Legacy: Biafra and the GSM [pic: Elizabeth Sloan]

Dead Kennedys legend Jello Biafra says it took the band a month to work out how to play California Uber Alles after he'd written the song.

Due to his limited guitar abilities he sang the chords to the other members rather than play them, and it took them weeks to translate the vocal tones into finger movements.

He tells PunkNews.org: "I teach the parts with my voice - I pretty much always compose with my voice.

"In the very early days of Dead Kennedys I would try to show East Bay Ray the riff by playing a single string on guitar. I was never much of a guitar player.

"Eventually Klaus Flouride said, 'Look, you sing well enough on key so why don't you sing us the part?' And then I was a free man because I could come up with more intricate and complicated parts.

"And because I did it with my voice it took them a month to figure out the chords to California Uber Alles. Made perfect sense to me."

Biafra says the subjects for his songs are much more personal than even close friends of his realise.

"People have complained over the years that I don't write personal stuff. But this is what's personal to me - it's my way of singing the blues.

"A lot of other peoples' personal lyrics bore me to tears. I hated love songs from the moment I found out what they were: one big lie designed to sell people a product and make them obedient, insecure consumers."

Biafra's current outfit, The Guantanamo School of Medicine, recently released the album The Audacity of Hype, in which he tries to point out that even though George W Bush is gone, his legacy lives on.

"The Terror of Tiny Town opens the album," he says. "It's based off a movie with the same name from the 1930s.

"It's an old western and the cast is all midgets. The black-hat evil midget cowboy is saying how he's going to trick everybody into handing him all the land in the area. Then he kills one of the good cowboys and he's eventually trapped in a building and it blows up on him.

"It was too good - I thought, 'what a perfect metaphor for what Bush did in Iraq'. The last part of the song says, 'So what now? He ain't gone, so they're all brought to justice for war crime. So act fast for this laugh, 'cause before you know it, guess who'll be back?'

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