Why I dropped out of Commoners Choir

It was certainly not to do with any ideological difference regarding the lyrics.
It was to do with the balance between the individual, and the collective: the balance that has always been at the heart of jazz music, which perhaps needs to be borne in mind, even though this is not a jazz-related post.
When I got the chance to participate in Commoners Choir, set up by Boff Whalley from Chumbawamba, I was glad. I knew that any venture started by Boff would have humanitarian politics at its heart, and would be conducted with the utmost rigour.
I enjoy singing. I used to contribute to an Irish (and I mean, Irish) session at The White Stag on North Street in Leeds, which was demolished some years ago. (The subject of a poem in my collection, ‘Throwing Mother In The Skip’.)
I learnt, from attending rehearsals of Commoners Choir, that I am a bass. My voice broke when I was seven, because I was given steroids for my idiosyncratic aplastic anaemia. Be that as it may. The fact that I am a bass is not surprising.
When Boff was saying, with appropriate hand gestures “higher, higher”, or “lower, lower”, that was great.

The experience of the recording was exhilarating.

These events took place in Leeds, my place of origin. I was conceived in LS17 and born in LS2.
Boff is what some people may consider to be a “dropout” from Leeds University. I consider Boff to be a massive cultural import.

Though I enjoy singing, including choral singing, the kind of performance that I am concentrating on at the moment is individual spoken word performance. I realised during my time with Commoners Choir that choral singing in Leeds was not where my creative energy should be spent.

My next open mic performance will be at Getting Gobby In The Lobby, in Wakefield, on 15 November 2023.

My next booked performance will be at Huddersfield Literature Festival in March (see programme for details) in pursuit of a short story collection called “Apocalypse?”

The fact that Boff (who is outstandingly a much more established artist than I am) and I are not working on the same project does not by any means that we have any ideological differences.

We both believe that the community must recognise individual aspirations.
The economy must feed and house everybody, with no exceptions.
With regard to the ruling class: hold them to account, and keep holding them to account, until they eventually fall.
Boff’s music has had a seminal effect on me. I could name so many tracks. Three will have to suffice for now.

These are tracks that I first heard twenty or thirty plus years ago, but I know every word of the lyrics:

Unilever (possibly, in the history of rock music, the greatest ever track that has nothing to do with sex or personal relationships)
Rappoport’s Testament. “I never gave up. I never gave up. I crawled in the mud, but I never gave up.”
Add Me. Look me in the eye, and try to tell me that anarcho-socialists do not have a sense of humour.

Boff Whalley is a musical genius. An out-and-out, musical genius. His work has changed the course of my life, for the better.
But I can’t sing in his choir, because I have other things to do.

Review: The Hitchers, and Indignation Meeting, upstairs at The Pack Horse, 7 October 2023

The immediate reason I bought the ticket (GBP 7.50) for this gig was to hear The Hitchers perform their signature track, Strachan. I first heard that track on the John Peel Show in about 1997, and it had an immediate effect on me. I do not often go to gigs these days, but I still consider that gigs in small venues are essential for the development of new music.

The Pack Horse in this case is the one next to the Leeds University campus, not the one on Briggate. I decided to go by car. I parked on Rampart Road, and walked about a quarter of a mile to the venue. The streets were full of students, many in fancy dress. The pub was crowded. Downstairs, every customer was a student, and all apparently oblivous to the performance that was about to start, upstairs.

Upstairs, the age of the customers increased by about 30 years. The sex ratio went from 50:50 to 90:10 in favour of males. Hair largely disappeared. Day-glo fancy dress was replaced by black T-shirts and denim.

The stage is only about a foot high. It has a patterned rug on it. As well as the ceiling-mounted speakers, there were speakers and monitors on chairs, and one on a block of concrete. There was a small mixing desk at the back of the room. The background music seemed to be Cuban jazz. The live music started reasonably on time.

The PA set up was typical of a pub performance. It all seemed fine, except that it was impossible to hear the vocals. In other words, the sound was very different from what you get by listening to a recording of the same band.

The Hitchers came on second. Their line-up is two electric guitars, bass, drums, with the drummer and the lead guitarist also performing the vocals. There was a lot of banter in between songs, including a running commentary on the printed set list. The performance of Strachan was all in good order, except, as I said, the vocal tracks could have done with coming more cleanly through the PA.

Indignation Meeting also discussed the set list as they went along, except, like the UK constitution, it was unwritten. Their line-up is two electric guitars, bass, and drums. The drummer is the lead vocalist, and also plays a trumpet. He plays it with one hand, while continuing to play the drums with the other. At one point, the bassist played a couple of bars with his instrument held behind his head, Hendrix-style.

The genre of music that Indignation Meeting play is “railway punk”. This appears to mean, “short, fast, amplified tracks, with a single vocalist and strident percussion, with lyrics mostly on the subject of the British railway system”.

Like the front man of The Hitchers, the front man of Indignation Meeting plays the drums, sits at the back, and provides a commentary in between tracks. As well as what track they were going to play next, subjects covered by this commentary included: water (procuring more plastic beakers full of it, for drinking), and what amounted to sleeve notes about the tracks. If you want to know the content of these sleeve notes, you are either going to have to turn up to an Indignation Meeting gig, or buy their CD, which costs GBP 8.00 and is called Trouble In The Shed. The band also has a 7″ single, which is due for release in November. I forgot to note what this is called. The CD is on a label called Deputation Records: DEP001CD.

I don’t know how much more material in the railway punk genre Indignation Meeting have to produce. I hope, like Half Man Half Biscuit, they continue to write songs about subjects that other bands would never touch. I hope they get bookings in enough venues, and big enough venues. I hope that somewhere another band is rehearsing, who will one day, fairly soon, support them.

At GBP 7.50, this was outstandingly the best value for money gig I have been to in over 35 years. I have put my name down on the Indignation Meeting mailing list.