Crime Of The Century

Andy channels his inner Tom Jones

Thank you to all of you who came down to our single launch the other night. A classic Bombskare gig in Edinburgh and something we should do a bit more often probably. Thanks to all of you who bought a CD also. We hope you enjoy the recordings. Crime of the Century and Bondtrack will be on our forthcoming album. The other two tracks are tracks we recorded live a few months ago, and then hastily remixed with Tim Young about two weeks before the launch. It was a great night thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our guests Andy ‘Big Fat Panda’ Laidlaw, Cammy Sinclair, and of course Vini ‘Van’ Bonar.

I’ve been asked about the single itself but there’s not much to say. Crime of the Century was picked for a single because it was the first track that we finished recording and the first one we finished a mix of, simple as that. It seems to have been a popular choice however, but trust me it was a choice made by default. Its already been remixed for the album. Written during the adverts in Hollyoaks one evening, it took about eight seconds to write and that included the time to find a blue biro. It’s a classic Bombskare tune, rehearsed once, gigging it the following week, and that’s about it.

It was written in 2003 during the run up to the illegal and criminal invasion of Iraq. As soon as Tony Blair said, on the telly with a straight face, that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction, hitting targets in the UK within forty-five minutes, well, that was the day I quit sniffing glue. Wrote the song straight afterwards. At the time it was fashionable to be anti-War, everybody was doing it. One time at a gig shortly after we debuted Crime, a dude approached me and told me he was thinking of getting tattooed. “What do you think? ‘Death to America’ or ‘Mother’ in gothic script across my chest”? A tough decision admittedly. Safer to go with Death to America; you never know how your feelings towards your mother might change. It’s not that we have anything against war crimes per se, not at all. In fact Bombskare had toyed with the idea of pre-emptively invading Iraq back in the nineties. Not many people know this but Iraq has the world’s second biggest reserve of crude Ska in the world and with world reserves of Ska on the decline, you have to admit, it was a tempting thought. We believed we would be greeted as liberators, we thought the ska revenues would pay for the war effort, and we thought democracy would spring forth and flourish.  We decided against it eventually because the drink wore off thank Christ.

It seems a little bit overstated now of course when we look at the state of the Middle East and the state of the world generally and the world economy in particular, since everything is going so swimmingly. It’s simply that Crime of the Century seems a bit overblown, a bit pompous, a bit Supertramp. Lets face it, its only eight years into the century, even less when it was written. I’m sure there will be much, much worse to come, criminally speaking. Perhaps they might make another sequel to Highlander. With Christopher Lambert playing Sean Connery.