When I heard that the town
council in my old home town had decided to amputate the First World War
memorial from the town centre and replace it with a water fountain, in
spite of a local petition signed by thousands, I was outraged. Though
the disingenuous argument was being made that a site dignifies its
monument rather than the other way around, I had very strong opinions on
the matter and set about writing them down. The result was a tub thumper
which I hadn't been working on long before the unmistakably Joe-Strummeresque
tones of Henk Milne began to suggest themselves. (How Strummer beat Henk
to Shane MacGowan's old job remains a mystery.) Henk is one of my
original musical peers in Miami, and, as between us we pretty much
constitute Miami's Celtic rock scene in its entirety, we've been aware
of each other's activities since the late 80's. I invited Henk to
participate, and he tore into the project with his usual gusto, bringing
along most of his large band, The Volunteers (including Diane Ward and
Jack Shawde), disguised on this occasion as Rebel Crewe (pictured after
a show in Sunrise, FL), to give voice to the names on the wall of the
Crewe War memorial, on plaques which have now been removed from the
centre of one of the last towns in England to put a war memorial to its
dead up in the first place. While the plinth is to be resituated, no one
seems sure yet what will happen to the names. The song generated a lot
of local press, and Henk and I did radio interviews both with US and BBC
radio and made the song available as a free audio download, and freely
available as a sort of memorial in itself it will remain, as long as I
have anything to do with it.