„Revolution" asks Swindelli, ManBREAK's charismatic leader, in that Liverpudlian accent that will forever be associated with the global explosion of rock'n'roll „Count me in".

But while a few other rebellious artists tackle the socio-political realities of the end of the millennium with more heat than light, more anger than enlightenment, more noise than poetry, ManBREAK wrestles with our life and times, with melody, intelligence, even optimism. The Sex Pistols with a positive attitude, The Clash with working-class bollocks, ManBREAK rails against a system that patronizes, poisons and pisses on us all.

„I can't write love songs without sounding pathetic, "Swindelli admits. „I don't know how much love I have in me. I write what is tangible and real to me. Someone once said 'only art, love and politics matter'. Well, I'll take two of those".

On Come and See (their debut release for One Little Indian), produced by Stephen Hague (Siouxsie and The Banshees, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Pere Ubu etc.) and recorded at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios in Bath, ManBREAK throws down the gauntlet of political rock. And if you can't deal with it, well, co can still dance to it. And if you don't read philosophy, economics, history and the Socialist worker newspaper as Swindelli does, well, you can still sing along.

On one hand, the album's titled after Come and See, al 1985 dramatic epic from Soviet director Elem Klimov which depicts a young man roaming the Russian countryside after the U.S.S.R. was invaded by Germany in World War II. Its rendering of war and atrocities on the Eastern Front is grim, vivid, and unnerving. On the other hand, ManBREAK's Come and See rock ( the storming 'Ready Or Not'), pop, hip hop, and even the dance undertow of Manchester ('Kop Karma'9. Add the piano ballad 'God's Never Heard Of You' and the complete-with-string-quartet revolutionary lullaby 'Is Everyone Still Asleep', and ManBREAK reveal itself to be a surprisingly diverse musical endeavour. Swindelli agrees: „We don't say, 'this is our sound and that's it'. We push the boundaries".

What separates ManBREAK from the pretenders, he emphasizes, „is that most artists who delve into politics tend to be prosaic and didactic. There isn't much poetry in their contribution, and the music is not on a par with the words. I want to be able to listen to our songs for pleasure in 10 years, or else, „he adds with a laugh, „be seriously agitated. But I like Frank Sinatra and Burt Bacharach and that melodic tradition. If I wrote a pop song as good as Bacharach, I would not sleep less easy because it was not a political polemic. But the double challenge for ManBREAK is to be good as well as relevant".

Formed in May 1994, the band took its name from a then-secret, now-scandalous military program of the Fifties and Sixties in which the British government exposed some of its own soldiers to low-level chemical weapons and then put them on an assault course to test how they would perform in the field. The program was aptly dubbed Manbreak, and some of the experiments' human guinea pigs died from the experience. Sneers Swindelli, „so much for 'King and Country'."

Hailing from Liverpool are singer-songwriter Swindelli, lead guitarist Snaykee, rhythm guitarist Mr. Blonde and drummer Stu Boy Stu with bassist Roy Van der Kerkoff. Snaykee performed and recorded with Swindelli's previous group, The 25th May, which toured Europe with the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, and released the smartly titled 1992 album Lenin & McCarthy.

Swindelli acknowledges it wasn't easy to find a producer willing to take on a socially-conscious band such as ManBREAK. „As soon as producers read the lyrics, they shied away. When Stephen Hague asked on, we were surprised. The first thing I said to h im was, 'the band your name are synonymous with, aren't like Manbreak.' But that's precisely why we wanted to do it."

According to Swindelli, the result of years of apoliticism in the UK - and the US - is that „it's become unfashionable to challenge orthodoxies through music. A lot of artists won't stuck their heads over the precipice. so everyone becomes nihilistic: 'There's nothing we can do.' But you can't just say, 'Fuck everything!' At the end of the day, that's not terribly constructive. Calling something 'PC' turns it into a caricature. Being politically correct is a challenge to racism and sexism. So be it."

