KOZLODUY VVER 440

Kozloduy , a town in North-western Bulgaria boasted , for many years 4 ,

YES 4! VVER 440/230 pressurised water nuclear reactors .

The site has a long list of protocol failures - The 1989 turbine fire , leaks in 1991 , cooling pump failure in 1992 + many more (not forgetting the 1977 earthquake) but it still churns out it’s ‘clean’ electricity whilst harmoniously poisoning the Danube .

LOOK FOR FUCK’S SAKE , it’s a nuclear power plant , by definition it is a dangerous time bomb .

But while we are controlled by money grabbing right wing Tea-Party Jihad types , (yes you Mr David ‘environmentally friendly’ Cameron ) more will be built on YOUR doorstep , and even with the currently scrutinized , heavily regulated safety levels , even the most ardent supporter of atomic power would baulk at having one of these things down the road .

What about you?

YEAR OF THE CYNIC

This song is in many ways the most important thing I have written in my life .

Many of us who are part of a sub-culture , whether it be Emo , Goth , Metalhead , Punk ,or whatever , often are targeted with verbal abuse from certain members of society .

Some of us are physically assaulted .

Just because of the way we look .

Like many other people I have been victim to this on more than one occasion . This set of lyrics were written to help me recover from one incident a few years back where I was targeted by a gang of approximately 15 lads leaving a pub on a Friday night .

Riding home from work I know that remarks were made to me , 7 years on I can’t remember what was said . I can remember being belted across the back of the head with a metal scooter of all things . Everything went black , I had no control over my body , I couldn’t see a thing as I hit the floor . I could hear everything that was happening , I could feel myself being stamped on , punched , kicked in the face , being dragged by my hair . But oddly at that point I didn’t feel any pain .

I came around , struggled free and ran about 300 yards to a local pub . At that point I realised my clothes were torn to shreds . I was coughing up a fair bit of blood .

I arrived at hospital at midnight , was seen to for 5 minutes by a doctor , sent to the open waiting room (being a Friday night in Sunderland you can imagine all kinds of things were kicking off) and sat for 5 hours until I was seen again . I was told to wait in the waiting room again for another hour and a half .

In all I spent 13 hours in accident and emergency before they sent me home , concussion , fractured jaw , many lacerations including a huge hole in my knee and more , lots more .

On the Monday morning I went to my Doctor (I obviously hadn’t worked the weekend) , it destroyed me when he wrote in his notes that I was ‘allegedly’ attacked . ALLEGEDLY . These things stay with you . He told me to go back to the hospital to have an x-ray on my knee (the doctors there had cleaned the wound , that’s all) . Then gave me a sick note for 3 months . At hospital they discovered cracks in my kneecap and sent me on my way.

By this time I was bruised everywhere , I ached everywhere , everything was swollen and I must have still been in some form of shock .

I went to see the personnel management at the place where I worked . I had been jumped on the last Friday in November , It was nearly Christmas , and yeah you guessed it , It was goodbye time for me . A few weeks before Christmas .

The Police were amazing , a Detective Inspector came on the Monday night to take a statement , he had to go half way through due to an emergency , which I can understand , but to come back mid way through February to finish it ?

Now it may seem that I am riding on about my treatment after the event , I know that these services are stretched , but the result for me was a huge loss of confidence in them . When the shock wore off a bit and I became mobile , I had no confidence . I couldn’t remember the faces of the people who assaulted me . Any white male with short hair between the ages of 15 - 30 scared the shit out of me . So I tied my hair back , wore a hat , wore a hoody (usually hood up) and rarely went out after dark . I jumped at everything and became fairly paranoid about people .

I was angry , very angry and confused why someone could think and act like this .

It still affects me now , especially in the dark or near a gang of people .

When I wear big studio style headphones I can’t hear properly out of my left ear (maybe that’s why we sound so shit!) .

When I was passed fit for work I applied to become a postman , it was the best remedy for me , to be walking the streets of my home town gave me a lot of my confidence back . Thankfully my managers there were more understanding than my last lot , they knew my story and never asked me to work the round where it all happened . But hey that’s another song , Going Postal , check it out if you get the chance , it’s a positive play on the title .

And hey , thanks for taking the time to read this , writing it has helped me take another step forward.

Cheers , Mick .

IN THE SHADOW OF PARAMOUNT DENG XIAOPING

Ah . Our man Deng , full of joviality wasn’t he ?

Might have had a lovers tiff or two and fallen out with that Chairman Mao bloke , but made up for it with his ‘reforms’ .

