Like most rational west coasters, I would happily set off a tactical nuke in Edinburgh to thus purge the world of pretentious east coasters, rubbish kebab shops and, as a huge bonus, wiping out our sorely deluded Holyrood Hitlers (great name for a band – pity they would only play the same old tune and it wasn’t a hit the last time around). Of course, there would be a bit of regrettable collateral damage and one piece of that blood splatter would be Ste McCabe who runs some sort of gay night (we’ve all got to be happy, right?) over there and also finds time to release ironic electro punk songs on an unsuspecting (and probably uninterested) world.
“Bad Kitty” is therefore something of a low budget oddity. Packed to the max with plastic drums and two chords and a suction cup guitars, it would have been easy to dismiss this album as just another rant of the disadvantaged but that, surely, would be to miss the point. The sociological significance if you like. “I Want To Be In Your Magazine”, for example, muses on the cost of following the path to fame summarising it with the simple phrase “…I always swallow”. You don’t think that is the work of a master wordsmith? How about giving brand centric consumerism a licking? That what happens in “Bargains Galore” as even the lowly, and yet lovely, Aldi finds itself moved way up the list in matters of shopper satisfaction. This is practically poetry.
Do I hear you cry out for more? If you are a self-described working class bastard like Ste McCabe then you will indeed have plenty more to attack and that is duly done in the Goons meets Billy Bragg style pseudo song “City Chambers”. Could it be that someone has finally noticed that political correctness is just another way of patronising the very people that should benefit from it? There is indeed a sharp mind at work here.
Anyway, enough analysis. Ste McCabe should be brought over to Glasgow and let loose on our plague of sensitive singer songwriters and twee alt-folksters to give them a lesson in how to be righteously angry. Maybe you will like this album and probably you won’t but we should all be thankful nonetheless that working class queer feminist bastards like Ste McCabe are still keeping the faith. Wait…as the distant refrain of Debbie Gibson’s “Only In My Dreams” reaches my ears, it occurs to me that Scotland’s next musical super group could feature Ste McCabe and…Ashley Collins! Pure magic!