THE EJECTED – HAVE YOU GOT 10P?
It’s been about five years since I was introduced to Oi! punk and few bands have charmed my ears like The Ejected. These days it may be hard to come by the white-hot rush of adrenaline you’d find at a gig, but just the first few crackling moments of my Have You Got 10p? single are enough to plunge my spirit right back into the pogo pit, where it belongs.
Written as a cultural critique geared towards the ‘classless’ and ‘prideless’ scoundrels (are they poor old souls or real arseholes? Depends on which version of the song you listen to) clinging around the marquee, asking us walking past, “have you got 10p?”, the single’s ruthless pumping kick surely represents something like the unified beating heart of working class youths.
The barebones of punk are sometimes all you need – a snare roll, a big stumpy bass sound and a quick kick is all it takes to get the blood singing. There are still plenty of people around asking if you’ve got 10p, though I suppose that depends on where you live. If you’re wondering, I don’t have 10p, and you’re better off asking the bloke behind me.
CRUX – KEEP ON RUNNING
Even if it’s true that liking music so ‘heavy-handed’ and ‘tactless’ reflects badly on my IQ, you can find me sitting quite happily in the double digits in the land of street-punk. Keep on Running’s simplicity is tenacious – simple, but not stupid. And by that I mean the drums go bmm tshh bmm tshh, the bass pulses through and the guitar does pretty much the same thing over and over again for three minutes, but I don’t think it needs much else. Even when you think the track ends halfway through but it carries on, its stamina is so infectious that after three minutes of the same fucking thing, you don’t want it to finish! This one’s been chanting on loop in my head for a while now, and with good reason.
ENGLISH DOGS – PSYCHO KILLER
In no way similar to Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer, Psycho Killer charges with all the hot pace, brusqueness and grainy electric you’d expect from the English Dogs; but instead of an attack on the senses, you get some nice-and-neat chord changes, catchy bassline and good drumming to match. I wouldn’t call it subtle, but you can’t exactly sit still while listening to it either…
So, in regard to Isaac Newton’s third law of relativity, I can proclaim in confidence that one cannot give in to their wanky studenty senses and listen to the Talking Heads while drinking soya milk tea, without then putting on the English Dogs and making downstairs’ ceiling shake.
THE EJECTED – I DON'T CARE
I Don’t Care is an addictive, spring-time pogo anthem. Its bouncing pace, cockney chants and classic Ejected bassline remains buoyant and full as the hard snare punches, making it impossible to resist nodding along (or jumping around and kicking something, whatever floats your boat). It’s a real uplifting track – as uplifting as lyrics like ‘I just wanna spend the night puking up on you’ can be anyway.