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Nuclear Power No Thanks!!?

Nuclear Power No Thanks!!? (Plane IMP 2)

Nuclear Power No Thanks!!?
Various Artists

The Plane Label IMP 2 (LP, UK, 1981)

This is a specially recorded protest album.
Produced by Martin Carthy
Recorded on 16 track at Gateway Studio, London, August 1981
Engineered by Dave Ward and Dal Abbey
Sleeve design and typography by Graham Betts (Inter-Action Printshop)

Musicians

Frankie Armstrong: vocals [3, 5, 6, 11], chorus [1, 9];
Roy Bailey: vocals [1, 3, 5, 6, 7], chorus [9];
Martin Carthy: chorus [1], guitar [3, 8];
Chris Foster: chorus [1, 9], guitar [3, 4, 9];
Sandra Kerr: vocals [10];
Alison McMorland: vocals [4, 5], chorus [1];
Brian Pearson: vocals [8], chorus [1, 9];
Leon Rosselson: vocals [2, 3, 5, 9], chorus [1], guitar [2, 9], piano [5];
Geoff Pearson: piano [7];
Ron Elliott: Northumbrian small pipes [10];
John Kirkpatrick: button accordion [1];
Howard Evans: trumpets [1, 8];
Roger Williams: tuba [8], trombones [1, 8]

Tracks

Side 1

  1. March of Progress (3.50)
  2. Experts (4.25)
  3. Stay Home in Bed (2.35)
  4. Sleep Well (2.30)
  5. Who Reaps the Profits? Who Pays the Price? (7.45)

Side 2

  1. Mock Auction (4.10)
  2. Gravity (1.50)
  3. The Very Slow Bomb Song (2.34)
  4. No Cause for Alarm (5.18)
  5. The Cheviot Hills (3.54)
  6. Speech to Apollo (from John Barton’s adaption of The Greeks) / Out of the Darkness (3.42)

Track 1 Red Ladder Theatre;
Tracks 2, 5, 9 Leon Rosselson;
Tracks 3, 4 Nigel Gray, Leon Rosselson;
Tracks 6, 8 Brian Pearson;
Track 7 Geoff Pearson;
Track 10 Sandra Kerr;
Track 11b Frankie Armstrong

Sleeve Notes

Britain’s nuclear programme of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors has proved to be, in economic terms alone, an unqualified disaster. Now the push is on from the nuclear establishment (the Atomic Energy Authority, the Central Electricity Generating Board and the private companies hoping to profit from nuclear power) to adopt the American-designed Pressurised Water Reactor - the kind that went wrong at Harrisburg. The Government plans to build ten PWRs over the next decade, the first one at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast. There will, naturally, be a public enquiry into Sizewell B. It will, naturally, conclude that Sizewell B must be built. That is what democracy is all about. The growing numbers of people opposed to nuclear power will have to make their own rules.

The songs on this LP are bright, bleak, black, biting, ironical, tender, sharp, gentle, thoughtful and emotional. They will, it is hoped, give heart and voice to those who are standing up against the nuclear state. They attack the monster which is nuclear power from all angles. They are about the conditioned belief in leaders, authority figures and progress (March of Progress and Experts); about the fears of living in and bringing children into a nuclear world (Stay Home in Bed and Sleep Well); about the trap of nuclear power’s supposed economic benefits (Very Slow Bomb Song); about those things which have gone wrong and are going wrong and will go wrong, but which, of course, present no danger to the public (No Cause for Alarm); about the prospecting for sites where nuclear waste can be dumped in some of the more remote and beautiful areas of Britain (The Cheviot Hills).

Three songs - Who Reaps the Profits?, Mock Auction and Out of the Darkness -- ask more fundamental questions: about the violence done to the earth, about the destruction of the indigenous people of the world in the scramble to exploit the earth’s resources, about the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, about the kind of society which demands nuclear power, a society motivated by competition, profit and greed, a society whose values are hollow, devoid of all feeling and humanity, a society driven by some mad logic and a technology out of control towards its own extinction.