Warrington- Runcorn New Town Development Plan, the synth based musical vehicle for Gordon Chapman- Fox, has a new album out, the sixth under the Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan name- Public Works And Utilities. The album buzzes with ideas and invention. A few weeks ago this track came out to promote it, Swift, Safe And Comfortable...
The video and sounds are in sync, the synths and drum machines replicating railway rhythms. This isn't just nostalgia for 60s modernism, concrete and the years of political consensus- Gordon is genuinely angry about the stripping of the UK's infrastructure in the 1980s by the Thatcher governments, the wholesale selling off of our public utilties. Forty years later none of the industries that were sold in the great Thatcherite privatisation scam are better for us as a nation- the services are worse and they're owned for the benefit of shareholders.
The tracks on the new album are designed to play live, influenced by the tour W-RNTDP undertook last year. They are upbeat, for dancing too as much as listening too. On side B of the album there is a nineteen minute epic The People Matter which fades in slowly with drones, distortion and some horns before finding a cosmische pulsebeat.
I have a friend who thinks that Warrington- Runcorn New Town Development Plan is a terrible band name, so bad it puts him off listening to them. But I think there are worse band names out there...
Hello English Teacher!
English Teacher have pulled in some remixes and this one by Daniel Avery is predictably great, Avery building a wall of Stooges- esque guitars onto The World's Biggest Paving Slab. How good is that?
Todmorden's Working Men's Club have done a version too, skeletal acid house crossed with early 80s post- punk.
And if we're talking about possibly poorly chosen band names Dry Cleaning are about to return with anew album and tour, the eleven song Secret Love (coming early next year). Dry Cleaning's debut, New Long Leg, was one of my favourite albums of 2021, grimy post- punk and flat, non- sequiturs.
3 comments:
New Fast Automatic Daffodils was one for me, good band and some great tunes. Perhaps their name held them back from greater recognition somewhat?
Car Seat Headrest is the name i can't stand.
I'm always surprised at the choice of names around now which are going to be particularly hard to search for successfully online - understandable for pre-internet bands and artists but the times I've had to type in 'band' after a group's name to try and filter out all the dry cleaning English teachers and sports teams, etc!
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