Total Assault on the Culture - May 2024
The work must go on. Everything must be free for everybody — that’s a good place to start. Total Assault on the Culture, by any means necessary. . .
“Our culture is a revolutionary culture, a revolutionary force on the planet, the seed of the new order that will come to flower with the disintegration and collapse of the obsolete social and economic forms” - John Sinclair
“I am only a madman among the mad.” - Emil Cioran
“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.” - Martin Buber
Photo by Colm Whelan
John Murry - Tour Dates 2024
“We talk in black and white, ones and zeros and satellites, and one day we just might, replace our very souls.”
Born in 1979, John Murry is an American musician, singer-songwriter, composer, and producer. He hails from Tupelo, Mississippi, and currently resides in Drumlish, County Longford, Ireland. Murry gained critical acclaim with his debut solo record, "The Graceless Age," which was released in 2013 on Evangeline Recording Co. The album was listed by Uncut as one of the 10 best records of 2012 and received recognition from Mojo, The Guardian, and American Songwriter as well.
Murry's music is characterized by its alluring, emotional, and infectious qualities. His songwriting often delves into themes of drugs and near-death experiences. Murry has collaborated with other notable musicians, including Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank, and frequently writes and collaborates with San Francisco-based singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet.
“The longer you spend in the darkness with him, the more beauty you’ll see.” – Country Music Magazine
May
22nd May – LEICESTER, The International
23rd May – FROME, HydeAway (Sold Out)
24th May – STONE, The Wren
26th May – MANCHESTER, Retro
July
22nd July – Newcastle, Cluny 2
23rd July – Edinburgh, The Speakeasy at The Voodoo Rooms
26th July – BRISTOL, Chicken Shed @ the Hen & Chicken
28th July – Twickenham Festival – The Cabbage Patch pub stage at 15:50
December
11th December – LONDON, What’s Cookin’ @ Leytonstone Social Club
12th December – SOUTHAMPTON, The Attic
To book John Murry email mark@ironmanrecords.co.uk for more info. More dates are being added at time of writing.
Follow John Murry Tour Dates on Songkick
Winner BEST IRISH DOCUMENTARY - ‘The Graceless Age - The Ballad of John Murry’
Director: Sarah Share
Producers: Nuala Cunningham, John Galway & Aeschylus Poulous
The story of American singer-songwriter John Murry who was on the cusp of greatness until he became addicted to heroin, creatively exhausted, and went to Ireland a broken man….
John Murry’s third album, ‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’ was produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels, Aldous Harding, This Is the Kit) at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth. Now based in Ireland, Murry has released two critically acclaimed albums, his 2012 debut ‘The Graceless Age’ Age’ (“…a work of genius” ***** The Guardian) and the 2017 follow-up ‘A Short History Of Decay’ (“..delivers in gloriously dysfunctional bucketloads” **** Mojo).
The starkly beautiful ‘Ones + Zeros’ has a meditative, melancholic feel, with warm analogue crackles, subtle percussion and soothing backing vocals from acclaimed singer-songwriter Nadine Khouri. “Sometimes songs almost write themselves; Ones + Zeros being one of those that did just that, albeit in fits and false starts, and over two recording sessions,” comments Murry of the track. “It was something I wrote very quickly one afternoon many moons ago and recorded the following day as a sketch, or demo, with Tim Mooney of American Music Club. It would prove to be the last thing we recorded together. Tim passed away suddenly only a few days after, and The Graceless Age was released a couple of weeks later. I ended the sketch before we recorded it with the line, ‘I stare at the ceiling while they fall asleep, I wish I was dead, you wish it weren’t me… lying still: learn to love or don’t.’
“I didn’t know where to leave it as a song after Tim died, so I tried to shelve the thing permanently,” he continues. “One day, while filming our upcoming documentary film, director and friend Sarah Share filmed me at The Watergate Theatre in my then adopted hometown of Kilkenny, Ireland. She asked me to play a melody on the Steinway grand piano there, and for whatever reason, this song was the first thing to come to mind, and – without singing any of the lyrics – I played it while they filmed and recorded… maybe because it is simple, and intentionally so, even necessarily so. Immediately after filming it, Sarah asked me what that melody was. I told her, and she brought it up and couple more times in the following days while filming at other locations. That was the permission I needed to take it seriously, as a melodic and lyrical impulse.
“I took it to the sessions at Rockfield with John Parish as it was. We began recording it and, because I wanted to see what would happen if I chose to write in this way. Sometimes ya just get lucky, gotta trust the creating and not the thing you think you intend to create, because that’s often when magic happens. This felt like that. The song and I felt incredibly alive, meeting one another again there, seeing how things had changed over the years, and how things hadn’t; realising nothing is within our control, that we are just kinda dancing with time itself, hoping to find the same groove but different needles.”
The video for ‘Ones + Zeros’ was directed by Sarah Share, who directed the documentary ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God: The Shane MacGowan Story’
Murry found a kindred musical spirit in John Parish. The need for trust when they recorded at Rockfield was total, and Murry and Parish quickly established a deep bond. “Trust matters a great deal,” Murry says. “All my mad ideas, John would facilitate those fully, and get the value of them.”
“John works instinctively and openly in the studio, and his songs are uncomfortably honest and revealing at times,” adds Parish.
