Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
When we sing in the voices of the downtrodden, when we admit to ourselves that the songs we sing are not from an exalted high praising the so-called great and good, but ones that sit in the realm of the beggar’s folk dance, the vagabond and the hobo’s Mosh, and the parody of the discotheque frequented by the cash strapped and harbingers of the bouncing cheque, then we show the world just how to give A Thousand Pokes to the classless upper classes and the wannabe nouveau riche who see the world as a plaything without understanding the most basic of rules.
The superb Stick In The Wheel have returned to the foreground of the satirical divine is not only welcome, it is the reward we all deserve for the terrible times we have lived through, the incentive driven cool and payback for the way the echelons of society have mocked their wealth, status, and privilege in ways that have crippled life, made it almost impossible to kick upwards.
Stick In The Wheel’s Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter style is never in doubt, it is engaging, full of dramatic sequences, and praised be with a joyful sarcasm that underlines themes of global fear, the mass corruption inherent as greed is lorded as a virtue, and the ever sweeping political turmoil that ranges from congratulating war and embracing perpetual insanity.
Each track is one steeped in glorious revolution, from the sardonic and cynical view as if delivered from the stage of the East End music hall, to the scathing and corrosive substance of language delivered with gentle grins of harshness, the pairing turn on every biting expression possible, and as tracks such the acid dripped opening of Crystal Tears, Lavender, What Can The Matter Be?, Watercross-o, the excellent and brow defining Steals The Thief, and the album’s title track of A Thousand Pokes, is a 21st music extravaganza that resembles a night in a Victorian/Edwardian music hall filled with characters brought forth from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, thoughtful, demonstrative, educational, vital to raising the spirits of the listener and with hope of acceptance in the pushing them to stand firm, to fight back against the undoing of language and working class humour.
A beggar’s banquet, a feast of wit, a series of individuals made stars by Stick In The Wheel as their stories thrill and haunt the listener; this is restoration of the ability to kick upwards whilst acknowledging the belief that forever holds true in the darkest alleys and the unlit streets of sarcasm and ironic truth.
Stick In The Wheel release A Thousand Pokes on 11th October.
Ian D. Hall