We’re not gonna take it... Or perhaps we will.
We’re not gonna take it... Or perhaps we will.
How a dystopian TV series inspired the latest single by the Dear Boys
This week sees the release of a new double A-side, “Gone Viral” and “Scan Me,” by The Dear Boys, the transatlantic “band” built around myself and Tony Page.
For background: Pagey joined my South London school band trio Apocalypse in 1981, as an additional guitarist but primarily to sing my composition given how bad my own voice was back then. As a five-piece, Apocalypse went on to have some reasonable success: we were The Jam’s last ever support band, touring with them twice, and had the honour of seeing our sessions produced by Paul Weller, the Mad Professor, the greatly missed Dale Griffin and Overend Watts of Mott the Hoople, and also the late Ken Thomas. We had a couple of indie hits on my own Jamming! label, a disastrously expensive flop on EMI, and broke up nearly five years after our first gig. I had just turned 20.
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The subsequent story of how Pagey and I, having stayed best friends throughout, came back around to playing music together was partly the subject of my first post on Substack, Digital Conversion Therapy. I’m increasingly glad we did so: since our first garden shed session taking care of old business, The Dear Boys have released four of our songs across two 7” singles, made a couple of cool videos, and released a one-off digital single in time for the UK election, a song that is perfectly relevant for the impending US election too. We have also been blessed with an ever-increasing amount of quality airplay, and found ourselves picking up proper press along the way, with Record Collector having positively reviewed both our 7” singles to date. Not only is it wonderfully rejuvenating to find myself making music again at this age but it’s incredibly rewarding to have it appreciated.
Nonetheless, it’s interesting that I should have titled my first post on Substack as a celebration of my ‘Digital Conversion Therapy,’ because the new single is very much a commentary on our digital society. As I wrote for a short profile piece in the latest issue of the US magazine/fanzine Second Scene,
‘“Gone Viral” and “Scan Me” form a pair, all about our dystopian society in which viruses threaten to kill off humanity in the ‘default’ world, but viruses are meant to be ‘cool’ in the digital world and we are all meant to aspire to going ‘viral’ ... The same word can have different meanings in different environments. For “Scan Me” I took the notion of everything having a QR code these days and a sense of desperation about it but it is also about being constantly data-mined, online or off.’
I am sure you all know what I am getting at. The very fact that you are reading this post means you are (or were just) online in some form or another, almost powerless to prevent your information being sold to some corporate entity somewhere down the data chain. You all probably feel a similar sense of hopelessness or despair, a sense that this is now the way the world is and there is nothing we can do about it.
And it’s true, almost all of us – though Pagey is a notable and noble exception – are chained to our phones and devices, and perhaps none more so than myself when, in New York City a week back, the morning after seeing Johnny Marr and James at the beautiful historic Brooklyn Paramount, I entered the Smith Street subway station during rush hour, staring intensely at my phone screen in the hope that I could film people staring at their phone screens. The universe rewarded me with a full platform length to walk, a wall lined with commuters staring passively, listlessly, mostly vacuously, at their screens, none questioning my right to film them (thus proving one of the above points), with a picture-perfect poster at the far end of the platform to wrap things up.
Back upstate, I topped and tailed the video, sped it up slightly to run just over the length of “Scan Me,” allowed for the sound of the subway to introduce and close out proceedings, and sent it (digitally, of course) to Pagey for consideration. He wrote back that he considered it finished already, observing that it was “Quite tragic and very thought provoking,” and lo-and-behold if The Dear Boys do not now have a third in what’s becoming a series of single-shot promos. It is now universally available on YouTube. I hope you dig it.
I’m not laying any claim to great originality or high art with The Dear Boys. We lovingly take on the challenge of working within the familiar constraints of three verses/choruses plus a middle 8 and/or instrumental section; we have brought in all but one song either on or under the 3-minute mark; and we’ve recorded all backing tracks live in proper studios where the clock is always ticking. For the one-day session in South London this spring that has so far yielded three masters with hopefully a fourth to come, we were joined by Brett “Buddy” Ascott on drums, who I’ve admired musically and known personally since the week I turned 15 when I first saw him play with the Chords, and by my longest-standing female friend Jeni de Haart, who I met the same month in 1979, on additional vocals. Further female backing vocals were added by my partner in love and Hudson Palace, Paula Lucas, back home in the Hudson Valley, where I then took time with overdubs in my apartment. My teenage son, Noel, took his own time to mix the tracks properly in his bedroom as he has all the Dear Boys song bar one; judging by the airplay and press, he knows what he is doing. I also had Noel replace my guitar solo and acoustic guitar on “Gone Viral” because he’s a better lead player than me. It’s a family affair. And it’s fun: as music should be.
