THE TWO-TONE / SKA REVIVAL WAS IN FULL SWING WHEN THE BEAT HIT BIG IN 1980. THE BIRMINGHAM SEXTET HAD RELEASED A COVER OF SMOKEY ROBINSON’S CLASSIC TEARS OF A CLOWN A YEAR EARLIER – BUT IT WAS AS THE SEVENTIES FINALLY CRUMBLED THAT THE BEAT’S UPTEMPO DANCEHALL STYLE TRULY CHIMED WITH A GENERATION LOOKING TO ESCAPE THE GLOOM OF MARGARET THATCHER’S FIRST TERM AS PRIME MINISTER.

First time round the band released three albums – I JUST CAN’T STOP IT (1980), WHA’PPEN? (1981) and SPECIAL BEAT SERVICE (1982). Chief amongst their hit singles was MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM – a top five hit in 1980. The Beat split in 1983, burned out by years on the road. Since then, frontman Dave Wakeling has been part of General Public (alongside former The Beat member Ranking Roger) and released a solo album. He now tours (in the US) as The English Beat and (in Britain) as The Beat Starring Dave Wakeling. His strand of the band tours the UK this autumn and is working on a new album (HERE WE GO LOVE) for release in 2016. In this new interview Wakeling speaks to The Mouth Magazine from his home in Los Angeles, and looks back at the climate which gave rise to The Beat. He also discusses the current state of the UK and America… 

THE BEAT FORMED IN 1978, AND YOU WERE TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD AT THE TIME. THE BAND’S FIRST SINGLE (IN 1979) WAS A COVER OF SMOKEY ROBINSON’S TEARS OF A CLOWN… DO YOU KNOW YOU SHARE THE SAME BIRTHDAY AS SMOKEY ROBINSON?
I do indeed. And Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath, too. That’s varied isn’t it? So obviously it was a date starred in heaven, ha ha…

CLEARLY IT WAS! WITH THE SMOKEY ROBINSON SONG BEING CHOSEN AS THE BEAT’S FIRST SINGLE, I GUESS THERE WAS A LOT OF THAT SOUL STUFF AS YOUR SOUNDTRACK TO GROWING UP… BUT AS A YOUNG MAN IN THE EARLY ’70s WERE YOU EVER TEMPTED TO SLIP ON A BOWIE ALBUM OR GENESIS OR LED ZEPPELIN OR SOMETHING?
Yeah, very much so. Just like my birthday, really, it was varied. Growing up in Birmingham we were very proud of Black Sabbath and very proud of Led Zeppelin. They were our local bands and were some of the first bands I ever saw play live. Like a lot of kids in the Midlands, I think, I’d got two sets of shows going on. I’d got my progressive rock, Virgin Records, hippy mates sort of concerts and I’d got my football mates concerts.

THAT COULD BE CONFUSING…
For a little while I tried to run an ambiguous haircut. It looked like a long suedehead or a short hippy…

… HA HA…
It was odd, when you look back at it. We’d only got Radio One and TOP OF THE POPS, really… And Radio Luxembourg if you were super-keen and all of that… But the reception wasn’t that good in Birmingham, some nights. Radio Caroline… Anyway, on TOP OF THE POPS and Radio One you’d got Smokey Robinson or whoever followed by The Kinks followed by The Rolling Stones followed by… I don’t know… something else from Motown. It was a smashing way to grow up. I always thought of them all as just parts of the same thing; a sort of continuance. I didn’t realise that I’d grown up loving Motown quite as much as I had until I got to America. The people out there had to make a distinct choice between rock radio or r’n’b radio.

BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE…
Yeah. That’s what it is – they call it “black radio”. The first tour that we did in America this college student, a white girl, came up to me and said “Do you know that someone’s already covered your song TEARS OF A CLOWN? But it’s really slow, you can’t dance to it”. Ha ha, it was the first time she’d heard Smokey Robinson’s version of it! So, in the UK, I don’t think it was actually done as some sort of multiculturalism. There was just one radio station and one TV channel and if you’d got in the charts that was the one you were on… It worked out well, though – you’d get The Four Tops followed by The Kinks. That’s the way it should be, really.

