Rocking away recession blues

London: Are you feeling low and lonesome, or really subprime? A band of guitar-playing construction workers say they want to rock their way through the recession and put smiles on the faces of British bankers.

Playing their song Credit Crunch atop a building site in London's Canary Wharf financial district Friday, the group said they hoped their surreal act would lift some of the gloom of the global financial meltdown.

The song's lyrics involve a cat named Footsie and a dog named Nasdaq - after the FTSE and Nasdaq stock exchange indexes in London and the US. The performance is punctuated by the band's hard-hat wearing singer picking up a bunch of carrots and flinging it at the audience.

Credit Crunch singer Richard Bray, a 43-year-old building services co-ordinator, acknowledged that the financial crisis "concerns us all", but he said the group's music was trying to keep things in perspective. "It's not the end of the world, is it?" he said. "There's benefits. We were all spending money on things we didn't need. This will bring us down to earth a bit, probably with a bump."

The group's name, Canary Wolf, is a play on Canary Wharf, the gleaming financial district that sprang up over London's disused Docklands in the late 1980s and 90s.