Maverick Sabre from the Roundhouse

From the Roundhouse recording studios in Camden, North London, comes a song that should sweep the world. Well, yes, in my view, it should. I can already hear the complaint that the Editor of the TLS should step back from tipping songs. But, I've begun and, since 'They Found Him A Gun' has not left my head since I first heard it yesterday, I'm sticking to my 'should'.

This is a song about classroom shootings, about 'fight or flight' in our own local streets and others' streets, and if a sweep of 'the world' is perhaps too much to predict, it should echo and re-echo across the Atlantic to Virginia Tech and Columbine and surely will.

The singer and writer is the nineteen/twenty year old, Irish-Londoner, Maverick Sabre, about whom there is only a certain amount of reliable information on-line and nothing like as much as there will be soon. There's a somewhat scratchy video version here which gives some idea of the song but the double CD on which I found it last night, being a TLS Editor unfashionably unattached to downloadings, was put in my hand by Marcus Davey, the director who inspires so many of the great things that happen there.

ThirtytrihT is set of thirty songs recorded in the Roundhouse studios that sit under the brick and great-bowled roof of the rock and theatre venue that was once a gin-store and turn-table for steam-engines. We had had a trustees meeting  - and doubtless discussed a good deal about Roundhouse money, Roundhouse bars and future projects to help the young make music, movies and something more of themselves than they otherwise might achieve in a culture of state education that offers and expects so little.

But I don't remember very much of that this morning, with Maverick Sabre hammering in my head.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter, This is a much better online version of "They Found Him A Gun:" (YouTube)

"Maverick Sabre -They Found a Gun (Live Maida Vale Session for Ras Kwame's BBC Radio 1 show)".

I am not sure what message you took from the song. Are you perhaps undergoing a personality change?

Clayton.

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter, Why not try this site and let me know your opinion of the captivating Sabre song on it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neXSMm7p_58

I await with eager anticipation (horror?) your own rap lyrics--"Teacher, You Mus' Be Die Today." Endorsed by the BBC.

[Ali Raymond]

Thanks Sir Peter,
Maverick Sabre is a brilliant new talent, and one young people of today can look up to.
He is also a positive artist that is light years ahead of the current negativity engrossing the charts.

@ Clayton maybe have a second listen to the song. 'They Found a Gun' is a narrative piece describing the atrocities of the massacre in Columbine. In no way does Maverick condone what you are implying, rather he is putting himself in the place of the students on that sad day.

http://www.beatnikonline.net/features/maverick-sabre

[Clayton Burns]

Ali, I was not implying anything at all about the song. Surely you are somewhat sensitive to irony? I posted a link to what seemed to me to be a reasonably clear site, where any listener could draw his/her own conclusions.

I suggested to Sir Peter in an e-mail that it would be useful to have the written lyrics, so I could hardly have had the ambition to distort the content. Thanks. Clayton.