That musician doth protest too much, methinks

Everyone loves a list, right? And if you like music and you like lists, well you're going to adore my 200 best protest songs of all time list, as painstakingly compiled and summarily posted in another - more organised and altogether more meticulous - place.

Almost certainly the Niluccio top two hundred is NOT going to feature that special tune you always summon to mind when people mention protest songs. No, it's not. Don't complain. Don't kick up a fuss. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it ...

Delivers more than the alternatives #134 (Sept 2016)

I usually marvel at people who, for one reason or another, don't like music. Not that they usually put it that way. They just don't seem to care about it. And it just doesn't, as it were, feature in their lives. It's conspicuous by its absence. But having been exposed to some truly godawful music recently (I can't remember what, where or when, but I remember the depression-like feelings it occasioned), I almost understand the beauty of life without music.

Almost. But then again, I actually don't understand it at all. Because, when you've got Podcast #134 ready and waiting, how can you possibly contemplate a single solitary moment without the glorious sounds of a Niluccio on noise compilation? Rest assured. It delivers more than the alternatives ...

1: Summer, Se meurt
2: Just Blankets, ? (JT Soar, Nottingham 9/9/10)
3: Special Request, Request the style
4: Thee Knaves, (His) breathing artwork
5: ?, Meditational raga of north India
6: worriedaboutsatan, The violent sequence (edit)
7: Delivers more than the alternatives
8: Stiv Bators, It’s cold outside
9: MegaHast3r, Uff
10: Dennis Brown & The Crystalites, Changing times
11: Raving lunatic
12: HiT, ? (Windmill, London 20/9/10)
13: Pretochines, Dark fall
14: Papa San, Big and bad
15: Thurston Moore, Speak to the wild
16: Edmond Hall’s Jazzmen, Night shift blues
17: Stefano Pilia, Ada
18: Oelek, De droes
19: Los Calchakis, Guitarra nueva
20: Chinese apology
21: Langax, The alien party
22: Roy Brown, Hard luck blues

Al-Qa'ida's drugs, Noisepod #9 (Oct 2016)

With your Dr Dre Beats clamped to your oversized head, swaggering down the street in your expensive togs, you're gonna be cursing my name. Because, when you hear the auditory offerings contained in the latest Niluccio on noise Noisepod, it's going to hit you. This collection is disgusting, depraved and barely worth gracing with the name of music. It's tuneless, witless and hollow. Yes, it's that good. 

But, ingrate that you are, you're probably still not convinced. Not having previously sampled al-Qa'ida's drugs, it's all a little mind-altering. C'mon! Follow this chap's lead. Pull down your hood, turn it up and wait until everything around you becomes a faintly disturbing swirl of blues, greens and yellows. NOS! 

1: G.L.O.S.S., Trans day of revenge
2: Cinderblock, No future
3: Pharaoh, Recease
4: No One Survives, Fuckin' pigs
5: Dagger, Worn away
6: Heck Tate, Battle of pogo
7: Nuclear Witch, Fast to sleep/Poisoned and cursed
8: Like a clown
9: The Damned, Alone
10: Dixie, FRI!! FRI!!! FRI!!!!
11: Flat Sucks, Sorry
12: Occultist, Death siglis
13: Infect, Clarenza
14: White Christian Disaster, Smiling happy people have sex
15: Al-Qa'ida's drugs
16: Death Grips, Feels like a wheel
17: Loffciamcore, Bad touch at the Love Parade (Pink Punk Boy remix)
18: Sex Prisoner, Hard feelings
19: Yaitw, Psychopathy
20: Sex Pistols, EMI (bootleg)
21: If I liked the movie
22: Hinge, How the west was won
23: xDELOREANx, Trash for my engine
24: Congential Haemorrhoids, Concerto for noisegrind Pt2
25: The Fall, Rowche rumble
26: Fister, Antitheist
27: Chain Gang Grave, Autumn cannibalism

A message from the past

Yes, you heard it here first kids. Punk is not dead and there is no future. The two things apparently not being related to each other. Nice haircut though!

