The effect of unemployment on our lives

Things have come down a peg or two on the stress level today, most of the work needed to get the ‘kujenga Society’ album out is now behind me and two things occupy me the most at this moment. One is getting review copies out and the other is the feedback from people on the album. After the months of work, it’s only now that I begin to find out how it is going to be received.

I am aware that people who love the punk material I wrote and still love playing, have been aching for a new Neurotics album for years and now they get something at long last from Steve Drewett, it is acoustic/acoustically driven and is a long cry from ‘Kick Out The Tories’. On that basis, I have to build into the expectation that some people will loath it. So far the response has been fantastic, but it is early days and I am expecting a backlash of sorts.

I think that “It’s Christmas Time! (Oh yeah, (NaNaNa)” will be seen as a betrayal by many of my fans but that is a silly reaction.
As a songwriter, I feel I need to stretch myself, to do something different, just like I did with the Indestructible Beat. I made an album with this outfit which never really came out and I am so proud of it, even though I have barely sold a copy (it was available briefly as a download, but I intent to release it again at some point).

The Indestructible Beat was, to me, a creative and critical success and yet it failed in success and sales, which has a lot to me pulling the plug on it after three years because of the amount of work it took to keep a big band running.
Maybe some people think that writing for acoustic guitar will stop me from writing more raucous stuff with the Neurotics, that is not so, it may actually be my first step back into the world of writing new material, which may in turn lead me back to writing for the Neurotics again, who knows?

Anyway, other news is that I hope to have the CD’s available to buy via Amazon by next week, we shall see.

Angela (Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks)

Struggling to make a living over the years through cycles of recession and austerity of one sort or another, made me acutely aware of all my friends who were unemployed and how that impacted on the way they led their lives.

Angela was an attempt to touch on the difficulties that unemployment brought to peoples relationships when one of the couple is employed and the other not. Love is not always enough to win through; sometimes cold hard economics can wreck what could have been a perfect relationship if only the hand of global economics had not strangled their lives.

All these years on, the theme is touched on again in my new single “it’s Christmas Time! (Oh yeah, NaNaNa)

“Times are hard and so cruel, they changed the father that you once knew, when I was at home, happiness left the room and now you, don’t want me around, no you don’t want me around. But it’s Christmas time.”