“It’s not often that reading history books works best with a soundtrack playing simultaneously, but Hugh Hodges has succeeded in evoking both the noises and the feel of a tumultuous 1980s. Proving that pop music is the historian’s friend, he has here recovered those who help us best make sense of a scary, precarious, and exciting world.”

—Matthew Worley, author of No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984

“Those who think the 1980s were camp and fun clearly didn’t live them. The Thatcher/Reagan era was grim as fuck. This tells the real story from the underground.”

—Ian Brennan, author of Muse-Sick and Silenced by Sound

“Very interesting and timely indeed.”

—Anne Clark, spoken-word poet, The Smallest Act of Kindness

“Written with verve, humour, and great passion for music, history, and politics, The Fascist Groove Thing is a fast-paced, absorbing read. It will jog memories, entertain, and creatively engage those who survived the Thatcher years and those who weren’t yet around. Hodges not only reminds us how music can offer hope, express outrage, inspire action, or provide moments of escape in bleak, frightening times but also that some ’80s music was abysmal! Yet music can help bring people together, broaden horizons of the imagination, and build solidarity and connection. And forty years later, the lyrics of Sheffield’s Heaven 17, with ‘evil men with racist views, spreading all across the land,’ seem just as relevant to ongoing struggles against today’s fascism and racism.”

—Aziz Choudry, McGill University

The FascistGroove Thing

A History of Thatcher’sBritain in 21 Mixtapes

Hugh Hodges

The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher’s Britain in 21 Mixtapes

Hugh Hodges © 2023

This edition © 2023 PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-884-3 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-62963-903-1 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947291

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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PM Press

PO Box 23912

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Printed in the USA

for Julie

“There was a time when music seemed a matter of life and death; when days were whiled away listening to records and poring over album covers in some ill-defined but all-important quest.”—Andrew Gallix, “Unheard Melodies,” Punk Is Dead

“I’ve only got record shops left.”

—message etched into the runout ofJoy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Ramsey Kanaan for believing in this book and seeing what it needed. Thank you to Joey Paxman, John Yates, Gregory Nipper, Wade Ostrowski, and everyone else at PM Press, and to all the Friends of PM Press who support what they do; to Chris Dodge for the index; to Brian Layng and John Yates; to Trent University for supporting my research, and to Aziz Choudry, Stephen Brown, Michael Epp, Rob Martin, Michael Morse, Janette Platana, and Mark Richardson for feedback on various drafts of the manuscript; to Ted Chamberlin and Lorna Goodison for their encouragement; to Matt Worley for the kind words and the community of scholars he has fostered online and in print; to Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley for obvious reasons; to Mark Wilkins, Chris Low, Tony Wakeford, Neil Dunnet and everyone else who has lent me a generous ear, and to all of the artists whose songs are referenced in this book. I believe that everything quoted here falls within the limits of fair use, but whenever I have used more than a phrase or two of a song, I have tried to contact the rights-holders: my gratitude to Paul Burgess, Chumbawamba (EMI Publishing), Anne Clark, Cockney Rejects, Robert Howard, Colin Jerwood, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Robb Johnson, Danbert Nobacon, Oi Polloi, Leon Rosselson, Alexei Sayle, and Ann Swinton. My particular and awestruck gratitude to all of the artists who generously gave me permission to use their songs on the companion disc to this volume: Andy Diagram (the Diagram Brothers), Richard Cross (Metro Youth), Dick Lucas (Subhumans, Culture Shock, Citizen Fish), Mark Wilkins (the Astronauts), Jock McCurdy (A-Heads), Daffy Marshall (Icons of Filth), Tony Wakeford (Crisis), Mavis Dillon (Passion Killers), Ramsey Kanaan and Steve Brown (Political Asylum), Clair Grainger (Hippy Slags), Deek Allan (Oi Polloi), John Baine (aka Attila the Stockbroker), Jon Langford (the Three Johns), Mark Richardson (Terminus), Sean Forbes (Wat Tyler), Nogsy (Anti-System), Chumbawamba, Robb Johnson, and Leon Rosselson. Finally, thank you to Julie Gagné for being unfailingly supportive and for accommodating what I admit has become an intractable record collection.

Foreword

OK let’s start at the beginning

When fishes roamed the sea

They swam around before anything else

In ten million years BC.

Then one day they decided

To evolve into vertebrates

And a few came out of the water

And got drunk to celebrate.

Soon, well, when I say “soon” I mean

A coupla million years

They evolved into various quadrupeds

With legs and things and ears.

And about a trillion aeons later

They went all civilized

And built lots of bombs and council flats

That reached into the skies.

The moral of this tale, you see

We are descended from the fish

And if we progress much further

We’ll put our lives at risk.

We’re starting to destroy ourselves

With pollution, war, and greed

When food and sex and water

Is all we really need.

When “sink or swim” is the choice you get

You cannot swim forever

You need support to keep you alive

Us fish must swim together!

—Dick Lucas, “Us Fish Must Swim Together,”

From the Cradle to the Grave, 1984

Music has always primarily been seen and described as entertainment, but its largest secondary characteristic is that of unifier. A shared taste in music can cement relationships, and a lack of it can destroy them. It bonds strangers into friends and tempers the hold that social alienation has over most if not all teenagers, with the relief of knowing that You Are Not Alone. Especially that last quality was why punk, with all its lyrical messages of everyday angst and cynical confusion, meant so much to a generation of teenagers growing up in the dimly lit economic wasteland of the UK in the late ’70s. Whereas the unity provided by music up to that point had been generally based on its sound, punk contained that extra dimension of bringing together people who were in need of more provocative lyrical content.

The 1980s arrived, with Thatcherism, the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, AIDS, monetarism, hunger strikes, the Poll Tax, rioting, Stop the City, Live Aid, Clause 28, the National Front, apartheid, the Cold War … and the questioning nature of the newly punked-up musical culture produced a steady wave of protest songs to hold the establishment to account, to reveal the darker sides of the media’s whitewashed version of reality, and to keep that unified feeling of awareness alive—and definitely kicking.

Politics, albeit important, is basically dead dull once you take the music away, and vacuous lyrics are a waste of breath compared to the lungtastic joy of singing along with, say, the end section of “Complete Control” by the Clash.

So for Hugh to have aligned the tumultuous sociopolitical events of the 1980s with the music they inspired is an event long awaited. And highly informative: for who, living in their particular musical taste pod, could say they were aware of all the bands in other scenes declaiming the injustices of the times? This book takes the unification that one step further.

Dick Lucas, July 2020

PART ONEEverything’s Brilliant!

March 1981. It’s the second-wettest March since they started keeping track in the eighteenth century, which is somehow more rubbish than if it were actually the wettest. And it’s turning out to be a depressing month in other ways too. It started with the government’s “no-hope” budget and will end with 364 economists warning it’s actually much, much worse than that.¹ Unemployment is on the rise, up over two million; Bobby Sands is on hunger strike in Maze Prison; Ronald Reagan has been president of the United States since January; and Prince Charles and Lady Diana have just announced their engagement. On the bright side, though, Heaven 17’s single “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” is clanking and thumping its way into the lower reaches of the top fifty:

EVERYBODY-MOVE-TO-PROVE-THE-GROOVE-

EVERYBODY-MOVE-TO-PROVE-THE-GROOVE!

With lyrics zigzagging between the American cruise missiles soon to be stationed in Britain, the racism and xenophobia that are endemic to British social life (they will spark riots later in the year), and the legacy of European fascism, it’s an improbable dance number. Perhaps inevitably, it’s going to stall at number forty-five.² It doesn’t help, of course, that the BBC won’t play it because drawing a direct line from Adolf Hitler to Ronald Reagan is impolite.

