Blame Steve Bray for the latest resuscitation of D: Ream’s 1990s dance-pop hit Things Can Only Get Better, which re-entered the iTunes top 10 last week. For the last five years the anti-Brexit campaigner has parked himself around central London and blasted out random chants and tunes in a one-man psyop on successive Conservative administrations. It’s a tribute to the robustness of the United Kingdom’s freedom of speech protections that they trumped any noise pollution regulations that Bray was breaching and permitted him to keep driving all of Whitehall around the twist.
But his long struggle reached its apotheosis on Wednesday, May 22nd, when Rishi Sunak emerged from No 10 Downing Street into the teeming rain to inform a surprised nation that he had called an election. The visuals were memorable enough, with the likely soon-to-be-ex-prime minister turning into a puddle in human form on live television as he waded grimly through his script. But it was Bray’s very loud playing of the song associated with Labour’s 1997 landslide victory that elevated the scene to levels of perfection not seen since the letters started falling off the wall behind Theresa May at the 2017 Conservative party conference.
“I thought about what would be the best trolling tune if [Sunak] announced the election,” he said afterwards. “And of course, it had to be Things Can Only Get Better. Because everybody can relate to that and the 1997 election.
” Bray has now, finally, been banned fr.
