backdrop of a broken Britain. Ginger’s long-term
issues with depression fed into Dislocated, although
the overriding message is one of communication
and the need to reach out for help from friends
and family.
“It was written about a girl I knew, who was
going to commit suicide,” says Ginger, speaking
from grim first-hand knowledge (he tried to take
his own life in 2017, which resulted in 36 hours on
life support). “I stayed up all night talking her off
the ledge, so to speak, and it gave me loads of room
for thought. Her thing was that she was being
bullied and victimised on Facebook and Instagram.
She’s fine now, and more present for other people
as well. Dislocated is also about my own battles. It’s
still hard to sometimes get through the day when
you’re dealing with depression, but when you’ve
got a bunch of fucking arseholes on social media
it’s much harder. I dislocated myself from that
whole world.”
Similarly, Emergency (Fentanyl Babylon) addresses
the dangers of the prescription painkiller, which in
2018 surpassed heroin as the most common cause
of death by drug overdose – two recent casualties
being Prince and Tom Petty.
The magnificent Diagnosis takes aim at a culture
that tends to reduce complex health issues to
overly simplistic categories. “That song talks about
the actual process of living with mental health
problems and trying to get sorted out in a broken
system,” Ginger explains. “It’s based on a lot of
stories that I’ve read about other people’s suffering,
not just mine. When the system’s fucked, the only
way you can really go forward is to try to learn
your own survival skills, just in case you have to do
it on your own to get through.”
It’s to Ginger’s credit – and also that of The
Wildhearts, of course – that they can turn this
dark, personal subject matter into such an uplifting
and euphoric experience. “That positivity is all
really there because of Ginger and his writing,” says
Battersby. “He’s had a pretty tough couple of years
and, bless him, he has his downers and all that. But
it’s fucking great that he manages to pull out so
much positive feeling. The Wildhearts wouldn’t
work any other way. It’s never been a band that’s
felt sorry for itself.”A
nother crucial factor in all this is the
passage of time. The onset of middle age
can do strange things to a band, even one
as historically anarchic as The Wildhearts. Long
gone are the days when they were so obnoxious
that Izzy Stradlin kicked them off his tour. Or
when they upturned the Kerrang! office, causing
£2,000 worth of damage, in response to a news
item they felt was unjust. Or when Ginger and the
others got into a rib-cracking scrap with high-
handed security at a Finnish rock festival.
“Back in the nineties we used to pride ourselves
on telling people to fuck off, just because they
hadn’t been told to fuck off enough,” Ginger says of
their volatile past. “We never cared about anyone.
I remember us tripping our bollocks off at some
festival somewhere and sitting at Bryan Adams’s
family table, and no one had the balls to come and
tell us to fucking shift. Obviously we’ve all had a lot
of experience since then, and having children
changes you a lot. So now we’ve got the element of
gratitude, which is something we’ve never had
before. And that’s why I feel confident that we’re
not going to break up later today.”“And if we did break up later today,” CJ interjects,
“we’d be back tomorrow anyway! That’s how it
tends to work with The Wildhearts. It doesn’t
worry me any more, because we could’ve split up
years ago and never worked with one another
again. But we do always bounce back. That’s why
this album is a celebration of a band who are still
out there doing it.”
McCormack says that while The Wildhearts
have been touch-and-go over the years, “it’s my life,
it’s what I’m all about. It’s everything I love about
music. I’m in my favourite band in the world”.
For Battersby, who likens their past to
“a constant fucking soap opera”, it’s ultimately
been worth it because of the music. “Despite
everything, we always seem to make it work. And
the gigs are more emotional than ever these days,”
he says. “Personally, I’d like to do another album as
soon as we can and get some continuity going.”Ginger reveals that he has another solo album
ready to go in addition to the as-yet unrecorded
Elemental Bleeding, although for now he’s utterly
focused on The Wildhearts. Indeed he sees the
band as providing an essential service in these
uncertain times.
“Whenever there’s political and social unrest, it
fucks the mood,” he says. “That’s when you get
great punk bands. But I’m not seeing any young
bands with that stare-you-in-the-eye attitude that
I’ve always associated with punk. So I’m really
proud that we’ve made an album that captures that
spirit. And if there are no great punk bands that
come out from this, then the next Wildhearts
album is going to be really fucking pissed off.”Renaissance Men is available now via Graphite
Records. The Wildhearts play Ramblin’ Man
WIL Fair on Friday, July 19.
L^ IR
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“Back in the nineties we used to pride ourselves
on telling people to f**k off.” Ginger
Ginger gets in
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