What’s brilliant about all of this is that the song was built on the same juddering electro-funk chassis as the instrumental track “Groove Thang,” which the band released simultaneously under the moniker British Electronic Foundation. “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” was, it would seem, the band’s answer to the question, “How do we make a pop hit out of this?” Only at the beginning of the 1980s could it have seemed plausible that adding a smarty-pants, antifascist polemic to the mix was the right answer. It wasn’t the best route to pop stardom even at the time, of course. Before breaking away to start Heaven 17, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware had been part of another experimental electronic outfit, the Human League. That band had predictably failed to chart with the single “Being Boiled.” After the split, the band’s vocalist Phil Oakey kept the name (but not the experimentalism or the troubling song titles) and went on to massive chart success with a string of top-ten hits. It made punk poet Attila the Stockbroker groan, “How many hits must the Human League have before they get locked in a zoo?” to the tune of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Indeed, even as Heaven 17’s “Fascist Groove Thang” faded from the charts, the Human League’s innocuous “Don’t You Want Me” was on its way to a five-week residency at number one. Sadly, Heaven 17 would eventually knock all the interesting edges off their own music trying to emulate this success.

So it’s remarkable that “Fascist Groove Thang” even got a look in. “Fascist thang advancing!” Heaven 17 warned, and they were right. The death of Bobby Sands and another decade of conflict in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, the smashing of the miners’ union, the rise of so-called popular capitalism, three million unemployed, and riot police armed with CS gas—they were all coming, a grim greatest hits of political and economic experimentation.

And the artiste behind all of them was a grocer’s daughter from Grantham named Margaret Thatcher.

images MIXTAPE 1: THE GROCER’S DAUGHTER

Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the UK” (1976)

Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen” (1977)

The Mekons, “Never Been in a Riot” (1978)

David Bowie, “Fashion” (1980)

UB40, “One in Ten” (1981)

The Specials, “Ghost Town” (1981)

Madness, “Grey Day” (1981)

Instant Automatons, “Nothing Ever Happens to Me” (1981)

Attila the Stockbroker, “Flappin’ in the Wind” (1983)

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax” (1983)

Serious Drinking, “The Revolution Starts at Closing Time” (1983)

Chaotic Dischord, “Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You” (1983)

ABC, “United Kingdom” (1983)

Subhumans, “Reality Is Waiting for a Bus” (1983)

The Macc Lads, “Buenos Aires” (1983)

Osibisa, “Too Much Going On” (1984)

Howard Jones, “Don’t Always Look at the Rain” (1984)

Vice Squad, “You’ll Never Know” (1984)

The Jazz Butcher, “The Jazz Butcher v. the Prime Minister” (1985)

Conflict, “This Is Not Enough” (1985)

The Style Council, “Walls Come Tumbling Down” (1985)

Tears for Fears, “Shout” (1985)

Television Personalities, “She Was Only the Grocer’s Daughter” (1986)

The Smiths, “Panic” (1986)

The Membranes, “Everything’s Brilliant” (1986)

Chumbawamba, “Rock ’n’ Roles” (1986)

Terminus, “Propaganda War” (1986)

Billy Bragg, “The Home Front” (1986)

Momus, “I Was a Maoist Intellectual” (1988)

Conflict, “Let the Battle Commence” (1988)

Easterhouse, “This Country” (1989)

The Pogues, “White City” (1989)

You may not remember all the bands on this mixtape. You may never have heard of some of them. That’s okay. The point is that there were so many songs written about Thatcher in the 1980s that you can practically trace the outline of her career as prime minister just from their titles. “Landslide Victory,” an unrecorded song by Prestwich post-punks the Fall, anticipated the outcome of the 1979 election as early as ’77. The song was written by the band’s Tory-voting drummer (remembered only as Dave or Steve, depending on your source), and the rest of the band clearly didn’t share his enthusiasm: he was fired before the band ever recorded.³ After the 1979 election, the Notsensibles, a tongue-in-cheek group from Burnley, announced very, very repetitively, “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher.” In this, they were simply parodying a chorus of high-profile cretins including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and French president François Mitterand.⁴ A year later, from Birmingham, UB40 sang obliquely about “Madam Medusa” and her “marble smile,” and the Beat insisted more pointedly, “Stand Down Margaret” (with proceeds from the single going to the antinuclear movement).⁵ Three years later, in the aftermath of the Falklands War, anarcho-punk band Crass asked Thatcher “How Does It Feel (to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)?” During the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the chant “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!” became popular on the picket lines, and punk-funk band the Larks made it the B-side to their first single. When Thatcher supported the illegal American bombing of Libya in 1986, the band Thatcher on Acid wondered about, well, “Thatcher on Acid.” In 1987, during an election in which dozens of musicians, comedians, and activists collaborated as Red Wedge to campaign against Thatcher’s Conservatives, soul-pop group the Blow Monkeys speculated optimistically about “The Day after You” (the BBC banned it). And when, despite Red Wedge’s best efforts, Thatcher won the election, art-rock experimentalists Test Dept. decided that no normal song title could adequately contain their contempt, and went with: “LONG LIVE BRITISH DEMOCRACY WHICH FLOURISHES AND IS CONSTANTLY PERFECTED UNDER THE IMMACULATE GUIDANCE OF THE GREAT, HONOURABLE, GENEROUS AND CORRECT MARGARET HILDA THATCHER. SHE IS THE BLUE SKY IN THE HEARTS OF ALL NATIONS. OUR PEOPLE PAY HOMAGE AND BOW IN DEEP RESPECT AND GRATITUDE TO HER, THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS.”

By the end of the decade Steven Morrissey, solo after the demise of the Smiths, was fantasizing about “Margaret on the Guillotine.” Alt-rockers Kitchens of Distinction had similar notions, toying with the idea of euthanasia in “Margaret’s Injection,” while reggae DJ Macka B insisted “Get Rid of Maggie,” and Elvis Costello prayed he’d live long enough to “Tramp the Dirt Down” on her grave. The most outré threat to Thatcher’s person, however, probably came from Pat Fish and Max Eider, who declared themselves “The Jazz Butcher v. the Prime Minister” and threatened to eat her alive. They were sure she’d be “surprisingly tasty.”

Nobody had written songs about Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, or Jim Callaghan (although the Beatles did reference the first two in the song “Taxman”); it seems unlikely anyone will ever write songs about John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, or Theresa May. But then none of them managed to inspire anything like the deep, personal hatred that attached itself to Margaret Thatcher.* People wrote songs about Thatcher because she was so closely identified with both the policies of her government and the callous ways in which they were implemented—so much so that they came to be known as Thatcherism.⁶ Indeed, somewhere between the 1979 election and the 1984–85 miners’ strike, Thatcher actually ceased to be a real person and, at least as far as popular music was concerned, became instead the handbag-wielding embodiment of the thing she had given her name to. In reality, the Fascist Groove Thing was a many-headed monster; other politicians were at least as responsible as Thatcher herself for the details of Thatcherism.⁷ But this was a nuance that popular music rarely bothered with, addressing itself in hundreds of songs almost exclusively to Thatcher’s hypnotic, media-generated simulacrum and its baleful effects on society.

There were also, of course, plenty of songs about the usual stuff—boys, girls, and the things they want to do to each other—the stuff pop music is, at any given moment, mostly preoccupied with.⁸ And Thatcher’s tenure was punctuated, in the pop world, by music scenes which on the face of it celebrated hedonistic escapism and studied indifference to politics: new romanticism and new psychedelia at one end, acid house and rave at the other. But even this escapism, in the context of Thatcher’s Britain, had political implications. “If she makes you sad and blue,” the Television Personalities sang in 1986, referring to Thatcher, “There’s one thing that you can do: relax your mind and float downstream.” They were looking back to the new psychedelic scene that singer Dan Treacy had been a part of at the beginning of the decade (and further back, of course, to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), but they might as easily have been anticipating rave at the end of it. In the early 1980s, bands like Mood Six, Miles over Matter, and the Earwigs had offered reheated psychedelia as a form of resistance to grey Thatcherism (never mind that floating downstream isn’t exactly resistance); in the late ’80s, rave would offer pop-up utopias. “Politics became superfluous during rave,” the photographer Gavin Watson remembers, “All of the bullshit that Thatcher was coming out with started to fall on deaf ears … we just didn’t have time to care about politics.”⁹ Thatcher’s government, it turned out, didn’t believe it. Andrew Weatherall, DJ and cofounder of the acid house fanzine Boy’s Own, recalls, “Because a few people had the power to assemble thousands of young people with a phonecall, the government thought there was a political angle to it.… They started to politicize it by having the police follow them and film them, and by asking questions about it in Parliament.”¹⁰ It was as if, by ruling out the social with her infamous dictum “there is no such thing as society,”¹¹ Thatcher had made everything, including not caring about politics, political.

