Electric Vandals

Last Thursday's 1985 Big Audio Dynamite song- Sony from the debut album This Is Big Audio Dynamite- sent me back to the rest of that album and to the extras that came with the singles, the 12" mixes and B- sides. I remembered that the 2009 double CD re- issue came with a studio outtake, a song that didn't make This Is Big Audio Dynamite's final cut, Electric Vandal...

Electric Vandal (Session Outtake)

Don Letts on vocals, some lovely African highlife guitar lines, clattering drums and percussion and a la la la la la chorus part. It could have easily sat beside the songs on side two- A Party, Sudden Impact!, Stone Thames and BAD- without any problem and without causing an issue with vinyl running times. Maybe Mick didn't like it or maybe it was held back for a B-side and then never used. Who knows. Anyway, four decades later, it's a BAD deep cut worth hearing.

In 1990 Aztec Camera released their single Good Morning Britain, Roddy Frame's state of the nation address looking at the four corners of the UK after ten years of Thatcherism. The song was so like a BAD song in style that he told Mick, 'you will either want to sing on it or sue me'. The pair wrote it together within three hours of a conversation they had in the canteen of a London recording studio. Mick sings backing vox, the response lines to Roddy's calls. They must have had a go the other way round to because this version, unreleased officially, exists...

Good Morning Britain (Mick Jones vocal)

The four verses give a snapshot of the UK in 1990, Scotland and the Scots need for devolution, ten years of an English government they never voted for, Northern Ireland and the Troubles, Wales and population decrease and holiday homes, and then England...

'From the Tyne to where to the Thames does flow

My English brothers and sisters know

It’s not a case of where you go

It’s race and creed and color

From the police cell to the deep dark grave

On the underground’s just a stop away

Don’t be too black, don’t be too gay

Just get a little duller'

The 1990s and beyond would see progress in many areas of life- improved attitudes towards minorities, greater equality, much wider acceptance of homosexuality and disability. The backlash we've been going through since 20XX (when? 2012? 2016?) is in full swing, people emboldened to say things they wouldn't have even a few years ago, overt racism and discrimination once again a feature of public life. Depressing. Roddy's words don't even need an update in some ways, it's still 'race and creed and colour'. And Roddy's message in the chorus rings still true too, that these things are still worth standing up for- 'The past is steeped in shame/ But tomorrow's fair game/ For a life that's fit for living/ Good morning Britain'. It's the optimism of 1990 that has taken a battering.