condition (record/cover): EX / VG (ring wear)

The 1980 Rough Trade UK 7" single (RT 046) pairing Robert Wyatt's cover of "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'" (the 1944 song by African-American gospel quartet The Golden Gate Quartet's Willie Johnson, originally a wartime tribute to the Soviet war effort) with Peter Blackman's extraordinary recitation of his own poem "Stalingrad". Blackman, the Barbadian poet and communist activist who had served with the British army during the war, reads the poem with a directness and gravity that converts it into a kind of secular liturgy.

Wyatt's "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'" is unaccompanied multi-tracked voice (Wyatt singing every part himself), three minutes of choral arrangement that recasts the original gospel quartet form into a stripped, eerie post-Canterbury vocal exercise. Blackman's "Stalingrad" is over five minutes of spoken-word delivery against minimal piano backing, the poet's voice carrying the entire piece. The pair together form one of the most committed political statements of Wyatt's early-1980s Rough Trade period, and one of the most direct documents of mid-century British communist culture available in a popular-music format.

The original vintage Rough Trade UK 7" pressing on RT 046, paper sleeve with cover illustration. Both pieces were later included on the Nothing Can Stop Us compilation, but the original 7" single remains the proper format: the format Wyatt and Rough Trade chose, and the format in which the Falklands-era working-class British left would have encountered the records.