Swindelli is far from a sloganeering dilettante. Extremely well-read and articulate, he says that „without knowing the information, all you have is an emotional response. You must obtain the intellectual foundation, something I find fascinating." Quite oppositely, his parents were 'throwbacks to the pre-enlightenment.' The family was working class, his father a manual labourer. As a boy, he liked football and fighting: „Fighting was a way of negotiating our reality. If you didn't have enough front, you were picked on. Fortunately, I'm the type of person who can talk his way out of a hangman's noose."

He left school at 16 and worked, when he could, in construction. He also began his own political education. „I saw something seriously wrong with society: The opportunities for someone from my background were limited and that's an affront to a meritocracy. You're excluded if you're working class; you have no say in how your life is run. That's no democracy."

A singer first, he didn't play guitar until he was 17. Influenced by the punk of the late Seventies and the rap of the mid-Eighties, especially Run-DMC and Public Enemy, he found both genres suited the music in his gut and the musings in his head. He was also inspired by a band that emerged from hometown Liverpool decades earlier: „The Beatles were avatars of the human race. Despite their lowly background, they achieved - not by default but by hard fought effort and well crafted talent."

Until he too could achieve, Swindelli survived on the dole. „That's what it's there for," he says, „For scrounging apprentice pop stars. „He adds, more seriously and with typically searing honesty, „I'm in this to be successful and not go back on the dole. I don't pretend to be an artiste who says he doesn't give a fuck. That's bullshit. I deserve a crack at the whip too."

Liverpool's changed enormously since the Fab Four. Once an industrial powerhouse, it hit hard times. Like many northern cities, who have an historical antagonism with the more bourgeois south, austerity and class consciousness go hand-in-hand. Yet the nightlife thrives. Just as in the Sixties, it seems the only avenues to escape the hard life are football and music. Still, Swindelli is somewhat optimistic. „Things are bad, but we don't have Salvadorean death Squads at our door either. But we still want better, don't we? Music can't change the world, but if we can add to the argument then at least we're adding something."

He insists there's a place for politics in pop. „No one criticises Picasso for 'Guernica' because it comments on war. Why should pop music be treated any different?" Yet he understands the limitations of music as well as the potential. „If we really had the bollocks, we'd be fighting on the side of the rebels in East Timor (where the Indonesian government has been brutally putting down an independence movement). That's a genuine issue, not pop music. But what's a poor boy to do?"

The best he can - and have fun doing it. Frankly, what has amazed Swindelli is that despite the band's hig-minded political bent, ManBREAK's audiences are usually filled with an inordinate number of screaming teenagers, particularly sexually charged young women. „You know", he says, „it must be the trousers".

THE ALBUM

„Ready Or Not": „We're active consumers and passive viewers. Ask questions. Answer with a verb."

„Kop Karma": „How our taxes pay for us to get beaten up by the police. Rodney King can testify to that."

„Morning": „Getting up and seeing the city for what it is. Being resigned but still with an air of optimism."

„New Of The World": „About people who masturbate while sitting in front of the TV, switching channels. About information overload and being desensitised to what we see."

„It's On": „The fuckin# stupefying boredom of suburbia".

„God's Never Heard Of You": „We are alone. So we create this useless construct of religion that tells us to defer gratification to the „next life". We abrogate our responsibility to the divine - and that's the source of part of the malaise in our own lives."

„City Life": „A new messiah - a paranoid schizophrenic who things he's mad. Who knows if he's mad? It would not be unusual if he were."

„Round & Round": „Look left and look right. Be careful. Any minute you might die. You have only one life."

„Cut ups": „This was inspired by a story I read in the Socialist Worker: In Mexico City, a woman goes out on a window ledge about to commit suicide. A policeman is sent up to try to talk her out of it. Instead, she convinces him of the futility of their lives, and they both jump."

„Future Days": „The future we want. Dream what we want - a future that's a better one."

„Is Everyone Still Asleep": „An ode to apathy from people who are always shoved to the end of the queue, people whose noses are always pressed against the window of the store."