March 27, 2009

Manic Street Preachers stop right-wing group from using music

BNP completely miss the point of 'If You Tolerate This...'

Manic Street Preachers have stopped the the British National Party from using one of their songs, which they did completely without the band's permission.

The far-right political party were hosting a video on their website, and on a youTube account, under the heading 'The Cesspit Called London' which was soundtracked by the band's 1998 Number One single 'If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next'.

Ironically, the lyrics to that song concern the International Brigade – the group of volunteers, including Welsh farmers, who went to Spain to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War. The phrase appeared on a poster published at the time.

The band's label SonyBMG immediately issued cease and desist orders, and the material has now been taken down.

NME

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent news and a nice reminder that they don't always get away with their crap.

Anonymous said...

Gosh - the BNP pinch somebody else's material without permission !!!

Not that they've a record (pardon the pun) on this sort of thing.

Anonymous said...

They haven't stopped these wankers playing it though on their TV channel.

http://youngbritishnationalist.blogspot.com/

Kev Scott loves The Jam said...

I take it that the 'glorious' bands they have signed up to Great White (aka fat blobby bastard)Records doesn't have any suitable tracks to supply (royalty free.... of course)?

No I didn't think so!

Rusty said...

Report in the Guardian about this too. Note Simon Darby talking bollox at the end. The party doesn't use copyright material? Don't I remember something about the Mr Men being used ages ago?



Manics' tribute to International Brigades crops up on BNP website
Sam Jones

Clues to the Manic Street Preachers' political leanings are not hard to decipher among their allusive lyrics and public pronouncements.

Their hymn to the International Brigades - If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next - contains the lines "So if I can shoot rabbits/Then I can shoot fascists", making quite plain their attitude to Franco and his falangists.

The Welsh band might have been surprised, then, to find the song on the British National party's website, playing over clips of an article which, according to the far-right group, reveals the "violence, hatred, fragmentation and despair" wrought on London by the "great multicultural experiment".

Although James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore were apparently unaware of the fuss yesterday, their spokeswoman was slightly stunned. "How ironic that they've chosen a song inspired by the International Brigades," she said. "You can never pre-empt what Nicky Wire is going to say, but I'm sure the band would see the irony in all this."

Their record company, however, was not so amused to find the song on the BNP website or attached to extreme rightwing videos on YouTube yesterday.

"This is an unauthorised use and we are talking to our legal advisers and doing all that we can to have it removed as soon as possible," said a spokeswoman for Sony.

By mid-afternoon yesterday, the offending clips had disappeared from YouTube and the BNP had removed the song from its site.

Simon Darby, a spokesman for the BNP, said it did not use copyrighted material, and claimed the song had mistakenly been automatically streamed on to its site and had nothing to do with the official party.

BNP supporters often posted material online that had not been approved by BNP leaders, he said. Asked about the irony of the situation, Darby said: "You can interpret the lyrics any way you want."