Grey Hairs, are due to release their new album Health & Social Care on the 2nd August via Gringo. The Nottingham based punk band, deliver ‘Piss Transgressor’ a raucous, caustic song, that’s shot through with the theme of failing male identity. Today we debut the video, watch it below.
Here’s what the band say about the track: “Piss Transgressor is a song about seeing yourself in failing men. Standing next to each other in pub toilets dispelling your body waste together. It’s a symbiotic moment that is rarely comfortable. It’s about the fear of becoming the other. The lines get blurred as we remember our younger selves and times when pop culture was less prescient and that the streams should never cross. The streams have crossed and what now?”
Mixing elements of The Birthday Party, Laughing Hyenas and The Jesus Lizard, ‘Health & Social Care’ is a scorching reflection on balancing your creative impulses with your life as you get older and how best to direct your rage at the system whilst working inside the public sector.
2016’s ‘Serious Business’ saw a clear sharpening of the band’s focus. The clue was in the title. What started as an offshoot to the members’ proper bands reached that wonderful point where it becomes an entity all of its own and steers the ship as though an invisible 5th member.
‘Health & Social Care’ expands on this. Its rage is tight and deliberate and its themes more explicitly stated. This is not a bunch of guys mimicking their youth (or other people’s youth) and balancing their weekend anti-establishment anger with their job as a software developer, or vintage furniture dealer, or credit check specialist.
If ‘Health & Social Care’ has a theme (and again the clue is in the title) it’s “how can someone be a public sector punk in 2019?”. Commendable though most political music is, it’s perhaps easier to articulate your rage at the system when you don’t spend over 40 hours a week working in it.
Press shot: James Finlay
