“A MUST-HEAR RELEASE” - FV Music
“FROM START TO FINISH, IT’S ONE OF THOSE PIECES WHERE YOU INSTANTLY FALL IN LOVE” - Karley Mayall
“A SERIOUS SONIC EXPERIENCE THAT WILL STAY WITH YOU” - Other Side Reviews
Crunch up the melodious sleaze of Roxy Music, the tightly-wound exuberance of Bernie Worrell-infused Talking Heads, the voracious genre-hopping of 80s Prince and the oddball lyricism of Tom Waits, and you might start to get somewhere near The Miller Test on this record.
Inhabiting a disenfranchised netherworld of travellers, terrorist fantasists, and pussyhatted never-Trumpers, these songs are sometimes cryptic, sometimes cynical, but always sympathetic to their cast of beautiful losers - and in the hands of The Miller Test, speeding from shouty psychedelic pop-disco to crunching post-rock J-punk via jagged electro-funk and smoothly harmonic soul, they’re also irresistibly catchy, toe-tapping, booty-shaking, headbanging good fun.
Produced by The Miller Test with John Winfield (Jimmy Somerville, Paul Mosley, Delta Saxophone Quartet) in the chair, This Funk Is Political was recorded at Big Jelly Studios, Ramsgate, and mixed and mastered by John at Nelson's Place, Broadstairs.
LYRICS
FAMOUS WORLD
As upon a hill
Where a moor once moved in for the kill
Drawing chalk circles round Cordoba
Newark and Illinois
Heart on sleeve
Through a nightflight to cold Tel Aviv
Tender young treasons
In cities we mean to destroy
But it’s nowhere
Nowhere we should be running from
When there’s nowhere
Nowhere for us to go
See the flamenco
Oh
Black and Tans
Clear the floor for a gypsyish dance
The juicers, the doctors
Head down for the docks
Where the workers are screened
Soak in the booze
In the barrio old Santa Cruz
Gun-toting ministries
Crack smoke
Mysterious cloth to be cleaned
And it’s nowhere
Nowhere we should be running from
When there’s nowhere
Nowhere for us to go
No way we’d shoot so low
No one to tell us no
How the flamenco twirled girl
Not in your famous world
Nothing to fear
All the pain will be gone in year
And now there’s Maria
She’s up from Sevilla
And down on your friends
Live at the bourse
With the stars and their messy divorce
It’s punctured and bursted
It’s drunken exhausted
It’s how this world ends
But it’s nowhere
Nowhere we should be running from
When there’s nowhere
Nowhere for us to go
No way we’d shoot so low
No one to tell us no
How the flamenco twirled girl
Not in your famous world
Nowhere we should be running from
Nowhere for us to go
See the flamenco
Oh
KARAOKE LOVERS
Take your flammable spirit to town tonight
I hear it party hard
I can’t get near it
Running on a dollar tonight
Dem good vibrations tickles you
Lock down in her particle zoo
Slot in her box takes nickels too
Under a dollar tonight
Karaoke lovers from the nineties
Buried with the others in their fineries
Some disco for yer mother
Sing another song karaoke lover
Don’t let the rhythm fool yer
She’s dancing quite peculiar
Sweet glory hallelujah
Running on a dollar tonight
And if you think the mist is clearing
Guess you woke late missed the hearing
Look around, it’s disappearing
On a dollar tonight
Karaoke lovers, terrorists and paedos
Burning in the bushes with the other weirdos
Some disco for yer mother
Sing another song karaoke lover
UP, DOWN, SIDEWAYS AND STRANGE
Deep in the desert
Riddling the sphinx
I’d stay forever
But it isn’t what she thinks
Don’t say nothing
Don’t say nothing
Here in the desert
Living is cheap
Cross on a mountain
And the lion there asleep
We could take him
Missy rude awake him
You should have known it
It never ends!
Big black clouds here for you
And all your friends
God send some shelter from the rains
Up down sideways & strange
They’ll take your issue
Offer them game
Mark up the young ones
As they barter off the lame
Imperfection
What a sad reflection
Untie the harness
Set ‘em all free
K-keep the ashes of the flowers
They’re from me
And those who laugh
Can kiss my ass
First to last
Into position
Get with the system
Dealing favours in a debtor’s prison my son
No word no luck no change
Up down sideways & strange
In this existence
Gotta seek assistance
With something toxic
Coming at us from a distance
So I get get high
Look her in the eye
Tell her a well-told lie
Into the subway
Down to the train
Can’t say what it is
Brings us here again
Escape a breadline
Partake a mainline
Disgrace a bloodline
Hand on the mic is mine
Excuse the violence as evidence of age
You better feel it coming at you from the stage
Outrageous
Out of range
Up down sideways & strange
BETTER THAN YOU
Done schlepping on
a breadline
Gone fishing at the zoo
Not working no morning deadline
Like the ferryman
With the ood and the theremin
Still better than you
Done camping out a border
Unlucky but true
Not working no world disorder
Take the heroine
Mixed up on amphetamine
Still better than you
Done singing out of fever
Can’t hear it?
Me too
Not working no far cathedral
Church of Bellingham
Yeah
That’d be telling ‘em
Still better than you
BIGGER SOUL
We meet in a strange hotel
Raise hell
Just the two of us
What’s to do with us?
