As the world tears itself apart in neo-liberal screams of static and alternative facts bouncing off every antenna, twisting our very thought processes into self hate, the population of this planet are crying out for hope. 6 billion desperate people driven to poverty and despair are looking to defend themselves, to strike back against the tiny oligarchy that's eclipsing the future of this planet. We need an assassin from the left, some one who's willing to return fire. We need a... FAVELA NINJA!

This is our 3rd full length proper album where every track is where it is for a reason. It took ages to make. 4 years for some of the songs!

Here's the story:

The squat, the Miroiterie, had been in danger of closing for a few years. We’d done a few “last ever” concerts and a bunch of benefit concerts there by the time it actually closed. It had already resisted years of lawyer, police and neo-nazi pressure. It had gradually risen to become one of the most internationally famous music venues in France! When the Stooges came through France on tour, Mike Watt and Steve McKay from the Stooges turned up for a jam session and asked to play with local musicians like me and Nathan Mozes (from the band Mozes. Nathan turns up a few times in our story! Stay tuned!) Anyway jamming with members of the Stooges in front of 200 people is just one of many amazing memories I have of that place. The concerts there were (sometimes) completely amazing! Sometimes there’d be 5 people and sometimes 300 people!

Anyway, eventually a wall was damaged and partially collapsed and the Miroiterie was declared dangerous. Then neo-nazis (or under-cover police officers) fire bombed the few people who were left there as caretakers. The inhabitants decided that enough was enough. Nazis hit you when you’re down, it would be silly for people to get hurt for a pile of rubble.


In the years that followed, a wave of police action closed hundreds of bars across Paris. Many of them were places that dared to host events by local artists. Paris became a city that is almost impossible to play music in! It’s insane!

The importance of the Miroiterie can’t be overstated. Even now I meet people who tell me that the Miroiterie was their gateway into the underground of DIY, extremely left-wing politics and generally helping your fellow humans in the face of a cruel world. They tell me all the amazing causes that they’ve supported or even started! We were evangelist preachers for our world view. Not all squats are like that. We’ve played lot’s of cool squat parties and we love them dearly but most squat parties are for people already in the loop. Preaching to the converted.

Our friend Rabby Bochel from the band Hypnotizing Chicks invited us to play one of these kinds of parties. But she had a plan to do the craziest and most underground squat festival ever! Her idea was a festival of bands playing hundreds of metres under the ground in an abandoned chalk mine. We’d got our friends from Barcelona, Spain, Subfobias, onto the bill. Our good friends, the 3 Gnomes were already on the bill. 3 Gnomes were 3 members from Les Gnomes. They were one of the first french bands to bring the Californian punk sound to France in the early eighties. We’d go on to play with them quite a few times and I’d go on to produce their comeback EP.

Where wasI? Oh yeah! Playing down a mineshaft! We turned up a bit early before the soundcheck to hangout. What obviously didn’t know what to expect. When we arrived, they offered us vegan food from the buffet and some beers. Cool! Subfobias were late though… would they turn up in time for the gig? It was time for our soundcheck so we started walking down a dark shaft with our gear. About 50 metres of tunnel. Our guide told us to stay in the lit areas and that we absolutely fucking shouldn’t explore as the last person to do that was lost for days. I was starting to wonder if this would actually be pretty awful when we turned a sharp corner. The tunnel opened out into a big cavern. Not claustrophobic at all because it was as big as a church. Sounded like one too! Punks were scrambling around setting up a cool looking stage

Anyway, Subfobias made the gig just in time. (We would go on to play with them everytime they came to France I think!) We played a pretty good gig and I have the sneaking suspicion that I broke the Marshall amp that I borrowed for the show. Sorry! The bands played all night but so far underground, who gives a shit what time it is? All in all an amazing experience! Thanks Rabby!