I JUST MENTIONED BOWIE AND THAT’S REMINDED ME THAT YOU SUPPORTED HIM AT MILTON KEYNES BOWL…
Yeah, we did. 1983. He was on the SERIOUS MOONLIGHT tour. They were the last two shows by The Beat. The Saturday night was the last ever show by the original line-up…

… WHICH IS A REAL SHAME, ‘COS YOU WERE CLEARLY ON FIRE. BOWIE TOLD THE AUDIENCE THAT YOU WERE THE BEST BAND HE’D EVER HAD AS A SUPPORT BAND…
Yeah! What a way to finish! Bowie said that to me backstage afterwards as well. He asked us to go on an American tour with him but we were kind of burnt out, really. Whereas things had been charmed and just fallen together really easily at the beginning, by then it was the hardest amount of work to get anything done. And we’d always promised ourselves that, because it’d had such a magical start, we wouldn’t be labourers.

WAS IT ALWAYS GOING TO BE A SPLIT AND NOT JUST A BREAK?
Well, I’ve felt it strongly that I’ve sort of gone down in history as the executioner… whereas, really, I was just the bloke who had the job of delivering the death certificate to the office, you know what I mean? We’d done a lot of really hard work and a lot of non-stop touring, you know? Some of the other members of the band wanted time off, a couple of years off – they’d got sick of being in a group. Or living their lives through the eyes of being in a group. The phrase at the time was “There’s more planes than buses nowadays”… And then just a couple of years later three men and a trumpet came out – Fine Young Cannibals with Roland (Gift)… So, it would actually have been smashing for The Beat to carry on but everybody needed a rest, yeah.

THE BEAT FORMED ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT BUT GREW OUT OF BIRMINGHAM, REALLY. THAT’S ENGLAND’S SECOND LARGEST CITY AND FOR MANY MANY YEARS HAS BEEN A REAL MULTI-CULTURAL HUB. AS A YOUNG MAN THAT MUST HAVE BEEN TREMENDOUSLY INVIGORATING – OR WAS THERE A LOT OF RACISM TO FIGHT?
There was racism, yeah, but a lot of it was institutionalised racism. Having so many factories all over the city, everybody got crammed into the same workplaces and down on the line I think blokes found out that they’d got much more in common than they had differences. They had the same challenges throughout the working day, the same money problems, the same sort of family issues… I didn’t know it, really, until we played down in London. It was odd, ‘cos playing in Birmingham you’d see black and white musicians playing in bands in pubs together. In London people commented that there was people of different colour in the band. We played with The Selecter, and some London skinheads came to have a chat after the show and I thought “Here we go, here we go”… and they said “I like that – black geezers and white geezers together on stage. That’s good, I’ll have some of that”… So we said “Yeah, we thought you’d like it – and that’s why we did it”! If you wanted to blend up Toots And The Maytals and the Velvet Underground – which would have been my first idea of it – and then form it into The Monkees and Buzzcocks style three-minute pop classics, you’d likely end up with people from different backgrounds wouldn’t you?

IT DOESN’T SEEM THE SLIGHTEST BIT UNUSUAL NOW BUT I GUESS IT WAS BACK THEN?
It didn’t seem such a big deal in Birmingham. I suppose it came from the industrialisation of the place… cramming people so tightly the way that they did…

… YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT TOWERBLOCKS…
Yeah. I don’t think it was a glorious lifestyle. But it’s funny, isn’t it? Doing that actually had the effect of integrating people far more than happened in the affluent areas down south, where people could still live basically parallel lives, you know?

THE REAL PROBLEM WAS NOT THE RACE ISSUE BUT THE CLASS ISSUE, WASN’T IT?
Yeah, it always has been and it still is. I don’t get involved with, or speak much about, British politics because I don’t do much more these days than check the Birmingham Evening Mail every morning on the internet. But I saw this, and it was interesting… I saw a map showing which areas of the country had done better or worse under Margaret Thatcher and it corresponded almost exactly to a map of who voted for and against Cameron in the last election…

IT’S NOT THAT MUCH OF A SURPRISE THAT THE TORIES GOT IN AND MARGARET THATCHER BECAME PRIME MINISTER, IN 1979… I DON’T THINK LABOUR HAD MADE A PARTICULARLY GOOD JOB OF THEIR TERM IN POWER, HAD THEY?
No, they hadn’t. They’d really botched it.  It did seem that all of the unions were fighting against their own Labour government too much – pushing their issues too far. Really, I think everyone overdid their opportunity to build a fairer society… but that idea was quickly taken care of anyway by our friend Margaret, wasn’t it?

