Chris T-T - 9 Red Songs

  by Daniel Cressey

published: 18 / 10 / 2005

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Review

Urban troubadour Chris TT turns his particular brand of humour to protest music with his latest album. Lined up are all the targets you would expect from a man who once sang “I give up, we’re all fucked, The Daily Mail readers have defeated me.” So Chris, with intermittent success, takes aim at Tony Blair, hunting, road building, terrorism, attacks on civil liberties, and – no surprise – The Daily Mail. Actually the surprising thing is with how many of these songs the aim is off . It’s a very small number but you would expect a marksman like this to hit the target every time. While ‘Tony’s Heart’ is an amusing tale of doctors who open up Blair to find nothing, ‘M1 Song’ is simply mawkish. While ‘The Huntsman Comes A-Marchin’’ is a brilliant slap for the red velvet clad aristocracy who decided they were an oppressed minority at some point recently, ‘Bankrupt’ is frankly boring. An explanation of this surfaces on track ten. This opens, “War is bad, poverty’s bad, racism’s bad – well done have a biscuit.’ Chris TT it seems has been pulling our leg with all these tracks. This is the musical equivalent of those appalling stories where at the end “it was all just a dream”. It does make you reconsider your initial impression of these tracks though. Is ‘The Court of You’ actually about the current ‘anti-terror’ laws or just a song about a particularly unfair lover? (If the latter we must be prepared to admit someone has finally got the word ‘kangaroo’ into a love song.) Likewise is ‘Simmer Down, Simmer Down’ about terrorists blowing up a military vehicle or a song about a good Samaritan taking out that malignant kitchen dwarf Jamie Oliver while he throws together some tomato soup in his camper van? And what the hell is ‘Admit One’ with its sampled frog noises all about?

Track Listing:-

1 Bankrupt
2 Tony's Heart
3 A Plague On Both Your Houses
4 The Huntsman Comes A-Marchin'
5 M1 Song
6 The Court Of You
7 Uh... The Press (For Paul Dacre)
8 Admit One
9 Simmer Down, Simmer Down
10 Preaching To The Converted