. I remember a conversation at Tolpuddle the morning after we’d played when a fella we’d not met before (let’s call him Hugh) came back to us with a couple of lines from the first verse of No Pasaran In E17 for a fuller version of the story.*

Talking of anonymous contributors to the story, I used a fictional friend (let’s call him Dave) as part of the intro to Victoria Says. Fictional Dave is of course based on a real friend called, um, Dave, but being 200 miles away from home I thought I’d got away with it. Turns out that Dave (the real one) had a mate in the room who he’d encouraged to come along if we were ever playing nearby. Busted. But in a good way.

Anyway, an hour long set gave us a good opportunity to set out our stall to a new crowd. We started with a bang, messed around with spoons and poetry in the middle, and finished on a high with a Pete Seeger singalong and our version of the National Anthem. We got a lovely review in the Morning Star too.

With a bit of TLC, the Protest Family tour bus made it to and from Glossop without incident and we’ll hope for the same again as we head to Barnsley on May Day for the Festival of Solidarity in the Polish Club. That’s one you don’t want to miss, a gathering of the great and the good of the lefty touring scene, with an average age slightly lower than the Pensioners Against The Cuts Tour.

May Day Festival of Solidarity

You should come.

Steve

* Hugh: “So what you’re saying is that the RMT used health and safety to perform an overtly political act and oppose fascism?” Us: “Yeah”.

 

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A Spoonful of Poison

Fantastic.

Spoonful crops up periodically in the history of The Protest Family, from my early solo appearances at its original incarnation in the front bar of the Rhythm Factory (banished to the main room eventually after too many noise complaints), to me, Doug and Lol debuting our non-Orient Barron Knights stuff as Fuck Off White at the Legion*, to Lol trying not to bash his head against the unfeasibly low ceiling in the Trash Bar, and that night in a basement in Stoke Newington when Andy realised that The Protest Family probably wasn’t for him.

What is A Spoonful of Poison you ask? Well if you really don’t know, it is, in Spoon’s own words “a night of joyfully shambolic, chaotically entertaining, multi-discipline open mic anarchy”. And that’s not far from the truth. Spoonful at the Rhythm Factory was the spiritual home of the London Antifolk scene and the place where you’d catch all of the capital’s most interesting performance poets. Kate Nash, Milk Kan and Scroobius Pip all cut their teeth at Spoonful. Without Spoonful we’d never have had Spinmaster Plantpot, nor that glorious night when me and Chris The Lips ended up opening for Babyshambles.

As the years went by there were fewer poets (“Go back to your ghettos and bring me poets!”) as the spoken word slots were filled by stand-up comedians (I invariably preferred the poets) and the realities of running an open mic in London forced a series of venue changes** but the important things remained constant: the great, and sometimes challenging, acts, Spoon’s progressive drunkenness as the evening wore on and the variable timekeeping that meant it’s always ran late, but everyone always made the last bus.

There was, and is, something very special, and hard to define, about A Spoonful of Poison. Not everybody gets it, but for those that do, they realise that there’s no other night out like it, and for proof of that you’ve got to look no further than last night. After something of an extended break, Spoonful’s back. Well for five Saturdays in March and April anyway. And last night’s opener was a cracker featuring a bunch of old-school Spoonful acts: Scrappy Hood, Stu Crane (did Stu have a stage name last night?), Ernesto the Naked Poet and of course, JJ Crash and The Lips….

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Spoonful’s back. You should definitely go.

Steve

* Yes, that was the night that Lol first set eyes on Ernesto.

** I lost count somewhere along the way, but if we haven’t played at all of them, then it’s nearly all of them.

 

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Protest Family Migration

So, there I was this morning enraged yet again by the unbiased BBC reporting that hearts are hardening to the Syrian refugee crisis, as now 41% of those surveyed thought that we shouldn’t take any more in. No mention of the 59% of people who think that we should definitely be doing a lot more. Even if it’s down from 69% it still looks like a majority to me, but looking at the figures that way clearly doesn’t suit the narrative. (And before we go on to talk about the “M” word, has anyone noticed the complete lack of media coverage of the bombing campaign in Syria since the vote?)