Come on , his Tiananmen square shenanigans put China right in the face of the west in a way that probably gave Mao a giant boner in his mausoleum .

I wonder how our Deng would view the socialist market economy today , or more precisely the bourgeois people who line their pockets at the expense of the underclass (on whose strength Mao and his buds built that little party of theirs) .

Cultural revolution (extermination?) again anybody ?

HALF MILE SQUARE

My home town , 16 concrete villages of mainly substandard housing and substandard people with substandard parenting skills . If you want to write anything in a soul crushing , drab , not even melancholic environment , this place is not the place to go . It is far too philistine and philosophically draining for that kind of individualism and free thought .

SARAJEVO ROSE

2 scenarios are usually shown on television when revisiting the siege of Sarajevo , civilians traversing built up areas under sniper and mortar fire , and UN peacekeepers not keeping any resemblance of peace.

It’s just simply incomprehensible to me how you can attempt to murder an innocent person going about their daily business .

And it’s equally incomprehensible to me how our governments can stand by and allow ethnic cleansing to continue right under their nose .

So many people , so many regrets , so many more still hostile and unapologetic .

Still hostile and unapologetic , that is my feeling towards Boutros Boutros Ghali and his sham organisation .

RED SNOW 1.1MT

Red Snow was a British thermonuclear weapon , I think you may have guessed my opinion of any form of nuclear weapon/energy , but this one irks the fuck out of me . Basically a useless piece of kit that was shoe-horned from one delivery package to another ,.

Blue Steel and Red Beard , two payload delivery systems that were outdated before entering active service , I mean for pity’s sake why waste all that money on something the Eastern Block knew was useless , they could have bought more American technology , or (yes you’ll baulk at this notion) spend it on the NHS etc…

Don’t you think our current submarine fleet could be in the same boat? (pun intended)

P.S. Protect and Survive scares the fucking shit out of me.

THE CURSE OF THE IX LEGION

Blood Angels , my favourite chapter of the Space Marines .

These were guide lyrics that just remained as part of the song ,

I am not always raging about political and social failures , even I like to unwind to some model building and miniature war gaming sometimes!

HIBAKUSHA

Hibakusha is the Japanese term used to identify survivors of the Atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima . There was only 1 officially recognised survivor of both attacks . Tsutomi Yamaguchi .

BASIJ

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his lap dog thugs . Yeah , democracy running rife and free again , I have the utmost love , respect and passion for the people who have tried to stand up against this brutal and belligerent regime .

And in the meantime back in the U.K. we have people storming Top Shop and Vodaphone for not paying taxes . Way to go , it’s not like you could be protesting for anything unimportant like freedom and democracy .

SERPUKHOV-15

In the late 1970’s General Sir John Hackett wrote an inspiring book entitled The Third World War , a fictional history of a 1984 war between the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces . The chapters ’The Destruction of Birmingham’ and ‘A Devastating Response’ scared the crap right out of me . Along with Threads , The Day After and the book Brother in the Land , fictional realistic nuclear destruction was a daily nightmare for me.

Thanks to Stanislav Petrov for averting the possibility of this happening whilst in command of bunker Serpukhov-15 .

PRIPYAT

Pripyat is written as a mother whose children have been taken . Now residing in Slavutych they bear no knowledge of her maternal grieving . All they know is faint memories of her loving cradle , her caress and protection . But she could not protect them from our greatest folly .

On the horizon , in her peripheral view it still breathes .

If she only knew the pleasant surroundings in which a large proportion of her children now reside .

If she only knew her younger sister .

CUT DOWN THE TALL TREES

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines broadcast ‘Cut down the tall trees’ . It was an indication to Rwandan Hutu‘s to slaughter the Tutsi populace . The racist media outpouring against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu population had went unchecked for a number of years prior to the 1994 genocide .

But this isn’t a song only about the genocide in Rwanda , it’s about our treatment of the continent of Africa .

From Uganda to Darfur to Rwanda to CAR to Chad to Somalia . It does not matter . These people have nothing of value to offer do they ?

DO THEY ?

Not to western governments they don’t . If the continent was of value the European Empires wouldn’t have left . The only thing productive for us is to ignore war in Africa , to ignore suffering in Africa , in fact to become numb to the brutality that man pits against man .

Yes Ladies and Gentlemen African wars on the whole = Profit , y’know that thing that we in the west were born to strive for .

Makes you sick to the Motherfucking stomach that you have to share the planet with these money-mongering TWATS doesn’t it .