THE ROOM JUST GOT COLDER, DAVE…
And a shiver ran down your spine!

IT DID… THATCHER CAME INTO POWER AND REALLY VIOLENTLY, VERY DEEPLY, CARVED UP SOCIETY ALONG CLASS LINES, ALONG FINANCIAL LINES…
… Yeah. She did. And you know these ‘trickle-down economics’? They worked, didn’t they? At least geographically they did – all the money trickled down south, ha ha… So it wasn’t a complete fabrication – we just read it wrong, that’s all.

YOU LIVE IN LOS ANGELES, AND I WONDERED WHETHER WHAT GOES ON IN ENGLISH POLITICS TRANSLATES AT ALL, OVER THERE?
It does in a certain number of ways, I think. Particularly in terms of ‘the changing of the guard’ on who’s the biggest empire in the world. My Dad experienced the dissolving of the British Empire, and by the time he died I think he still thought Britainnia ruled the waves, bless him. And you can see that sort of mindset happening in America as they try to come to terms with China and India and the fact that they’re not the only big player on the field anymore…

THE PERCEPTION IS THEY REALLY DON’T LIKE THAT…
Yeah. They’re always the quickest on the draw because they’re frightened. That’s why Donald Trump is getting so much airplay at the moment. He’s voicing all those old white fears of the 1950s and 1960s, really. He’s running away with the Republican side of it because he’s saying all the things people say when they’re frustrated and drunk in a bar. In the same way as happened with the British Empire, here they’re saying “What’s happened to the American dream? What’s happened to the middle class?” – and I think it’s that the working class have been emancipated for too long and they want theirs now, too. There shouldn’t really be any room for a privileged white middle class who prosper off the labour of people in their own country and abroad who have to work for pennies…

I GUESS EVERY GENERATION SAYS THIS – BUT IT REALLY FEELS LIKE WE’RE ENTERING SOME SORT OF ECONOMIC, CULTURAL, SOCIAL ENDGAME… OR WE’RE ALREADY IN IT…
Yeah. And I think we’ll see this one play out during our lifetime. We haven’t got decades to go with a system as dysfunctional as this, have we? America is so busy exporting democracy around the world, but they’re not interested in it over here, ha ha… I find it fascinating. Really, they’ve got to find a balance – like all countries in the world – between a certain amount of socialism and a certain amount of capitalism. You can’t have a capitalist country without roads, without bridges – but you’ve all got to buy the roads and bridges together, so that’s socialism. Every country has to do it, now, otherwise they’re not going to exist. But socialism is still a dirty word over here. I think that’s to do with the Declaration Of Independence – they made individual rights so important that it’s a bit hard for Americans to consider collective rights without thinking “What is this? Russia?”… I don’t really like the sound of right wing populists suddenly becoming all the rage, but Trump is running away with it by speaking out… None of the other politicians will dare even go there because they’re paid off by their sponsor to say this, that or the other…

THAT’S THE FLIPSIDE OF THE COIN FROM THIS GUY OVER HERE, JEREMY CORBYN… HAVE YOU HEARD OF HIM?
Yeah, I’ve heard of him. I know a little bit about him.

THERE ARE FOUR PEOPLE STANDING FOR LEADERSHIP OF THE LABOUR PARTY, AND THREE OF THEM SEEM CLEARLY TO ONLY BE WELL ENTRENCHED IN THE ‘GAME’ OF BEING A BRITISH POLITICIAN… CORBYN SEEMS TO BE BEHAVING WITH GREAT DIGNITY AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, SPEAKING UP ABOUT WHAT’S RIGHT, WHAT’S FAIR AND WHAT NEEDS DOING TO REBALANCE SOCIETY. YOU COMPLETELY BELIEVE THAT HE MEANS IT.
I think we always look at them like they have answers but I don’t think too many of them – hardly any – actually have an insight into how their own society’s living.