So this is an account of what popular music had to say about life in Thatcher’s Britain (or, as the comedian Alexei Sayle put it, “Thatcher’s so-called Britain”).¹² Strictly speaking that would make this a book about the period between May 4, 1979, the day Thatcher’s Conservatives swept Jim Callaghan’s beleaguered Labour Party from power, and November 2, 1990, the day Thatcher tearfully exited No. 10 Downing Street, ejected from power by her own party. But in many ways the country was already Thatcher’s long before 1979. The so-called postwar consensus (concerning the importance of the Anglo-American “special relationship,” the desirability of nuclear weapons, the wisdom of Keynesian economics, the beneficence of the union movement, and the sanctity of social democracy)¹³ which had characterized British politics in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s had already collapsed when Thatcher took over as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. The postwar economic boom which had underwritten that consensus had also collapsed, and Britain had spent much of the 1970s staggering from one economic crisis to another. By the end of the decade, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, Callaghan’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey had even started experimenting with the economic policies that would later become associated with Thatcher.¹⁴ Indeed, in retrospect, it seemed to the hard left of the Labour Party that Callaghan and Healey had been “road sweepers,” clearing a path for Thatcher and Thatcherism.¹⁵

To be fair, though, some people had been working hard to clear that path for a very long time. Thatcher’s colleague Nigel Lawson defined Thatcherism as “a mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatization and a dash of populism,” but most of this was hardly new.¹⁶ Conservative Party leaders had been promising voters tax cuts for years,¹⁷ and many of the economic and social ideas associated with Thatcherism had been around for as long as—and in direct response to—the postwar consensus.¹⁸ There were elements in Thatcherism that were quite new, though, like the populism Nigel Lawson refers to. That really was a carefully cultivated innovation.¹⁹ In 1979, Thatcher’s advisors developed easily digested “themes” for the coming election: instead of “Capitalism” or “Free Enterprise,” Thatcher was to talk about “More Choice.”²⁰ Instead of talking about civil and economic liberties, she was to demand that government “Stop Messing Us About.”²¹ She was to be seen grocery shopping and worrying about the price of things. She was to be seen to be, as the Blow Monkeys put it, “Only a Grocer’s Daughter.” The Conservatives even brought in the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi to sell this down-to-earth Thatcher simulacrum. Leeds post-punk band the Three Johns called it “Thaatchiism.”

As an aside, although it’s not the purpose of this book to track the evolution of the Thatcher simulacrum, it’s worth remarking that it first appeared long before this advertising campaign. Thatcher had already reinvented herself repeatedly, first at Oxford where she shed both her Midlands accent and her past,²² then as a junior minister, changing her voice again but rediscovering a useful version of her past,²³ then as a candidate for the leadership of the party, changing her voice yet again, with the help of a voice coach, and perfecting her rediscovered past as a valiant struggle up from humble origins against the odds.²⁴ Charles Powell, her closest advisor, explains, “She was really … Margaret Thatcher Productions, almost, I mean there were the policies and the rhetoric, but there was also the hair, the dress, the lighting.… It was all packaged. It was almost like a great diva, giving a performance.”²⁵ Even before Saatchi and Saatchi went to work, Thatcher “offered the public what politics was bad at supplying, a sharp-edged character recognizable from a distance.”²⁶

Also new with Thatcherism was something that Lawson doesn’t mention: a sociopathic disregard for the people affected by its so-called financial discipline. In fact, this may have been Thatcherism’s most “sharp-edged” feature. Many of the social and political problems associated with the 1980s were evident long before that: Thatcher inherited the Troubles in Northern Ireland, racism, bad policing, the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse, the hangover of imperialism, and of course the weather. Margaret Thatcher Productions didn’t invent any of these things; it just made them all worse, including the weather.

Okay, as far as I know, the weather in the 1980s wasn’t actually any worse or wetter than in any other decade, but it sometimes felt that way. Andy Perry of Manchester band Easterhouse complained that the country was going “down the drain / washed down by the rain,” although Billy Bragg reckoned no matter how hard it rained it was “never enough to wash away the sorrow.” London Afrobeat band Osibisa sang, “I can’t stand the rain upon my face / There’s too much confusion in this place” (although any sorrow they felt was washed away on a wave of bubbling jazz-funk). Madness greeted another “Grey Day” in Camden Town, felt the rain in their faces, and wished they could just “disappear without a trace.” And just down the road in Shepherd’s Bush, the Pogues lamented the demolition of White City Stadium: with the stadium gone, all the local pubs were closing down too, and without pubs, the Pogues reckoned, “it’s just another bloody rainy day.” In Bristol, punk band Vice Squad looked at the decay all around them and saw “years and years of heavy rain [and] centuries of lies” (another three decades would pass before antiracist demonstrators finally pulled down the city’s statue of slave trafficker Edward Colston). Howard Jones, who grew up just across the River Severn in Cardiff, was determined to be upbeat about it all, and suggested, “Don’t always look at the rain / No, don’t look at the rain!” But, for anyone unpersuaded by Thatcher, rain just seemed a natural metaphor for the state of the nation. And in 1987, when the worst storm in centuries²⁷ was followed promptly by the worst stock market crash in history, it seemed considerably more than metaphor.

Even so, it would be unfair to lay it all at the feet of Thatcher. Even the rise of greed and consumerism so frequently associated with her premiership was already evident in the mid-1970s.²⁸ It made Johnny Rotten sneer, in “Anarchy in the UK,” that Britain’s only plan for the future was a “shopping scheme.” For that matter, the Situationists, the European avant-gardists whose writings may or may not have influenced Johnny Rotten depending on who you listen to,²⁹ were already complaining about consumerism in the early 1960s: “Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit,” wrote the French poet Ivan Chtcheglov, “Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”³⁰ “Don’t be told what you need,” Johnny Rotten added, in “God Save the Queen.”

If the consumerism of the postconsensus world offended Johnny Rotten, though, the rejection of social responsibility he advocated in both “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen” aligned him with Thatcher in ways we might prefer not to interrogate. In 1980, Crass suggestively superimposed Thatcher’s head on Rotten’s body for the cover of their “Bloody Revolutions” single, a move which provoked outrage among punks.³¹ But the fact is one could easily insert the line “no such thing as society” into “Anarchy in the UK” without changing its message or its tone. Similarly, as others have pointed out,³² punk’s do-it-yourself ethos was superficially consonant with both Thatcher’s frequently referenced up-by-the-bootstraps upbringing and her intention “to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society—from a give-it-to-me to a do-it-yourself nation.”³³ Thatcher herself was, by her own party’s standards, a bit of a punk—or at any rate it suited both Thatcher and her supporters to characterize her as one.³⁴ Alfred Sherman, director of the Centre for Policy Studies (dedicated to converting the Conservative Party to monetarism and free market economics), described her approvingly as a “woman from the provincial lower middle-class, without family connections, oratorical skills, intellectual standing or factional backing of any sort.”³⁵ This upstart hijacked a Conservative Party which had traditionally represented “hierarchy, social stratification and male dominance,”³⁶ in what her supporters characterized as “a peasants’ revolt.”³⁷ It was very much the sort of revolt punk rock had set out to accomplish in its own milieu; a few years later, attempting to give a name to the obliterating nihilism of Thatcher’s economic policies, Denis Healey called it “punk monetarism.”³⁸ (The term monetarism refers, roughly, to the theory that inflation can be controlled by limiting the amount of money government injects into the economy in the form of benefits, wages, industrial subsidies, spending on social services, and so on. I say “roughly” because there never seems to have been any consensus about how to put the theory into practice, or even whether it ever actually was put into practice. After all, every time Thatcher squeezed the money supply in one area, the direct result was that spending had to increase in another, usually unemployment benefits. So the money supply didn’t really shrink much; it was just distributed more cruelly. Denis Healey concluded that in addition to being “punk monetarists” Thatcherites were also “sado monetarists.”)³⁹