But yes, the “M” word got a repeated airing in the BBC Radio 4 coverage this morning. Migration’s for the birds isn’t it? I thought people were immigrants or emigrés, not migrants. Migrant is a dehumanising term straight out of the bigot’s toolbox. How much easier is it to discriminate against people if you describe them as something that falls short of your definition of people. See also: the way the Nazis described the Jews and the way soldiers are taught to describe the enemy. Charlie Hebdo can fuck off too.

But I’m not here to talk about that.

The talk about travel does remind me that I should be talking about The Protest Family and our upcoming travels. Now maybe if you’re AC/DC or Bruce Springsteen your gigs for the next twelve months are already well mapped out, but if you’re us, maybe less so. What we do know is that we’ll be hitting the road a lot more this year than we have done in previous years, starting with a trip to Glossop next month.

Now Baby Jesus died on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Monday, leaving a very convenient long weekend in between. Easter Sunday might be a re-run of Christmas three months later, tofurkey dinner and board games with the folks, but that does leave you with a whole Easter Saturday to fill, particularly if the football calendar gets switched to the (Good) Friday. Never fear, we shall be performing at Glossop Labour Club with fellow WSO-er Ste Goodall. The Quiet Loner’s Defiance Sessions are gathering some momentum and it promises to be something of an evening.

Talking of Sundays, May the 1st falls on a Sunday this year and it’s Tony Hurrier’s inaugural May Day Festival of Solidarity in Barnsley where we’ll be joined by many of the luminaries of the socialist music scene. We’ve got to get to grips with the workers’ holiday before the Tories turn it into Margaret Thatcher Day or something equally horrid, so hit the streets and celebrate, and if it’s the street that the Polish Club in Barnsley’s in so much the better.

The weekend of the third Sunday in July is of course the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. Expect the usual Tolpuddle Unplugged shenanigans. More of this later, but also on a Sunday is the Burston Strike School Rally and another opportunity for band selfies in front of trade union banners.

Somewhere between Burston and Bridport we’ll have to squeeze in WSO, Stowfest and somebody’s birthday celebrations, but the fixture computer hasn’t spoken yet so watch this space.

Is that it? Probably not, but do join us around the country and do listen to the news with a critical ear.

S.

 

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2015

From picket lines to private parties, it’s been an interesting year for the Protest Family. Gigs for workers on indefinite strike at both Lambeth College and the National Gallery turned into celebrations at the successful conclusion of their disputes; UCU members fighting off new contracts for existing staff and the National Gallery strikers winning on all of their demands except privatisation of the gallery, including re-instatement of their union rep Candy Unwin.

Singing Bad Day For Bojo over and over again outside Leytonstone station may not have halted the tide of Boris Johnson’s ticket office closures but an early start on the RMT/ASLEF picket line did see the network brought to a standstill along with the mayor’s plans to push through the introduction of the Night Tube. We all want the tube to run all night, let’s hope that now we can have it safely, and delivered by workers whose work/life balance is protected by well-negotiated contracts.

Both private parties were wakes, one for a comrade who was already dead, the other for the woman who stuck around long enough to have two living wakes a year apart and one more Tolpuddle Festival than she thought she was going to get. We lost Sonja in September, a great friend, an indefatigable campaigner and a great advocate of the band. She badgered Billy Bragg ceaselessly on our behalf and the ultimate fruits of her labour may yet still be to be seen.

Festival sound engineers ranged from the nonchalant to the point of not caring in Plumstead to the brilliantly professional at Rhythms Of The World in Hitchin to the absolutely nothing is too much trouble of Matt from Wilding Sound in Walthamstow who helped us out so much at this year’s Matchwomen’s Festival. Festival weather had its ups and downs too, glorious sunshine in Canning Town but an absolute soaking for our audience in Hitchin who were at least treated to the rain stopping by the end of our set.

