It’s a biography of radical US folk legend Woody Guthrie, told mostly through snippets of his music. Four performers cover all the roles, dispensing with such frippery as props, costume or set changes, and it works kind of as an accompanied monologue, rattling straight through a half century of American history like a west-bound boxcar.

Told from Guthrie’s perspective, the show records his travels through an unequal society, stretched to breaking point by the great depression, and demonstrates how witnessing the lives of people caught on the sharp edge of a great crisis radicalised him and his art.

The performances are fantastic – with dozens of instruments shared round between the cast, from banjos to spoons, with everyone seemingly a virtuoso at them all – and the cast’s enthusiasm for the material is utterly infectious – a Guthrie CD has now replaced the nursery rhymes CD in our car stereo – with “This Land is Your Land” the new back seat favourite.

With protest the new black, this show deserves a packed house every night. For those worried about how this current crisis is going to hit the UK’s most vulnerable, the show is an affirmation and an inspiration. It’s only on until 2 April, so get in if you can.

Well, if the cameo samples from Maggie, D-Cam and the ghost of future electoral catastrophe, Nick Clegg, in Captain Ska’s Xmas #1 candidate song, Liar Liar, don’t scare Ebeneezer Osborne from his skinflint path, I don’t know what will…

If you haven’t heard the good Captain’s oeuvre yet, check it out in this youtube vid, tell all your friends, and go buy a download of it, to help it storm up the charts.

Imagine if this could make it to the number one spot for Christmas, brandishing two fingers very publically to not only Osborne but chart nasty Simon Cowell as well. Wouldn’t that be the best 79p you ever spent?

This amused me today. Spanish union federation CCOO are hosting a contest for user generated 40 second ads to get the word round about the upcoming General Strike (29 September). Don’t know if this one is from a supporter or CCOO themselves, but it’s jolly, memorable, and slightly surreal. Todo fuera, hermanos!

Where Dirty Canon got in turns maudlin and snarly with the fantastic “Don’t fall asleep at the wheel” and “Caesar’s Revenge”, this is a firmly up-tempo shot to perk up the grotty autumn. The (even) fuller production this time brings in dozens of the talented trio’s unusual instrument choices, making them sound like they’ve turned into a sprawling Negresses Vertes style mega-combo. Given this treatment “My Latest Mistake” becomes even knees-uppier, and new songs “Bad bad baby”, “The Human Tragedy” and even drink-damage ballad “The Long Goodbye” swing along, juxtaposing nicely with the little barbs in the narratives. “Jumbo” well deserves top billing though, a huge theme for a movie I’d certainly love to see, even if I’ve no idea what it might be all about.

And not content with being an internationally fêted movie auteur (hem), I’ve now become a virtual session musician, in that the closing bars of the title track feature the buzz of an old white Stylophone that I long ago gave up trying to learn to play (if that’s indeed what you do with them), and which has since found its way to someone vastly more qualified to use it.

Get your own dose of Jumbo from all good record stores (and I imagine a number of bad ones), including some handy links from the Figs.