All things considered, it's pretty difficult to hold the average music fan's attention for over 45 minutes with a mere guitar and voice album, but it's something Sheffield-born, Leeds-based JOHN PARKES managed to do effortlessly with his debut solo record, the tongue-twisting 'Faithlessnessless' in 2006.
Aside from sorting the wheat from the chaff when it came to successfully name-dropping his album after ten pints of Old Speckled Hen, 'Faithlessnessless' also marked the entry of John Parkes' alter-ego: the acidic, acoustic troubadour counterpart shade to the lo-fi fuzzed-up electric light of his work with noisy git alt.rock contenders Whole Sky Monitor. Indeed, while WSM'S debut album only sparked intermittently for this writer, 'Faithlessnessless' was lit up by a welter of caustic corkers like 'Hippy Father', the anti-It Girl salvo of 'The Gail Porters' and the brilliant 'You've Never Heard Of Me' where our hero celebrated his own obscurity with something approaching relish.
As 2008 dawns, though, John and his fiendish chums in WSM are making an infernally fine racket with their second album 'Bland Bland Bland' (enthusiastically reviewed by this hack recently on W&H) so Parkes' sophomore solo release arrives with a high standard to maintain.
Fine, says our man, slinging his trusy acoustic over his shoulder and fixing up his harmonica cradle. Let's get to it. And indeed he proves equal to the challenge, for the fourteen sardonic, vimto and vitriol addresses to a diseased nation making up 'Illegal Songs' prove to be both the equal and a tremendous sequel to 'Faithlessness'.
So, with his trusty, Woody Guthrie-referencing six-stringer ("this machine gets grumpy" - I ask you!) all tuned-up, Parkes is back and this time it's even more political than before, as the furious early salvo featuring 'Second Golden Age Of Protest', 'Glorification Of Terrorism' and 'Let's Make Love' make abundantly clear. The opening 'Second Golden Age...' - with its' references to Melanie, Donovan and "Bobby D" - is hilarious and features the immortal lines "most still say their sweet baby left them/ she's well out of it, it seems to me." The governmental control blues of 'Let's Make Love' ("we talked for a while, I took a gamble/ said she was the girl of my dreams/ so she asked for a DNA sample and I introduced her to my legal team") is arguably even better and the scabrously witty tirade of 'Generation Of Terrorism' ("that woman's got hand cream, that man's got a beard/ we don't like the cut of his jib, he looks weird") is only too easy to relate to if you've been subjected to the ever-shifting baggage controls at Stansted airport of late.
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It gets better too. For example, if you don't think bleakly wry humour and militancy can make groovy bedfellows, try 'Incitement To Religious Hatred' on for size. Or perhaps the narkily brilliant 'Pray For Recession' where our hero suggests the rich should forcibly change places with the poor ("I pray for the downturn, green turn/ less waste, less greed, less rich/ let them have their turn - it's only fair") and may just get some form of retribution if the current stock market wobbles are anything to go by. See? Who says music can't change the world or at least let the odd MP's tyres down now and again, anyway?
Elsewhere, Parkes turns his sights inwardly on unlikely love songs like 'Valentine's Day' and 'My Desire' before getting all wordy and Rocky Votolato-ish on the New Labour-stabbing 'Left Of Centre' and even giving 'Bobby D' a run for his money on the Dylan-meets-Ed Hamell groove of 'Stalker Boy'. Hell, he even makes the actually pretty reprehensible Size 13 foot-in-mouth, man-behaving-badly blues of 'You Win' (opening line "if you were dead, I could sleep with all your friends") sound like the most fun you can possibly have while listening to a one-man rant machine going into acoustic overdrive of an afternoon.
So, like its' bizarrely-monikered predecessor, 'Iillegal Songs' is hardly liable to make its' gifted, but heartily pissed-off author into a household name, but that's scarcely the point. What is important, however, is that it's a second intelligent and acutely well-observed collection of tunes railing brilliantly against both the big issues and the all-important minutiae of modern day living with healthy doses of humour lobbed in to medicate. Three cheers for the weirdo once again, if you please.
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