What news from Thee Faction?

We’ve not been keeping you abreast of stuff. So here’s the news.

On Wednesday 22nd May we’re quietly playing the Buffalo Bar in Islington, to celebrate Billy Brentford’s birthday. Want to come? Just turn up and tell them on the door why you’re there. No charge, but it’s a party so keep it comradely. Joanne Joanne are playing too. They’re epic.

On Sunday 26th May we’re playing the Now We Are festival in  West Bromwich. Get your tickets here.

The next day we release our new single. Better Than Wages. It’ll be available for free, here on our website. In the meantime, here’s the video:

Then, on June 1st, we are playing our great friend and comrade Attila the Stockbroker’s Glastonwick Festival. We’re playing last, on the Saturday night. Which the bourgeois end of the music industry might call ‘headlining’. We call it ‘going on last on the Saturday night’. You have to come to this. And when you do make sure you catch Grace Petrie and Robin Ince and Attila and everyone else. But especially Steve White and the Protest Family.

Then on the 6th July Thee Faction, The Protest Family, Attila, and all sorts of others will be playing the Matchwomen’s Festival in London. It’s going to be free and ultra comradely. Come.

And then we release the new album.

goog politics stretched

After which we all club together, bring down capitalism, and build something much better. Just as Marx and GDH Cole intended. But this only happens if everyone plays the game. So join us.

Rejoice

In funeral black: a new T-shirt from Philosophy Football

 

Thatcher s-s Mk III
This one is for the miners, the steelworkers, the printers, the millions unemployed, the injustices the Hillsborough familes were forced to endure, the Poll Tax protesters, those who lost their lives on HMS Sheffield, and the Belgrano, for what? For the women of Greenham Common and the Trident missiles we didn’t want. For the NHS and the nurses, our schools and teachers, the council houses sold off, the privatisation of our public utilities, railways and buses. For our school milk. For  the reputation of St Francis of Assisi.

In remembrance of all we lost 1979-90, much of it never returned to us. A life remembered with decent human sympathy. But lifetimes remembered too, scarred by divisions we’ll never forget .

Special offer just £17.99 until the ceremonial funeral.:

Order before Friday12th and Philosophy Football will do their very best to get in time for you to wear on the day of the Funeral.

From here.

Thatcher dies. Thee Faction launch new video.

A rabid class warrior has died. The struggle continues. We don’t take moral exception to the celebrations. We just note that her death will do little, if anything, to loosen up the grip of bourgeois hegemony. In fact, if the hagiographical tributes the TV news is showing us are anything to go by, it’s a splendid opportunity for the ruling class to reinstall her as the postergirl of British capitalism. Which is very disappointing. So we need to redouble our efforts.

thatcher

Tonight, though, we do celebrate everyone who stood up to her. Those who refused to believe the lies about apartheid, the lies about trades’ unions, the lies about ‘freedom’, the lies about selling off our industry and our housing stock. Those who told her she was wrong in her careful imbalancing of the tax system – whether income or community. We also honour her victims: those who didn’t make it, and those who weren’t strong enough for the new robust liberal individualism she forced on us all. Many of us retreated into traditional ties of solidarity, but any project designed to atomize society is going to leave a lot of people isolated. That’s the point, of course. United we stand, and they knew that.

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We could knock out a lengthy article, rebutting the TV’s claims, for example, that she had ‘phenomenal moral courage’. But we have long asserted our commitment to solution songs, rather than protest songs. So instead of pointing out the evils of Thatcher as everyone else will be doing we, via Artrocker TV,  have premiered our new video for Better Than Wages. It’s a song that takes the end of the wages system as a given, and celebrates the joys to be had in prioritising other, more joyous things. Listen hard. The album version – Track One on Good Politics: Your Role As An Active Citizen In Civil Society – is heavier on the guitar and has the odd lyrical difference. This version, a remix from our very good friend and ultra-solid comrade Andy Lewis, is heavier on the horns and keys, and sounds fantastic. A radio hit, we hope. Watch the video right through. The gags come later on.

