OFF the road for a bit now: I’ve been far and wide in the past two weeks.  Cornwall was lovely, the north-west as welcoming as ever. Thoughts turn to June, as I plan our Glastonwick festival and my Bollocks To Brexit solo tour of mainland Europe: that’s all I have left now over there, nearly 30 years of band gigs are at an end, killed by a pinched-faced referendum vote. 

But enough of my travels:  I’m devoting the majority of this week’s column to an unexpectedly good review of an unexpected album from an unexpected source. 
 
 It’s been 41 years in the making, beating Abba in the “longest wait for a comeback album” stakes, as Paul Wellings, aka Anti Social Worker, the irritatingly persistent creator of Militant Business and Grime Poetry has informed me over and over again in a series of self-penned “press releases” over the last couple of weeks. 
 
He’s also endlessly informed me how much “critics” love his album and how much “national airplay” it’s getting. I neither know nor care if that’s true. (Paul is a former music journalist who also used to work in PR, and by fuck it shows. Get out of my FACE!)

Fortunately this independent-minded contrarian, accustomed to react in a diametrically opposite way to that intended by nagging music industry PR types, has managed to bypass all that bollocks — and Paul’s endless 1980s “working-class-East-End-street-cred-prolier-than-thou” stylings. Against all the aforementioned odds and once you’ve ditched the baggage, Militant Business and Grime Poetry is a skilful, diverse, original and thought-provoking piece of work.