It’s a devil of a job getting songs right

7:56am Tuesday 10th April 2007

If, as the old saying goes, the devil has all the best tunes, why didn't he give some to the fascists?

Could it be that even Satan is embarrassed by the current standard bearers of the Master Race ethos, and doesn't want much to do with the podgy, ruddy-faced, middle-aged men who currently make-up the Far Right's leading lights?

Right-wingers are rubbish at pop music, and that's a fact. The biggest movement in fascist music was the skinhead sub-culture, with bands like Skrewdriver and The Ventz writing punk songs about kicking in Asians' heads and then, rather inexplicably, getting radged up and kicking in each others' heads in the close quarters of whatever gig space would put them on.

The thing is, they were never as good as proper punk bands, were they? And even when Sid Vicious slapped a swastika patch on his leather jacket, you knew he was only doing it for shock value and not because he was an actual Nazi.

There was a short-lived National Front riposte to the whole Rock Against Racism movement in the Eighties called Rock Against Communism, in which bands with racist tendencies would gather to sing about giving a good kicking to the reds under the bed. It is not known what Russia made of all this during the Cold War years, or whether it cared.

A few years ago there was a hip-hop act from Europe called Aryan Duo, who used to bang out racist rhymes. The fact that they were appropriating a sound born in the black inner-city areas of America to do this was presumably an irony that escaped them.

And so on to pop's latest Great White Hope, a combo named, rather bizarrely, Red Claire, which makes you think of a particularly left-wing militant female, but is actually the name of a band predominantly made up of BNP members, including Queensbury councillor Paul Cromie.

Their song is entitled Savile Town, Where's It Gone, which is a snappy title that trips off the tongue and will have young people driven to a frenzy in scenes reminiscent of, if not Beatlemania, surely the Nuremburg rallies.

Savile Town, Where's It Gone is a folky lament about the apparent decline of this community near Dewsbury into a dark and fearful place where non-white people reside. There are allegations of heroin use, paedophilia and kebab eating. It sounds a bit like something Mike Harding might have performed if he'd accidentally ingested a huge amount of LSD and shoved a copy of Mein Kampf up his backside while listening to a Bernard Manning podcast.

In other words, a pile of rusty old Panzer nuts.

Far be it from me to give the Far Right any kind of helping hand, but you've got to feel sorry for any political movement that can't even write a serviceable pop song.

What they should do is employ, say, the songwriting team behind some of the biggest hits of the Sugarbabes or Girls Aloud to give them a jaunty, singalong number, maybe something like: "We're Fat and Ugly (But We're The Master Race and We're Comin' Atcha!)"

Then the various members of Red Claire need to squeeze themselves into some very tight glam rock outfits and play this year's Bradford Mela, where they can get their message directly across to the people they're talking about.

I mean, that would be the manly, British, upstanding, right thing to do, wouldn't it..?

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