In other words, although neither would have appreciated the association much, punks and Thatcherites were articulating similar frustrations with—and in some instances similar solutions to—Britain’s mid-1970s discontents.⁴⁰ Sham 69 never wrote a song called “Stop Messing Us About,” but they could have. So, arguably, in 1979 Thatcher merely took formal control of a country that had been going her way for several years. Of course, you could also argue that this was just larval Thatcherism, that Thatcherism proper didn’t assume its fully mature form as the Fascist Groove Thing until sometime in 1984 when, emboldened by her victory in the Falklands, the prime minister finally took on the coal miners’ union and revealed precisely what she was prepared to do to break it. And then, if the blue-skinned beast reached maturity in the mid-1980s, one has to wonder: when did it decline? When did Britain stop being Thatcher’s Britain? The historian Richard Vinen argues that Thatcherism started to come unravelled in 1988.⁴¹ Others, including Simon Jenkins and Alwyn Turner, argue that Britain didn’t stop being Thatcher’s even when she resigned in 1990, or, for that matter, even when a rebranded Labour Party, indistinguishable from Thatcher’s Conservatives in its core beliefs,⁴² swaggered its way into power in 1997. Peter Mandelson, who had helped to engineer New Labour’s victory, famously announced in 2002, “We are all Thatcherites now.”⁴³ In many ways, post-Brexit, Britain is more definitively Thatcher’s than it was at the height of her personal power.

None of this happened without protest and resistance. Dozens of organizations emerged to fight particular elements of Thatcherism: Direct Action, Anti-Fascist Action, and Red Action; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and the Scottish Campaign to Remove Nuclear Menace; London Greenpeace, and several anarchist social centres including the 1 in 12 Club, the 121 Centre, and the Blackcurrent Centre; the seriocomic anarchist newspaper Class War; the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, and the 3D network; and the Stop the City campaign, which organized blockades of London’s financial district “in an effort to raise awareness of corporate globalization.”⁴⁴ And there were hundreds of musicians who played concerts or released records in support of these causes. Leon Rosselson, who had already had a long career in political music when Thatcher came to power, recalls, “You could spend your life doing benefit concerts for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, for striking miners, for CND, for boycotting apartheid South Africa, for Greenpeace, for an end to the Falklands War.”⁴⁵ The band Conflict, like many of their anarcho-punk compatriots, were committed to this form of activism, and their single “This Is Not Enough,” released in support of Stop the City, expressed the urgency of it. They meant two things by the phrase this is not enough. It was an assertion about the world Thatcher was creating: a world of not enough opportunities, not enough hope, not enough social justice. But it was also an acknowledgement that just singing about a problem doesn’t fix it. “If I have sung it once then it is a thousand times,” Colin Jerwood bellowed, “If we don’t do it now, we are never gonna break free from the oppression.” He knew damn well that, ironically, while he sang it a thousand times, now had already passed. At their live shows (at least through 1984 and ’85) Conflict performed in front of a banner which read: THIS IS NOT ENOUGH. STAND UP AND FUCKING FIGHT. Four years and another thousand repetitions later they concluded, in “Let the Battle Commence”:

Ghetto rock changes nothing.…

Rock against the rich,

Rocking against this and, yes,

We are rocking against that;

All we ever seem to do is rock.

It’s an astute and rather depressing observation about the shortcomings of music as a weapon of revolution. Singer-songwriter Nick Currie, adopting the name of the Greek god of mockery Momus, sang satirically about the travails of being “a Maoist intellectual in the music industry.” As he delicately fingerpicked an acoustic guitar, he complained that despite applause from the music press “the petit bourgeois philistines stayed away.” Why, he wondered in aggrieved tones, did he get so few takers when he so clearly “showed the people how they lived and told them it was bad”? It was a question many well-intentioned musicians might have asked themselves. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, kids had been invited to Rock Against Racism, Rock Against Sexism, Rock Against Repression, Rock Against Thatcher, and Rock Against the Bomb, often with no discernible results. “It was like hitting your head against a brick wall,” Rosselson admits.⁴⁶ Anarchist collective Chumbawamba argued that the problem might have something to do with popular music itself:

We’re shouting loud but we’re facing a wall

Of sexist, drugged up rock ’n’ roll .…

Rock ’n’ roll won’t change a thing:

It’s the same institution no matter what you sing.

Scunthorpe punks Terminus were forced to agree; entitling their first album Going Nowhere Fast, they sang, “We are fighting a propaganda war that we are losing because of the medium we use.” And Bristol punks Chaotic Dischord made the point (brilliantly, although perhaps incidentally) that there was also a law of diminishing returns at work. The lyric to their song “Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You!” is mainly the title repeated at full volume, going nowhere fast, ad nauseam. By the thirtieth or so repetition, the line becomes an exhausted drawl:

Fuhrligerrrrn …

Fuhpollerdics …

Fuhralodayuuurgh … uuuurgh … gnnhh …

It’s the entire history of punk politics in three gleefully noisy and utterly wasted minutes. The irony is that half of Chaotic Dischord were actually members of Vice Squad, one of the more politically articulate of the second wave punk bands; they’d recorded as Chaotic Dischord to parody the noise-not-music approach of fellow Bristol-area bands Chaos UK and Disorder. Absurdly, Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You! ended up being one of the best-selling punk records of 1983 (significantly outselling anything by Vice Squad). It seemed sometimes that punk audiences were more interested in gleeful noise than in articulate critiques of religion, politics, and the rest of it.

This was something the American rock critic Lester Bangs had discovered to his chagrin when he followed the Clash around for several weeks in 1977. He was inspired and excited by the politics of their music, and it seemed to him they were really managing to communicate something new, honest, and revolutionary. Joe Strummer had made it clear a year earlier: “Look, the situation is far too serious for enjoyment.… I’d rather play to an audience and them not enjoy it, if we were doin’ what we thought was honest.”⁴⁷ But when Bangs finally asked an audience member, a twenty-four-year-old teacher, “Why do you like the Clash?” she replied, “Because they make me jump up and down!”⁴⁸ She wasn’t even remotely interested in the seriousness of the situation, and in that she was almost certainly more representative of the Clash’s fans than Lester Bangs.

Mark Perry, author of the influential fanzine Sniffin’ Glue was coming to this disappointing conclusion at about the same time. In a 1977 issue of the zine, he complained, “I’m really fed up with the punters on the ‘scene’ at the moment. At the Clash gig in Harlesden there were lots of stupid kids who kept acting childish by pogoing in front of the stage.… There’s the Clash on stage, trying to say something, and all the kids can do is beat each other up.… I’ll admit, there’s nothing wrong with jumpin’ around to the bands (I’ve done it myself) but it’s got to be a bit less enthusiastic.” He concluded, dispiritedly, “I may be talking like an old cunt but perhaps I think too much these days.”⁴⁹ The New Musical Express journalists Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons were in the same mood; offering an “obituary of rock and roll,” they grumbled, “Punk started as a movement born out of No Fun and ended as a product whose existence was No Threat.”⁵⁰

