January 20, 2010 by alunparry

Album Review in The Socialist

We Can Make The World Stop CD

Get yourselves a copy if you can.

Big thanks to reviewer Joel Lane who had the following to say:

I first heard Alun Parry, a radical singer-songwriter from Liverpool, this July at a demonstration for the Shrewsbury Pickets Justice Campaign.

His song ‘My Name is Dessie Warren’ is a moving tribute to the trade unionist who paid with his freedom and, ultimately, his life for his commitment to workers’ rights.

That song isn’t on We Can Make the World Stop, but you can find it on YouTube or on his website. Parry’s new CD, recorded with an impressive backing group, is a strong album of songs that range from the political to the personal, and from plaintive folk music to edgy pub-rock.

The standout track for me is ‘Run Patsy Run’, the true story of a building worker killed by unsafe working conditions on the Wembley stadium site. It’s the perfect antidote to vicious tabloid attacks on health and safety legislation.

Another powerful track is ‘Waiting For the Lovers’, a tender portrait of a gay romance stirring into life in the shadow of homophobic violence.

Parry’s politics define this album, as clearly as the ‘Capitalism Isn’t Working’ banner on the front of the CD. The title track is a rousing ‘call to arms’, and the final ‘All Hail To the Market’ portrays the bosses choking on their own empty rhetoric:

‘He does not hail the market the way he used to do / For he’s standing on a window-ledge as he begins to weep / And the folk who used to work for him are urging him to leap’.

#alun parry#review#the socialist#we can make the world stop