Gavin Martin's album Talking Music Revolutions evokes the late, legendary John Trudell, and not just because both artists read their poetry with musical accompaniment. And not just because Martin's Irish lilt is as powerful in its own way as Trudell's forceful declamations, either, though that's true. Just as Trudell claimed Elvis Presley as his generation's "Baby Boom Che," so does Martin pay tribute to Wilko Johnson the soldier, Rory Gallagher the revolutionary, the "Pistols of Sex," David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, and plenty other musical heroes who've inspired and moved him and us over the years—moved us not just to shake our asses (though that's crucial), but to envision and pursue an alternative to the status quo.
Martin is a longtime music journalist and critic, having started the original Alternative Ulster fanzine (which gave Stiff Little Fingers their best song title and best song) and gone on to write for the NME and a multitude of other publications, including an on-going column and regular reviews at The Mirror. In 2009 he started the Talking Musical Revolutions performance events, with spoken word and music presented by Martin and other scribes like Barney Hoskyns and Charles Shaar Murray. In the years since, Talking Musical Revolutions events have covered topics as specific as Bowie and Hendrix and as broad as metal and Latin music. Last year, Martin began working with Kelly Munro, who helped him match instrumental tracks to some of his best poetry, and who produced the Talking Musical Revolutions album for Munro's End of the Trail records.
Those instrumentals complement the words so perfectly, it's remarkable that they were composed and recorded independently of the words. Blush's shotgun guitar sound suits "Wilko (Is a Soldier)" to a tee, Family Jools' minor key jam nails the anguish of Marvin Gaye in "Long Hard Road to Be Free," and Coquin Migale gives "The Pistols of Sex" an appropriately raging accompaniment. And you'd never predict it, but Summer Loving Torture Party's celebratory rock actually works in a song called "My Daddy Went to Belsen," in which Martin honors his father's fight for freedom and against fascism, anchored by the elder Martin's horrific experience liberating the concentration camp ("It was called a liberation after the Nazis fell/ But how do you liberate people from an actual hell?") If you didn't know it, you'd never guess that the words and music weren't recorded in the same room.
Powerful as the music is, of course, the focus is on Martin's words, and over the course of the album, he sketches out a series of alternative histories (and possible futures) born of personal experience. In "Wilko (Is a Soldier)," Martin recalls seeing Dr. Feelgood for the first time in Belfast in 1976, an eye- and mind-opening experience for a 14-year-old kid in Northern Ireland in the midst of The Troubles. It's as memorable for his description of Johnson doing the "chicken lurch" as it is for the tears in his mom and dad's eyes as they drove through checkpoints to take Gavin to see his older brother in a care facility in Belfast. And the aside about sleeping in Rudi's van every night evokes both romance and terror (especially if you've seen the movie Good Vibrations—and if you haven't, you should stop reading this right now and go watch it).
In "My Daddy Went to Belsen," we hear Martin reckoning with the idealism of an earlier generation, casting his father's dreams of fighting fascism against the price he paid for it for the rest of his life. Still, Martin finds something truly heroic in his elder's fight: "As Hitler advanced across europe the rebel heart did burn/ The atheist bible he kept there in his head/ Economic emancipation for the living, not the dead/ A better world for everyone/ The blacks, the whites, the Jews/ But there was no way of ever losing those long-time Belsen blues."
But the album's tour de force comes when Martin confronts an evil within that's just as dangerous as the enemy without. His father may have fought Franco's fascists and Hitler's Nazis, but Martin himself sees an evil just as sinister in England itself, in the form of "Thatcher and Savile." The song makes clear that the sick crimes of the serial pedophile Jimmy Savile are inseparable from the culture that produced him, the country that elected Margaret Thatcher (who knighted Savile and welcomed him into the heights of British society): "He was in the body politic/ underneath the nation's skin." But Martin casts his net wider than simply linking Savile to the Toriest of Tories; he doesn't let Tony Blair off the hook, either. In fact, it's in the person of Blair that Martin connects the dots between the government's willingness to ignore Savile's pedophilia with a broader disregard for the lives of children: "Tony Blair became a papist/ Jimmy was a full-time rapist/ He didn't like children, they were under attack/ In Stoke Mandeville/ And also...in Iraq."
It's a societal rot so deep that it seems hopeless to fight, but fight we must. Which brings us back to the revolutionary power of Wilko Johnson and his rock and roll soldiers: "Fuck Ian Paisley/ Fuck the pope/ Fuck your laws, and your stigmatizing dope/ Fuck Stormont/ Fuck the Irish border/ That night we declared a new world order/ Lies and bullshit and rapist priests/ Every political cover-up/ Every palm that'd been greased/ They all went up like in a funeral pyre/ And with Wilko as an arsonist/ The flames went even higher."
I hope I haven't done Martin a disservice by quoting him so extensively, but I trust that one listen to any of the tracks from Talking Musical Revolutions should dispel the notion that the words have anywhere near the kind of impact on the screen as they do coming through the speakers. Talking Musical Revolutions is available on iTunes and Spotify, or you can buy the CD here.
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