“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!”…
For this year’s Record Store Day, Matt Johnson has released his first new material for 15 years – a one-sided 7″ single called We Can’t Stop What’s Coming. In fact, as he reveals in the new documentary The Inertia Variations – a film essay that uses Johnson’s experience to investigate the notion of creative stagnation resulting from anxiety – it’s the first time he’s written a song or even sung one in a very, very long time.
When Neurotics frontman Steve Drewett wrote this song for the 1986 mini-album Repercussions, its chief target was the South African apartheid regime and thankfully that has long since been overturned. But every other point of reference in this rallying cry against inaction sounds depressingly contemporary. “Why are you so quiet?” Drewett asks in the chorus, “when these are fighting times?”