You can’t please all the people all the time, but you can annoy a large percentage of them with minimum effort. It’s a maxim I’ve lived my life by. Irritated yet? Give it time. Imagine my disgust then when I come across a band, Radar, so desperately trying to please everyone.
Living just off the Strand, having a banana and doing the Lambeth walk (that means they live in London, fugu-head) these four boys are on the cusp of releasing an entire album produced by Dan Carey (he’s doing Sly and Robbie, you know – not in that way, filth monkey!) and ‘multi-instrumentalist frontman’ Callum Johnston (he can play both the triangle and the kazoo) called ‘Bright Like The Sun,’ and by ‘Sun,’ I believe they mean the big burny thing in the sky as opposed to the papery rag available on ‘the streets’.
By way of an appetite-whetter, ‘War Out There’ is the first single from the aforementioned album and contains so many different versions of the one song that it has my pomposity bristling like a porcupine who’s overdosed on Viagra. Not only that, but they’ve just finished off a tour with eye-starring indie-muffins Just Jack. Go on, please the masses, you mass-pleasing gits! Trouble is 1) it’s not a bad track and 2) the versions really are different. So for all of those who have only read the intro due to my uncontrolled rant… oops, you’re not reading anyway, so sod ya.
The official version is a dubby, ska-ey, poppy upbeat sequel to The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town;’ The haunting woodwind has been replaced by a popcorn ping-pong life support synth, but the Hammond jags and dub guitars remain. Madness reigns and Ian Dury blocks heads, but you could also draw sound-parallels to reality-TV-murdered ska merchants, The Ordinary Boys, or essex-bardoliers The Streets – the lyrics have a witty turn of phrase that links them more closely to the latter than the former – and, in the closing moments, to Eastern European Romany anarchists, Gogol Bordello. The rhymes are clever (“The streets they all border/ on violent disorder) but the verses are strictly ‘Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder’ stupid. Credit is due for their reference to Albert Einstien’s famous comment about wars with nuclear weapons being followed by wars with sticks and stones though. All in all, it sticks to the ‘under three and a half minutes’ rule and is therefore ideal radio 1/2 fodder. Unlike the other versions. The South Central version… goes on a bit. Over six minutes of the title, spoken and looped over and over with random electronic fx, interludes and a bog-standard backbeat; it’s a bit like standing outside a Camden cybergoth stall. The Tomboy vocal version has more in the way of words, but less in the way of tune (especially considering the effect it slaps on the vocals). It’s fashionably minimal, trendily comparable to LCD Soundsystem and has some tame Clangers on it. I hope nobody gave them drugs.
But what it lacks is a bit o’ sex. You get that with new rave- just a bit/lot o’ sex. Guess they couldn’t sex it up with a Clanger in the studio. Tomboy have another crack at it by dubbing it up i.e. they stick a couple of extra beats in and take the words out. Now it sounds like Trio’s ‘Dadada’ gone Studio 54 high-energy and the Clanger is getting distressed. Oh dear. What will the Soup Dragons say.
Completing the single line-up is an instrumental version to remind you what the song originally sounded like for you to sing along to. Only it’s 47 seconds longer, so you can’t. Oh wait a minute, scratch that. The extra 47 seconds comes from some bod rabbiting at the end. I’m all for messing around with songs, though; 1000 Homo DJs version of ‘Supernaut’ is, dare I say it, infinitely better than the Black Sabbath original (transversely, Johnny Cash’s version of ‘Hurt’ is better than NIN’s, and it’s a real tug to say that). It’s a bit of a cheek, bunging 5 versions of the same song on a single, but, as I said, they are all different, only not…quite…there. But that’s just garnish, isn’t it? You want the main song, dontcha, and frankly it’s okay. Pop-u-like, clever and catchy, it should bring dub, ska and two-step momentarily back into the mainstream. Unless Callum decides to do a reality TV show…
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