I sympathize with Mark Perry. Dancing serves important social, ritual, and psychological functions; the music critic and sociologist Simon Frith points out that it’s an important way of thinking about our world.⁵¹ It may even be an important way of engaging with politics: David Widgery, one of the leading lights of Rock Against Racism, argued that “how people find their pleasure, entertainment and celebration is also how they find their sexual identity, their political courage and their strength to change.”⁵² So it’s disappointing when revolution stops at enthusiastic jumping up and down, doubly disappointing when it feels like the act of dancing itself could have been properly revolutionary. Musician Mat Callahan, writing about the role music played in San Francisco’s counterculture in the 1960s, recalls, “Music suddenly challenged the authority of the … state as legislator or representative of the popular will, and it posed this challenge through the participatory act of the dancing multitude.”⁵³ But, then, as one of the key figures in the San Francisco scene remarked, even as it was happening, “As times get heavier, more and more of the beautiful people are finding that what they mean by ‘revolution’ is groovy vibrations.”⁵⁴ Looking back on the whole hippie era, Penny Rimbaud of Crass reflected, “The acid revolution had been fun, but that’s just about where it ended.”⁵⁵ That is, the very things that make us feel like we’re starting a revolution (dancing, acid, booze) have a tendency to prevent us doing anything of the sort. Norwich punk jokers Serious Drinking called their first album The Revolution Starts at Closing Time: “We’re gonna be drunk when the going gets tough,” they reckoned. But there wasn’t the faintest chance they were going to get past simply being drunk. Ian Bone and his cohorts at Class War printed up a series of stickers to go with the second issue of the newspaper. One said, “Our lives will be better when the rich are all dead”; another said, “Beer first—business later”; a third said, conclusively, “Fuck the revolution—where’s my beer?”⁵⁶

So there’s something heroic about trying to create pop music that does more than make people jump up and down. Conflict may have come to the nearly unavoidable conclusion that music gets us nowhere, but I’d rather agree with Terminus, who, even as they admitted “we are losing,” clung to their conviction that “THE TRUTH OF WHAT WE SAY … WILL MAKE US WIN IN THE END.” And I want to believe that Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl has it right: she argues that music is a trigger that “starts things off.”⁵⁷ Or Billy Bragg, who observes that even if pop music can’t change the world, “it’s still worth having a go, ain’t it? … [because] you can give people that other perspective. You can give them another view of the world that they may be able to take away and build on.”⁵⁸ Or Bob Short of gothy punk band Blood and Roses who argues that when you give people something to build on you do change the world, however minutely, for the better:

Do I think music can change the world? I know music can change the world because music changed me.… It changed others like me … and it brings me together with people. When we give voice to our ideas, we give them to the world in direct contrast to the voices that would oppress us.⁵⁹

Blood and Roses were part of a scene that music critic Richard Cabut identified at the time as “positive punk.”⁶⁰ Like the gothic rock it emerged from and fed back into, positive punk tended to eschew political commentary and social realism,⁶¹ offering “personal revolution” instead of revolution in “the wider political sphere.”⁶² So when Bob Short talks about changing the world, he’s not talking about being moved to direct action (which is what Conflict wanted) but about changing one’s inner world. Cabut argues, “Certainly this is revolution in the non-political sense, but at the same time it’s neither escapist nor defeatist. It is, in fact, ‘political’ in the genuine sense of the word.”⁶³ Simon Frith makes a similar point about how popular music does politics, arguing, “Song words are not about ideas … but about their expression.”⁶⁴ That is, “Songs don’t cause people to fall in love, but provide people with the means to articulate the feelings associated with being in love.”⁶⁵ Similarly, we might add, songs don’t cause people to revolt, but they do offer them ways to articulate feelings of disaffection and dissent. “The most significant political effect of a pop song,” Frith says, “is not on how people vote or organize, but on how they speak.”⁶⁶ So, for example, Conflict’s songs may not have persuaded many people to organize themselves into anarchist collectives, but they offered them what Dave Laing calls a “provisional discursive formation,”⁶⁷ a vocabulary (linguistic, visual, physical, and musical), a new way of “performing (and thus changing) everyday life.”⁶⁸ Similarly, the Redskins, who made a joyful rockabilly-funk-punk noise in service of the Socialist Workers Party, probably didn’t do much to recruit people to the SWP or to popularize its particular ideology.⁶⁹ But, as political historian John Street says, for anyone standing against Thatcher in the early 1980s, “they provided a brilliant soundtrack.”⁷⁰

In other words, popular music is unlikely to precipitate the Great Leap Forward, but it can keep us moving in the right direction, or at least remind us what the right direction is. This mattered in the early 1980s because, after the convulsions of first-wave punk rock, mainstream pop seemed determined to go off in exactly the wrong direction again. The musical landscape wasn’t quite the “glossy wasteland” that some remember,⁷¹ but there’s no disputing that much of it—transatlantic, commercial, and purposefully insubstantial—celebrated and encouraged uncritical consumption. As Phil Oakey said of his version of the Human League, “The idea was that people could go into a record shop and say, ‘I want the record by the bloke with the hair on one side.’ It had to be as easy as buying a bar of chocolate.”⁷² This effect was heightened by the emergence of a new breed of “style culture” magazine (i-D, The Face, and Blitz for example) which inevitably catalogued only the easily reproduced surfaces of youth culture. One i-D reader approvingly described the magazine as a “Marks & Spence’s Continental Biscuit Assortment” for cool hunters.⁷³ It was heightened further by the emergence of a new advertising medium, the music video, which depended heavily on its product modelling surprising haircuts, “dancing around in frilly shirts and pretending to be in Rio” (as John Robb of the Membranes put it).⁷⁴ “[It] became imperative,” Dylan Jones, one-time i-D editor recalls, “for pop stars to be photogenic, to have a ‘style’, a story they could tell through their clothes, their hair and the location of their videos.”⁷⁵ John Robb was not impressed.

The particular objects of Robb’s contempt were the “new romantic” and “new pop” bands whose followers populated the pages of i-D: Visage, Spandau Ballet, Flock of Seagulls, and Adam and the Ants; Culture Club, Altered Images, ABC, Haircut 100, the Human League, and Duran Duran (whose video for the song “Rio,” shot on a yacht in Antigua, is nothing if not a Thatcherite fantasy of ambition and success). But his criticism could be fairly levelled against the music industry as a whole, which, even when it wasn’t explicitly endorsing the Zeitgeist, seemed to prefer music that made Wiltshire punk band Subhumans complain, “Record stores got plastic nutrition.” For Subhumans lyricist and vocalist Dick Lucas, the problem was that “music is the food of love / but reality is waiting for a bus.” That is, the music Lucas was hearing both failed to connect with his mundane reality and failed to explain the troubling things at the edges of that reality.* It couldn’t explain why there was “an anarchy sign on the bus stop wall,” for example, and it certainly couldn’t explain what Dick Lucas was meant to do about it. As the Membranes said, even in the face of mass unemployment, war, and rioting in the high street, the message kids were getting from the media was “Everything’s Brilliant!”

The escape artists had their defenders, of course; Paul Rambali of NME argued that “rock ’n’ roll in all its grey, earnest high-handed importance” hated the new romantics because they were “into dance music, parties and clothes,”⁷⁶ but reasoned, “Music has already reassured us that it won’t change the world, and the least it could do at this point is not make it any greyer.” Gary Clarke, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, was optimistic that the parties and clothes were actually about more than being colourful, that they contained “an element of resistance as part of a struggle over quality of life.”⁷⁷ He figured that new romantic decadence actually represented a refusal of monetarism and austerity. Similarly, the novelist Michael Bracewell has suggested that new romanticism was a “reaction against the social consequences of Thatcherism—a kind of Tory-baiting by way of an autistic obsession with unadulterated style.”⁷⁸ Dylan Jones has even argued, retrospectively, that this obsession with style, with choice, with bespoke identities, was an “inevitable stepping stone” towards acceptance of transgender identities in the twenty-first century.⁷⁹ But this optimistic assessment of how new romanticism changed the world feels like a post hoc fallacy; as Bob Short observes, “The world is shaped by media. If the airwaves are filled with pretty young things singing about love and cars, they are changing the world … for the worse.”⁸⁰