YOU COULD SAY THE SAME ABOUT MARGARET THATCHER. WHAT SHE STOOD FOR SORT OF LOOKED GOOD TO HER ON PAPER, PERHAPS, BUT THAT WAS A GRAVE MISJUDGEMENT. IT WAS TOTALLY UNWORKABLE WITHOUT REALLY DAMAGING PEOPLE.
It was, and the scars are still there. I see them even twenty-five or thirty-five years on, and even though I only come back as a visitor now. For me, what was worse about it was that she should have known better, being from a grocery shop in Nottingham. It wasn’t as though she was completely disconnected from the working class. Somebody told me that when she got mad in private she’d drop that affected posh accent. Angry Nottingham woman would come out… That’s what I was on about in STAND DOWN MARGARET. Over and above any sort of telling her to “Resign!” from being the Prime Minister, it was more “Get off your high-horse! You’re from Nottingham! You’re the same as us, really”… Social climber…

I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED ABOUT STING, WHETHER WHEN HE GETS MAD HE DROPS THE KID OF COOL ‘FILM-STAR’ VOICE AND THE GEORDIE ACCENT COMES OUT …
Why aye, man! Ha ha ha…

YOU MENTIONED STAND DOWN MARGARET… THAT SINGLE WAS QUITE A SUBVERSIVE STATEMENT – AND ALTHOUGH WE THINK WE’RE A MORE PERMISSIVE SOCIETY I’D WAGER THAT SOMEONE WOULD BE DOWN LIKE A TON OF BRICKS IF YOU PUT THAT OUT NOW. 
Yes, I think they would, I think they would… Now they seem to be tightening up on the idea that criticism is sedition, don’t they?

THEY DO… DOESN’T THAT VERY FACT ITSELF MEAN THAT PROTEST SINGERS AND PROTEST SONGS ARE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT NOW?
I think so, yeah. It can have an effect… The BBC and TOP OF THE POPS were caught a little bit unawares by STAND DOWN MARGARET, but they’d learned their lesson from GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. They banned it so we all bought it every two weeks to see how long we could keep the Sex Pistols at number one, ha ha… See how long we could make it so that TOP OF THE POPS had to finish at number two: “And topping the charts at number two this week…” sort of thing, ha ha. Fabulous. It meant you’d got a big pile of Sex Pistols singles at home but it was worth it! They realised that backfired on them so they kind of slowly suffocated STAND DOWN MARGARET in its sleep. They let it die on the vine rather than execute it.

AT LEAST IT MADE A MARK, THOUGH…
Yeah, it did… It got into the charts and before the BBC caught us we got to do it in STAND DOWN MARGARET t-shirts which sort of made the point, on a glorious edition of CHEGGARS PLAYS POP, ha ha…

BLOODY HELL – CHEGGARS PLAYS POP..!
Yeah! Hey, did you know Elvis Costello played STAND DOWN MARGARET on tour? I was thrilled by that… I did feel guilty years later – you know, I sang that song and then Thatcher went on to be the longest serving Prime Minister and the biggest tyrant since Cromwell. I hope she didn’t do it to spite me…

SHE DID IT TO SPITE EVERYBODY, DAVE…
Ha ha, yeah… Well, it was a sad and cruel end for her, wasn’t it? It’s easy to appeal to everyone’s banality. Everyone’s got a greedy side – we know that. It’s a fact. But if you can dress it up nicely, and make it sound polite enough and posh enough – make it seem acceptable – then you get a certain amount of acquiescence, don’t you? We were doing a show down south somewhere, Brighton or Bournemouth, and someone had made a poster for the gig with the song title ‘STAND DOWN MARGARET’ on it, and I was quite surprised because I got two very very vociferous complaints about it…

… THIS WAS RECENTLY? 
Yeah! Only a few months back… “Don’t you think it’s about time to bloody drop this, Dave?” – and I hadn’t even made the poster. Surprising. It drew a very quick knee-jerk reaction, caused quite a little furore. I had to ask the bloke if he could take it down ‘cos it was upsetting the natives. Funny, really, after all this time. There is definitely a Watford Gap on this issue… If people have done well they’d rather keep shtum about it, wouldn’t they? Especially if they’ve done well at the expense of whole towns and cities.

