Last weekend’s Guardian had a fun piece about the music favoured by dictators and political villains (Robert Mugabe is apparently a fan of Cliff Richard whilst Mahmoud Ahmadinejad favours Chris de Burgh). However, there was little bit of the article that mildly pissed me off. Amongst the pantheon of bad hats and loonies was Nick Griffin,who apparently is a fan of (and I quote) “that most arthritically white of genres”, English folk music including ‘nu-folk poster girls Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby’. According to his blog Griffin finds it ‘"an alternative to the multi-cult junk played incessantly on Radio 1"
First of all, a slap for the journalist for that lazy bit of stereotyping and secondly a slap for Griffin (I don’t think I need a reason for that). I’m sure they’ll both be pleased to hear that Eliza Carthy is currently touring in the band Imagined Village, whose members include a sitar player, one of the country’s leading dhol drummers and an overall line-up which is about 50% ‘non-indegenous English’. I saw them live in Leeds at the Irish Club on Tuesday (I’ll post a review soon). Pleasingly the band had also picked up on the article and videoed the entire audience flicking the Vs at Griffin and shouting “bollocks”; they are doing this at each venue on the tour and will be editing it all together and putting it on there website as a suitable rejoinder to the BNPs attempt to get into folk music.
Does this matter in the big picture of things? Well, lets face it, I don’t think that all Nick Griffin needs to do to make the elusive electoral break-through is to profess an appreciation of Steeleye Span and The Wurzels; nor, I suspect, will the SSuporters of the BNP be particularly dismayed that a bunch of weirdy beardy folk fans don’t like them. I still think its important though to try and attempt to resist Griffins/BNP attempts to annexe English folk music, history, archaeology and other things close to my heart in his rather half-arsed attempt to create a volkish image of an indigenous national culture which he is trying to use to contest his (mis)-understanding of the multi-cultural society we actually live in. So, if shouting “bollocks” to Nick Griffin and his nasty little party are what we have to do, then so be it!
(Image whipped from David Owen's Ink Corporation website; an excellent site well worth looking at).
1 comment:
Bollocks to Nick Griffin.
Nick Griffin thinks that because he’s white, that means he’s always right.
Not just in politics, but common sense and his call to fight
Against the waves of immigrants come to steal our jobs that is-
Against asylum seekers who seek to steal our benefits.
To him the sea is like a moat around England’s castle wall
And every time a ship docks in he sees more defences fall
To foreigners who come over here expecting to be paid
Flooding Liverpool, that monument to our slave trade.
Nick Griffin, trace your ancestry, go as far back as you can.
But before this was called England
There could be no English man.
You can fight your squalid battles, but don’t claim to fight for me-
I say bollocks to Nick Griffin
Bollocks to the BMP.
Nick Griffin wonders, loudly, why we have no St Georges day?
Because the government hates England, he is not afraid to say.
Well if Nick wants to celebrate a dragon killing Turk
I’m not going to protest against another day off work.
But the Scottish, Welsh and Irish, though they look a lot like us
And their hearts too, swell with pride when they behold the crimson cross-
They’re proud of their resistance, and this is why they celebrate
And that slash of red on white cloth brings back memories of hate.
Nick Griffin, check your DNA, only if your blood is pure
Can you save this country from
Sinking into the sewer.
Stand up for the English, but you will never stand for me-
I say bollocks to Nick Griffin
Bollocks to the BMP
Poor Nick, bad enough he can’t keep them out of his country
Now he has been told that he must let them into his party
Yet another example of liberal pc thought gone mad
This kind of thing would never have happened to his dear old dad.
Then he is humiliated in a live TV debate
What’s so hard to understand in his message of fear and hate?
Then while his favourite folk artist rejects him like a tease
He’s caught taking expenses money from his MEP’s
Nick I hope there are no foreigners on your ancestral shelf
Because that kind of self loathing,
Is bad for mental health
Pursue your sad little agenda
Just stay away from me-
I say bollocks to Nick Griffin
Bollocks to the BMP.
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