John Street writes, “Whether pop is banal or brilliant, it is political because it affects or reflects the way people behave.…What it affects are the politics of the everyday.”⁸¹ Ironically, John Street and Bob Short do mainstream pop the courtesy of treating it more seriously than its contemporary apologists. Where Rambali and Clarke, for example, excuse its frivolousness, Short recognizes that it isn’t frivolous at all, that it serves a serious ideological function: in the 1980s, under the camouflage of triviality, mainstream pop—commercial, aspirational, and uncritical—was playing Thatcherism’s tune. Worse, and more unforgivably, it was demonstrating that while pop music might not be an ideal weapon of revolution, it can be a mighty force for conservatism. The only possible response to this insult was defiance. Tracey Thorn, dismissing Duran Duran as “vacuous social climbers,” recalls that “those of us who still remembered punk held firm to the belief that the purchasing of yachts had NOT been our sole reason for deciding to form a band.”⁸² And the Style Council, taking aim at Frankie Goes to Hollywood (who encouraged people to relax and “live those dreams, scheme those schemes”), sang: “You don’t have to take this crap / You don’t have to sit back and relax.” Those who took the Style Council’s advice included anyone who was instinctively repelled by what John Robb calls “the bland conformity of the mid-Eighties.”⁸³ Many of them became musicians and started bands (not necessarily in that order), and Noel Kilbride of A.C. Temple captures the general mood when he says he saw his music “as part of a cultural battle against the Tories and the establishment.”⁸⁴ For some bands that battle entailed writing explicitly anti-establishment songs; for some it meant participating in benefits and protests; for some it mainly meant performing gloriously noisy, radio-unfriendly pop designed to drown out all the “music for white-socked suburban dullards.”⁸⁵ Big Flame, who usually rendered their name “bIG fLAME” to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary socialist organization they had borrowed their name from, were one of the most gleefully radio-unfriendly bands of them all, and they explained, “the sound we produce is political in music circles because it is so radical and anti-complacency when compared to the crap we are being fed now from all angles.”⁸⁶ The Membranes, Big Flame, A.C. Temple, they were all, Kilbride explains, trying to offer a response to “the unrelenting grimness, and the feeling that the world might end at any moment in a nuclear war, and the Thatcher government, with its attendant greed and selfishness.”⁸⁷ For all of them what was at stake was a kind of reflexiveness, a belief that pop (all pop) is serious because the world it reflects upon is serious. Mainstream pop irked them because it constantly, erroneously asserted that pop is trivial; and new romanticism infuriated them because it went a step further and asserted that pop is trivial because the world it reflects is trivial. As David Bowie, the arch arch-conservative godfather of new romanticism, put it, politics is just a “turn to the left—Fashion!—turn to the right—Fashion!”

It should be noted, though, that there weren’t many musicians actually willing to turn to the right, for fashion or otherwise. Paul Weller infamously said he was going to vote Conservative in 1979, but he was just trying to get up Joe Strummer’s nose (“An’ I did,” he noted later, with some satisfaction).⁸⁸ Beyond that, the list of artists who publicly supported Thatcher was short: Gary Numan, Cilla Black, Rod Stewart, Errol Brown (of Hot Chocolate), Mick Box (of Uriah Heep), Leee John (of Imagination), Tony Hadley (of Spandau Ballet), Stewart Copeland (of the Police), Lynsey de Paul (who wrote and performed a song just for the 1983 Conservative Party conference: “Vote Tory, Tory, Tory / The only party for me!”), and Vince Hill, who cowrote the Conservatives’ 1983 campaign song “It’s Maggie for Me” (“Thatcher! Thatcher! Thatcher! Not a man around to match ’er!”). But that’s about it. Even those bands John Robb found guilty of bland conformity and pandering to suburban dullards didn’t identify themselves as Thatcherites,⁸⁹ Billy Bragg dismissed Spandau Ballet as “a bunch of young herberts wearing their mum’s living room curtains,”⁹⁰ but Gary Kemp thought of himself as a socialist (and would eventually team up with Bragg as part of Red Wedge). “We had no sympathies with anything remotely Thatcherite,” he insists, and adds, with no apparent irony, “We were also commercial, which in those days was a political act in itself. We wanted to get on.… We wanted to be successful.”⁹¹ Even John Taylor of Duran Duran, while acknowledging, “We were the Zeitgeist … unconsciously tapping into all the changes that were happening in the culture,” nevertheless thought of the band as nonconformists, adventurers beyond “the punk bubble.”⁹² But then one of the ironies of punk was that, having opened up popular music’s lyrical horizons beyond the familiar round of love and heartbreak, it permitted a new wave of dullards and conformists to imagine they were doing something clever by shutting those horizons down again. So Martin Fry of ABC, for example, explained that The Lexicon of Love began with the novel idea of “writing something very emotional and not about toothpaste or electric pylons or the brutality of living in a high-rise block.”⁹³ He added, as if nobody had ever thought of this before, “Our songs were about heart and love and trying to make sense of that.” And Howard Jones, coming on like a repressively cheerful Sunday school teacher, no doubt thought that telling people to think less and feel more, in “Don’t Always Look at the Rain,” was new and helpful advice (and not just the old chestnut “Keep on the Sunny Side” trotted out with a new wave haircut). They were all kidding themselves, as ABC eventually recognized; in the final song on their second album, they reflected that in a “busted, rusted, upper-crusted / bankrupted done and dusted” Britain they were perhaps “covering up the agony with mindless entertainment.” But then they were merely doing what pop musicians have always done: selling music to as many basically conservative people as possible. Nobody, as far as I can tell, actually wrote songs extolling the virtues of monetarism, mine closures, or privatization; nobody wrote pro-nuclear-war songs. And, despite popular support for it, virtually nobody wrote pro–Falklands War songs (two notable exceptions being the contrarian Mark E. Smith, who made a sharp point about hypocrisy, in “Marquis Cha-Cha,” and the intentionally vile Macc Lads, who sang about showing a thing or two to the “bloody fairies in Buenos bloody Aires”).

Admittedly, there were a few bands—the so-called white power groups affiliated with the National Front and the British Movement—who articulated a politics that sounded a lot like Thatcherism.⁹⁴ Skrewdriver, perhaps the best known of them, declared themselves opposed to immigrants (“White Power”), pacifists (“Shove the Dove”), the IRA (“Smash the I.R.A.”), the CND (“Europe Awake”), Russia (“Soldier of Freedom”), and communists in general (“Hail the New Dawn”), and in favour of nationalism (“Our Pride Is Our Loyalty”), the imperial past, and, of course, white power (“White Power”). With the possible exception of the last, these were all sentiments that Thatcher would have publicly approved. However, it’s unlikely that Thatcher would have endorsed Skrewdriver’s rants about “Zionists” (“Voice of Britain,” “Before the Night Falls”), or their curious belief that Britain fought World War Two to make the world safe for National Socialism (“Before the Night Falls”). It’s also unlikely that Skrewdriver would have listed Thatcher as an ally; as much as they reviled communism, socialism, and “snivelling left wing scum” (“Smash the I.R.A.”), they also inveighed against privatization (“Power from Profit”) and the “capitalistic economy” (“Europe Awake”). In other words, neither the bland conformists nor the neofascists straightforwardly reflected Thatcherism. Perhaps the Thatcherite spirit was a bit of both, an unlikely and hideous concoction of Duran Durans and Skrewdrivers.

The Skrewdrivers of this world, though, were never more than a peripheral annoyance. It was mainstream pop that really annoyed anyone who wanted pop music that said pop music mattered, that didn’t just reflect the world but reflected upon it. We wanted it because punk and roots reggae (like blues and jazz before them⁹⁵) had shown us that it was possible to make that kind of music, even if people did tend to jump up and down to it. And in the 1980s we got it, arguably more of it than any other audience, anywhere, ever. Punk continued to point the way: more than half of the songs on the mixtapes that follow are either punk or umbilically connected to punk; most of the rest owe punk something, even if it’s just the impulse to say something important. Paul Humphreys of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark says, “When punk happened … it didn’t matter whether you were musically proficient; it was what you were saying.”⁹⁶ He and Andy McCluskey carried that idea into OMD, making their songs about technology and its discontents “almost like punk on synth.”⁹⁷ It wasn’t just synth music: mod, indie folk-rock, funk, metal, and even a lot of suspiciously mainstream-sounding pop found ways to say important things about Thatcher’s Britain. Curt Smith of Tears for Fears explains, “The content of punk music affected us lyrically … because it was now acceptable to get out there and just complain about stuff.”⁹⁸ Musically, Tears for Fears’s pop-rock was a very long way indeed from punk, but, as Smith says, the connection was there in the lyrics: “Shout! Shout! Let it all out / These are the things I can do without!” Ramsey Kanaan, onetime frontman for the Scottish band Political Asylum, sums it up: “Punk was huge.”⁹⁹