I THINK THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE TORY PSYCHE WHICH ISN’T NECESSARILY SO MUCH ONLY ABOUT DOING WELL – IT’S ABOUT THE FEAR THAT THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU MIGHT HAVE DONE JUST A LITTLE BIT BETTER THAN YOU AND HAVE JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE THAN YOU… AS IF THAT DIMINISHES YOU…
There’s an avarice involved, yes, that’s for sure. And my Dad suffered from it, too. He tried to speak posher if he was around people who’d done better than him – I think he was convinced it might rub off on him. I think that’s what Margaret was conning people into thinking. Really, so much of England is pyramid-shaped – the power structure I’m talking about. It’s all skewed. Like you were talking about those other three applying for the job of leading the Labour party – you can’t really tell the difference between them and between who’s on the other side. They all look like they’ve come out of the same schools as the kids from the other 500 families who run the whole show, don’t they? I’ve actually enjoyed being away from it. Having said that, being here in America has its own problems, though… “I’m an individual,” says 365 million people, ha ha…

I FOUND THIS BEAUTIFUL QUOTE FROM A 1984 INTERVIEW WITH YOU… IT’S “YOU TEND TO GET YOUR INSPIRATION WHEN YOU FEEL THE MOST IDEALISTIC.  THEN YOU SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE STRUGGLING TO LIVE UP TO YOUR BEST MOMENTS”… DO YOU STILL FEEL LIKE THAT, DAVE?
Yeah… Failing myself miserably most of the time, you know? It’s a real problem, actually, because you can take flights of fancy and you can be as idealistic as you like in your imagination. It’s like you can dribble the ball and score a goal as long as there’s nobody trying to tackle you and there’s no goalkeeper… But in real life you end up on the floor. If anything, I’ve got used to it. I accept it. Life’s not such a dreadful struggle and I don’t feel like “You’ve let the side down there, Dave”… That’s just the way life is. You try and do better tomorrow.

THAT’S AN ADMIRABLE AMBITION. HOW DOES IT TRANSLATE TO YOUR MUSIC?
This game is ‘feast and famine’ – emotionally as well as anything else. Right now? We’re making this new album and it’s going fantastic, we’ve got loads of shows, so many shows, and I’ve hardly had any days off. Sometimes I find myself in a corner with my head in my hands going “I can’t do any more, I’m sick of it”… and someone walks round the corner and goes “This one’s sounding great, isn’t it Dave?” and I’ll be “Yeah. It is, yeah. I’m just looking for something on the floor here”…

HA HA… I USE THE SAME ONE WHEN I WATCH IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE: “NO, I JUST HAVE SOMETHING IN MY EYE, THAT’S ALL”…
Yeah, ha ha! “I’ve just got a bit of dust in there, okay?”, ha ha ha ha… “My bloody allergies!”…

THERE’S BEEN NO NEW RECORD BY THE BEAT SINCE SPECIAL BEAT SERVICE IN 1982… BUT YOU’RE NOT TOO FAR OFF RELEASING A NEW ALBUM… YOU FINANCED IT THROUGH PLEDGE, INITIALLY, AND REACHED YOUR TARGET REALLY QUICKLY – SURPASSED IT BY A LONG WAY, IN FACT… THERE’S A BIG APPETITE FOR WHAT YOU’RE DOING…
Yeah. It’s a nice feeling. Seven years ago I decided to start touring nationally around America instead of just up and down California. And there were new songs. None of the record deals offered made any sense, really. They wanted the whole back catalogue of songs and they offered hardly enough money to make the new record. They didn’t seem to – as they say over here – “have any skin in the game”. Really, they just wanted to buy the catalogue to use forever.

… WHEREAS PLEDGE CUTS OUT THE MIDDLE-MAN AND YOU SELL A NEW RECORD DIRECTLY TO YOUR FANS…
Yeah, someone suggested this Pledge, and one thing turned into another. But we’ve always been pretty close to the fans, so it was a bit hard to come up with things for Pledge that we didn’t already do. ‘A chance to meet the band’ – everyone’s already done that. We came up with some interesting ones, anyway. I must say, with something like Pledge there’s a different type of pressure. These are people who’ve loved your music from the past and they’ve paid for new music up front, so you don’t want to let them down and you feel a big responsibility not to squander the money at every opportunity you’re given. It’s different to the old record company pressures. You knew that the record company were ripping you off anyway, so your attitude when you’d spent the money was “We need some more”…

… YOU PAY FOR THAT IN THE END, THOUGH…
You do, yeah. They’d lend you thirty thousand more, or something, but they’d take fifty thousand later. But you’d never notice… To start with, until I came across Pledge, I was kind of missing that guy at the record company. Whatever happened to that guy who’d give you a quarter of a million of whatever the local denomination was, to go into the studio and see if you’d got any songs? But this is much better, Pledge. I think there’s around a thousand pledgers and it means that when we bring the record out there isn’t a ridiculously huge record company advance to pay back.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT IS THERE’S NO BIG MARKETING, THOUGH…
Well, I don’t suppose sales would be like what they were back in the day anyway… I think I’ll sell quite a lot of records at the shows, and at least I’ll be paid for each record that we sell this time. I’m glad I hung in for that!

