On decides it's time to shake that bootie, but in a rocky kind of way you understand, with the metalled up beats of VITRO and ManBREAK's raw, throaty politicised dance-rock. Oh yes, now we're dancing...
ManBREAK
A woman stands on the edge of a window ledge 20 storeys up, about to commit suicide. A policeman edges towards her, trying all the time to make her see sense. After five minutes of conversation witht the woman, the copper thinks, "F*** it!", and jumps to his death with her.
This true story inspired the ManBREAK song 'Cut Ups'. Similar disturbing images flicker thoughout ManBREAK's guitar-lashed, sample sodden, drum-driven apolcalyptic anthems: 'mad' cows on the TV choking on the froth that bubbles up from their own poisoned stomachs; flickering Super-8 footage of Polynesian children frolicking in the fallout ash from the atom bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll. The band's name is taken from radiation experiments carried out by the British Army on unsuspecting squaddies in the 1950s. The only influences that they'll admit to are Public Enemy, Run DMC and Bob Marley. Acording to vocalist and mastermind Swindelli, they play "big, brash and totally impersonal" music. This isn't your average white band.
"Our new single, 'Ready Or Not', is about atavism," explains Swindelli. "It's about living like a f***ing hamster on a treadmill, it's about being trained to respond to everything like on of Pavlov's f***ing dogs. It's like what's happening in France with the elections (in which the Left recerntly won a hefty majority - Political Science Ed); eveyboedy's expectations are sky high, and you just know they're going to get shat on, nothing's going to change".
Swindelli is beaming as he recalls our own election night. Het bet a Tory MP's wife (now an ex-Tory MP's wife!) 200 pounds that her party would be mashed into a bloody pulp. We're on a recently privatised train (where most of the crew still proudly sport their union badges) off up to Liverpool to meet the rest of the band, who are: 'Mr Blonde' (aka Gareth) on rhythm guitar and vocals, 'Snaykee' (aka John) on lead guitar, 'Stu Boy Stu' (er, Stuart) on drums and Roy Van Der Kerkoff on bass. Swindelli has a thick book of feminist theory open on the table next to him. The reason he reads books like this, he tells us, is the same reason he doesn't drink - because he refuses to accept the reality society has planned out for him. On the way to the rehearsal studio, we bump into a mate of Swindelli's, a working-class Scouser whose play about the life of a man who wrote the socialist classic The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist is soon to recieve its London premiere. These are the people The Sun thinks don't exist - the intelligent, angry, self-educated, active, socialist working class. This isn't the Happy Mondays.
Swindelli, whose first bite at the pop cherry was with the 25th of May a few years back, wryly dismisses ManBREAK's music as "sock music with ramples" (sic). It's much more than that: it's a full-throated, hyper-intelligent raw dance-rock from brains sharp enough to always avoid bleeding the obvious, producing music that sounds like an embittered manifesto for those of the downtrodden who are determined to go down spitting, kicking and punching. It's not Ver Verve.
You have been warned.
-Steven Wells, Edited by Kitty Empire; from On, June 21, 1997
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