The Social - Under Grey English Skies/London Is Divided

I stumbled across this band today, and was dreading having to give yet another band a right slating. I’m fed up with slating people; I want to listen to things that get my gander going. I just want some good clean fun.

After the first listen. Get in there. Good clean fun. I like good clean fun and that’s what this record is.

It makes me think of a million and one things, it’s brilliant. The Social have a singer who is somehow the product of a full on Edwardian orgy, involving Morrisey, an amateur dramatic who fancies himself as a baritone in an opera, a medieval town crier and a dirty camp little Goth. Great stuff.

I can imagine the singer, Laurence Hussey, walking through Camden Market on a dirty, dark medieval night, with a wheelbarrow, shouting out “Bring Out The Dead”, whilst the trendy residents throw out buckets of piss from their windows and remove the rings from the corpses of their grandparents before offering them to Hussey's barrow.

Imagine that crap comedy with Nicholas Lyndhurst (he of small narrow head fame), where he goes back in time so that he can knock off some war-time broad. Well, that’s what this band are, sort of. Except they don’t keep on going back in time so that they can get their end away with one of our grandparents, they’ve come from the past. In fact, maybe the “Goodnight Sweetheart” analogy was a bit crap. We’ll try another.

Imagine that film, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, where they have to go back in time to recruit historical figures and bring them back to modern day in order to pass their class, and not flunk. Well, that’s what this band are, sort of. They’ve been seized from another time to bring us their brand of rock and roll, and I love it.

I swear Charles Dickens would have loved to have been this band’s manager. It’s George Orwell, Edgar Allen Poe, Industrial Revolutions, bent and crooked hags with glints in their eyes, diseased chickens sleeping in the same beds as children, rats feasting on a sleeping mans toes.

I honestly can’t stop singing “I will bring the fight to you”, from “Under Grey English Skies” over and over again. It’s 80’s jangly guitar pop, it’s Gothic, it’s baroque, it’s wonderful and uplifting.

Comparisons have been drawn with Interpol and Clash. I can’t see the Interpol comparison myself, but they certainly know how to make a stomping tune if this is anything to go by. The guitars dance about like The Smiths or even early Stone Roses on “London Divided”.

Get hold of this when it's released on the 23rd of April, it’s worth it. I’d love to take them back in time so I could be the richest man in Old London Town, I don’t think I could be any happier with my merry band, my pocket full of farthings and a syphilis carrying, corset wearing, buxom hag by my side.

You can get more information on The Social from their website and their MySpace page.