Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release Free Song, ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’

I’ve just made available a free song on Soundcloud, ‘Tory Bullshit Blues‘, by my band The Four Fathers, from our forthcoming album, ‘Love and War.’

With just five days to go until the General Election, and with reports that the Tories are leading in the polls, I wanted to make sure that I made my opinions clear about the last five years under the Tory-led coalition government, with its assault on the poor, the unemployed and the disabled — as well as my thoughts about UKIP, whose rise has been such a depressing spectacle.

The song is embedded below, and I hope you like it and share it if you do.

Last week I also set up a Facebook page for the Four Fathers, and will soon be setting up a Bandcamp account to make all our songs available online — and we’ll also be making CDs. Along with myself, Andy Worthington (on vocals and guitar), the band is made up of Richard Clare (guitar and backing vocals), Bren Horstead (drums and percussion), Andrew Fifield (flute and harmonica) and Louis Sills-Clare (bass). We began recording last November, and have had two other sessions in January and February, and we’re in the studio later today (May 2) recording the last two songs for the album, two of my recent compositions — ‘Fighting Injustice’, a storming roots reggae anthem, and ’81 Million Dollars’, about the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program.

The album features eight original compositions, seven of my own songs (including ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I launched in November, with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison), and one by Richard, and two covers, Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and a radical re-make of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive.’

We also have some gigs coming up. We’re playing at the Duke in Deptford (at 175 Creek Road) at 6pm on Monday (May 4, the Bank Holiday) as part of the Deptford Heritage Festival (a change in time and venue — it was originally scheduled to be at 3pm at another venue, Number Three, on Creekside), and on Saturday June 6 on the closing day of the Brockley Max festival (further details to follow). Both gigs are free. Do get in touch if you’re interested in having us play.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.