Cardiff based one man folk-punk-hiphop phenomenon Cosmo releases 6th studio album, Picket Line Party – Aventures In Austerity Britain on 28th March 2012 on Perverse Pop. This is the latest offering from the longtime musical chronicler of UK underground life.
After years of criss-crossing the country on tour, Cosmo has a wake up call after he wakes up at a festival covered in sick. It’s summer 2010, the Tories have got into bed with the LibDems and begun a vicious attack on ordinary people’s living standards. The question is: how to fight back? Armed with a guitar and a load of attitude, Cosmo takes off on the road again, playing at protests, picket lines, parties and street corners, seeing how ordinary people start to wake up and resist.
On the way, he manages to get a gig at a LibDem post-conference shindig, start flamewars with BBC Radio DJ Adam Walton and make an accidental appearance in a Daily Mail photo-shoot. He encounters undercover cops, plays at a royal wedding boat party and manages to get his antifascist anthem F@ck the BNP into the Amazon charts – ahead of some Simon and Garfunkel tunes, (much to his mum’s delight!).
In addition, he writes and records songs and keeps a diary of his travels, putting them up online to freely download and share. Starting with localised demos, his account twists and turns into the global uprising that becomes known as Occupy.The resultant furore is a musical rollercoster of an album, taking in folk, punk, music hall, hip-hop, bluegrass, Monty Python and even the new genre of country protest! Lyrically the songs range from historical struggles such as the Music Hall War of 1907, to the hilarious send-up of the far-right English Defence League – and much more.
And you thought protest music was dead? Think again! It’s alive and kicking, genre-defying, hungover and pissed off! Picket Line Party is free-to-download, but is also available as a digipak CD, plus a book with lyrics, chords, blog entries, photos etc. Oh, and a t-shirt, too. Who says filesharing harms music sales?
For more information visit http://www.cosmoguitar.net/
