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| John has released two albums to date. His debut Faithlessnessless and Illegal Songs which was released in 2008. Click here to discover and listen to Faithlessnessless Click here to discover and listen to Illegal Songs |
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| Illegal Songs Illegal Songs Album - Comments on the songs
I have decided in my modest way that I am the future of protest music - or at least the man who has reinvented it - and everyone else is its past or somehow rubbish or corrupted in some way - JP announces himself as the new Bob Dylan, has a pop at the competition and then explains that he's been distracted and isn't going to carry it through after all. So there (you'll be seeing that phrase again if you're concentrating). The word 'vagina' should keep it off the radio too. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Glorification of Terrorism There's a raft of new laws about. The one banning 'Glorification of Terrorism' is surely the daftest and most arbitrary as well as the most dangerous. If you can't glorify terrorists you can't praise Nelson Mandela, the French Resistance, the founders of the USA or whoever. If you're some misguided hot-headed Muslim teenager in the West who has decided that cutting people's heads off on telly is great and glorious and just what God ordered you could be sent to jail for it. Not a very pleasant view of the world - but then nor is watching Celebrity Big Brother Goes Shopping on Ice. So should we have a 'send every teenager with a bit of a twattish opinion to jail' law? A 'send people to jail who aren't quite playing the white man' law? A 'The Home Secretary doesn't like the cut of your jib law'? And on we go.'Without freedom of speech I might be in the swamp' said the man. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Let's Make Love There was a warning on the radio that you need specific permission from your potential partner if you want to have sex. Well, first of all let's get on the record that I'm not in favour of non consensual sex (unless its something done to me by a very select number of individuals I'm not prepared to name). However, when was the last time you got explicit permission? Does a hand down the trousers count? (No is the answer to that by the way) - And does it all mean you can't have sex if you've also had a drink or a smoke or a hard day at work (though that hardly ever happens, obviously)? Good of the authorities to get involved though eh? This could well be 'the comedy song' from the album. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Incitement to Religious Hatred Another ridiculous law to prosecute the critical and the rational is the one against 'Incitement to Religious Hatred'. Why does anyone who subscribes to some irrational medieval belief system get special treatment? Once again it's all in the interpretation, leaving it wide open to abuse from the first not very cuddly government that comes along. Another song written to piss people off and to break the law. If I was Leonard Cohen I'd have a girly choir singing along with the 'hate them all, kill them all' chorus. I await the green ink. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Pray for Recession I had the title and a few words for this kicking about for ages. Then I finished it (along with some others) one afternoon in a photographer's studio in Armley in about ½ an hour. This is my heresy song and I assume that there's hardly anyone in the country (or the world) that will agree. It's still sort of legal to slag off God (though not for long - se above) but questioning economic 'growth' is beyond the pale. People burn, plunder, lay waste and move on - all so people can buy rubbish they don't really want and don't need. Sustainable development indeed! Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Valentine's Day All that chocolate hearts, roses, cards and quilted teddy bears stuff is such sickening nonsense - why do people go along with it? I'm sick of being told by the advertising industry how to behave. Fuck 'em all. I might fall in love with you (not you, fool!) but I will not express it through jewellery and rabbits with hearts sewn on thank you very much. If there is such a thing as romance it's probably more to do with dying for a hopeless just cause or dreaming of a sunset that's not caused by pollution in the atmosphere than it is about nipping into Thorntons. So there. Not an angry song though - I'm going to introduce this live as 'one for the girls' and see if anyone gets the joke. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song My Desire I'm not sure where this one came from. Something about working in Micky D's or somewhere similar. Another song that just came out and never really got 'worked on'. I think I came up with this in the studio but had to go away and learn to play it (before forgetting it again). Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song The Dog Ate My Song A song about not having any songs finished - neat huh? My song writing muse often turns up sweating and disheveled to toss something at me about 5 minutes before I'm out of time. Luckily my cassette recorder (circa 1979) sometimes captures it - and that's what happened in this case though it was recorded a bit more correctly later. In fact it was so disorganised it had to be edited down so it didn't sprawl over the whole table cloth. 'The dog ate my head' is a great line though eh?! Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Left of Centre I heard a 'New Labour' politician making out that they were 'left of centre' (no, really!) I wrote down just a few of the government's recent actions and ended up with a list. Then I came up with a further list. I know that freedom of speech and such like is not necessarily a left-ish belief but it is in my world so there. Economics I had a strange couple of days in a temporary rehearsal space and 2 or three songs just appeared or got 'finished' very quickly. I had a recording session booked soon afterwards and just decided to do the new ones. They weren't really finished but I thought recording them quickly and moving on was the right thing to do. This is one of the results. As a result the words should perhaps have been either more 'focussed' or more weird. More harmonica faking too which I was quite pleased with. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Stalker Boy When I were a lad the 12-bar was the thing all the old rockers did in pubs and was to be avoided like Genesis and Rush albums. But sometimes it's just so easy to do one - and sometimes it seems right. It's this kind of song that makes me wonder how great and yet how awful it would be to have a band playing along. Anyway, beware young man; it's a thin line between determined crazy irresistible love and stalking. It'll be illegal soon enough though so that's OK. A not-quite-documentary song. