GCBC is - stevie ward, vocals, electric & acoustic guitars & rhodes piano, Jolly, bass guitar Nick iliffe - Drums & percussion Formed in 2003, Good Cop Bad Cop quickly established their musical modus operandi: If it feels right, then it is right. Why be restricted by rules and genres? Why should a song have a guitar solo? Why should a song not have a guitar solo? Who cares? Just play the damn tune till the room shakes. Based in Northampton, England, GCBC are now putting out their second album ‘End of the beginning’ (Liberal Hearts Bleeding - a collection of no budget recordings was released in 2005 and there are just a few copies remaining). The band love to play live and have hundreds of gigs across the UK under their belts. The roots of the music come from bands such as MC5, Husker Du, Black Sabbath, the Pixies & Fugazi. Good Cop Bad Cop are influenced by life. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll find stories exploring the darker side of human nature. Tales of love, hate, sex, religion, politics, decadence, frustration and anger. The interesting stuff. The DiY ethic of the 1980’s underground scenes are a massive influence on the band. GCBC are done chasing the dream. The dream is a nightmare filled with bad people who all want to fu*k you over. GCBC want to do this on their own terms. Just playing live and documenting material as they go is enough. The more frequent, the better. The more you play – the better you become at your craft. The better you become – the more you write, the more you play.! And so on. Simple. The band live for that rush of performing new material in front of a crowd before familiarity kicks in. Always on the edge of messing up, that’s where the kick is. Everything else is a bonus. About the album… End of the beginning is very much a reactionary record. The state of music in the public domain is a truly horrible monster, dictated by men in suits snorting coc*ine from the arse cheeks of teenage wannabe rockstars. Images and song structures are formulated down to the last note and the last little star tattoo…. Here speaks a bitter man. Stevie Ward has been down this road before (although no fat bigshot ever snorted coke from his a**, he informs me). With End of the beginning, GCBC have made a record that at times you have to persevere with, it’s not always an easy listen, but listen on and EOTB will draw you in. It twists and turns, changing direction just when you least expect it, moving from eardrum searing rock riff to moments of sheer beauty. The record deals with diverse subjects from the very personal through admiration and disgust of public figures. Here follows a brief Track-by-track description by Stevie Ward…. Choose your weapons – maybe the wrong choice for an opener as it’s a little long at 6 minutes, but it states the intention of the album from the off. We just grind out a big fat riff, spit some bile and lay on a solo or two!! Act 1, scene 1 is a simple slab of a song!! About the love of classic silver screen movies and their wonderful actresses. Good eye open is about my daughter, if you know her, it all makes sense, her spirit is untameable and she has a way of dealing with an ongoing medical problem that I just can’t comprehend. No More medicine. I wasted days, weeks, possibly years of my life in the pursuit of getting off my face. I should have been more creative when I was younger. It’s not a preachy ‘don’t do drugs’ song’. Recreational drugs have a place and can be fun. But days at a time spent grinding my teeth away were not. Black tattoo is written in the third person narrative. I don’t have any, I’m glad. Again, not really an anti tattoo song, more of a cautionary tale to all the kids who have one because fashion dictates it. They look sh*t when you get old. Car crashes are horrible things, they make such a mess of flesh and bone. The wreck is imminent tells of late nights spent driving home when you should be sleeping. As you pass a wrecked car and truck your mind wakes suddenly to just how close you were to drifting off. …and other modes of transport was nearly the title track of the album. It’s an instrumental, but its theme is on of how so many beautiful things in life turn to sh*t. The drowning tells a simple tale of witnessing a suicide from such a distance that you are powerless to intervene. Heavy. half made of stone. I am, If I wasn’t I would have sunk long ago. It’s not a boast, it’s not about physical strength, It’s about mental strength. The way some people can heal and overcome without the need to rely on religion. Jam #69 is what it says. The 69th jam from our rehearsal tapes. The title pays homage the James Gang’s incredible Funk #49 I am or am I? Is a groove, it makes me shake a hip. The main guitar line started out as a homage to Clutch. All three of us love the band. The words cover the cheerful theme of a family tragedy where an abused kid fights back. Thankfully not autobiographical. And so to politics…. The quiet man is in all of us. The problem these days is that we seem to have lost the will to fight. The corrupt power hungry career politicians tell us we aint sh*t, and we just sit back, watch TV and drink more. What happened to marching through the streets of London to voice your disgust and outrage? Let the quiet man out. Where I come from. Somewhere amongst all the angst lives a simple man content with my place in the world. If you have read this far, I sincerely hope you like our record and add it to your collection. We are very proud of these songs but they are no longer ours, they are yours. Please drop by our mySpace and say hello. Peace GCBC