Aware Of All

After being given this album recently we thought it deserved a short article. We especially love the front cover, illustrated by David McCluskey and the review and sleeve notes, written by Stuart Cosgrove.

It’s the debut LP from the McCluskey Brothers, Ken and David (both of whom had previously made a name for themselves in Scottish indie-pop outfit The Bluebells) from 1986. We felt that, although written in the mid 1980s, Cosgrove’s words resonate today given the current political climate around the potential for an independent Scotland. And, we also absolutely love the artwork. David McCluskey’s DIY collage recalls Alasdair Gray’s iconic style in a playful, child-like way. Here is the review of the album, featured in the Vinyl Japan re-release sleeve notes, in full:

There’s a joke that’s massively popular on the tangled grapevine that links Derry to Dundee. How do you get 30 Englishmen in a Mini? Make one the manager and the other 29 will crawl up his arse. As a joke it’s not great, but as a political capsule it can’t be bettered. In two short sentences the Irish can get their own back on the Thick Paddy and the Scots can enact revenge on all the mean Jock stereotypes that England has constructed. It’s not a belly laugh, just a Gaelic snigger at the crawling conservatism of the English nation state. And if you want an alternative capsule of meanness and stupidity, try 200 years of English imperialism.

The McCluskey Brothers Aware Of All is neither a joke nor is it a tract against England. On the contrary, it’s an internationalist modern folk album. It draws its influence from a radical heritage which has grown in historical opposition to England’s economic dominance. Kenny and David McCluskey’s background in The Bluebells gives the music a pop dimension and the contributions of the Irish folk music polemicist Dominic Behan adds the touch of radical authenticity.

On Yer Bike, a song about human waste under Tebbit, introduces a series of acoustic arguments incorporating the jew’s harp, a hurdy gurdy, harmonica, fiddle and mandolin. The instruments provide the focus for Dominic Behan’s real-ale sleeve notes, but throughout the 12 tracks it’s evident that coherence comes from the attitudes rather than music.

Searching For The Bold Young Man and Let The People Free are Glaswegian pleas for political change whilst If I Had A Dream, a confident folk ballad, freeze-frames the contradictions of Scottish culture into a triumphant march towards a new future held back by the sad sound of lyrical lament.

Aware Of All is also a resurrection. Older and more suppressed protest songs are rejuvenated for a modern audience. Woody Guthrie’s Union Burying Ground praises the dead and defiant of organised labour, whlst the rousing John Maclean March, a Scottish republican standard, remembers Maclean’s return from jail to the streets of Clydeside and to a Glasgow tenement which acted as the first Soviet Embassy in Britain. Like Maclean himself, the album advocates active social change through the specific experiences of a country that suffers the full wrath of a Conservative government it didn’t even vote for.

(Special thanks to our good friend, the always inspiring, Ken McCluskey for the help with this one.)