JOHN PRESTON TRIBUTE BAND- Ruling class


I was attracted to this album when reading the blurb on the press release, which stated that JPTB are what happens when ‘punk meets climate change and en route kills the Buddha on the road’. Say what? It turns out, anyway, that this Norfolk-based quartet perform songs by ‘ver people’ and for ‘ver people’, and are, as you might have guessed by the title, principally political in their content. Named after their bass player, who thought that the only way forward for him as a musician was to start a tribute band to himself, JPTB mostly write about hating bankers, consumerism, the London riots and alcoholic parents, over either keyboard-fuelled incomparable minimalist rock and roll shambles or an equally as shambolic pop/rock.


Though I didn’t personally find the lyrics particularly witty or funny, as I expected they might be, each song tells a story about modern life in Eastern England, needless to say a usually quite bleak and angry story. Although the influence is largely classic punk and so not as intriguing as made out- and the members look of a maturity that suggests they were there when it first broke- ‘Dharma talk’ sounds like it should be on Doctor Dee. Also make of that what you will. Finishing on ‘Full catastrophe’, with just the right amount of wah wah to get away with it, the track sums up the mood of ‘Ruling class’, being one of calculated indifference on the whole. I really didn’t like it all that much but, as I have been accused in the past, it’s probably because I didn’t get ‘it’. As in the ethos of the band, make up your own mind, won’t you?

Anna C

www.jptb.co.uk