My last. Read the Weekly Worker? Full of material on the wreck of Scargill's SSP and his membership in the Stalin Society.
Cue to John saying I wouldn't have supported the Miners in '84?
Great album, btw, "Shoulder to Shoulder, recorded with "the South Wales Striking Miners' Choir."
half of a Miners quire then, a great rousing speech by a Miner
repeatedly arrested by the coppers and Test Department, one of the
best industrial bands back then.
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8806
>...We did a huge benefit at the Albany Empire in London with a Welsh
male-voice choir, and a band called Test Department. I can only
describe Test Department as a band which filled plastic drums with
water and sand and banged them in a rhythmic way. It was a bizarre
night - these Welsh miners came down in a coach and were stuck in the
middle of Deptford with these punks banging plastic drums - but there
were a thousand people there!
http://www.mp3.com/test-dept./artists/4841/biography.html
>...More expressly political than their German counterparts
Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Department followed the same tack: A
creative use of the ethos in which diverse objects (including large
amounts of scrap metal and power tools) can be used as instruments.
Formed in London's New Cross in 1982 by Alistair Adams, Graham
Cunningham, Tony Cudlip, Gus Ferguson and Paul Jamrozy, the quintet
became renowned for the staging of huge multimedia events at obscure
venues -- a railway works in Glasgow, a sand quarry, Cannon Street
Station in London, a Welsh car factory -- and their political agenda,
which has included action against apartheid, the rise of neo-Nazism
and Britain's Criminal Justice Act. The quintet signed to Some Bizarre
Records for 1984's Beating the Retreat, and outlined their socialist
agenda set to music on the following year's Shoulder to Shoulder,
recorded with "the South Wales Striking Miners' Choir." After forming
their own Ministry of Power label to organize multimedia events, Test
Department released two records -- The Unacceptable Face of Freedom
and A Good Night Out -- in a MOP/Some Bizarre conjunction, but struck
out on their own with 1988's Terra Firma. Test Dept.'s sixth album,
The Gododdin, was followed by their most scathing criticism of British
politics, Pax Britannica, in conjunction with the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra and Choir. After releasing albums for Jungle Records and
Dossier, the group gained a contract with the American industrial
label Cleopatra in 1994 and released the fruit of their early-'90s
work on Legacy (1990-1993). Signed to Cleopatra's subsidiary
Invisible, Test Dept. released the new albums Totality (1995) and
Tactics for Revolution (1998), as well as reissuing several previous
works. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide