Guys and Dolls: Marxman - Dark Are The Days/The Fascist Boom (9 April 1993)

 

Buy Dark Are the Days at Discogs

Buy The Fascist Boom at Discogs

WARNING - The video for The Fascist Boom contains disturbing images. It was uploaded in 2014/15.

Peel opened tonight’s programme with The Fascist Boom, Marxman’s contribution to a compilation album distributed by Youth Against Racism in Europe called By Any Means Necessary.  Listening back to the warnings given in it, I can only feel shamed by the complacency that I would surely have felt at the time. It wasn’t that I was oblivious to Neo-Nazism, but back then, they seemed like nothing more than a lunatic fringe. They could have their demonstrations and one could feel sorry for any poor unfortunate who got attacked by them, but I never saw them as a direct threat to the world order, because I couldn’t see how anyone could get taken in by it. But a combination of declining living standards and continent-wide NIMBYism has seen far-right political parties make sweeping gains across Europe over the last decade and a half. While in America, the political right has been become rancid and dangerous without anyone seemingly able to do anything about it. Marxman warned us - nothing was done - and now we find ourselves in a time where too many parties & politicians who should know better are trying to court that vote and present anything opposite to it as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. 

Exactly one year ago, Peel had greeted the results of the UK General Election with a weary cry of Do you ever have days where you feel you got out of bed on the wrong planet? In 2025, those days outnumber the good ones, I find.

There’s little to cheer us up in the other Marxman selection either. Dark Are the Days is a despondent screed on everything:

1) Capitalism winning out over socialism.

2) The media brainwashing the public.

3) Unions either being depowered or selling out to bosses.

4) Too many low-paid and dead end jobs.

It’s curious how the presence of a beat and some sprightly penny whistle can get you dancing away to such an onslaught of negativity. Had Peel not been distracted by having to be Jakki Brambles, I wonder whether he would have played Dark Are the Days back-to-back with Dollars by Bajja Jedd, which makes a case for how to survive and thrive in a capitalist society.

Videos courtesy of h2eire and blackiron60.