Mark Vennis Fighting on All Fronts: Where Thirteen Songs Came From, One Weekend at A Time

A Film Producer, A Long-Time Collaborator, and Eighteen Months of Weekends

Fighting on All Fronts opens with reggae guitar and people still living the life on cheap beer and maxed-out credit cards. Then, a minute in, the song stops for an instrumental breakdown. That is not the usual move for an opening track. In fact Mark Vennis wrote Fighting on All Fronts between shifts at another job entirely. He produces films for a living. Once you know that, the whole album sits differently.

You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artist’s music, and know more about the artist’s work by scrolling down the page.

---

Where Mark Vennis Fighting On All Fronts Started: A Day Here, A Weekend There

The album came out on 27 November 2020 through Cadiz Music. It was recorded the slow way. Vennis made it primarily with Dave Sweetenham, a long-time music associate, across roughly eighteen months. A day at a time. A weekend at a time. Duncan LeFeuvre produced and recorded it at Gravel Track Studios.

Reviewing it for Get Ready to Rock, Brian McGowan flagged exactly that. The approach was not the normal one, he wrote. But personal circumstances always prevail. In practice it gave the songs a perspective that a short dash to a deadline would have lost.

That is the useful fact about this record. The writer kept going back to it. Thirteen songs assembled over eighteen months are not thirteen songs written in a fortnight. The difference shows in how much room each one has been given.

The day job matters too. Vennis runs Moviehouse Entertainment and has produced films for two decades. His credits include the Maxine Peake comedy Funny Cow and the Don Letts documentary Rebel Dread. That is not a novelty detail. A producer spends years deciding whose story gets told. Meanwhile Fighting on All Fronts is a record built almost entirely out of other people’s stories.

The Lyric: Thirteen People You Would Not Otherwise Meet

Every song here is written by Vennis, and the subjects stay consistent. The underdogs, the oppressed, the forgotten, the down at heel. Rock n Reel described the album as thirteen snapshots of overlooked lives lived in the hard shadows of contemporary Britain. As a summary of the method, that is fair.

Waste Away is a sharply observed litany of suffering. Cut Me Loose is a defiant, reggae-shaped cry from the heart. Its floaty saxophone sits deliberately at odds with a lyric about wanting out of your surroundings. The Shark follows a menacing figure through city streets, smelling blood in the water. The Edge of Everything watches a town, then a city, then a world tip into chaos.

These are character sketches rather than confessions, and the distance is the point. A songwriter working this way has to build someone the listener has never met. Then he has to make them recognisable inside three minutes. It is closer to casting than to diary-keeping.

Vennis has described the work in his own terms.

“The creation of ‘fighting on all fronts’ was a deeply personal journey, exploring themes that I believe still resonate today,” said Mark Vennis.

Six years on, that holds up better than most catalogue pitches. The album was written before the pandemic reached Britain and released into the middle of it. Even so, the subject matter needed no updating. The Brazilian site Os Garotos de Liverpool picked it up in January 2021. So the songs travelled further than their postcode.

The Arrangement: Thirteen Songs That Refuse To Sit Still

The arrangement choices are the second half of the craft story. They are also less predictable than the genre tags suggest.

Fighting on All Fronts runs thirteen tracks and does not stay in one place. Reggae guitar carries the title track. Saxophone drifts across Cut Me Loose. Light Summer Rain turns on an almost jazzy guitar solo, then a languid vocal pulls the pretty tune somewhere bleaker. The Shark steps sideways into old-school hard rock riffing. The closer, Shadow Boxing, starts in despair and works its way out through a complex arrangement. Eventually it gives up a melody. Red Guitar Music called the result an eclectic mix of cool tracks. That is the right word for it.

That spread is unusual on a record this consistent lyrically. Most writers with one subject settle into one sound. Instead, Vennis and his players did the opposite. The variety keeps thirteen songs about hard lives from becoming a single long complaint.

Mark Vennis and Different Place are Vennis, Dave Sweetenham, Sean Quinn and Brian Gee. The band formed in 2008 and works out of Petersfield in Hampshire. Or, as their own site puts it, south of Guildford and north of Portsmouth. They have kept the same version of themselves across four records. For an independent band over that many years, that counts for something.

The reference points reviewers reached for are the ones that description leads you to expect, and they hold. Billy Bragg for the English delivery and the politics carried in plain speech. The Clash for the reggae running underneath the guitars. And The Stranglers for the way Light Summer Rain keeps its unease under a pleasant surface.

Where To Hear Mark Vennis Fighting On All Fronts

MusicRoots.News’s curator team on why it earned a slot:

“A record made in fragments over eighteen months by a man whose day job is deciding whose story gets filmed. The songs are all about other people, and they are built like short films rather than confessions. That is a craft worth writing about six years after the fact.”

You can hear the album on Spotify and Apple Music. The band also post new songs first on SoundCloud. Vinyl and physical copies go through elasticStage.

Follow Mark Vennis and Different Place across platforms: YouTube, Facebook, X, and their official site. The site keeps the reviews, the discography and the live dates in one place.

---

About The Author