Goldblade have re-released their Christmas single, a duet featuring frontman John Robb and the late and great Poly Styrene on Damaged Goods Records.
‘City of Christmas Ghosts’, a minor hit on it’s release in 2008, has been re-released due to pubic demand and is Goldblade’s lament to lost friends and a celebration of the former X Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene, one of the most wonderful and talented artists of her generation.
The song was written about the melancholic side of Christmas, a time of year when you think about lost friends and comrades and it was tragically ironic that the duet and song ended up having an extra sadness to it with the former X Ray Spex singer dying from cancer in 2011. The song is now dedicated to her. The single will be for charity raising money for the hospice that looked after Poly- St Michaels Hospice, animal charity Food For Life and anti war charities.
John Robb explains “We wanted to write an uplifting punk rock song that mixed a euphoric almost spiritual rush with the melancholic darkness of the real Christmas- a time of memories and ghosts. The song was written as a punk rock take on the Phil Spector wall of sound – pop classic if you will and it demanded a duet.”
“For us the song stands as a tribute to one of our dear friends, a remarkable and inspiring woman who was both a friend and an inspiration when we were young and one of the great lyrical and singing talents of the punk generation.’
When Goldblade recorded ‘City Of Christmas Ghosts’, the idea was to do the song as a duet and the legendary Poly Styrene seemed the perfect choice.
The record is a perfect Christmas single that captures the euphoria and the melancholia of that time of year and is a celebration of a friendship with a remarkable women and one of our most talented songwriters and is dedicated to the memory of a lost friend.
The new single rounds off a great year for Goldblade with their current album, ‘The Terror Of Modern Life’ getting the best reviews in the band’s history and a run of powerfully successful festival appearances where the groups’ reputation for being one of the best live bands was fully underlined.
John Robb, whose classic Stone Roses biog was released this year worldwide, is working on an update of his definitive and widely recognised as being one of the key music books ‘Punk Rock An Oral History’. He’s also been busy with his website Louder Than War, one of the biggest in the country, and toured recently with Mick Jones in support of the campaign for the Hillsborough Justice campaign where he not only compered, but performed Clash songs with the legendary West London guitarist.
Order from HMV here https://t.co/nk9AdjxzQC / iTunes http://buff.ly/1fHZYGA
