You’d imagine Bono must get pretty paranoid at times. After all, with the amount of bad press the messianic egomaniac gets, it must seem like everyone is out to get him.

And quite rightly too.

The point is no matter how short on legs and big on ego Paul Hewson is, he’s far from the only pop star who believes that because they’ve shifted a few records they can ‘make a difference’. Bob Geldof, for example, found that people have heartstrings that can be twanged, as millions dug deep for the starving via Live Aid. What he also found is while he was able to convince Margaret Thatcher to repay the VAT received for ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, famine still exists thanks to governments (and their paymasters, Big Business) having little interest in making the world a better place. Band Aid actually was just a sticking plaster and it was left to regular punters to (slightly) ease the suffering of their fellow man. As The Housemartins once sang, “try shaking a box in front of the Queen”.

So, effecting political change in the world seems a thankless task. Despite this, musicians do sometimes believe in their own press. Just this week, Keane West had some sort of epiphany, thinking he could do a better job as US president than, er, Donald Trump, They may stride different stages but are still just hollering into a microphone. We shouldn’t be fooled that it was a lack of Steven Van Zandt (remember him?) performing in Sun City that eventually brought majority rule.

Indeed, Brian May’s political activism may stem from lingering guilt that Queen played the whites-only millionaires’ paradise when the whole world was campaigning against apartheid. Or maybe he just prefers animals to people.

It’s not exactly Johannesburg – they oppress every citizen equally – but North Korea is still the subject of a de facto cultural boycott. The ‘pariah state’s international exile is self-imposed, so Laibach’s recent mini-tour – like the visits by basketball star Dennis Rodman – is more a curiousity than an actual sanctions-buster. But should we do anything to encourage Kim Jong-un’s regime when, apparently, agents of the oddly-coiffed dictator are going from house to house looking for subversive recordings – pretty much anything Western in nature and, you’d imagine, including the Slovenian act’s weirdly epic industrial rock, far-removed from the DPRK’s state-approved girlpoppers, Moranbong Band. It may have as much effect as 1980s poet Attila the Stockbroker who toured Stalinist Albania. Not long afterwards, the country rejected Communism – the two facts may not be related but who can say for sure?

Or maybe we need bigger names to demonstrate their discontent. Apparently the cuddly Chinese government are deeply hurt at Taylor Swift’s perceived slight on them, just because they don’t want reminding that they massacred thousands of their own people. Yes, the pop sensation’s ‘TS1989’ album is a clear reference to the slaughter in Tiananmen Square 26 years ago. And definitely not her initials and birth year. Even Bono wouldn’t be that paranoid.

PERE UBU
Elitism for The People 1975 – 1978
(Fire)
Less a compilation and more a reference manual for alternative music, this 35-track collection from the Ohio art-rock outfit covers the first three years of their existence when the terms ‘seminal’ and ‘influential’ can be, for once, correctly used. Debut album Modern Dance, leading off with the skewed punk of ‘Non-Alignment Pact’, is a lesson in how glam and Velvets-style noise can be happy bedfellows. Follow-up Dub Housing saw the band throw free jazz and found sounds into the mix while retaining an ear for a pop hook. Chuck in a 1978 live show and the band’s early singles, all remastered, and you have the ideal introduction to one of the most important but least-heard acts of the past 40 years.HHHHH