Jon Ewing
Playlists
Music to Fight Evil – Year One Retrospective
23 May 2018
A little over a year ago I started adding inspirational music to a Spotify playlist. In that time I’ve been discovering emerging new artists as well as revisiting old favourites and learning about classic songs, all with one thing in common – the artists have something to say beyond boy-meets-girl, something about the state of their nation and the world…
Smalltown Boy – Bronski Beat
15 May 2018
Rejected by your family and community, your life becomes so unbearable that you would rather give up everything and run than spend another day amongst people who despise you for being who you are. That’s the story behind Smalltown Boy, a UK No.3 hit single in 1984, with an accompanying video that spelled out unflinchingly the emotional agony and physical danger of being one of society’s outcasts in an age of intolerance.
Thrill Pill – Pacing the Cage
6 May 2018
Imagine David Lee Roth had finally discovered his inner feminist and you’ll have a sense of what to expect from this riffing glam metal juggernaut from Melbourne, Australia in which the primitive thought processes men use to sexualise women are summed up in nine words: “I will beat my chest / Until you are undressed”.
Political Puppets – Second Hand Arms Dealer
29 April 2018
From the city of Bristol’s vibrant music scene comes an unequivocal call for revolution from a guitar rock trio steeped in rage: “We don’t have to accept what our democracy’s become,” shouts frontman and bassist Joe Spurrell of Second Hand Arms Dealer. “Let’s Revolt now, before we’re smouldering ashes / The 1% cannot stand up to the masses”.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black – Bob and Marcia
23 April 2018
Bob Andy and Marcia Griffith’s joyful ska version of this powerful civil rights anthem was brought to the world by the hugely influential British-based Jamaican record label Trojan – an offshoot of Island Records – reaching No.5 in the UK charts in 1970 at a time when Jamaican music was just beginning to make its irrevocable mark on British culture.
Freedom – Rival
17 April 2018
Generations before us have laid down their lives to protect it and now we’re giving it away in return for “likes”. Freedom is an essential ingredient of justice and democracy, but those of us lucky enough to live in a free country risk squandering it in return for free access to social media. In their gently funky blues song Freedom, Montreal rock band Rival remind us to be alert to the danger: “How could we ever have a right to complain / when we’re the ones that said it’s okay / to take our freedom away?”
Pride (In the Name of Love) by U2
3 April 2018
If a shot did ring out in the Memphis sky early on the morning of April 4th 1968, it wasn’t because Martin Luther King Jr was being shot dead – that didn’t happen until past 6pm. There are those who would forgive Bono for his slapdash recollection of one of the saddest days in the history of civil rights (he was, after all, only seven years old at the time)…
They Gave Me A Lamp – Public Service Broadcasting
26 March 2018
This sweetly soothing instrumental builds to a euphoric climax on the back of rousing brass and angelic backing vocals but the emotional weight is carried not by the growing grandeur of the arrangement but by the words of two working class women from the valleys of South Wales recalling their own humble contribution to an historic struggle for workers’ rights…
Running the World – Jarvis Cocker
20 March 2018
In the summer of 2006, little had been heard from Jarvis Cocker in a while. After more than 20 years as Pulp frontman, he was dropped by Island Records following the release of Pulp’s final album We Love Life in 2001. He had dabbled, almost anonymously, as half of a very low-key indie duo going under the name Relaxed Muscle, but the project had petered out after releasing an album in 2003. So when Running the World came along it ought to have been a big event in the music calendar…
Walls Come Tumbling Down – The Style Council
13 March 2018
Former Jam frontman and “Modfather” Paul Weller was determined that The Style Council’s 1985 UK Top Ten hit Walls Come Tumbling Down should be a “balls-out soul tune” from the Motown mould and so you could be forgiven for failing to notice at first that this hip-swaying Eighties pop hit is a red-blooded, revolutionary protest song with the very positive and provocative refrain of “Governments crack and systems fall / ‘Cause unity is powerful / Lights go out, walls come tumbling down”…
Mother – Idles
6 March 2018
Listening to this furious, caustic, industrial NSFW anthem is like witnessing the nervous breakdown of the British underclass crushed under the boot of an uncaring state. But amongst the confused ramblings that take in escalating working hours, sexual violence, social inequality and media sedation, there’s an embittered clarity – a message for a jaded generation sick of the machinations of politicians in their ivory towers…
Don’t Let It Go – Jon Worthy
27 February 2018
Emerging from the shadow of the Grand Ole Opry, there’s a new, more eclectic sound coming from Nashville today and with it a youthful new broom sweeping away the centuries of conservative Tennessee values. Opening with a sample of Gil Scott Herons’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and with a chorus that reminds the disenfranchised that they are not alone, Jon Worthy’s Don’t Let It Go is a product of a fresh and inclusive new Nashville…