Some of the songs on these mixtapes were commercially successful at the time of their release, a lot of them weren’t (a lot of them weren’t even trying), and it may strike you as odd that, in the account that follows, I don’t make much of an effort to identify which was which. The reason for this is that, commercially successful or not, all of these songs mattered. They all had an audience, and in most cases a national audience, thanks to the nation-wide network of independent record shops that distributed them, the DIY cassette culture that circulated them by post, the weekly music papers and hundreds of fanzines that wrote about them, and the BBC Radio 1 hosts who played them.¹⁰⁰ Top-ten hits or indie obscurities, they all contributed to the discourse. For example, Twa Toots were a duo from the Isle of Sheppey whose entire recorded output consisted of a 12″ EP, a 7″ single, and a recording for John Peel’s show on Radio 1. One of their songs from the Peel Session turns up here in the mixtape about the Falklands because in its own small way it’s important. It mattered then because it was saying something serious about the world; it matters now because it still has something serious to say about the world.

In other words, what I’m offering here is an account of what pop music (or, at any rate, the punk-influenced end of pop music) had to say about British culture and politics, rather than an account of what it materially contributed to them. The two activities aren’t really separable, of course. Music journalists Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons concluded their book The Boy Looked at Johnny, a lacerating “obituary for rock and roll,” with praise for the musician-activist Tom Robinson. “Compared to the Tom Robinson band,” they said, “every other rock musician is wanking into the wind.”¹⁰¹ It was an assessment based not just on the strength of “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay” and “Up Against the Wall,” but also on the fact that TRB played “benefits for battered wives, against homosexual persecution and for the Anti-Nazi League.”¹⁰² So the ways in which musicians participated in Rock Against Racism, the antinuclear movement, the 1984–85 miners’ strike, and Red Wedge matter even in my account; as the political historian John Street says, “These organizations and movements mediated the politicization of music, and the politicized music mediated the activism.”¹⁰³ But my focus is on the songs. Books on popular music generally begin with questions about the emergence of scenes, subcultures or music worlds, the rise and fall of seminal bands, the inception and popularization of specific genres, or the development of the networks that produce and distribute popular music. With one or two notable exceptions,¹⁰⁴ they tend to take the songs themselves for granted, and, as much as I admire many of those books, this has always bothered me.

The Instant Automatons, a band who lived somewhere in remotest North Lincolnshire and distributed their wonky music by inviting people to send them blank cassettes to copy it onto, had a song that went, “There are lots of things happening in the big wide world / but none of them happens to me.” That was me as a teenager. It was like the Mekons said on their first single, after a brief, frantically inept intro, “Never been in a riot / Never been in a fight / Never been in anything / That turned out right.” I was a timid observer; the songs in this book were about as close as I got to any of it. So the songs and what they said mattered to me; they were despatches from the front lines of the big wide world. The first record I ever bought, to play on my first ever record player, when I was eleven years old, was Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, and I hung on every word. That record, in several formats now, has stuck with me for forty years. Lots of others have too, of course. Some of them have stuck with me even though I sincerely wish they hadn’t.

images MIXTAPE 2: DO NOT PUSH PINEAPPLE

The Wombles, “The Wombling Song” (1973)

The Wurzels, “The Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)” (1976)

The Jam, “That’s Entertainment” (1980)

The Four Bucketeers, “The Bucket of Water Song” (1980)

Jon Pertwee, “Worzel’s Song” (1980)

Brown Sauce, “I Wanna Be a Winner” (1981)

Alexei Sayle, “Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?” (1982)

The Firm, “Arthur Daley (E’s Alright)” (1982)

Keith Harris and Orville, “Orville’s Song” (1982)

Tracey Ullman, “They Don’t Know” (1983)

Kenny Everett, “Snot Rap” (1983)

Roland Rat Superstar, “Rat Rapping” (1983)

Subhumans, “Rats” (1983)

Conflict, “Stop the City” (1984)

Black Lace, “Agadoo” (1984)

Alvin Stardust, “I Feel Like Buddy Holly” (1984)

Spitting Image “The Chicken Song” (1986)

Claire and Friends, “It’s ’Orrible Being in Love (When You’re 8½)” (1986)

The Firm, “Star Trekkin” (1987)

The Timelords, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” (1988)

Harry Enfield, “Loadsamoney” (1988)

The second record I ever bought was The Wurzels Are Scrumptious! The Wurzels were a novelty band from Somerset, best known for their 1976 parody of the song “Brand New Key.” Their version was called “The Combine Harvester,” and it started, “I drove my tractor through your haystack last night / Ooh arrr! Ooh arrr!” So I don’t claim to have been a musically discriminating eleven-year-old. In my defence, though, I’m hardly the only Briton ever to have fallen prey to the lure of novelty songs. In fact, if this book were a properly balanced account of what the British public actually listened to, much of it would have to be given over to them, because, throughout the 1980s, the public’s appetite for songs by rodents and cartoon characters was voracious, ludicrous, and seemingly insatiable.

A remarkable number of these songs were the product of children’s television. This wasn’t new of course. The 1970s had been beset by Wombles, small, pointy-nosed creatures who lived in a burrow under Wimbledon Common and spent their time up-cycling rubbish, “making the most of everything / even bottles and tins,” as the “Wombling Song” had it. These tiny environmentalists (or, rather, singer-songwriter-producer Mike Batt in a Womble costume) had eight top-forty hits between January 1974 and December 1975, including the “Wombling Song” (a number four hit), “Remember You’re a Womble” (number three), “Wombling Merry Christmas” (number two), and “Super Womble” (a relatively disappointing number twenty). Nevertheless, the 1980s saw a dramatic increase in this sort of thing. At the beginning of 1980, Jon Pertwee cracked the top forty as Worzel Gummidge, the living scarecrow he played in the excellent and slightly sinister program of the same name. A few months later the cast of ITV’s Saturday morning kids’ program Tiswas, billing themselves as the Four Bucketeers, also cracked the top forty, with “The Bucket of Water Song.” It’s a cheerful marching song about, well, throwing buckets of water at people (dousing people with buckets of water was a recurring element in Tiswas). Not to be outdone, the cast of BBC’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop had an even bigger hit the following year with “I Wanna Be a Winner.” Less obviously damaging to public order than “The Bucket of Water Song,” it was in its own way deeply subversive, expressing a desire to be showered with awards while doing absolutely nothing to deserve them. In 1982, it was the turn of ventriloquist and children’s show host Keith Harris to have a go. He sold a staggering four hundred thousand copies of “Orville’s Song,” a duet with his puppet Orville the Duck. Frankly, the less said about it the better. And Orville wasn’t the only puppet in the charts. Roland Rat, host of several serials on TV-am and then the BBC, hit not once but three times between 1983 and 1985 with “Rat Rapping,” “Love Me Tender,” and “No.1 Rat Fan.” If that wasn’t enough, Roland Rat also presented Kevin the Gerbil, who squeaked into the top fifty with “Summer Holiday” in 1984.