Are we out of our minds?
Happiest when we are not
Forgot that they’re through with us
And all that they knew of us burns blue
Dispools and unwinds
Big heat on a rising fever
Bigger soul on a true believer
Get it rightful disciple
It’s night for day
You watch us on a tv screen
Unclean and untrue of us
The lies that they threw at us
Must be having their jokes
With everything that we have planned
They’re damned
It’ll do for us
What they’ve gotten into with us
No one knew it but us and ‘er folks
Big heat on a rising fever
BIgger soul on a true believer
Get it rightful disciple
It’s night for day
Thought it was well understood
Writ blood
There’s a clue to us
You think that you know us?
Jupiter-Juno, us
You’re dead right
Clock ticking
I can hardly wait
God’s great for a few of us
Say toodle-oo from us
A-boogaloo on us
And get down all night
BIg heat on a rising fever
Bigger soul on a true believer
Get it rightful disciple
It’s night for day
COLA MAMBO!
Buckshot blue smoke warning simple country folk
In a field could the village yield up a sacred cow
It doesn’t matter now
Gutshot heartbroke muezzin hymning a country joke
Lights out for the last devout
We too could disavow
It doesn’t matter now
I sipped the cola in Babylon
Oran was home
Get up on it
Carry on dancing and cheating
The hearts are repeating
I’m going as fast as I can
Cola mambo!
Moon shot up there
Blood red bauble in the country air
Caps doffed for the cancers offed
We dare don’t ask how
It doesn’t matter now
Hotshots past caring
Stone cold blooded at the country fair
And the guerrillas gunning with the limo running
And a nod from Mao
It doesn’t matter now
I sipped the cola in Jeddah
And Tehran was home
Get up on it
It’s better to be dancing and cheating
The hearts are repeating
I’m going as fast as I can
Cola mambo!
Rimshot hard toil
Bubbling up below the country soil
And there ain’t no score till we need it more
Than they might allow
It doesn’t matter now
Bloodshot hot bucket
Wrap your pretty kisser round the pipe and suck it
Semtex drips down your sad old lips
Like Rimmel on a sow
It doesn’t matter now
I sipped the cola in London town
Ran for home
Get up on it
And come on down
Dancing and cheating
The hearts are repeating
I’m going as fast as I can
Cola mambo!
THE SOUL IS MADE OF BLOOD
I can’t walk the street again
I don’t respect it
Whispering on the porticos
Diabolic Spaniards sit and protect it
Widow in the wheelchair knows
She’ll sing you her songs
Of Las Vegases
Saigons
Always one more for Rome
Everybody thinks that she was famous
And she stinks of money
Her credit good
The cross of wood and wire
The soul is made of blood
I can’t play this scene again
I won’t remember it
Got nobody to wash my clothes
And everytime I sing this line I sound effeminate
Baby in the beerhall knows
We sashay and sway red carpets this way
So as to catch hall mirrors all alone
The bartleby knife we bargained from a Folsom lifer
Darlin
His credit good
The cross of wood and wire
The soul is made of blood
I can’t walk the line again
Or re-invent it
Knuckleduster wind she blows
Said I’d bury you in Leeds
And I meant it
Jesus in his Humvee knows
A cry in the night
Sounds helpless alright
Yes you’re a long long way from home
Migrants on their shifting borders
Prison guards that follow orders
Their credit good
The cross of wood and wire
The soul is made of blood
HOUSE OF FLOPS
Fever-hot diva
Sickening high achiever
Let it shine melancholy lights
Summer’s unholy appetites
Sold out when it’s cold out
Stripped back here as I’m rolled out
No sense in any pound
Nor six feet of english ground
Til the bubble pops
We gotta hit the hops
Here in the house of flops
Leperish shepherd
Won’t you tend the carcass peppered
Winter come on a native groin
No wrap no foreign coin
Tables for unstables
How it disarms and disables
Sign here little dog on heat
No six figure none compete
Look busy with the mops
Nobody call the cops
Not on the house of flops
Seldom I rebelled ‘em though I partied as I felled them
Springtime - what a mean old man
No idea, bad masterplan
Schemers and dreamers and the searching for redeemers
Something stinks up the autumn noon
Six crawl under the pirate moon
You kiddies lift your tops
You bet the world still stops
Even in the house of flops
House of flops lover
House of flops brother
House of flops sister
House of flops mister
LOVE MY CRIMINAL
Love
My criminal love
Subliminal wonder
Why?
We couldn’t help cry
To see them pass by
Those incubi
Summon up wings and fly
Invisible dove
With minimal thunder
Stole on a human heart
Killed for a simple token
And while we’re kept apart
Briars where the bars are broken
Sing
Of incredible things
Indelible singer
More!
Go give ‘em what for
Outgun the outlaw
And the in-law
You’ve no fear of their sort no more
Impeccable sting
You venerable swinger
Didn’t you steal a heart?
Think on the billions suckered
And while we’re kept apart
Even the piano’s crooked
Dream
Unstoppable dreams
Impossible dreamer
Hate
The curfewing state
We’re coming home late
With these mates of mates
Some kind of shit awaits
Where the hell have you been
Unintelligible screamer?
I stole a human heart
All done and elementary
And while we’re kept apart
Love’s the perp
And you’re the sentry