Joe Solo: Songs and Verses

Joe Solo: Songs and Verses – Selected Lyrics & Poetry

(Picket Line Press)

Joe Solo – Songs And Verses is exactly what it states on the tin. A lengthy paperback tome of 311 pages, charting Solo’s lyrical career as one of England’s premier Punk-Folk political mouthpieces. A review by Richard David. 

It’s a journey that began way back in 1987 and has seen him evolve from being a member of Punk outfit ‘Lithium Joe’ to a relentless solo voice of contemporary protest, one which has been heard on 21 self-penned albums since 2004.

That’s one hell of a prolific output for any artist, but when you’re holding down a normal daytime job as a washing machine engineer and endlessly trailing the country performing gigs and benefit shows year in, year out, it’s a pretty damned remarkable canon. Solo’s live work and fundraising activities are the stuff of Punk-Folk legend, with him having picked up a number of prestigious awards as a result. As a co-founder of the ‘We Shall Overcome’ Charity, his efforts, along with others, have seen the organisation raise an estimated £1m-plus, supporting those impacted by poverty and hardship.

The 21st century corporate record business does not do artists like Joe Solo. Which is barely surprising given his avowedly anti-capitalist stance as a songwriter, performer and genuine activist. Instead, Solo maintains a constant social media presence, communicating with his followers via his Facebook platform on a virtually daily basis. My words there are more easily written than adhered to. In reality, it’s quite astonishing witnessing Solo’s capacity to share his thoughts at length so regularly, given all the aforementioned other commitments he’s bound by. The manner in which he does so also deserves some commendation.

Personally, I happen to know that the current political climate and certain ongoing conflicts within it have left him feeling profound senses of anger and frustration – something he has in common with a good number of us – but to his credit, his social media missives always somehow manage to obtain messages of hope and inspiration. Solo is a walking positivity machine, a rare commodity inside these dark times.

This is no easy feat with the constant bombardment of Right Wing propaganda masquerading as news coverage in contemporary Britain and the as yet, abject and it has to be said, embarrassing failures of much of the organised Left to present a serious, united alternative to what is becoming an increasingly more sinister embodiment of Farage’s Reform UK. In terms of where Britain is headed politically, the next three years are going to be crucial as concerns all that, and whilst it’s almost impossible to make reliable ultimate predictions in such a tumultuous political climate, I’m pretty confident that Solo’s voice will remain an absolute constant, right up until the next general election.

What happens after that is pretty frightening territory to imagine, but let’s not throw ourselves in front of cannons yet to be loaded. And so to his lyric book…

Divided into somewhere around 30 titled sections defining chronological progressions in terms of years and eras, the songs flow thick and fast, covering everything from broken teenage romance to shattered working-class communities, industrial decline and the frightening shifts towards authoritarianism in modern Britain. If there is a sense of desolation and emptiness in many of the stories covered, it is one wrought by the realities of decades of assault on the British working class by its political masters, including all parties of government in recent decades. There is no arguing that there’s a lot of dark stuff in here and much sadness too.

That stated, such essences are matched with a solid spirit of rebellious defiance, a quality which is probably the fundamentally defining element of Solo’s work. A 2022 section entitled ‘Never Let Them Win’ confirms that, but the book’s defiant spirit is also laced with touching portraits of youthful love and ambition. Another recurring theme is Solo’s belief in the power of music and the sense of redemption he personally feels inside the body of a guitar.

Some might view all that as romantic daydreaming, but I’m not quite so sure on that. Reading this book made me dwell on certain questions, one being the following: Is it ever really possible now for British music to produce bands like The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers or The Specials again? Can the youth of today step up and take a swing at mainstream culture with the same potent level of power and swagger as bands like that? Well, it may look very unlikely, but one thing’s for sure in my mind. If there are such young artists sitting broodily around deserted cellars and crummy flats, then they could only be further served in their aspirations by being handed copies of this book.

With its sprawling poetry of banners and bands, clubs and bouncers, chancers and losers, strikes and rebellions and games of backgammon in Barcelona bars, it’s a whirling kaleidoscope of human emotion, anguish and resolve. Junkies, drunks, hopeless dreamers and lost souls all filter through the focus of Solo’s muse, as do working-class men who fought courageously in the wars for scant acknowledgement from a cold, class-driven society and those who battled for union recognition in previous centuries. Solo’s prose digs deep in search of heroes from the underbelly, a territory which produces rich dividends, albeit ones scarred with much human pain and communal suffering. It also exhibits no mercy in its condemnation of the type of supposed national figures worthy of commemoration via statues.

Visions of England and crude nationalism staining the minds of bullying train-bound thugs, jostle for space with portraits of dignified working-class people facing death and the importance of standing up to bullies as a template for life, from the classroom to the grave. The championing of working-class solidarity and the desperate need for such energies and traditions to manifest today are well covered in numerous songs, with some giving acknowledgement to cultural forces like Wigan Casino and Northern Soul; these combined with references to the judgmental moral codes of Catholic Nuns who were schoolteachers. There are some pretty damning stanzas on religion in general, it has to be said, not a factor that this reader struggled with.

Thematically, it’s an admirably wide canvas of examination and one which I think could act as an engine of inspiration for any aspiring young teenage working-class songsmiths of today, if they still exist to any significant degree, that is. In the same way that Joe Solo looked at writers like Strummer and co to provide his youthful scrawlings with some sense of shape and perspective, I think this book could do the same thing now, and if I had my way, it would be injected immediately into the creative writing curriculums of all state schools.

It will not be of course, and Joe Solo will go on tracking up and down the country, raising money and pouring out his heart and soul in the name of working-class emancipation. He’ll carry on performing old songs and new ones, and I’m pretty sure there are a fair few more albums still to be written. In the meantime, this book is well worth reading. This is more than a collection of somebody’s songs over many decades; it’s a searing illumination of one man’s sense of personal artistic quest and purpose. It’s a journey of poetics and a journey of a soul committed to representing his own people in song.

Which is a journey worth celebrating for sure.

We were Betamax not filofax, we grew up taking turns…
And my favourite teachers were Joe Strummer and Jake Burns’…

From We Were Young by Joe Solo

~

Buy the book from Bandcamp

Joe Solo will be playing 3 special Book Launch gigs at:

THE Station, Ashton Under-Lyne Sunday, 22nd February
Mandela Cafe, Sheffield, Sunday, March 1st
Betsey Trotwood, London, Sunday, 15th March 

The latest Joe Solo album ‘PUNK ROCK PREPARED US FOR THIS‘ will be released on Monday, 9th March 2026.

For all other information on JOE SOLO Live Shows, Tours and related activities visit: Joe Solo – Solo Central- news, gigs, music and more.

All words Richard David