Various Artists
Album: Celebrating Subversion:The Anti-Capitalist Roadshow
Label: Fuse
Tracks: 30
Website: http://www.anticapitalistroadshow.co.uk

The Anti-Capitalist Roadshow is a collective of eleven like-minded souls - comprising a host of illustrious singers and songwriters (and the UK's one and only socialist magician) - who have of late been taking their songs and magic to enthusiastic audiences across this land, with the humble aim of raising spirits and giving hope and heart and a smile or two to those angry at injustice. It all began with the Occupy movement and the overwhelming sense that this government was imposing an ideologically-driven austerity programme on all but the elite, and in particular on the poor, the vulnerable and the disabled.

The ACR's united aim is to challenge the narrative that says "there is no alternative", and the two hours' worth of music (together with a visionary poem by Ian Saville, the aforementioned magician) on this pair of discs forms part of the resistance to insidious capitalism, and part of another way of looking at the world. The participants could not have been better chosen to voice these concerns with total conviction, all of them having proven (and mostly very much long-term, nay virtually lifelong) credentials in the field of musical agitprop and eminently sensible social and political commentary in song. All but a very few of the recordings here were made last summer, although a number of them serve as contemporary updates to, or timely revisits of, songs that have previously appeared on record (or tape! - some being now long-deleted).

The range and tone of the songwriting is, as you'd expect, extensive, from justifiably angry (Jim Woodland's The Grapes Of Wrath) and satirical (Janet Russell's lambasting of the arms trade in Guns And Bombs) to cheerily caustic music-hall-style (Robb Johnson's Why Not?) and sharply perceptive (Leon Rosselson's wry account of the 2011 riots, Looters, and his cheekily cautionary tale of fitness-for-work, Benefits), via the feistly anthemic (Robb Johnson's Be Reasonable and Peggy Seeger's adaptation Doggone, Occupation Is On). Roy Bailey contributes several key tracks including passionate, typically adept accounts of songs by Si Kahn; Frankie Armstrong brings her stentorian tones to powerful activist texts by Godoy, Biermann and Brecht; Reem Kelani delivers a stunning performance of a song from Tunisia expressing the pain of worker migration, also a riveting account of Leon Rosselson's celebrated Song Of The Olive Tree; and Sandra Kerr poses the still-all-too-relevant question Can We Afford The Doctor?

But perhaps the biggest discovery of the set for me was Grace Petrie, an impressive young Leicester-based singer-songwriter who, despite not having been born for the majority of Thatcher's reign, has a singularly acute grasp on the evils of the world she inherited - the world which Mrs T shaped. Grace's three contributions to the set are distinct highlights, and choice tracks certainly, but I could almost as easily turn the spotlight on the many more incomparable performances here which make the set thoroughly recommendable to any thinking listener with an ounce of humanity and political sensitivity.

David Kidman