In the latter half of the aughties, King Blues were one of the most promising British punk groups, their sound a potent Molotov cocktail of hardcore, ska, folk, and reggae. Aside from their cherry-picking approach to punk, the group was notable (and notorious) for their frontman, Jonny “Itch” Fox, a loud, rowdy, self-proclaimed anarchist who, when he wasn’t screaming his face off or playing a mean ukulele, was known to contribute to anti-authoritarian writers’ collective Last Hours.
The King Blues disbanded last year, but Itch’s spirit of resistance is still very much alive; his solo work, a pungent breed of thrash-inflected rap with a tint of good ol’ UK-style dubstep, is just as acerbic as anything he’s done with his band. His new video for “London is Burning” takes that frenzied aesthetic and encapsulates it in what can best be described as a high school film production class project gone horribly, horribly wrong. The visuals are highly saturated and of poor quality (at one point, you can see the tape marking the boundaries of the green screen), the lyrics are blasted in Arial (decidedly the least punk rock font in the Microsoft Office suite), and Itch sports a cynical sneer throughout. It’s an indignant middle finger to the glossy lyric videos we’re used to seeing, and like any good protest, it’s captivating to the very end.
• Itch: http://itchsmixes.com
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