Album: Thee Faction, At Ebbw Vale (Soviet Beret)

Thee Faction – note the authentic garage-rock spelling – are an "unpleasant socialist R&B band" from Surrey who claim to have been stranded behind the Iron Curtain in 1985.

At Ebbw Vale purports to have been recorded at the height of the miners' strike, and catches the band, led by the fags'n'lager-voiced Billy Brentford, rudely welding rhetoric to rhythm & booze. With a recession, a services-slashing government and a Royal Wedding in the offing, Thee Faction's "comeback" couldn't be more timely.