Isolation Mix Twelve

I’m not sure that the title of these mixes holds true any more but onward we go. This week’s hour of music is coming from the punk and post- punk world and the long tail that snakes from the plugging of a guitar into an amplifier and someone with something to say stepping up to the microphone. Some Spaghetti Western as an intro, some friendship, some politics, some anger, some exhilaration, some questions, some disillusionment, some psychedelic exploration and some optimism to end with.

In History Lesson Part 2 D. Boon explains his friendship with Mike Watt, the importance of punk in changing their lives, the singers and players in the bands that inspired him and, in the first line, the essence of punk as he experienced it.

‘Our band could be your life
Real names’d be proof
Me and Mike Watt played for years
Punk rock changed our lives

We learned punk rock in Hollywood
Drove up from Pedro
We were fucking corn dogs
We’d go drink and pogo

Mr. Narrator
This is Bob Dylan to me
My story could be his songs
I’m his soldier child

Our band is scientist rock
But I was E. Bloom and Richard Hell
Joe Strummer and John Doe
Me and Mike Watt, playing guitar’

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Ennio Morricone: For A Few Dollars More

Minutemen: History Lesson Part 2

Joe Strummer/Electric Dog House: Generations

X: In This House That I Call Home

The Replacements: Can’t Hardly Wait (Tim Outtake Version)

Husker Du: Keep Hanging On

The Redskins: Kick Over The Statues

The Woodentops: Why (Live)

The Vacant Lots: Bells

The Third Sound: For A While

Spacemen 3: Revolution

Poltergeist: Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder)

Echo And The Bunnymen: Ocean Rain (Alt Version)

Pete Wylie: Sinful

Carbon/Silicon: Big Surprise

I Ain’t Found What I’m Looking For

I keep making the mistake of opening Twitter or the newspaper and going back to what happened last Thursday, like a dog returning to it’s own vomit. There’s nothing much to be gained by it at the moment, all the news, comments and opinions are giving different but equally depressing views on the same shitty mess. Johnson’s supporters are obviously cock- a- hoop and the right wing is invigorated and emboldened. The Labour Party has been tearing itself apart since the moment the exit poll slammed down at 10 pm on Thursday night. Boris Johnson has already made some threats against the BBC, to decriminalise non- payment of the license fee and, in a move straight out of Trump’s handbook on how to damage democracy, is boycotting some BBC programmes.

The Redskins 1986 single keeps bubbling up in my mind. Funny how we revert to the protest songs of the 80s. The Redskins famously wanted to be a combination of The Supremes and The Clash and in Keep On Keepin’ On wrote a song that delivered on that promise.

Keep On Keepin’ On

Keep On Keepin’ On (Ted de Bono 12″ Mix)

We’ve Got To Get The Reins In Our Hands Ourselves

This fine slice of pop and politics came up in an internet discussion the other day- The Redskins searing indictment of Tory policies, workers/boss relations and the dole, over a Motown beat, horns and clipped Telecaster. In this clip, live on The Tube, a striking miner is invited to speak over the intro and Channel 4 producers cut the mic. Meanwhile the audience dance in their DMs and bomber jackets. Different times, yet somehow still the same. The 12″ version has an extra five inches of agit-prop funkiness. Keep on keeping on!

Keep On Keeping On (12″ version)

Don’t Forget

Don’t forget to vote today.

I’m sure none of you would consider voting for Ukip and I’m sorry if I’m preaching to the converted here but… there are some people who think that a vote for Ukip is just a protest vote, merely a rejection of the big parties and their grey-suited, all-the-same policies and their featureless leaders. That somehow they are sending a message that ‘the people’ need to be listened to and here’s an ‘outsider’ who can shake things up a bit. And he seems like a decent chap, likes a pint and a smoke, speaks common sense, says what people are actually thinking.

But… a vote for Ukip is not just a protest vote. It is a vote for small mindedness, for a petty Little Englander outlook, for people who think they can turn the clock back to some imaginary 1950s idyll of whiteness and conformity and tidy front gardens, it is a vote for intolerance, for distrust and for bigotry, for conservatism, for backwardness.

Don’t forget to vote today.

Go Get Organised

Keeping It Peel Day Slight Return

A second Peel Session song. It’s half term and I’ve got the time. Early 80s left wing skinheads The Redskins, with Young And Proud from a 1982 session. Get your red docs on and bounce.

Young And Proud

>Redskin Rock

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Furthermore, here’s The Redskins, funked up leftwing punks, who wanted to ‘walk like The Clash, talk like The Supremes’ with their single Unionize. This was released on their own label CNT, which as everyone surely knows is the name of the anarcho syndicalist union who helped prop up The Popular Front government in Spain in the 1930s (despite being anarcho syndicalists, and therefore being against government and believing that the workers should rule themselves for their own benefit) and who armed the workers in the defence of Spanish cities against Franco’s military fascist coup.

Sorry to be a history bore. The music’s worth it.

Unionize

The Redskins ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’

After yesterday’s Clash inspired Rancid roots-radicals-rock (which hasn’t exactly sent Mediafire’s servers into meltdown admittedly), here’s some 80s political soul punk, The Redskins Keep On Keepin’ On. Marxism you can dance to. Remember, Neither Washington Nor Moscow But International Socialism!
How quaint and dated those types of phrases sound now. Nothing quaint or dated about the music though.

Keep_On_Keeping_On.mp3