Having become considerably popular on the festival circuit since first making their mark on the music scene in 2014 with now high energy-and fun performances at the likes of Glastonbury, The Isle Of Wight and Bestival under their belts, 7-piece alt pop band Cable Street Collective haven’t released that many songs compared to many of their fellow artists, but the ones they’ve shared with their growing fanbase have certainly earned them attention and acclaim, from outlets including Clash Magazine, and rightly so. Their new track “Speaking In Tongues” on which they’ve enlisted the help of Osibisa’s Gregg Koft Brown, is doing exactly the same, and PopWrapped are delighted to premiere its video.
The song and video have quite the story and background to them too, as the band explain: “Lyrically, Speaking in Tongues is about what happens when relationships and trust- both personal and political – break down. Gregg suggested the chorus line, using speaking in tongues as a metaphor for talking at cross purposes. It conjured up images of individuals with entrenched, religiously-held views shouting at each other. That felt like a pretty good way to describe not just a break-up, but also the way the UK’s been led in recent years.
The track was written towards the end of last year, when it felt like the UK was descending into a full-blown culture war over Brexit. The lyrics are laced with references to the English Civil War, another period in the country’s history where you had these massively polarising debates about parliamentary sovereignty, and the exercise of power by unaccountable leaders.
Both current events and our history also have their place in the creation and idea behind the track. They go on to add: “There’s this current of British history that’s really revolutionary, including the ideas of civil war factions like The Levellers – and of course, much later, the Battle of Cable Street – that never really gets the attention it deserves. All too often, British history gets appropriated by people on the right, who want to use it to defend the record of the empire, or push nasty, anti-immigrant rhetoric. So we were kind of referencing that with the lyrics. If anything, that culture war, those fights over history and identity, feel like they’ve become even more entrenched in the time between writing the song, and sitting down to make the video. The outrage that was sparked when a statue of a literal slave-trader was taken down in Bristol was mind-blowing. And then, looking across the Atlantic, it’s hard to ignore the parallels with what’s going on there.
So that’s where we got the idea for our three ‘end of level bosses’ who are – obviously – Edward Colston, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. We liked the idea of doing it as an 8-Bit platform game, with us throwing pineapples, because it felt like another good way of poking fun at these puffed-up ego-maniacs.”
Watch the video for “Speaking In Tongues” below and for more information on Cable Street Collective, give their page a like on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.
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