'Every step that we tread, the dead are behind us'

Released in 1992, Disco Inferno's 'Summer's Last Sound' was, despite the title, the sound of the last serious recession, a sort of post-rock analogue to the despair of Patrick Keiller's London. A claustrophobic mesh of increasingly overwhelming sample-scree, birdsong, droning post-punk bass and incongrously pretty, glacial guitars, it features a list cataloguing the impending doom, from 'the price of bread went up 5 pence today' to 'foreigners get hushed-up trials', mass graves, immigrants kicked to death, the rise of obscurantism and barbarity, the sense (as with most of D.I's work) of a queasy horror at all that is solid melting into air. Ian Crause was one of the best lyricists of the 1990s, his intensity and political seriousness never lapsing into cliche or earnestness - as in the fantastic 4-minute version of Theses on the Philosophy of History 'The Last Dance'. 'Summer's Last Sound' is, amongst other things, perhaps the only pop record to ever have made reference to negative equity.



On this track, there is a mounting horror at all this, the feeling that something has to give. Of course, it didn't. The revulsion at Black Wednesday might have given Labour, finally, an election that even they couldn't lose - and from their first act (denationalising the Bank of England) onwards, they willingly built up another bubble which is now bursting even more catastophically. Canary Wharf became a laughing stock, then a seemingly unstoppably expansive mini-city. The most horrifying thing right now is that - at least in Britain, there's still a fight elsewhere - there is no political party willing to reverse, or even ameliorate, the grim human consequences of neoliberalism and financialisation. The utterly pointless Lib Dems have even decided that the visible collapse of neoliberalism - the biggest wave of nationalisations since the 1940s - would be an opportune time for a shift to the right. Labour have no intention of rescinding their collective suicide note. The Tories will win the election with ease, and within a year Cameron will be as unpopular as Sarkozy is now. There is, except for the unions tentatively emerging from a decade of cowardice (and the resurgent Fascists) no opposition, and nobody who can reverse an increasingly suicidal course.



Last week, I attended a talk by Larry Elliott and Graham Turner on the credit crunch, and when asked what could be done to sort out the mess, there was a veritable list - higher wages, massive investment in green technologies, an expansion of council housing, an expansion of public transport...and it felt good, for about 2 minutes, until you realise that even this eminently sensible Keynesianism is considered tantamount to Bolshevism by anyone within a sniff of power. One can gloat at the death of neoliberalism - and why not, it's fun, and richly fucking deserved - but Thatcherism could have died in 1992, or 1997, and yet it still continues, undead, to dictate the perameters of acceptable political thought in this country. One of the finest things about Disco Inferno, and 'Summer's Last Sound' especially, is their depiction of this deadlock - even their collages of samples evoking the weight of the dead generations upon the living.