Nonetheless, as you can tell, our songs have a militant message. Regarding the new double A-side, I had felt the need to make some sort of comment on our aforementioned increased enslavement to our technology, and the two songs came to me as a pair, one super aggressive (“Gone Viral,” though I have already heard the guitar sound being compared to the Clash’ “Train In Vain”), the other more pop (“Scan Me,” though I’ve already heard this one compared to Devo. I’ll take both).
If there’s any direct inspiration for this latter song, it’s from the TV series Years and Years. Set in Manchester, broadcast on BBC and HBO in 2019, it was written and directed by Russell T. Davies, he who revitalized Doctor Who back in 2005, writing and directing epic episodes like the one about Vincent Van Gogh and the Sunflowers, and the terrifying “Weeping Angels.” But if the Doctor Who reboot allowed for a certain guarded optimism about past, present and future, Years and Years did not. This truly dystopian show launched in the final weeks of a consecutive Trump Presidency (i.e. right around this very moment), with China threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on an uppity sovereign island nation very much like Taiwan. It then got dark.
By the time Years and Years was done, just six episodes later, it had traveled back five and forwards another ten years, during which time Britain had gone through the rise and fall of a Trump/BoJo/Liz Truss-like Prime Minister (played brilliantly by Emma Thompson) with all its first-Trump-term chaos and division, and the world had witnessed that nuclear attack only for to be challenged by conspiracy theorists years down the line; eye implants had become the latest teen fashion, there was consciousness uploading to the Cloud, immigrant concentration camps on British shores, and even a fucking pandemic just six months before the real one. Not surprisingly, the family at the centre of all the action is shown imploding under the pressure, but they are brought back together for a family reunion in the final episode. In the clip below, you will see Anne Reid as the matriarch, Muriel, delivering a stunning repudiation of modern society, stating that she saw “it all going wrong… in the supermarket when they they replaced all the women on the till with those automatic check-outs.” That part is at 3:20 but it’s well worth watching the whole thing:
Muriel was right. The automated check-outs are now everywhere in the UK and no one stopped them (because secretly, everyone liked them?). My local supermarket here in Kingston, a branch of Hannafords that prides itself on its diversity hiring values, has just installed the self-checkouts as part of a horrible renovation/reorganization that has also done away with the healthy food section at the front of the store and dispersed it across the dozens of other aisles, more than doubling any time I’d theoretically save by theoretically not standing in line.
The double theoretical is because, on the occasions I find I do still have to use the place now that they’ve ruined it (I opt for the famers’ market and health food stores otherwise), I do just that: I stand stubbornly in line at one of the remaining human-staffed check-out line to dampen the store’s hope that I’ll do their check-out work for them without pay, and to persist in the ancient art of talking to people. As Kurt Vonnegut knew all too well, we need these human encounters to live and thrive.
Nonetheless, I won’t admit defeat. Nor does my song “Scan Me.” After a middle eight that features a rights-free AI voice reciting a real, recently controversial “privacy” statement which Noel pointed me towards, the final verse of the song invites resistance.
“We dictate our future If we don’t give up our past
We can sew the suture Close the wound that’s built the mask
We can shut the pipeline Restrict your machinery
We can craft the story Just say ‘No! we don’t agree’”
We decided to release this particular double A-side on CD rather than 7”. For one thing, it made lyrical, if ironic, sense to do so: these are, after all, songs about technology. For another, and perhaps more ironically, it made both qualitative and financial sense too: our previous 45s delivered somewhat disappointing audio quality whereas a CD can guarantee perfect digital repro of sound and visuals alike, besides which, the 7” singles cost us upwards of a prohibitive £10 a pop, whereas the CDs have only cost us about £2 a go. The inconvenient truth is that in many ways, digital is preferable, from those reasons just mentioned to the one I celebrated back on that original Digital Conversion Therapy post: the opportunity to share one’s creative output (including this Substack column) with, again theoretically, the entire online world via the click of a “publish” button.
Accordingly, “Gone Viral” and “Scan Me” are available on all streaming platforms , from which we likely won’t see a penny. The songs are also available for purchase on Bandcamp, either as a CD with bonus “undermastered” versions, or for digital download, and from that site, we do get paid, and promptly. We appreciate you.
…As for that poster at the end of the Smith Street platform, the one suggesting you “treat your depression symptoms from your phone”? It’s a prescription app. Yes, a prescription app. In my euphoria that morning on the Brooklyn subway platform, I misread the meaning of the phrase, “treat your depression symptoms from your phone.” Rather than admitting that the depression symptoms might well be coming from the (over) use of your phone, the latest snake oil company is inviting you to become further addicted to your phone-induced depression by committing to an app for it. Now you will understand why we stuck our own QR code over theirs. You know where to stick the cork.
