1966
YOU CAN'T BUY LOVE * ERNESTINE ANDERSON * MERCURY 912 * UK
Possibly the only time this sophisticated Soul record, and others like it, was played was on the radio in England at the time of its release was on the Mike Raven Show on radio 390 and King. Small 'pirate' radio stations like this and others were broadcasting to some 32 million listeners in the early 1960s. The British government were caught napping at the time when these off-shore radio stations successfully started to broadcast music, ideas, and attitudes, unmediated into the homes and work places of millions of listeners. This capitalist revolution, aimed primarily at the ears of the working class, came about despite the legislative efforts to stop it by Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, and other assorted spoons who thought it best the public get their information, via the radio, directly from the state. Not unlike the grinning evangelical Christian toff 'Bliar' who is in the top job at the moment - over the dead body of another - the teleogenic Wilson, replete with pipe as prop, became leader of the Labour party through the unexpected and untimely death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1962. Of course although 'phoney pipe' Wilson was in overall charge the real villain was the minister in charge of the BBC that was: Postmaster General, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, who fought the pirates for two years, declaring them illegal on trumped up charges and harassing them with the powerful customs department. This member from the privileged elite had somehow fooled enough people into thinking that because he had cut his name in half and renounced his peerage and donned a baggy jacket he was somehow no longer one of those same privileged elites who passed power from generation to generation, a hegemony that the Labour party had been brought into being to try to break! It would seem that Wedgwood-Benn's greatest achievement was to give the working classes the luxury jet plane Concord, at the cost of a staggering $3.5 billion to the tax payer (and that was 40 years ago) on which, in the 1960s, the cost of a return trip to America was $8,720! Not a fare many (any?) of the working classes that the well heeled Land owner claimed to be representing, even though they built it. Ironically it went back and forth to New York the home of the emergent global capitalism and not Russia; Wedgwood-Benn's beloved Communist Soviet Union. And the myth is vote to bring about a change, yeh right, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Now we have the imposition of a fourth generation of that family in the shape of his offspring (with another silly name) being deposited straight into the small, elite circle of power in Westminster, only this time were supposed to believe he is a spokesperson for the ethnic community, and not the working class, makes you sick dose it not.