The Wrong Sunshine
The album is a selection of songs written over the last ten years or so. The exception is ‘Song for David’ which must be approaching its 21st birthday.
There isn’t really any unifying theme beyond being a South Yorkshire song-writer trying to comment on a few of the things that have been happening in the world as I’ve seen it. The death of my dad in 1999 also prodded my thinking along some parallel if more personal root-lines, with unexpected outcomes.
I owe a great debt to the Chumbawamba family for nagging me into action; for the sound and the look of the album, indeed for the very fact of its existence. Neil Ferguson produced, engineered, shaped and inspired it. Jude Abbott added warmth, belief, and several dimensions of voice. Boff Whalley probed away at the image of the thing, crafted its look and texture, and homed in on that half-a-line from one of the songs that became the album’s name. Thanks are due in addition to all the members of the No Masters choir and orchestra whose contributions have raised the songs to another level.
The songs
There are fifteen on the album in total. Some have original tunes, some use variants of traditional melodies, English, Scots and Irish. Some of the landscapes in the songs are distinctly South Yorkshire-ish, with place-names that can be found on most good maps. An occasional idiomatic word or expression might have snook its way in here or there. If there is anything you don’t understand then drop me an email and I’ll try to elucidate!
The list comprises partisan comments on culture and tradition; elegies for the people of coal and steel; hymns of loss, personal and collective; laments for wasted and unfulfilled potential in ‘peace-time’ as well as war; celebrations of community togetherness; anthems on behalf of rubbished imagination’s ability to fight back, to stand up for itself, and to voice its own versions of the way things are, or might yet be.
The Wrong Sunshine is a kind of umbrella catch-all term that touches on the utter accident, the ‘fluke’ as we might say in these parts, of most people’s circumstances and predicaments at any given moment. In a society riven by stark divisions of class, wealth, and opportunity, the right sunshine for me might be intolerably and irremediably wrong for her or for him. We have to remind ourselves constantly, as progressive and enlightened folk across the planet are saying more loudly by the day, that people working, imagining and acting together can without a doubt transform the patently wrong into another kind of sunshine completely, that might even suit us all.