Andy White: Good Luck I Hope You Make It – Poetic reflections on a world gone stark raving mad

“The revolution is coming and the revolution will not be monetised,” Andy White declares, channelling Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised on the opening track of his new album, which is a more spoken-word affair than his previous forays into slightly more traditional folk-rock.

Since his first release, Religious Persuasion, in 1985, White has always had a performance-poet element to his work. His calling-card song took task with the toxic poison of sectarianism in his native Northern Ireland, which he later performed alongside Billy Bragg and Sinéad O’Connor. White describes some of his early efforts as reading poetry to a drum machine, so it is no surprise that he now returns to his poetic origins.

White considers this project as a pandemic-induced exercise of going back to his roots, reading Jack Kerouac and listening to John Cooper Clarke, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Bob Dylan and early hip-hop. Now based in Australia, White found himself “thinking about Belfast, texting friends, watching the clown show of UK politics and checking Patti Smith’s Instagram”. The results are an intriguing bag of mongrel folk and spoken word. The Day You Were a Bomb references “Belfast confetti” over a shuffling hip-hop beat, which is also threaded through Self-Isolation and other tracks.

Recorded in Melbourne, mixed in Calgary and mastered in Los Angeles, Good Luck I Hope You Make It candidly gives voice to White’s truth and experience, offering memorable reflections on a world gone stark raving mad.