Lancaster Unity: 2be

Joey Smith (right) and another nonentity reform unknown band

Okay, hands-up all those who have heard of Joey Smith outside the stuff we've written about him here at Lancaster Unity? No-one? What about the newly-reformed band 2be? Nobody at all? I thought not.

To be honest, we've never had much reason to write about this nobody, though we thought he might rise to become a somebody when he referred to Dewsbury (where he was standing for the BNP in a by-election) as a slum and then appeared on Radio 1 to be racist and talk bollocks with his great pal, naziboy Mark Collett.

If you want to discover anything about anybody, the place to go is, naturally, Google, so I searched for Joey Smith there. Oddly, apart from a couple of items from us, a few from the BNP and a bunch via the BNP's rubbishy Great White Records site, nobody appears to have the foggiest idea who Joey Smith is. Poor old Joey doesn't even seem to have a page on Facebook or MySpace - not an essential in life but I'd have thought it would be useful to a megastar of his talent. But then he isn't a megastar and he doesn't have any talent. Which makes one wonder why the BNP is lauding the reformation of 2be (Joey and one of his mates) as the best thing since, er, Wham.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Smith has just taken over the running of the dire Great White Records, the failed attempt at making Nick Griffin rich through flogging so-called 'nationalist' music to the gullible. Most of the tracks available via GWR seem to have been penned by Griffin himself, which is far from being a recommendation.

GWR and its sister organisation, the BNP's tat-flogging arm Excalibur, are peculiar business models. Both were set up by the BNP at great - indeed, extortionate - expense. GWR, for example, was said to have cost the membership around £50,000 and costs around £2,000 per month to run - an extraordinary amount for a business that sells less, we're told, than ten items each week. Formerly run by the miniature moron who is now the party's treasurer, Dave Hannam, it's obvious to anyone who has ever seen a set of accounts that GWR is a disaster and one wonders why a party that can't even run a small business can think itself capable of running the hugely complex UK economy.

Anyway, back to the staggeringly awful Joey Smith. Smith was briefly famous last year for producing a musical rebuttal to Lily Allen's anti-BNP song 'Fuck you'. I haven't got a lot of time for Lily Allen but anyone who is prepared to state publicly that they loathe the BNP and all it stands for gets my vote and the song itself is pretty jolly. Enjoy...

Smith's response was one of the worst pieces of music I've ever heard accompanied by one of the shittiest bits of film (starring the revolting Mark Collett) I've ever had the misfortune to come across. Why the hell anyone regards Smith as a singer is beyond me - he sounds like a dog in a blender. You can cringe your way through it below...

Smith's biography on the GWR site isn't all that enlightening, nor is it entirely coherent. Take this sample:

'After leaving school he joined various bands before establishing "2BE" with his best friend, a mildly sucessful cabaret duo in his home county of West Yorkshire.'

In fact it seems that Smith dossed around on the dole (except for a brief stint in this unknown band comprising of himself and one other person - or possibly two) until he heard about former BNP-supporter Colin Auty, whose only claim to fame is that he stood against Nick Griffin in a half-hearted leadership challenge. Auty produced another 'nationalist' song in which he bemoaned the fact that England wasn't actually the country thick with village cricket matches, tea on the lawn and country houses that Nick Griffin would have us believe it should be, but a diverse and rich country that embraces multiculturalism. Smith contacted Auty and was immediately grabbed for GWR as an emerging 'talent' of the nationalist music scene (if such a scene could be said to exist).

Since then, Smith's career - never anything to write home about - has taken a nosedive. Weekly sales of his album have dropped to zero and nothing else on the GWR label appears to be selling either. Thus the huge fuss that is being made by the BNP about 2be. And what about 2be? Are we about to discover that 2be are the best band to enter the musical fray since Florence and the Machine? I doubt it. Given that they were still around in their original incarnation in 2006, this 'headline' band doesn't seem to have even a single mention on the internet, beyond the BNP and GWR's own pages and those that pick up those pages as news items.

The BNP has put its leaflet design and printing almost entirely into the hands of Mark Collett, an idiot noted for his constant stream of disasters, from printing leaflets without imprints that the law demands, to chatting up schoolgirls at the BNP conference a couple of years ago. Then it hands over its tat-flogging Excalibur arm to Arthur Kemp, an incompetent though prolific author of white supremacist crap and disastrous husband/father, who has no idea how to run a business that has already collapsed. And finally, it hands over another failed business to a failed singer and attempts to regenerate that business by reforming a failed band. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

We'll let Joey Smith have the last word (more or less):