This next item is either a massive exercise in irony or some righteous serendipity, depending on where you're standing. The band performed a session for UK music publication the New Musical Express on the 7th March 2018, and it fairly beams with significance. It feels like with the release of
VI OLENCE we entered a new era of cooled relations between Editors and the NME, with the history of fractious tension between the two seemingly being in the past or at least put aside. The reasons for the friction are many, but the overriding one is the slightly mocking and dismissive tone that the magazine has aimed at the band, that is when they weren't being almost completely indifferent to them. Now, though, they've done some interviews with their old foe and achieved a favourable review for
VI OLENCE. Things were going so well that they were also invited to play some music at NME headquarters.
Then, on the very morning that this took place the NME announced that it would no longer be published in its physical, printed form after 66 years. Something not lost on the band who expressed their opinions during an appearance on the
Jo Whiley show on the same day all this went down.
What we have here then are Violence and Magazine, which considering the circumstances swirling around it on the day of recording is horribly appropriate. It's songwriting stripped back to the bones and delivered by Mr Smith, Mr Williams and Mr Lockey. Enjoy the music ;)
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
