The Day the Country Died by Subhumans

The Day the Country Died is the debut studio album by the English anarcho-punk band the Subhumans. The album was recorded in five days in June 1982 and was released in January 1983 through Spiderleg Records. It was later re-released on Bluurg, the band's own record label. The album is influenced by the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The most obvious sign of such an influence is the song "Big Brother"; Big Brother is the dictatorial political leader figure in Orwell's novel. The song revolves around how "Big Brother is watching you", and when Dick Lucas sings "there's a TV in my front room and it's screwing up my head", it is a comparison between the telescreen in the novel which monitored citizens constantly and excessive viewing of mass media. Today, there is a huge amount of video surveillance in the United Kingdom, showing the foresight of this subject matter. Like the novel, the album has dystopian overtones. It also describes a world ravaged by war, most likely our world which arguably is, this is suggested by track titles such as "Dying World" and "All Gone Dead". The latter contains lyrics like "So long to the world, that's what they said, it's 1984 and it's all gone dead", which can be seen as another reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Day the Country Died is widely regarded as a classic punk rock album.