It’s perhaps more about the message than the medium when it comes to this album. It’s the first release to exist as an explicitly political document of the credit crunch era that I’ve encountered to date, and this comes as something of a surprise. After all, people are skint, unemployment is at epidemic levels. As popular recent books like ‘Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted its Youth’ explain, it’s not just the credit crunch: today’s youth is in crisis, and while the baby boomers have benefited from cheap property and early retirement, anyone under 30 in Britain, unless born to a wealthy family, is fucked. So where’s the voice of protest that was so loud in the late 70s and through the 80s? Thatcher may have made for an obvious target, but there’s so much to rail against in the current climate: has everyone really been numbed into silence by a staple diet of TOWIE and Lady Gaga? Well, not The Great Leap Forward, that’s for sure. This should come as no surprise, though: Peel favourite Alan Brown, the man who has been operating under the GLF moniker since 1986, has made politically-charged music his trademark over the course of his lengthy career to date.
Largely of a 90s alternative persuasion (somewhere between Mega City 4 and early Jesus Jones) in musical terms, lyrically ‘This is Our Decade’ is a sustained attack on the government and the class divide in Britain’s capitalist culture. ‘Turning Difficulties into Goals’ sounds like a popped-up Gang of Four (arguably, that would be Franz Ferdinand, but it’s not here, as we’re looking at pop of a more 80s kind, with a pastiche of slick yuppie production with pleat-fronted chinos and baggy pastel-shade shirts) is a swipe at corporate speak (‘Describe to me what your preferred future looks like and let’s get solution focused’). The last lines are actually bullet-pointed. It’s simple, but effective.
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‘Race to the Bottom’ has a Wedding Present-y jangle and ‘Tax the Richer’ brings the brass to the indie sound. Elswhere, ‘I Catch the Bus Home With the Driver of the Flying Scotsman’ has something of a funk edge to it, resulting in something that sounds like a Radio 4 outtake remixed by EMF (I’m really not convinced the samples are all that much of a plus point – I only hope they were appropriated from some wealthy media corporation).
The super-snidey, sarcasm-laced pumping disco of ‘Capital is Wonderful’, delivered from the perspective of a corporate fat-cat (‘Capitalism is wonderful / When it works we make a pile / Capitalism is wonderful / When it fails, the taxpayer saves us’) and the pithy Smiths-like ‘Not the Full English Breakfast’ provide disgruntled commentaries on state of the nation.
It may well be that Brown’s only going to be preaching to the converted, and even some of them might find the endless polemic wearisome. Nevertheless, while it’s safe to say that another GLF album is not going to smash the system, it’s laudable that Brown manages to sustain the punchy lyrical assault for the entirety of the album’s thirteen tracks. As contemporary protest albums go, it’s heart’s in the right place and frankly, we need more artists to engage with contemporary society in this way, because it makes a change to hear someone really saying something.
The Great Leap Forward Online
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