I’ve had arguments with people who say Jeremy Corbyn’s a twat, regurgitating Daily Mail headlines that he’s a terrorist sympathiser. Working-class people up here think the Tories are on their side – which shows how completely the left have fucked themselves. The right are sitting back and laughing, sweeping up every election. But in order to get the Tories out, you’ve got to start representing the working class people of this country. These culture wars are valid wars that need to be fought – there’s a lot of bigotry, a lot of racism and homophobia. The line in Aye – “I don’t have time for the very few” – that’s the one thing that always going to be my main gripe on this planet, the sheer disparity between the 1% and the rest of the world. Nobody sticks their neck out for the north-east. A quarter of the kids in working families in my region are in poverty. They clearly know who they stand for and they don’t represent people like us. I was raised to hate them, I still hate them, and I always will. The left wing have abandoned the working classes, and with a lot of the left – I don’t want to sound like Piers Morgan when I say this – I feel like there is too much nitpicking and stupid fights, especially online. īecause of the polarity between the left and the right, I don’t feel I have an identity with politicians on either side. You’ve also written about politics – Aye, from the new album, is probably the angriest song you’ve ever written. Once I hit my mid-20s, I felt like I could write about it all in a way that wasn’t completely dull. They ended up disappearing and getting charged for things, but I wasn’t involved in anything illicit, I was on the sidelines. Not at the pub I worked at – I had a different job which led to us meeting some very charming but very naughty people. Put it this way: there was a time when I was 18 and working for some pretty suspect characters. You mention drug dealing in the opening songs – were you having to do that yourself? You don’t know how to communicate these things when you grow up in Shields. There were things that happened that I used to hold a grudge about, but a lot of it was my own fault because I never said what I needed to say. But it’s hard to raise a kid, especially when there’s divorce and money issues. You give your parents a hard time because of course they will do things that upset and hurt you. I saw him as me, as a son, and saw his loss. I was bawling my eyes out – I’d never seen him like that. There’s a very moving lyric about him kissing his mother’s forehead when she died, and you imagining doing the same to him one day. We’ll have these conversations about toxic masculinity and my dad goes: I didn’t teach you anything like that, did I? We laugh about it now things have really turned a corner. I’m sat there crying cos I’ve hurt my finger, and I’m crying even more because I’m watching my dad kicking the house down. He was so angry at himself but he couldn’t express it, so he just booted the wall under the staircase. One of my earliest memories is of him accidentally jamming my finger in a door. My father and I can drink beer and talk about music until the cows come home, but when it comes to expressing a grievance, it always ends up in a shouting match. You haven’t got a job, you’re only 17 a lot of came from that. She suffered from fibromyalgia, which affected her mental health and her ability to work. My mum was a nurse who birthed practically half the babies in North Shields. Because I didn’t have things to point at and write about during lockdown I started looking inwards, thinking: there’s enough stuff from my own life. There’s plenty of loudmouthed Geordie drug dealers, the most unsubtle drug dealers on the planet, and I’d get plenty of bits from that. Someone at the end of the bar, complaining about their other half – I would finish the story. Your new album draws from your own life more than ever.Ī lot of my lyrics used to come from pub craic. I just drank, over-ate, and played a lot of video games. I had to shield, so for the first three months I was on my own. I didn’t look after myself I wasn’t one of these people starting up a fitness regime on TikTok. I handled it as well as anyone else did: absolutely horrendously.
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