Jon Ewing
Playlists
Great Divide – American Television
4 February 2020
Three minutes of upbeat skate punk to remind us that democracy is under threat as the rich get richer while the masses are sometimes forced to choose between food and medicine…
Stand For Your Land – O’KEEFE
28 January 2020
Some protest singers are inspired by a hardship that affects them individually or a universal injustice that affects us all. For Erin O’Keefe and Colin Gilmore, the inspiration for the brooding, melancholic country-folk song Stand For Your Land came from respect…
Glad to Be Gay – Tom Robinson Band
20 January 2020
In the week of Valentine’s Day 1978, an anthemic and yet shocking protest song on a 4-track live EP sneaked under the radar to become a Top 20 hit in Britain. It was a song in which The Tom Robinson Band shamed a nation with a first-hand account of the abject indignity of being gay in 1970s Britain…
The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum) – Fun Boy Three
13 January 2020
“Nothing’s changed!” singer Terry Hall told Uncut magazine in 2019 when he re-recorded Fun Boy Three’s hit record The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum) for The Specials’ comeback album. “When we wrote it, we had Reagan and Thatcher and we thought things couldn’t get worse. Now we’ve got Trump and May!”…
Stop the Cavalry – Jona Lewie
17 December 2019
A Christmas hit in 1980, peaking at No.3 in the UK chart and winner of a prestigious Ivor Novello Award, Stop the Cavalry was an anti-war song for a world living in the shadow of the bomb, harking back to the slaughter of British soldiers on foreign battlefields, pawns in a game played by generals far from the front lines…
Harriet Tubman’s Gonna Carry Me Home – The Long Ryders
26 November 2019
Paying tribute to one of America’s greatest 19th century folk heroes, Harriet Tubman’s Gonna Carry Me Home is a history lesson from a white Southerner sung in the voice of a long-dead black slave – a spiritual in the great oral tradition, giving a lesson in bravery and compassion to a new generation, from the faithful to the faithful…
Superheroes – Skint & Demoralised
10 September 2019
Powerful and cinematic, Superheroes by Skint & Demoralised achieves an epic scope within its economical 2 minutes and 42 seconds by setting a spoken word story about a young boy’s innocent wisdom to a rousingly dramatic score. And as it builds to its heart-splittingly moving climax, it is made all the more poignant by the knowledge that it really happened…
Change – Mavis Staples
4 September 2019
The voice of the legendary Mavis Staples is sounding more soulful than ever on her raw new album, We Get By. And on the opening track, written and produced by Ben Harper, Ms Staples pleads simply and repeatedly for the violence and intolerance of our age to end. “Bullets flying, mothers crying,” she sings in this concise three minute blues, accompanied by a growling guitar riff. “We gotta change around here”…
Aleppo – Leyla McCalla
18 August 2019
“Fists are flying in the name of love,” sings Leyla McCalla on Aleppo, the sobering standout centrepiece of her third album, The Capitalist Blues. “So much violence in the name of love,” she continues as the guitar pierces us with a shriek of obstreperous feedback. “We look on and on, we don’t heed the call / Who knows if we care at all?…
Broken World – The Interrupters
22 July 2019
Lively LA ska punks The Interrupters are calling for greater unity at a time of great division. And their song even contains a few specifics about how we might get there. Unfortunately, it’s going to require a bit of sacrifice, so, you know, just scroll on by if that’s going to be too hard…
Take the Good – Jon Worthy & The Bends
15 July 2019
Inspired by his eye-opening, first-hand experience of extreme poverty in The Philippines in 2018, the closing song from Jon Worthy’s new album, Something’s Gotta Give, is a reminder to himself, at a very dark time in his life, that no matter how bad things seem, you have a lot to be grateful for when you are a young, white, American male…
Woke Up This Morning – Alabama 3
18 June 2019
The song that so perfectly epitomised the dark heart of 21st Century East Coast American organised crime, familiar to millions from the opening credits of The Sopranos, is not even American. It was written in London by an Elvis-loving Mormon from South Wales and a Glaswegian polymath. And it’s not about the American gangland. It was inspired by the true story of a British woman who killed her abusive husband… or was it?…