This Is The The Day (That was!)

This Is The The Day - Jukebox
A few days ago I put "Matt Johnson" into Google and immediately got sent to his site for the band, "The The". I'd been meaning to check it out for some time.

I first met Matt through his brother - artist Andy Johnson, who was an old mate back in the late 70s when I was publishing underground comix. Matt came over one day to raid my counterculture archives and showed great interest in things I guess he was too young to remember himself. Some years later I was invited the the debut gig for his "The The" band at the old Marquee Club in London. I remember little of the songs themselves, just the music - in the words of his brother: "I knew he was good - but not that good".

Times changed and I lost contact with a lot of people from that era, but Matt's band went from strength to strength and next came to my attention with one of the first "long-form" video albums - the excellent "Infected". This time I started paying attention to his words and sought out both the follow-up albums, "Mind Bomb" and "Dusk". There was an extent of international social commentary in his work that was, indeed still is, quite rare. A kind of post-punk sensibility if you will, that ranged beyond the local and national boundaries that frequently limit artistes of a political disposition.

My reason for checking up on Matt was that in recent times I've been haunted by one of his songs from the Mind Bomb album - "Armageddon Days Are Here". It may have been written in the mid-1980s, but it appeared to prophesise the corruption of Christianity and the rise of Islam, even mentioning "blood red skies at five miles high". These were days of airplane hi-jacks of the non-missile variant but also of an earlier conflict in the Lebanon. Looking back at the lyric sheet, the song even refers to Hezbollah!

Matt's site above has a worthwhile jukebox where you can listen to this and most of his back catalogue. I had a bit of a problem doing this myself because what appears to be a security facility stopped the tunes downloading through by proxy server's cache. For general users however, I doubt this will be evident. Check them out.

No link yet, but radio news has just annouced that the families of Iraq War servicemen here in the UK have been in court and won the right to a full public hearing on the legality of the war itself. Naturally some are concerned that they were forced to obey "illegal" orders as a consequence. Needless to say, Blair's government are not at all happy - this is a turn of events they've been trying to avoid for some years.

Other Whitehall sources are said to be claiming Blair plans to join Bush in another war aginst Iran during the coming months. Troops, it seems, are already practicising their tactics down in Australia. Maybe they think nobody's looking. Some are also wondering if the current Isaelhelli adventure is part of a build-up to the same. Such "arms length" antagonisation of Iran and Syria may play well for the long-term Amerikan agenda. See Once it starts and Cradle or Graveyard of Empire.

Later.