Tag: records

The Making of the ‘Everywhere That Wog Army Roam’ video

Posted on by ringocortina99

We have neglected this medium for a while, and intend to put a stop to this by quickly writing something.

I thought I should write about the ‘Everywhere That Wog Army Roam’ video from the new album ‘England Is A Garden’.  The song had been earmarked for release a few times, but was put back a few times because the fear of offending those that go weak at the sight of the Wog word.  I mean they are offended by Wog, not the word word, that would be silly.

To take out the harshness we thought an animated video would help soften the hurt, and be a good way to move a lot of ground quite quickly.  As a result, we got in touch with graphic artist Ian Viggars whom we have worked with quite a few times now, over the last few years.  His previous video for us was ‘Double Denim’ where he created a whole musical group of characters to depict double-denim nights, people used to do these things not so long ago.

At a cafe meeting we talked about ‘Everywhere That Wog Army Roam’ which he heard prior, and within minutes many ideas came out.  As we love reggae the idea of a cartooned reggae record cover such as was prevalent with Yellowman or Scientist cover art in the late 70’s early 80’s became the focus.  Character types were decided, and Ian went away to create them.  After a few weeks his ideas were very strong, and excitement began to built.  His big scene was going to be fight between Police and Thieves, but we decided that might be too expected, so the Policemen, whom look very India military to me, join in rather than let all hell break loose, with music being the common denominator.

There are some many nuances in the characters that he brought to life with special effects and humour.  The smoking cricketer is a favourite.  Ironically, I used to have a deputy head that was an amazing cricketer, ex of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Team who smoked a lot of Embassy number1. 

The audio I cut down to keep the video single edit sized, and Ian continued to work hard on putting it all together.  The result was excellent, but we hit a lot of resistance as the Black Lives Matter movement, one which consider most splendid was hitting most streets across the world, and no establishments would really chance putting out the video, and certainly not gamble on talking about it too much.  It seems timing to put out such a song was always going to upset someone’s applecart.

International Front Covers

Posted on by Tjinder

NFbookcover

As well as collecting records, I have slowly developed an interest in books. I generally go for old books, mostly factual, with a view to see what the writers opinions were at the time of writing, against how things panned out in reality. Of the Fontana book shown in the picture written by Martin Walker, there is amongst many other tit bits this paragraph, which shows history in the repeating:

Pg 220

“The responsibility for ending racism in general, and stopping the NF in particular, now seems to rest with the Labour Movement. For it’s own sake, it will have to end the erosion of its once core support in deprived urban areas, and the evidence suggests that it will increasingly have to challenge the NF for that support. This will mean, almost wholly, relying upon the weakest of three elements of the

Labour movement, the constituency Labour parties. The other two, the trade unions and the Parliamentary Labour Party, will have their own tasks through organising in the workplace and passing legislation. But in fighting racism in the communities where people live, the burden is upon the CLPs and upon Labour councils. They seem, in 1976,

to be ill-equiped to carry it.”

If you have an interest in items like records and books or car manuals etc., that you can pick up & smell, which may from time to time be used as a handy weapon, please share it with us. This blog space has not been well promoted as we think best how to push it, but one day it will of course be bigger than the Imperial Google Library at Queens.