Sunday 26 October 2014

Fragile Do Not Bend, This Fragile Life

5 Days 20 hours and 16 mins

This morning I have plunged into the world of mailers, there are a lot things to contemplate when you start your own music label and mailers are one of them. This is pretty mundane stuff, but it is necessary to be able to get physical product to customers and for those who choose physical and not go for a download, you need the thing to arrive without a single blemish, so it is very important. I am just disappointed with myself for waking up early today and the first thing that came into my head was, mailers! Sad. 

Having finished the background stories to the songs on the ‘Beggars Can Be Choosers’ album, I now feel inclined to tell the stories behind the tracks on our second album Repercussions.

Our first release on Jungle Records and we start off the next part of our career with a name change, well a name shortening. As I have said before, this was done to reflect the growing maturity of the band and to differentiate us from this idea that we may be an Oi band. So we became ‘The Neurotics’, which was what most people called us anyway.
And with that we lost a whole chunk of our potential audience globally, as people didn't realise we were one and the same band, believing that the Newtown Neurotics to have only released one album. There was no Google or Amazon to help make the connection in those days.

This Fragile Life.

We opened the album, with a very important song for us, in-fact the sleeve design for the LP reflected this, showing a group of elderly people in a sort of woodblock print design.
The Eighties was a tale of two worlds in which a small section of the population became increasingly richer, and a larger part falling into poverty. The most venerable, being the old and the sick. I wrote this song to make sure people did not forget the growing disparity between these two worlds, and the people who got discarded to enable the wealthy to get wealthier. 

It is often said that you can tell the level of civilisation by how much we care and look after our most venerable people. Now, in the world of global capitalism, you only have worth as a unit of production (or a trained killer in the armed forces, which have for the most part become an arm of globalisation). Once you do not work, or cannot work or are too old or sick to work, you are deemed next to worthless.

Capitalism will squeeze the profit out of a person’s lifetime and then discard them when they are no longer able to be commercially productive.
If you are not one of the wealthy elite, this is the dustbin you will end up in.

Bottom line, poverty is disgusting and a moral outrage. We do not so much need to protect ourselves from each other, rather, we need to protect ourselves from the effects the wealthy have our morals and society.








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