“I hope that I gave him the freedom to pursue outlandish ideas, and the confidence to know that someone was keeping track of them and would know how to fit the puzzle pieces together.
Together they brought out what was needed on ‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’: the simple pleasures of playing guitar figures, of working with sympathetic people, of playing music that has the same ragged looseness of Murry’s inspirations and fellow Mississipians RL Burnside and Greg Cartwright (Reigning Sound, Oblivians). No one would mistake it for a blues or garage punk record, but there’s that same organic sense to its rumbling guitars and contained wildness, nurtured by Parish.
‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’ is a world unto itself, wrapped in the softest black velvet and studded with shining examples of the musician’s signature style.
‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’
Tracklist:
1. Oscar Wilde (Came Here To Make Fun Of You)
2. Perfume & Decay
3. The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes
4. Di Kreutser Sonata
5. I Refuse To Believe (You Could Love Me)
6. Ones + Zeros
7. Time & A Rifle
8. Ordinary World
9. 1(1)1
10. Her Little Black Book
Buy ‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’ VINYL from Iron Man Records
John Sinclair
John Sinclair (1941-2024) Last of the Beatnik Warrior Poets and Cultural Revolutionary passed away at the age of 82 on Tuesday 2nd April 2024. The work must go on.
“Rock N Roll music is a weapon of cultural revolution. There are not enough musicians around today who are hip to this fact”
John Sinclair is best known as the Sixties “marijuana” activist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman. He was eventually freed when John Lennon and Yoko Ono spoke out on his behalf.
Less understood is his role as the founder and chairman of the radical anti-war group, The White Panther Party, an offshoot of the Black Panthers. The Black Panther Party was a militant political organization formed after the brutal murders of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy.
The Nixon Administration and the FBI launched a secret program called COINTELPRO to disrupt and ultimately destroy the Black Panthers and the Anti-War movement. As part of this program, John Sinclair was set up and imprisoned on marijuana charges. When the government could no longer justify denying him a bond over two joints, they falsely charged him with a Federal conspiracy to blow up a CIA station, in order to make him disappear. Watch this:
WHITE PANTHER: The Legacy of John Sinclair – a short film by CHARLES SHAW featuring JOHN SINCLAIR music by THELONIUS MONK
“The Revolution is totally committed to bringing people out of their shells and into each others arms. The music is the source and effect of our spirit flesh and we demand a free music and a free high energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves”
“Pop culture in general is the main thing they use to keep young people from developing any ideas.”
“Forget about the money, you aren’t going to get paid, so you can do whatever you want, you’re free! You just have to figure out a way to keep eating, and then the rest of your time you can create things, whatever you want. The only way you’re going to get paid is by making the dumb shit that they can sell”
Immortalized by John Lennon’s 1972 song that bears his name, John Sinclair was an iconic figure of ‘60s counterculture, famous for, among other things, having co-founded the anti-racist White Panther Party and for managing Detroit’s legendary proto-punk outfit MC5 early in its history. Following a highly publicized two-year stint in prison for marijuana possession (Lennon’s song was a protest against his incarceration), Sinclair has stuck to his guns as an advocate for marijuana reform.
“Living Euro to Euro, sleeping on the couches and extra beds of friends, a man without a country and a post office box in New Orleans for a permanent address.” That’s how spoken word poet John Sinclair describes himself on Beatnik Youth. From raucous rock ‘n’ roll to psychedelic jazz and abstract soundscapes. Throughout, John Sinclair’s booming voice functions as an anchor, taking on an American social landscape bursting with civil unrest and self-reinvention as Youth’s modernist production swirls around him.
John Sinclair, the renegade poet, scholar and cultural revolutionary released “Beatnik Youth” on Iron Man Records. The double CD contains over 80 minutes of music from the restless creative mind of Youth, with some fine spoken word and poetry delivered by John Sinclair.
Youth is one of the UK’s most influential producers and has been honoured, with an Outstanding Contribution Award by the Music Producers Guild. His career spans more than 30 years and is one of the UK’s most consistent, credible and influential producers.
“As for the Eagles, I don’t think It was their music so much that I hated, but the fact that they represented the corporatization of rock and roll, and the fact that “the man” had found a way to coopt the revolution, which was begun by the likes of the MC5, taking it from the streets of America, and moving it into the boardroom. They bought all of the guitars”
John Sinclair who was living in Detroit, died Tuesday 2nd April after years of declining health. Sinclair had been hospitalized at DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital for two weeks before his death at 7:58 a.m. He was 82.
“Everything must be free for everybody — that’s a good place to start. Total Assault on the Culture, by any means necessary. . .”
The Work must go on. Listen to John Sinclair’s here: https://johnsinclair.bandcamp.com
Buy John Sinclair Vinyl, CDs, T-shirts and more here: https://ironmanrecords.net/store/
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Transglobal Underground
Transglobal Underground - A band of cosmic mutant rebels representing the living, beating heart of multicultural Britain, a living rebuttal of race-hate politics are assembling tour dates. All UK, EU and USA Booking enquiries please email Peter Conway Tel: 44 (0)20 8378 1012 / 07885 288512
Flyers
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cheers
mark
Iron Man Records, UNIT 8A, Western Industrial Complex, Western Road, Birmingham, B18 7QD
https://www.ironmanrecords.net