Garbage Days Revisited #75: Newtown Neurotics - "Beggars Can Be Choosers" (1984)

 

"They always try to blame it on the blacks/But it's really those in power who will stab you in the back" - Newtown Neurotics - Living With Unemployment

It probably says a lot about my political beliefs that we've covered a fair few left wing fireband bands in both Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited columns past from the Clash's Sandinista! through the Angelic Upstarts (RIP Mensi), Carter USM and Pop Will Eat Itself's Dos Dedos Mi Amigos up to the likes of One Minute Silence, Pitchshifter and King Prawn in the early noughties. You could probably add the obvious likes of Billy Bragg in there as well (I've just not done a column on him yet as my favourite albums of his seem to be the same ones that get rightly acclaimed elsewhere like Brewing Up and Don't Try This At Home so I couldn't really call them under-rated). I guess it comes from growing up in a Teesside family relocated to West Yorkshire but I had the traditional north eastern values (always join a union, always vote Labour and never trust a Tory - although the second of these may have been broken a few times during the repugnant likes of Blair and more recently Starmer, people with about as much to do with working class politics as Boris Johnson has with bungee-jumping...or being honest for that matter...) implanted in me from an early stage where they've by and large remained ever since. And I make no apologies for that - I've always believed in fairness and having a society which is geared towards helping out those who need it rather than increasing the gap between the greedy uber-capitalist pigs at the top and the rest of the population (needless to say, my mood with the state of British politics has been one of increasing despair in recent years).

And this week's subjects of Garbage Days Revisited are another such band albeit one you probably won't have heard of as much as Bragg or Strummer, or even Mensi or Jim Bob probably, namely the Newtown Neurotics. Springing up from the grim Essex new town of Harlow (just down the road from where I used to live in Stortford and the town whose hospital I worked in for half a decade), they were a much needed voice of left wing anger in the worst "greed is good" excesses of the Thatcher years (albeit years that look like an absolute picnic compared to where we are now) who've undeservedly been mostly forgotten about.

The group were formed by school friends Steve Drewitt, Colin Dredd and Tig Barber (later replaced by Simon Lomond) at the tail end of the '70s after they discovered the Clash and the Ramones (the group's two obvious influences) and they released their debut single Hypocrite in the closing months of the decade. It's a good effort but their follow-up When The Oil Runs Out, released in early 1980, was even better and arguably remains their finest moment - a righteous full on attack on the war games being played out in the Middle East to protect the black gold supply at the time which seems to have become depressingly more relevant with the revelations in the years since of how absolutely fucked the climate is thanks to our over-reliance on said oil. One of my old bands actually liked this song so much that we used to cover it in the early noughties around the time of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq plus that lyric of "Think about the record industry and the people it's used/Self-indulgent pampered pop stars, which ones did you choose?" seemed increasingly relevant at the time with the onslaught of the horrible Toadman Cowell sewage stream of TV programmes (Popstars, Pop Idol, X-Factor etc etc et bloody cetera).

The Neurotics seemed to have a bit of a slow climb up after that - they'd feature on one of Garry Bushell's later Oi! compilations with an alternative verison of the track Mindless Violence which had left wing poet Attila The Stockbroker, a friend of the band (they shared a gig in Islington, before it became middle class, in 1982 which was done over by the National Front with Attila suffering injuries at the hands of a bunch of racist boneheads) reading his Andy Is A Corporatist poem over the top. However, their third single, Kick Out The Tories! (probably the song they're best known for) wouldn't surface until 1983 around the time of the general election then. Its message sadly didn't get through to the British public and we'd be stuck with the bastards in blue for another 14 years afterwards but it remains a simple but effective call to arms and set the group up nicely for their debut album, 1984's Beggars Can Be Choosers. By now the group were signed to Razor records who also had the likes of the Angelic Upstarts, Splodgenessabounds and the Adicts on their books as well as a lot of the early Soho glam bands like the Grip and the Tattooed Love Boys (featuring future Wildhearts and Honeycrack members Willie Downling and CJ respectively).

Similar to the Upstarts' excellent Last Tango In Moscow which came out the same year, Beggars Can Be Choosers is a despairing look at a nation that's not only gone to the dogs but blown its last tenner on a three legged greyhound while it was there. It's right there from the opening one two of the call to arms of Wake Up ("For years and years they've been telling you lies/Your full potential's never been realised/And then you slip into the attitude/Of 'I make a mess of everything I do'") and the early twenties panic attack of The Mess ("I was brilliant at school but not in exams/My teachers couldn't understand/How five years of hard work went to the wall") and keeps up the standards from there from the furious Get Up And Fight to the almost dub style lament of Newtown People. There's even time for a bit of humour in the form of Does Anyone Know Where The March Is?'s piss take of weekend warrior protesters while the closing furious assault of Living With Unemployment, a rewrite of the Members' Solitary Confinement, is another high point (I remember the late Nicky Tesco, god rest 'im, rather sniffily claiming that he wished the Neurotics had written their own song rather than ripping off his, well sorry Nick but I happen to think that the Neurotics' version is actually a big improvement, replacing the slightly cringy humour with genuine anger).

Sadly, Beggars Can Be Choosers would do respectably on the indie charts but stop some way short of bothering the main ones - as I've mentioned in the Last Tango In Moscow GDR entry, the general consensus by the time it came out in 1984 was that punk was pretty much flatlining. The Neurotics would put out one final single for Razor, a cover of Blitzkrieg Bop with its lyrics changed to reflect the worries of nuclear war that most of the world was experiencing at the time, before moving across to Jungle. They'd put out two albums there, 1986's Repercussions and 1988's Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks? (not quite up to the standard of their debut but still with some good moments like This Fragile Life and Inch Away on there) before quietly winding to a close as the decade ended due to Dredd contracting pleurisy (he would sadly pass away in 2015).

Steve Drewitt resurrected the Neurotics in the late noughties with Simon Lomond having rejoined him in recent years. I was lucky enough to catch them playing alongside their old mate Attila at the sadly missed Gaff venue in Holloway in 2010, the early days of living in London just after the Tory/Lib Dem coalition had sneaked into power. At the time most of us were convinced that the arrangement was too fragile to hold and that we'd be going back to the polls within 12 months by which time public opinion would have turned against the hateful pig botherer Cameron and his cronies to the extent that they'd soon be back out of power again and Kick Out The Tories! genuinely sounded like an anthem for the times that night. How wrong we sadly all were. Twelve years later and we're still waiting for that change to happen - possibly we'd underestimated the leech-like grip that Tories will display when it comes to keeping power once they get it and with one of the most clueless, arrogant and dislikeable leaders of the opposition I can ever remember currently leading Labour, it doesn't look like that's gonna change any time soon. Bleak times indeed. But if nothing else, at least Beggars Can Be Choosers will reassure you that there are still people out there who don't swallow the bullshit spouted by the press in this country and can see this whole sham of a society that Britain's become in the 2020's for what it is. It's a candle in an incredibly dark night but at least it's something hopefully pointing towards a brighter future. However far away that may be.