Revenge Recommends: "Ring The Bells" by James

By and large, the 90s was a weak decade musically. One of the highpoints, however, was James, a rather over-staffed band from Manchester, who melded the aspirational post-punk ethos of the previous decade with the druggy dance vibe then dominant to create an infectious musical style.

Ring The Bells is from their iconic fourth album, Seven, released in February 1992, which also included the spellbinding Born Of Frustration as well as several other excellent tracks.

Ring The Bells (lyrics):

Ring

Ring the bells

Wake the town

Everyone is sleeping

Shout at the crowd

Wake them up

This angers deeper than sleep

Got to keep awake to what is happening

I can't see a thing through my ambitions

I no longer feel like God is watching over me

Got to tell the world we've all been dreaming

This is not the end, a new beginning

I no longer feel my God is watching over me

Break

Break the code

Concentrate

Let the doors swing open

See through all my walls

All my floors

Now I'm in deeper than sleep

Got to keep awake to what is happening

I can't see a thing through my ambitions

I no longer feel like God is watching over me

Got to tell the world we've all been dreaming

This is not the end, a new beginning

I no longer feel my God is watching over me

When you let me fall

Grew my own wings

Now I'm as tall as the sky

When you let me drown

I grew gills and fins

Now I'm as deep as the sea

When you let me die

My spirit's free

There's nothing challenging me

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!