CATCH SWANSEA SOUND ON TOUR THROUGHOUT SEPTEMBER & OCTOBER
An album of sparkling pop-punk tunes from these lovable veterans of the indie scene, Featuring Hue (The Pooh Sticks) and Amelia (Heavenly) deploying their fuzzed-up guitars and melodic wiles in a set of loud, energetic pop songs, an album, containing self-deprecating critiques of everything that was supposed to be great about the alternative culture of the Twentieth Century – and of the way that culture left its adherents totally ill-equipped to deal with the reality of the Twenty First.
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In
Paradise, the first track, old-school futuristic synth-bleeps accompany Hue as he tries to establish some kind of relationship with a woman who only really exists on his screen. Like an early 80s Gary Numan aficionado, he spends most of his life in digital isolation. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in a coltan mine, using their bare hands to dig out the precious ore that will provide the raw materials for the manufacture of Hue’s smartphone, impoverished workers lose their lives:
‘servers hum/and miners die’ goes the chorus, as the woman Hue hopes to communicate with remains as elusive as ever.
In ‘Click It And Pay’, another cracked duet, Hue is the stressed-out home-worker doing some online shopping. Amelia is the girl in some distant hyper-warehouse who fulfils his requirements. They don’t get to meet – they will never meet – but they kind-of bond through CDs by The Police and Primal Scream that form part of his shopping list. Twenty-First Century romance amounts to no more than the purchase of music reissued from the Twentieth.
The Twentieth Century provided other rock prophets: more political than Gary Numan, these men wore combat gear and sang of revolution. In title track ‘Twentieth Century’ we meet a pseudo-punk singer in fatigues, a purveyor of radical anthems, cushioned by a major label deal, who wonders why he’s lost contact with his once-devoted fans. One of those disappointed fans crops up in ‘I Don’t Like Men In Uniform’: it’s 2023 now, and he’s still angry, still seething with pain – but he’s no longer robust enough to sink his fists, or his teeth, into the authority figures he hates. Meanwhile, in ‘Punish The Young’, an ageing rock icon and sometime rule-breaker curses the young people of 2023 who couldn’t care less about his heroic past, and despises them because they don’t want to work for shit wages on the trout farm that he bought with his royalties back in the 1980s
This sounds grim, and if you look at the Twenty First Century hard enough, it really is. So where is the hope? Well, the music on the album really is joyful, and it really will put a smile on your silly indie face. There’s a love song to Pete Shelley
This sounds grim, and if you look at the Twenty First Century hard enough, it really is. So where is the hope? Well, the music on the album really is joyful, and it really will put a smile on your silly indie face. There’s a love song to Pete Shelley (‘Far Far Away’) – a tribute to a true Twentieth Century hero. And in the final track – ‘Pack The Van’ – the band make fleeting contact with the pure idealism of their early teenage years, remembering the beautiful beach on the South Wales coast that provided the backdrop to their passionate youth. Maybe if we could access that optimism again we might find a way forward…