Philosophers, pilgrims & punks

In the Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris, some optimist has come up with this unlikely threesome ... 

A monster of rawk

Sonic

Crocodisc

Road to nowhere: the Jimmy Hill Way and other Coventry cul-de-sacs

I'll be popping out tomorrow to get petrol for the car and blow me down if I won't be travelling along the soon-to-be-called Jimmy Hill Way. Yes, that's right! The boring old A444 in Coventry is going to be named after the illustrious football pundit and one-time Coventry City manager.

Yeah, you probably already knew that. So what? Well, as one or two commentators have already observed, it's not everyone's idea of er, a good idea. Hill might be well liked by Coventry's beleaguered football fans, but, apart from thinking "nigger" is a humorous bit of football pitch banter, he's also notorious for his money-spinning tour of apartheid-era South Africa. Organising a tour of racially-segregated South Africa by a group of almost exclusively white British footballers isn't quite the "legendary" behaviour that seems to merit a road being re-named in your honour. Or so I think ...

At which point you're probably wondering why I'm going on about this on my tedious-as-hell music blog. Well ...

Well ... it's kind of obvious. Ask most non-Coventrians to name some famous descendants of the city and they'll soon come up with the Specials. Even football fans. Jerry Dammers, Terry Hall, 2-Tone: it's a huge part of the modern history of Coventry (I blogged about some of this earlier this year). Yes, OK, Hill helped make Coventry a moderately successful football club. Yes, they even, against the odds, won an FA Cup final (I was there). And perhaps understandably, as this once-fairly-big club slips into ever more precarious circumstances, the urge to memorialise a successful figure grows almost irresistible.

But, no. If you're going to start re-naming dull dual-carriageways in Coventry you should have a little sensitivity. The A444 (which I've been up and down thousands of times in my own oh-so-exciting lifetime) cuts a rude swathe through a part of northern Coventry with a particularly high concentration of people of South Asian descent. Did anyone ask them what they think of the Jimmy Hill Way proposal? Fine, maybe some are football fans and like the idea. Maybe they're not but don't care either way. Or maybe some recall that racism has been a real problem in Coventry and would rather that "legendary" football moguls like this one are not accorded some kind of civic hero status.

Given that Mahatma Gandhi's experience of racism in South Africa played a big part in his political consciousness, there's a not insignificant historical link between South Africa and some of the non-white residents who live in close proximity to Coventry City's football ground. Meanwhile, it was (of course) Jerry Dammers who wrote Free Nelson Mandela, that ubiquitous sing-alonger-er that became so associated with the UK's anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.

Surely this is the legacy that Coventry City Council should be celebrating, not make-a-fast-buck footballers who tour racially-segregated countries.

Actually, it's not that I want Coventry to start renaming roads after musicians (Jerry Dammers Way, Neville Staple Street, Ghost Town Square, Do Nothing Road, Gangsters Close ...). Or that I want it to indulge in a splurge of touristy heritagisation of its music history (the Coventry Music Museum and 2-Tone Village are already doing that). I guess it comes back to priorities. Is football, with its many warts and all, such an important part of Coventry's history? Does the city's very long and complex multi-cultural history not matter rather more than a once-famous football manager who used to be on television on Saturday nights?

The Specials react to news of the renamed road

And so, with the ref about to blow his whistle, here's a last-gasp winner. As someone who's originally from Coventry and still there a lot, I'd like to declare an interest. I used to watch the odd Coventry City game in my mis-spent youth and also liked the Specials (and Fun Boy Three!). It's no contest. While the Specials, their amazing punk-ska sound and the multiracial 2-Tone legacy still matter in my life, football has been several-times-relegated (to a zone of life called "Scandals, big business and media hype").

Forget football. 2-Tone is as much a part of Coventry as its central ring road, its modernist pedestrianised shopping centre and its bombed-out cathedral. But what's that? You say you've been threatened by gangsters? Well, we're busy making new road signs. Call back later.