SO THE NEW RECORD IS CALLED HERE WE GO LOVE AND IT’LL BE OUT EARLY NEXT YEAR, FINGERS CROSSED… AND BEFORE THEN YOU’RE TOURING THE UK. A LOT OF DATES…
Yeah. Well the record is coming out as The English Beat over here in America, but over there in the UK it’ll be out as The Beat Starring Dave Wakeling or something. I’ve been using the name over here and Roger’s been using the name over in England… The last time that we did a licensing deal for the old records was the last time that the original members of The Beat all spoke to each other. It was decided that rather than try and carve it up, everybody could use the name. I’m relieved. I didn’t want to put out a new record in England under the name The English Beat. The deal was everyone can use the name The Beat for their own stuff but they also have to put their own name with it…

IF YOU’D HAD TO DO THAT – PUT OUT THE RECORD OVER HERE UNDER THE NAME THE ENGLISH BEAT – YOU’D IMMEDIATELY BE ON THE BACK-FOOT, WOULDN’T YOU?
Yeah. Exactly. I’m coming out to do these shows in September into October and they’re sort of advertised as The Beat Starring Dave Wakeling but some have come up as The English Beat or whatever, so there’ll probably be some confusion… although, I have to say, there’s no confusion amongst the fans. They know The Beat, they know who I am, they know who Roger is…

AND YOU’LL BE PLAYING SONGS FROM THE NEW RECORD?
Yeah, two or three. More than that and we’d probably be pushing our luck a bit, I think.

SO YOU’LL PLAY A COUPLE OF NEW SONGS, YOU’LL PLAY A COUPLE OF SONGS BY GENERAL PUBLIC (THE BAND YOU FORMED AFTER THE BEAT), AND OBVIOUSLY YOU’LL PLAY A STACK OF THE BEAT CLASSICS… LOOKING BACK AS AN OLDER CHAP, IS THERE ANYTHING IN THOSE EARLY SONGS THAT YOU THINK COULD BE BETTER? IS THERE ANYTHING YOU’D DO DIFFERENTLY NOW?
No… I even like the John Peel session we did before we had a record out. We didn’t even have the chords right at all, but there’s such spirit to it, we just blew through it. I like the fact that some of the songs still sound contemporary – so we must have been near the mark. I like singing TWO SWORDS and I AM YOUR FLAG and SOUL SALVATION because we’re all still talking about the same sort of things, really.

ARE THE NEW SONGS POLITICAL?
Well, they’re less party political. For example, there’s a song on the new record called IF KILLING WORKED IT WOULD HAVE WORKED BY NOW. It sort of sums up everything I’ve ever felt since I was a kid, but when I was twenty I couldn’t say it like that because I was involved in the party political struggle. But now, it’s the overview from the old geezer with half a mild, sitting by the fire in the corner of the snug… “Listen – if killing worked it would ‘ave bloody worked by now, eh?”, ha ha…

I CAN SEE YOU THERE DOING THAT! 
Ha ha, yeah, with me half a mild… On the other side of the same penny there’s actually a song called THE LOVE YOU GIVE LASTS FOREVER… That’s about your feelings that come up about your own mortality after your parents have died. There’s a sense that something survives after they’ve gone – and me and my sister came across this notion that it was actually the love they’d shared with us that we could still feel in the world outside…

… BLOODY HELL, THAT’S DEEP.
Yeah, but these are the things you have to write about when you’re a bit older. These are the things you can condense down more fluently and easily after… erm… a couple of decades of tragedy. Ha ha… It’s all helped sharpen the pencil. Ha ha ha ha…

THE BEAT STARRING DAVE WAKELING tour the UK in September / October. Dates and tickets here