We had some ups and downs though. A legendary guy from Arras, Nath, booked us to play the Mayday festival, Le Son du Porte-voix twice. The first time we turned up early to do an acoustic radio session on Radio PFM and an interview. There was a big open air stage and all around the town, there was a book festival with street theatre and the like. All very left-wing and all very cool! My wife and son had taken the train to Arras and were in the audience. During the first song, I jumped around a bit on stage and I fell off! Yes, I fell off the fucking stage like an idiot on the first song! I hit a metal barrier on the way down and broke a few ribs. Damn! I knew I was fucked ‘cos my guitar had a big crack on it’s neck and a red patch was spreading across my side. The show must go on and I didn’t want my son to see anything that would frighten him. I had only missed a few beats by the time all this had gone through my mind. I got a rush of adrenalin and continued the show with every bit of energy I had. The neck of my guitar finally broke in two in the last song so that’s pretty good! My chest started hurting as soon as we came off stage. 2 young punks were inspired by my poor guitar, took it from me and started whacking it into the ground like the front cover of London Calling. I carried my son back to the train station. God knows how I did that ‘cos as soon as the train left, I could hardly breath or move at all. We went for dinner with some of the other bands. (Whenever we play gigs in the north of France we always eat Welsh’s which is a kind of cheese on toast but that’s like calling a 1980s calculator a motherfucking Ipad!) One of the other bands was a parisian hardcore band called Emma Pils, the guitarist asked me if my side hurt, waited then jabbed me in the chest, I collapsed in pain as he laughed. It still hurts to this day to think about. It was brutal for months. That guy’s a fucking prick, that’s for sure! I’d learnt a lesson. I was getting older and just couldn’t do the madcap stage antics to that dangerous level anymore!

From the very first record, We’d been releasing our records under Creative Commons Licences whenever we could. Creative Commons is a different legal framework to the classic copyright. If you copy one of our songs onto your computer or over the internet, it’s not illegal but when you do that with any classic record, it’s illegal even if you bought the damn thing! It worked out well because we had hundreds of thousands of downloads from various creative commons sites. That’s a lot for us! We also got on quite a few underground radio shows all over the world like PCPodcast in the UK and Ryno the Bearded in the US. Ryno’s show was really fun and the guy’s just really charismatic with great taste in music!

Anyway, off the back of all that stuff, we got booked to play at the Creative Commons festival in Cologne in Germany with other groovy CC bands like the incredible Vienna Ditto. Sounds like an adventure! Marc Hollenbach, another bearded person from the creative commons world, booked us a gig in Amsterdam. He had a very big beard! The adventure just turned into a tour! Ryno had received donations of a few bitcoins from generous listeners. A bitcoin was suddenly worth a shit ton of dollars so he visited Europe with the money he got from selling a bitcoin! He’d come on the tour with us. Yeah! Touring europe with a cool DJ from Mississippi! Bring it on! We rented a big red van, invited our friend Simon to be our driver and off we went! To infinity and beyond!

First stop Amsterdam. The little Amsterdam bar had a brutal limiter installed on the sound system. That means that if you play over a certain volume, you’re in trouble. One hard hit on the drums is enough to trigger the fucking thing. Luckily we’d had experience with these nasty little boxes in Paris. The sound engineer knew what she was doing too. It’s possible to get a good sound under these horrible conditions but it just takes a bit more work covering the drums in sticky tape carefully balancing the amps. We met the lovely Vienna Ditto and immediately realised that they were really something special like a rockabilly Portishead or a big band jazz Massive Attack! A nice Swedish band called Emerald Park had also driven all the way from Sweden for the event. Impressive. It was a strange gig really. In between bands, the barman insisted on opera singing renditions of everything from No Diggity to Du Hast. Absolutely and utterly annoying but by the end of the night, the auditory abuse kind of wears you down into actually liking it.

