Jon Ewing
Playlists
I Am Her – Shea Diamond
20 February 2018
I Am Her is a simmering Southern blues rock torch song that shoulders the enormous weight of being a woman in a world that treats women as second class citizens, shamed for their sexuality as the keepers of original sin. But there’s a difference that gives the song a jagged edge, because Shea Diamond is a black trans woman with a chequered past that would have Simon Cowell salivating down the front of his trademark half-unbuttoned shirt.
Holiday Destination – Nadine Shah
13 February 2018
Staking a claim on PJ Harvey’s crown as Britain’s leading female art rock singer-songwriter, Nadine Shah’s third album has been described by The Guardian as “darkly classy post-punk” and by No Ripcord as “captivatingly bleak” and in this title track she confronts the people and politicians who treat a modern day humanitarian tragedy as a tiresome inconvenience.
War – Edwin Starr
7 February 2018
Is there a better vocal flourish in all of popular music than when Edwin Starr cries out “Hunh! Good Gawd, y’all!” in the timeless anti-Vietnam protest song War? It’s the inflection of a maestro of the human voice. And with those few syllables, Starr injects a very believable sense of personal exasperation into a song that calls for the warmongers of the world to see sense.
American Skin (41 Shots) – Bruce Springsteen
29 January 2018
February 4th 2018 is the 19th anniversary of the death of an unarmed African immigrant in New York called Amadou Diallo. The 23-year-old had the misfortune to match the description of a wanted criminal and was shot dead by police in the street outside his Bronx apartment building in a tragic case of mistaken identity. A subsequent enquiry revealed that the police officers had collectively fired 41 live rounds, 19 of which hit their target. This astonishing fact is immortalised by American storyteller Bruce Springsteen’s most controversial song, American Skin (41 Shots).
I Am Woman – Helen Reddy
23 January 2018
I Am Woman is not exactly a radical feminist protest song, but it did help to crystallise the self-belief of groups of American women in the 1970s to throw off the shackles of centuries of conditioning and assert their own political, economic and sexual potency. Whilst today the song sounds a little kitsch, in 1972 it became a huge No.1 US hit single that represented an irreversible new wave of feminist thinking in the developed nations of the world.
Jesus in Vegas – Chumbawamba
16 January 2018
Self-proclaimed “anarcho-pop funsters” Chumbawamba were unique in becoming the first anarchist collective indie band to sign to a major label and have a massive worldwide one hit wonder, after which they gave most of the money they earned to social welfare projects and striking dockers. And then they followed up their huge US success with the distinctly anti-American Jesus in Vegas.
Stop Whispering – Radiohead
9 January 2018
Radiohead had a pretty good 2017 by any standards. They headlined Glastonbury and Coachella as part of a tour of the world (which begins again in South America this year) and they re-released their hugely successful album OK Computer to mark its 20th anniversary. But this song goes back even further, to their very first record, Pablo Honey.
Happy Xmas (War is Over) by John & Yoko and The Plastic Ono Band
12 December 2017
The culmination of two years of peace activism by John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, Happy Xmas (War is Over) is a perennial Christmas singalong that started life with the very specific aim of reminding the world, at a time of peace and good will to all men, that war is a choice.
Disco – Kyle Troop & The Heretics
5 December 2017
The opening track from the debut album by Atlanta’s Kyle Troop & The Heretics is a slice of hardcore skate punk that compares the supporters at a presidential campaign rally to oversexed nightclub drunks salivating over a pole dancer. In a song inspired by the 2016 presidential primaries, the preaching star of Disco is handing out “sugar water” guaranteed to “leave you wanting more” and at the end of it all, Kyle tells me, “people get to take their candidate home like a cheap date”…
Justice – Dumpstaphunk
28 November 2017
Self-proclaimed New Orleans “soldiers of funk” Dumpstaphunk broke the hiatus in their recording career last year to release this “hopeful, yet cautious” track, featuring guest star Trombone Shorty, with the lofty ambition that we might change society and “see the end of all that is wrong”.
Full English Brexit – Billy Bragg
21 November 2017
Billy Bragg’s first solo release in four years is a six track mini album called Bridges Not Walls which concludes with this elegy for the way things used to be, viewed through the eyes of the disenfranchised.
Mechanical Minds – Nordic Giants
14 November 2017
Nordic Giants are not so much a band as a multimedia performance art experience. Like a post-rock Daft Punk, they hide their individuality so that the concept of Nordic Giants is untainted by the banalities of the real world, creating cinematic soundscapes which seem to tell stories of monsters and men in grand, impossible landscapes.