Red Tape Enforcers Try to Stop Street Band, So They Perform Special Song
When a couple of stuffed-shirt city council workers tried to shut down some street performers in the English town of Manchester two years ago, they soon realized that they had chosen the wrong clique to bother.
For you see, the performers whose lovely jingles they sought to silence weren’t random “buskers,” as the Brits refer to street performers, but rather part of a professional “Cornish busking band” known as Phat Bollard.
“If you don’t know Phat Bollard they are a band that write and sing about all the inequalities that are happening in our country and the world at large,” notes Craig Winterburn, a blogger who recorded the altercation between Manchester’s city council workers and Phat Bollard.
“They travel around and live for the most part in their buses and vans with rescued greyhounds and a lurcher and live off grid as much as possible,” Winterburn added.
And it just so happened that, in the summer of 2016, the band was “touring Britain’s towns and cities busking through the summer weeks and hitting the festivals at the weekends.”
All seemed well until they arrived in Manchester, where two local council members interrupted their performance to demand they pack away their instruments and move along.
Phat Bollard then responded by serenading both the stuffed-shirt council members and locals with a ditty about overbearing government.
“When will we stand up and tell the governments to f**k off, only when we stand up will all the bulls*** stop,” they sang, according to Genius, which stunningly maintains a copy of the lyrics to this now well-known jingle.
“Corrupted councils in the country skimming off our cash, corrupted councils in the country like a rash,” the song continued.
Luckily, Winterburn recorded the whole ditty, so you may listen to it here (WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE) or read the lyrics at Genius.
Just to be clear, the ditty also contains some leftist ideas as well: “With big business taking over, as in profit there is power, they’ll buy you up, they’ll shut you up, they’ll crush you like a fragile flower,” some of the lyrics read.
Big business isn’t necessarily bad, though it can be when it becomes a sinister monopoly.
That said, the general idea of the song — that government needs to leave people alone — rang very true and deserves a loud applause.
In fact, according to Winterburn, after Phat Bollard finished singing, two cops showed up and took off their hats in “a sign of submission and humbleness.”
“They speak with the band sideways on inviting the band to play on, there are no laws being broken or to be answered to, just try and keep the volume down and language to a level of acceptability,” Winterburn reported.
And this brings us to the best part of the story: The stuffed-shirt city council workers then sheepishly stumbled away after having been defeated.
Considering how easily Phat Bollard owned those sniveling bureaucrats, I daresay President Donald Trump should consider recruiting them into his administration. Until that happens, though, sing on, my brothers; sing on!
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