Premiere: David Newton & Thee Mighty Angels, ‘The Kids Are Not Alright’

Kevin Bronson on August 5th, 2020

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In British pop circles, David Newton is known as the guitarist and songwriter for the Mighty Lemon Drops (1985-’92), the Wolverhampton-bred indie-rockers who were associated with the C86 scene and were sonic kin to Echo & the Bunnymen. In Los Angeles, where Newton has lived for nearly a quarter-century, he’s been a producer for up-and-coming bands, including the Little Ones, the Henry Clay People, Happy Hollows, the Soft Pack, the Lonely Wild, the Movies and the Blood Arm, among others.

Newton hasn’t released any music since 2011’s “Paint the Town” EP, but that will change Aug. 14 when under the guise of David Newton & Thee Mighty Angels, he releases the album “A Gateway to a Lifetime of Disappointment.” Winking title aside, it gathers up tunes from the EP with others the songwriter has had on the back burner.

Among the latter is the single “The Kids Are Not Alright,” in which fiftysomething Newton proclaims “I fear for the future” over a cascade of chiming, stinging guitars. It’s about as grouchy as he gets on “Lifetime,” and even Newton has seen the feelings behind his titular generalization see-saw since he wrote the song a few years ago. “At the time I was a bit disillusioned with the manner in which some of our younger generation were acting,” he says. “However, after the Parkland shooting, I was so impressed at how the younger kids that seemed to have it right, and maybe it was the older folks that had it wrong, and this made me hesitant to put this song out there. However, in recent months I’ve done another 180 after observing the way that the ‘kids’ are irresponsibly reacting to this pandemic, so I am now comfortable with my original assessment. Maybe the kids are not all right after all?”

Speaking of the pandemic, we probably have it to thank for the album’s arrival. “This album has been an on/off project over the last 10 years,” Newton says. “In my downtime during the pandemic, I realized that I had lots of half-finished songs. I was finally able to put all the pieces together.”

Included was the album’s first single, the Byrdsian “The Songs That Changed Our Lives,” which named-checks a a lot of tunes that influenced Newton (“the ones that rhymed anyway,” he jokes). Guesting on the song is Eddie Argos from the U.K. band Art Brut (Newton had produced and played with Argos’ side project Everybody Was in the French Resistance … Now.)

“‘The Songs That Changed Our Lives’ had been kicking around for a couple of years, but we knocked it into shape during lockdown,” Newton says. “Eddie actually recorded the vocals in Berlin, as his neighbor Leo Kaage (who is Anton Newcombe’s producer) had brought home his studio rig so he could work during the pandemic and Eddie was able to pop upstairs to finally record the vocal for me. Stuff like this made things all fall into place.”

One other of bit of minutae tying the past to the present: The album cover features a photo of a 13-year-old Newton wearing a Rock Against Racism pin. He explains: “We had a cool teacher at my high school who offered to chaperone a group of us all the way from Wolverhampton to London (120 miles) in April 1978 to witness a now-legendary Rock Against Racism march and concert featuring the Clash, Steel Pulse, Tom Robinson Band and others in Victoria Park. This was definitely a day that changed my life and it is also as relevant now in the current times as it was back then.”

||| Stream: “The Kids Are Not Alright”