Proof you can’t keep a good song down, ‘What About Me?’ started life in a very different guise as ‘Wot About Me?’ Now capable of commanding eBay prices stretching into four figures, it was originally an iconic, if lesser-celebrated 1979 single from South African punk pioneers Wild Youth and its lyric even questioned the new punk order: “I don’t wanna talk about Johnny Rotten/ I don’t wanna talk about Sid Vicious/ I don’t wanna talk about Joe Strummer/ I just wanna talk about...me...wot about me?”
Now reinvented as ‘Fuck The Future’/’What About Me?’, the song’s still the preserve of its original author, Wild Youth frontman Michael Flek, now based in London and collaborating with Fly Garrikk (ex-Dirty Stop Out) as SFMA.
This song’s an animal of a very different stripe these days, however. Instead of the original’s grinding guitars,the limited 7" ‘Fuck The Future’ has been made over as a glitch-y, stripped-back electro soundclash, cocking a snook towards early electronic/ synth pioneers Robert Rental or Cabaret Voltaire at their shadowy, Rough Trade-era best. Flek’s dark, mantra-like vocal delivery immediately draws the listener in and his vividly updated lyrics (“I don’t wanna talk about David Cameron/ I don’t wanna talk about austerity/ I don’t wanna talk about recession”) act as the perfect mirror to reflect paranoid Britain in the increasingly precarious here and now.
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Retrobution Records online
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