The point is that the struggle has got to continue. A night on the pop to celebrate Thatcher’s demise is probably well-earned, we s’pose, if you’ve spent decades fighting the ruling class. But for us it changes nothing. So the best way we can mark the death of this class warrior is to remind ourselves that we didn’t start this class war. But we’re going to end it. This video is a cheap, simple, light-hearted way of reminding everyone that there is better to come. Retain hope. Seek joy. Stay positive. Fight on.

Do share this with everyone you know. There’s no point in restricting this stuff to a small audience. Thee Faction are worthless as a well kept secret shared by the socialist cognoscenti. Get the word out.

Thatcher’s gone. But not forgotten. Let’s focus on what we’re fighting for.

Onward.

gdh

New Album Out July 8th

4PAN1T

New single: Better Than Wages available to download on May 27th.

STOP PRESS: Better Than Wages video launched at 15.00 on 8/4/13 at Artrocker TV. Check it out and share or retweet to the world.

Meanwhile, you can still get Thee Faction’s first three albums as a package for £15 (3xCD 1xvinyl LP), or £7 each, direct from Soviet Beret Records. Need convincing? Here’s what the critics say.

Wear Your Colours For Emily’s Centenary

Continental Grey Dare on White
Incoming dispatch from the comrades at Philosophy Football. Thee Faction commend this piece to you all. See that T-shirt above, and the others below?  They could be yours. Read on…
04.06.1913 
One hundred years ago the Epsom Derby was disrupted by perhaps the most famous protest at a sporting event in history.
Britain at the time was bitterly divided. The early Trade Unions and others were striking against poverty wages and appalling working conditions. The cause of Ireland’s Freedom was attracting support on both sides of the Irish Sea. And from the Suffragettes came a massive wave of non-violent direct action.
For these Suffragettes the Derby was absolutely a legitimate target for their protest. Horse-racing was the sport of the Establishment. Epsom was a day out to celebrate tradition, one that denied women the vote. The King and Queen would be in attendance to watch the their own horse race for glory.
When Emily Wilding Davison ran on to the racecourse a century ago she hoped to stop the race and ensure that women’s voices be heard.  When the horse at full speed collided with her, the chances of survival were virtually non-existent. She never regained consciousness and four days later she lost her battle to live.
Emily’s heroic, yet fatal, action formed part of a protest movement that involved many thousands more women.  From smashing every shop window in London’s West End to blowing up post boxes, via disrupting Parliament’s proceedings and heckling MPs at public meetings, this was a campaign few could ignore. So when they couldn’t ignore them, they imprisoned them, and when the demand by the women that they be treated as political prisoners was also ignored the Suffragettes responded by going on hunger strike. Again their punishment was more repression, brutalised by force-feeding. But these ferociously brave women still refused to abandon their cause.
The Suffragettes were not fighting for the vote alone, but for women’s liberation too. Most saw the vote as one step towards getting what they wanted. The Suffragette movement was large and strong, yet at the same time complex and multifaceted, combining those for whom hope lay in constitutional reform with others who believed in the vocabulary of revolution. Whatever their differing objectives, the result of the campaign was the loosening of the ideological hold of men over women. Women gained a real sense of their equality, and began to establish a determination to put it into practice. By their actions and protests , as well as their ideas and arguments, the Suffragettes liberated themselves and all their sisters too.
In 1918 the Representation of the People Act finally awarded women the vote, but only for those over 30 years  of age. In 1928, fifteen years after Emily gave her life for the cause, women’s parity in the vote was finally recognised when the voting age for women was reduced to 21 years, the same as for men.
Philosophy Football have produced a set of commemorative designs featuring the colours purple, green and white. These were hugely symbolic for the Suffragette cause. Purple was for dignity, white for purity and green for hope. Militant, committed to direct action, courageous and in the end victorious too.  Deeds not Words and Dare to be Free were the twin ideals, worn as brooches, on sashes, carried as banners, that shaped the Suffragette movement.  A century later we can wear them again, as T-shirts. All designs available from Philosophy Football.
 The shirts are in support of the  Emily Wilding Davison Centenary Campaign. Thee Faction urge you to get hold of these shirts and commemorate the struggle. There is still a long way to go.
To celebrate International Women’s Day this Friday 8th March, can we suggest you go and see our great friends and comrades Colour Me Wednesday and The Tuts play at the Gunners Pub, N5.
Continental Roundel set separate

