“I’m just one person, I have to look after my own life. I can’t save this stuff… so I’m gonna have a pint,” Mick Flannery tells me over the hubbub in the Dame Tavern, reaching for his Guinness.

There is a grin on his face that does not reach his eyes, and why would it? Human apathy in the face of injustices is the topic, and in particular how new album

I Own You

deals with it.

The eponymous lead single and album opener is Mick’s way of “raging against the capitalist ideal”, as he puts it. “Blue eyed ego, capitalist pig,” one line goes – it is the turning point where political anger becomes primal.

“The song is based on the idea that a man who has been undignified by society turns the tables on a wealthy, uncaring, greedy man,” Mick explains. “The culminating sentiment is that the poor man stands over the rich man and just says: ‘Now I own you’ – physically, even if only for this moment before the cops come.”

Indeed, Flannery name checks the deaths of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland in police custody in America as inspirations. “To imagine if it were my son who was put to the ground and then killed on the way to being booked for nothing…” he grimaces, recalling the video of Sandra Bland “being brutalised for no reason”.

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