Rock and Roll Prophesy is a blast from the primordial soup of its idiom.

Its bludgeoning guitars lash the innocent of mind, bass and drums thunder upon the ear of complacency, layered vocals, flute and searing keyboards lambast the senses with harsh yet melodic rock music that supports the sharp, cynicism-free notion of a 21st Century free from war.

Nurtured in the peace-loving belly of the late, great Dave Goodman’s Mandala Studios circa 2000/2001, RRP is a direct excitation of the studio’s motto, “Music can help save the world.” It also marked quite a change in style for songster Pok who had journeyed from the endangered idylls of faerie gardens to refute human greed for war.

The album was finally ready for presentation to the world on the very morning of the fateful 11th of September 2001, yet didn’t have much promotional power behind it, even though it obviously appeared on time in the zeitgeist with its bid to out-myth the dawning New Age of Terror.

It opens sonically with the equivalent of what it might feel like having an electric kipper slapped in your face as ‘Voices of a Future’ adroitly and poignantly sets the theme from the future: “Visions and Voices of a better world”. As if speaking out bravely might help the situation? I listened further. There follows a string of songs enlarging on the proposed paradigm, with a patchwork of ideas as fanciful as they seem implausable, yet which, knowing Pok’s sometime association with a blending of the more colourful end of protest, indigenous modern tribal lifestyles and so-called ‘value-creating’ buddhism, stem from formative culture. Such ditties as ‘The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth’ offer a stark but humorous, even positive take on post-apocalyptic vistas of reality as he obviously sees it, secure in the hands of the present day misfits.

If it is at all unclear exactly how ‘Voices From a Future’ will aid the world at large in shirking war, Pok has provided a calm centrepiece where is enshrined the naive edict that “We can put an end to war today”. Fine stuff, I must say. And how is this this to be achieved? The song offers yet more: “An end to war is made of will/Change the action, change the language”. There you have it. Encapsulated. In a nutshell. Thanks Pok, we can all relax now. 

‘Riddle’ presents an angry, rantilicious rap of a sort that, at length and by modifying licks from Neil Young, takes you behind the official presentations to the poisoned social malaise and offers hard-won nuggets of relief and hope in reward for your attendance at the sermon. Twice, the album soars into what must be termed spacerock. The first clocks in at 6 minutes and is called ‘Born of Stars’. The second, a compact 2 minutes, is called ‘Finale (When We Were Young)’. They are both intense white knuckle rides through evolution, so take some protein pills and put your helmet on.

Other stand-out tracks are ‘The Scorpion and the Tomato’, a cautionary tale of the scientists working during the infancy of modern genetic research, warning of potentially stupendous and horrific outcomes following the escape of random genes into the biosphere. Sounding like banshees with chainsaws, the most boisterous cut has to be ‘People Are Making a Change’, which rattles and rolls, sounds like death metal but has pro-active lyrics that sound like they are coming through a loud-hailer. Dude?

The requiem ‘I Hold the Candle Near’ closes the album at a less frantic pace, with a sort of prayer, earlier fires still smouldering and the new meme, a message — perhaps less common even a few years ago — burned into your circuitry.

Rock and Roll Prophesy and the rest of Pok’s output can be found at pookofpok​.blogspot​.com.