Two gigs at The Sov this year (one unplugged) was bettered by three We Shall Overcome gigs. Well for me and Doug at least, as we provided the opening entertainment at We Shall Overcome What’s Cookin’ on the band’s day off between gigs at the Bread & Roses and Ye Olde Rose & Crown. That’ll make three gigs at the Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen’s Club too if you count that one along with An Evening Of Radical Entertainment for the Leytonstone Festival in July and the Christmas What’s Cookin’ show with Graham Larkbey & The Escape Committee.

How we got the whole of The Protest Family, The Escape Committee and former member Rory on stage for the encore at What’s Cookin’ I’ll never know. However my favourite stage invader this year has to be Attila The Stockbroker who joined us on fiddle at this year’s Stowfest gig and exclaimed “I wish I’d thought of that” from the side of the stage during George of The Jungle so loud that the whole room heard. We even got him to play Sean Thornton with us.

We’ve got high hopes for George of The Jungle now that we’ve got a recording and accompanying video for it, but we’re wide-eyed naifs in the world of Getting Your Thing To Go Viral. We’re sharing it with everyone we can think of, but we don’t have industry chums or influential pals and we’re dubious about the ethics of the whole world of plugging, not that we have a budget anyway. So it’s a wing and a prayer, a lot of hard work behind the scenes with little idea of it’s value, and a We’ll See. Pay Your Tax got a few thousand views on YouTube quite early on then came to a massive standstill. Who knows what George of The Jungle will do?

But this is supposed to be a round-up of our year. Unplugged at The Sov might have been unplanned, but this was the year that we found our unplugged voice. It’s how we rehearse, but we’d not really pulled it off successfully until last year’s birthday party. This year the unplugged Family’s had a few outings: Show Culture Some Love at Congress House, Hove Folk Club, and of course on the picket line. It’s been very rewarding to do and it’s definitely another string to our bow.

So, more unplugged in 2016, more gigs out of town (watch out Glossop!) and more banjo (maybe). There’s a new album in us too, we’ve nearly got all the songs. Hopefully we’ll do that next year too.

Steve

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Too Political

So I was recently accused (after what I thought was a rather good show) of having become too political, and by extension, less fun. I say “I”, I guess “we” but as the lead singer and main songwriter I suppose I have to bear the brunt of any such accusation.

Whilst it’s true that we have been infiltrated by the hard-left, I’ve always tried to maintain Attila The Stockbroker’s spoonful of sugar approach to writing songs. For instance the songs about Boris Johnson are funny. The point is to take a politician who uses buffoonery to such a great effect to get his own way and to laugh at him, not with him. At the same time though, the songs tackle his racism and his negative relations with the trades unions head on.

Never Mind Your Bollocks, a song ostensibly about breast cancer in men, and prompted by Doug’s dalliance with the illness, tackles industrial disease and takes a backhanded swipe at the 1%. I am a safety rep after all.

And the old songs, even the ones that pre-date The Protest Family are political. Well politics is hard to avoid, it’s interested in you even if you’re not interested in it. Take Summer In Sainsburys for instance. It’s about major corporations bullying workers in the supply chain and pissing on the punters while telling them it’s raining, isn’t it?

But this has been brought to a head by George of The Jungle. I’ve got a lot to say about the Syrian refugee crisis and our government’s shameful role in its creation and in our response, but to write about it I needed an angle, and the patron saint of England being detained in Calais despite his obvious qualifications and because of the country of his birth seemed like the right one to me. If not funny it does at least meet the criteria for those sub-categories of wit: sarcasm and irony.

Perhaps I should be more robust in my acceptance of criticism. My bandmates certainly think so. But I think this is worth addressing and although this blog is a start, ultimately I’ll do it in the form I’m most comfortable with: a song.

Look out for Cheer Up Mate and see if it passes the Protest Family scrutiny process.

Steve

 

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