UK-based ‘Canary Wolf’ makes music out of credit-crunch blues

Are you feeling low and lonesome, or really subprime? A band of guitar-playing construction workers called Canary Wolf say they want to rock their way through the recession and put smiles on the faces of British bankers.

LONDON

Playing their song “Credit Crunch” recently atop a building site in London’s Canary Wharf financial district, the group said they hoped their surreal act would lift some of the gloom of the global financial meltdown, reports the Associated Press.

The song’s lyrics involve a cat named Footsie, a dog named NASDAQ — after the FTSE and NASDAQ stock exchange indexes in London and the U.S. The performance was punctuated by the band’s hard-hat wearing singer picking up a bunch of carrots and flinging it at the audience.

Why carrots?

“Credit crunch,” singer Richard Bray said between sets, a smile on his face and a flamboyant fruit-patterned shirt peeking from beneath his fluorescent safety vest.

Bray, a 43-year-old building services coordinator, acknowledged that the financial crisis “concerns us all,” but he said the group’s music was trying to keep things in perspective.

“It’s not the end of the world, is it?” he said. “There are benefits. We were all, myself included, spending money on things we didn’t need. This will bring us down to earth a bit, probably with a bump.”

The group’s name, Canary Wolf, is a play on Canary Wharf, the gleaming financial district that sprang up over London’s disused Docklands in the late 1980s and 90s. It also explains how the six band members, all but one of whom worked in construction, came to know each other.

“We’ve worked on a few of these buildings together,” said Steve Wells, a surveyor and one of the band’s guitarists. He gestured toward the glass-and-steel corporate monoliths set against a clear blue sky. “Citigroup, Barclays, Credit Suisse and, most notably, Lehman Bros.,” he said.

Bray said the band formed last year, when the world was still getting acquainted with the meaning of the phrase “credit crunch,” and said the song was a way of engaging current events without being too serious about it. The group’s themes are not limited to economic apocalypse- they also have a song about binge drinking.

The band’s small proceeds go to charity. Bray joked that he couldn’t use the revenue anyway. “There’s no point because money is not going to be worth anything soon,” he said.

Playing on a concrete slab at the top of an unfinished extension to Canary Wharf’s One Canada Square, Britain’s tallest skyscraper, on Friday, Oct. 31, the band drew a small collection of friends and curious onlookers. Construction worker Alfio Spina, 35, said it was “very, very different” and “very fun.”

“I’ve never had our work interrupted by a concert before,” Spina said.

ASSOCIATED PRESS