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Running Down the Clock Occasionally you'll meet one of those self-destructive people and there's nothing you can do. You Win This was nearly a band song a couple of times. My favourite un-sayable opening line ever in one of my songs I think ('If you were dead, I could sleep with all your friends'). I was told (though I knew) that it was very presumptuous. Yes it is. It was meant to celebrate infidelity (or at least the thought of it) but I kind of bottled out not wishing to misrepresent my own opinions (there are plenty of people who will do that for you for free). Or something like that. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Next to You That terrible moment when you've had a drink and you sit next to someone you fancy. Not much else to say on that. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song |
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| Faithlessnessless - The first JP acoustic Album Album Commentary 1. Goodbye Ms Jones This is definitely the oldest song on the album and featured on the 'Longing for Next Year' EP by the Sinister Cleaners many years ago. This tends to get played without the harmonica live as I can't work out how to use the rack without looking like a nodding dog after a meal containing muscle relaxant. It might be about leaving Cleethorpes. The idea of doing acoustic stuff was partly to get to play songs that had never interested any of the bands I'd been in. This meant looking through some old songs. This came up and I started doing it, not sure why. Probably because I could still remember most of the chords. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 2. Cigarette This is my most popular song live and was written after a woman with striking eyes made my eyes water. Should be a big hit and make me lots of money! 'Cigarette as metaphor for obsessive love' as a reviewer wrote. I always think of a song called 'Cardboard Boxes' by Loudon Wainwright III when I play this song. It starts with the same chord - an A minor since you ask. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song  Download This Track For FREE!!! 3. This Tonight I could've called this 'The significance (or otherwise) of a goodnight kiss'. That pretty much covers what it's about. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 4.To Go Round This was going to be called 'Paedophiles' or 'There Aren't Enough Paedophiles to Go Round' but I was advised that people would set fire to my house just for using the word and they were probably right. New Labour turned out to be a right wing authoritarian party and started taking the axe to civil liberties and freedoms. This is the closest I get to a protest song. The point is that the world is not full enough of bad people to justify removing freedom for everyone. To quote Joe Strummer 'freedom's always on the run'. I didn't used to believe that but it certainly seems true in the UK at the moment and nobody seems to care. Here endeth the lesson. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Download This Track For FREE!!!! 5.Hippy Father Or why are young people so conservative these days? A father wishes his offspring would be a bit less straight. Not sure how this one came up. This was recorded live in the studio. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 6. 80 Years Old Simply about unrequited love. The only kind of love that really lasts according to the wise words of Woody Allen. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 7. Goldfish This was written before I heard the Neil Young song about being a fish ('Will to Love' from the 'American Stars 'N Bars' album from 1977) so I still think it was big and clever to think of being a fish. It was recorded by Fuzzbird and featured on the 'Pulling the Wings Off Small Boys' album. Part of my original intention in doing acoustic stuff was that it would be mainly old stuff from all the years I've been writing songs so I started with a list of suitable songs that I could remember - and this was on the list. It stayed while I wrote new songs around it. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 8. Move On This is about leaving home. It's a weird mixture (for me) of stuff about me and stuff about someone else, a 'type' who's not me. I sometimes feel like I must have been married and divorced even though in my (current) real life I haven't. This was also recorded live in the studio if I remember rightly. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 9. Politics There might be more like this. I was just wondering whatever happened to politics because I remember it was seen as important at one time. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 10. The Gail Porters I read somewhere that Gail Porter had attempted suicide, which is sad This is about that phenomena of 'celebrity' women you've never heard of who feature in all the lads mags. Seems to me that if you want pornography you should buy pornography but, hey, that's just me. Ironically, people have heard of Gail Porter and I've no idea how desperate she was to be famous or if she went to drama school. If I ever met her I'd apologise though the songs is about her dumbass younger sisters (as Loudon Wainwright once nearly said about himself and Bob Dylan). And I didn't know she was in a car crash and she lost her hair either. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song 11. Darkness Another song about unrequited love - I'm pleased that this song is fairly focussed and says what it means. I was really pleased to be able to do some short songs on the album. Band songs always have intros and instrumental bits which you don't necessarily need just to get the song across. Annoyingly it's almost impossible to play on my current guitar as the top string is very near the edge of the fret board (or have I just got hands like hams?) and I keep catching it. This means I tend not to play it live. Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song Download This Track For Free 12. You've Never Heard of Me Maybe this is self indulgent but I don't care. Biographical information. All the credits at the end are real - see if you can spot your initials in there if you know me. When it was recorded I'd only just written it so the album starts with the old and finishes with the new - clever eh? Click Here To Read The Lyrics of This Song |
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