After the gig, some of us went back to Marc’s place to sleep. It was a completely empty flat so we slept on cold concrete floors. He said “I told you I didn’t have any furniture at the moment”. You’re not wrong, dude! He certainly tried to prepare us for it! He was the market manager for Nike Holland or something like that and was a real character! We invited him to join on the adventure to Cologne. We had an extra place in the van! Bring it on! Let’s hit the road!

Cologne was cool! Really great vegan food and we even had hotel rooms booked! That may have been the first time that’d ever happened to us! The soundcheck was excellent, the sound engineer was extremely fucking competant. Great! We set up our merchandizing stand and Marc offered to be the shopkeeper during the gig. He was drinking heavily.

We bumped into Spiedkiks, one of the best german electronic bands. Nice to meet people behind records that you actually listen to! The band playing on stage was playing abstract electronic music with a woman covered completely in gold paint gradually bathing in a bath filled with little pink balls. Yep! Really.

Vienna Ditto played next and everyone's jaws hit the floor. Being in Louis Lingg and the Bombs has really been an honour because we got to play with some of the most talented people I've ever seen! They were THAT good.

An awful reggae band with about 20 members played next and they made the sound engineer unplug important parts of his carefully set up system. We played next and the engineer couldn’t get things working correctly like they did before. Then he apologised and had to leave. Damn you crappy reggae band! We made the best of it and played a pretty rocking show! About half way through I saw Marc stand up on the merch table scream something that could have been words and take his T-shirt off! Ryno went to try to coax him down! We continued rocking! At the end of the gig, Ryno explained that we’d lost Marc mentally and physically, he’d run off into the night or something. He went to find him. We came up with a cunning plan, keep him locked in the van while we took the equipment off the stage. It seemed to work well so when we got to the hotel car park, we did it again so we could go and hang out with Vienna Ditto in the hotel lobby. The lobby had a vending machine that sold beer for fucks sake! We sat in a big circle on big colourful bean bags and emptied the fucking vending machine! Such a great night.

I woke up. My head throbbed for a few minutes. I had a shower. I had a nagging suspicion that I’d forgotten something important... Holy fuck! Marc was still still locked in the van!!! Shit! If he’s pissed in it, or puked we’ll be fucked for the 11 hour drive home! If he’s dead, that would obviously be even worse for obvious reasons! My heart was pounding as we crossed the car park. He was alive and well and in good spirits. “Oh, hi guys. How’s it going?” He looked like he didn’t even have a hangover. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen!

Anyway, onto the record: The guitarist of Les Becasses, Olivier Famin was still studying in SAE studios to become a sound engineer. He invited us to record a song in their studios. We recorded Freedom Fighter there in a day. Juliette managed to rent a tiny electric car and incredibly, she was able to stuff a drum kit and our equipment in it! A miracle! I brought a Kaossilator (a crazy synth you play by wiggling your finger around on a pad) and some thumb pianos to add an intro and some weird noises. We recorded the rest of the album in our rehearsal room over 2 or 3 years. Instead of practicing for 2 hours, we’d record for two hours. That’s a very inefficient and laborious way to work but it was really the only way to do the record we wanted to do. It involved meticulous sound design from me in order to keep a good sound on all the songs. Ace US pop punk mixer Steve Kravac was on board again to mix. As he was mixing the album at Hell’s Half Acre studios in California, we were playing a gig at La Comedia in Montreuil. It’s difficult to correctly give mix directions in a noisy environment! Steve’s experienced enough to ignore the dumb things we said and pick up on the good things so it turned out great! Aurelia Folch did a really cool cover for the record and it was released on transparent blue 12 inch vinyl, CD, and cassette. I was too physically and mentally exhausted after the mammoth undertaking of the album to promote it properly. Ironic really! What’s more, I’ve seen many bands make that mistake and here I was doing it myself! Oh well!

Favela Ninja took 4 years work and will always be our masterpiece. This is mostly because I seriously just want to make singles and EPs now. Making albums is a thankless task! A huge undertaking for a band with no resources.