Living With Underemployment

6 days 16 hours 49 mins

The sun is shining and I feel fine. Just completed a collage image that is to be the main visual for the homepage of steve-drewett.com. From there you will be able to choose from my solo work, Newtown Neurotics or Indestructible Beat. This is a big thing for me, because for the first time I am pulling the threads together of my creativity over the years. Approaching my sixtieth seems like a very good time to do this and it is bringing things into sharp focus for me. The Indestructible Beat stuff has not seen the light of day so far, but I am going to make this material available in the near future as I am very proud of it. There will be some Neurotics material that is currently lying in the Drewett vaults, that is excellent quality and will be released too.
Next up for me, is to integrate the new image into the website and connect up the parts of it to various areas within steve-drewett.com. Then I need to integrate the shop area where all things Drewett can be purchased.  

Yes folks, for the first time I am opening for business! Proper!

Living With Unemployment.

This is an adaptation of the Members song ’Solitary Confinement’ whose subject matter was about moving from the suburbs to London and the loneliness of working in a mundane job and knowing no-one, having left family and friends behind.
My version, pitched moving from the suburbs to London and then into long term unemployment.
We extended our version into a bit of a tour de force and it has continued to be a great set finisher over the years.
Pretty early on, Jean Marie Carroll of the Members and co-writer of Solitary Confinement, came along to see the Neurotics play at the Fulham Greyhound, and then he told me afterwards that I had made an ‘old man very happy’ with our adaptation and the same very much applied to me too, with that endorsement. I have since supported the Members playing solo and we have continued our friendship. They told me that they sometimes, get people requesting that they play Living With Unemployment and then suggested that we should do it together one day. Now that would be special!
The sad thing about this song, is the subject matter is still very relevant, thirteen or more years’ later, unemployment is still a blight but now we also have underemployment and Zero hour contracts. So this is caring capitalism? 

This feels like tyranny to me.