[lbo-talk] Palast's Palimpsest: Lying About Galloway.

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Sun Sep 18 09:55:39 PDT 2005


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



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