Something different this week, because, some days, it feels like I’m living through a terrible remake of the 1980s directed by Uwe Boll…

The Redskins are a celebration of hope and pride. Amidst all the dross of the music scene, all the kajagoogoo-gaga imbecility and whinging shite, there’s, like, only a handful of bands that have got any spirit. And at a time when people are getting really battered, when the Tories are really sticking the boot in hard and it’s not like 1976 anymore, with just a million plus on the dole and a few cuts in welfare. It’s 1983 with three and a half million plus, four million unemployed and the Tories like systematically dismantling the whole of the welfare state and yet the hardest music that’s coming out is on the level of griping about the sorry state we’re in and the same hundred words rearranged a hundred different ways to paint the same sorry picture of misery. There’s too many rock and roll philosophers about, the point is not to interpret the world but to change it. And there’s three things, three things you need:

You need hope, and hope above all, otherwise you never even think to fight in the first place.

Secondly you need spirit so that when the challenge comes you can take up that challenge.

And thirdly you need organisation so we can win, so we don’t get isolated, we don’t get divided and we don’t get beat.

And it’s like, in the immortal words of whoever it was that bloody said it, if we all spit together, we’ll drown the bastards.

Chris Dean
of The Redskins