Your record collection isn’t quite good enough. Thee Faction can help.

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So you reach for some music. You run your finger along shelf after shelf of discs, each spine registering with a dull thud in your soul that tells you that this record falls some way short of what you’re looking for. But you can’t quite articulate what you are looking for. You want a record that feels like the first time you heard punk rock, that delivers the adrenalin boost you had when Dr Feelgood first came on your radio, that gives you the goose bumps that Smokey or the Staple Singers laid on you in the opening 16 bars of anything they ever did. But you don’t want it to speak of vague existential dissatisfaction, or slight frustration of some kind with a romantic liaison. You don’t want it to be angry in an abstract way, or soppy in a specific way. You want it to put the words in the mouth of Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’. You want it to articulate the pain of liberal capitalism and the joy and hope of the possibilities of socialism. You want it to do this while employing a consistent analysis, and offering a realistic alternative. You want there to be a degree of protest in the song, but a preponderance of solution. You want it to have big drums, swirling organ, driving bass,  heavy rock’n’roll guitars, a real horn section, and an angry singer.

You want Socialist RnB.

Trouble is, as you run your index finger along all those spines, you can find some of these component parts in most of your record collection. Of course you can: your record collection is tremendous. But what you can’t find is a record that delivers all of this in one go.

That’s what we can offer. Three albums which do exactly that. And you can have them all for £15 (or £7 each).

Fact is, we’re a DIY band with a  brand new  album recorded and ready to release. We need to sell lots of the old ones to get the new one out. The old ones are fantastic. They are exactly as described above. You’ll love ‘em. So buy them.

But don’t buy them for us. Buy them because you recognise the scenario above. If you do, we’re what you need.

Victory at Stalingrad – The Movie

 

On 2nd February 2013 Thee Faction took part in a fantastic night, organised by the comrades at Philosophy Football, to celebrate the 70th anniversay of the Red Army smashing the Nazis at Stalingrad. It was one of the best thought-out and planned events we’ve ever been a part of. There were speakers (historian Geoffrey Roberts, Seamus Milne, Clare Solomon, Susan Richards), bands (Thee Faction and the Trans-Siberian March Band),  and a disco (with our own Billy Brentford spinning some floor-filling proletarian sexy club funk), all held together with rabble-rousing polemic from Philosophy Football’s Mark Perryman. It was sold-out, yet the move from seated lecture hall to vibrant dance hall was executed super-smoothly, and the whole event was a wonderful example of why socialism is always going to be more efficient than capitalism. Thee Faction had a tremendous time, and the comrades on the merch stall managed to sell record breaking quantities of our records, despite stiff competition from the Great Patriotic War memorial plates.

The whole thing is available as a movie (above). It’ll take up a quarter of an hour of your time to watch, but it gives a real flavour of how special this event was. We pop up in the middle doing ’366′ and at the end stumbling through the harmonies on ‘Marx, My Main Man’. Watch, enjoy, and make sure you go to these comrades next event. Us? We’ve got our fingers crossed for an invite to perform at whatever they do in 2017. That’s a pretty big anniversarsary….

Oh, the comrades at Philosophy Football made some superb shirts to commemorate Stalingrad. Pop across and have a look. Buy them for all your family.

VICTORY