It’s tempting to argue that the public’s appetite for these songs reflected a desire to just not be grown-ups anymore. Given the state of the grown-up world in the early 1980s, it would have been a fairly understandable ambition. That people were hungry for escape, if not back into childhood at least into a more cheerful past, seems to be confirmed by the extraordinary number of backward-reaching songs that charted at the time. Between 1980 and 1986, Shakin’ Stevens alone was responsible for twenty-one top-twenty hits, which collectively spent 250 weeks in the charts. That means that for six years barely a week went by without Stevens’s benign 1950s revivalism rocking away inoffensively somewhere in the top forty. His biggest hit, “Merry Christmas Everyone,” went to number one for Christmas 1985, and stayed in the charts until the following Christmas. Dave Edmunds made it into the top forty in 1980 with his cover of Marty Robbins 1956 hit “Singing the Blues” and again the following year with “The Race Is On,” originally sung by George Jones in 1965. The latter was recorded with American rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats, whose first album Edmunds also produced. So he made into the charts three more times in 1980 and ’81, as producer of the Stray Cats’ “Runaway Boys,” “Rock This Town,” and “Stray Cat Strut.” Tracey Ullman did her bit too, recording covers of “Breakaway” (originally recorded by Irma Thomas in 1964), “Move Over Darling” (Doris Day in 1963), and “Sunglasses” (Skeeter Davis in 1965). She also had hits with covers of a couple of contemporary songs, Madness’s “My Girl” (retitled “My Guy”), and Kirsty McColl’s “They Don’t Know,” both of which she gave a retro 1960s sheen. “They Don’t Know,” a song about sticking together no matter how imperfectly, offers the wisdom, “Baby, there’s no need for living in the past,” and, in McColl’s version, the line is sung by someone who has made up their mind to believe this; in Ullman’s version it’s sung by someone who doesn’t believe it at all. The video ends with Ullman driving away, in a 1960s Reliant Regal, with Paul McCartney at her side. Alvin Stardust, whose career relied almost entirely on living in the past, put a cherry on the whole thing in 1984 with “I Feel Like Buddy Holly.” Written by none other than Womble-maestro Mike Batt, the song has Stardust opine, “Now I know how Paul McCartney felt … I wish it was yesterday.”

Into this mix, we can add a number of comedy songs that found their way onto the charts in the early 1980s. Kenny Everett got into the top ten with “Snot Rap,” performing simultaneously as two of the characters he had created for the Kenny Everett Video Show: inept leather-clad rocker Sid Snot and bearded, cross-dressing Cupid Stunt. It’s musically pretty dubious, but done, to borrow Cupid Stunt’s catchphrase, “in the best possible taste.” Musically just as dubious was the Firm’s “Arthur Daley (E’s Alright),” a patter song constructed out of catchphrases from the TV series Minder. (The Firm would give Star Trek the same treatment in 1987’s “Star Trekkin” and spend two weeks at number one with it.) More musically sound, and infinitely funnier than either of these was Alexei Sayle’s “Ullo John! Got a New Motor?” It was at base a decent bit of pop funk (courtesy of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley), with the added bonus of Sayle’s demented non sequiturs:

Is there life on Mars? Is there life on Mars?

Is there life in Peckham? Is there life in Peckham?

What’s that switch over there for? What’s that switch over there for?

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ow! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ow!

Ullo, John! Got a new motor?

Finally, let’s add all of those songs which weren’t meant to be funny but whose momentary popularity can only be accounted for by the public’s perverse sense of humour. There were songs featuring adorable children: “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” by the St. Winifred’s School Choir, which spent two weeks at number one in 1980, and “It’s ’Orrible Being in Love (When You’re 8½),” a top-twenty hit for Claire and Friends in 1986. There were songs featuring ridiculous dances: “The Birdie Song” by the Tweets, in the charts for thirty weeks in 1981 and ’82, and “Superman” by Black Lace, there for twenty weeks the following year. And then there was Black Lace again with “Agadoo,” a song so legendarily bad that BBC Radio 1 is said to have banned it for being “not credible,”¹⁰⁵ which is to say the DJs simply refused to believe it existed. It spent most of 1984 in the charts.

In other words, there was a considerable portion of the British public who would do virtually anything to block out the reality of Thatcher’s Britain, even if it meant listening to Black Lace sing “Agadoo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree” for the billionth time, or buying another Royal Wedding mug, or a “Frankie Say Relax” T-shirt. Paul Weller’s comment on all this was the Jam’s relentlessly downbeat “That’s Entertainment.” The song borrows its title from the Hollywood musical The Band Wagon’s signature number, but that’s about all it borrows. “Everything that happens in life / Can happen in a show” the Hollywood version of “That’s Entertainment” promises, thinking of exotic delights and distracting escapes; Weller’s version offers only rain, damp flats, petrol fumes, and slashed bus seats, piling on details of a drab and inescapable reality. I suppose it says something that despite this refusal to be light entertainment, and despite not being released as a single in the UK, “That’s Entertainment” still reached number twenty-one and spent seven weeks on the charts. It could simply mean that between 1979 and 1982 the Jam could sell just about anything, but I’d like to think it also meant that some people, at least, were not prepared to push pineapple.

Nearly forty years on, though, there’s some danger that the history of novel distractions could become the history of 1980s Britain. Tracey Thorn writes:

I often feel I barely recognize “The 1980s” as a decade, in the form that it is now remembered and repackaged for glib TV programmes.… Events which many of us had shied away from, or sneered at, or at least had reservations about, from the Royal Wedding to Live Aid, have now become the unchallenged and unchallengeable iconic moments of the period.… But many of us simply lived an entirely different set of experiences, which seem to have gone unrecorded and unwritten about, so that it’s as though they never happened. Scenes which I never witnessed in my life—yuppies chugging champagne in City wine bars, toffs dancing in puffball skirts to Duran Duran—have now become the universal TV shorthand used to locate and define the era.¹⁰⁶

And it’s not just TV. There seems to be a growing consensus among historians of the period (now that it’s all at a comfortable distance) that, however harsh Thatcher’s policies may have been, they were a necessary corrective to the heavily unionized malaise of the 1970s welfare state, and that they eventually restored Britain’s economic health, and, you know, really, Thatcher herself was rather misunderstood.¹⁰⁷ I am not equipped to argue whether or not any of this is true (although, for the record, it isn’t). And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true (although again, emphatically, it isn’t). What matters is that this vindicating judgment of history threatens to obliterate what Christian Caryl calls the “shadow side” of the Thatcher era:

The number of those living in poverty increased from 5 million in 1979 to 14.1 million in 1992. The gap between the rich and poor widened: in 1979 the top 10 percent of the population measured by incomes held 20.1 percent of the wealth; by 1992 the figure had risen to 26.1 percent. Over the same period, the amount of national wealth held by the poorest 10 percent fell from 4.3 percent to 2.9 percent. The real incomes of the bottom 10 percent dropped by 18 percent over the same period, while those of the top 10 percent increased by 61 percent.¹⁰⁸

Already in Caryl’s account the term shadow side offers to obscure what were the most visible facts of Thatcherism in the 1980s. When UB40 sang about the “One in Ten,” the “statistical reminder of a world that doesn’t care,” or when the Specials sang about the country “coming like a ghost town” with “no job to be found,” millions of people knew what they meant from the inside. Caryl argues that, even at the time, most people didn’t want to hear about it, pointing out that, even as unemployment-fuelled riots broke out in Liverpool, the Specials’ “Ghost Town” was displaced at number one in the charts by Shakin’ Stevens’s vacuous rock ’n’ roll retread “Green Door.”¹⁰⁹ But the counterpoint, surely, is that “Ghost Town” kept Stevens’s somnambulant nostalgia out of the number-one spot for three weeks. Just as important, “Ghost Town” was (and is) only the tip of the iceberg. All of those “experiences, which seem to have gone unrecorded and unwritten about” that Tracey Thorn refers to are there, in the hundreds of songs collected in this book. These songs are an important historical record. Evidence for this can be found in Richard Vinen’s Thatcher’s Britain. His history of the 1980s includes exactly one allusion to popular music:

Reference to unemployment statistics produced some of the most contrived lines in the history of English pop music. The Angelic Upstarts entitled one of their albums Three Million Voices; the Birmingham band UB 40 were named after the form used to claim unemployment benefit.¹¹⁰

The Angelic Upstarts album was actually called Two Million Voices (it was recorded at the beginning of 1981, a year before unemployment hit three million), and, strictly speaking, both the band and the form were UB40, not UB 40. Surely, when someone tries this hard, and with such extravagant contempt, to get something wrong, it must be important.

The Angelic Upstarts, UB40, and the other bands this book calls upon to testify were important not just because, as I said about Twa Toots, they had something serious to say about the world, not just because they still have something serious to say about it, but because they often said things that nobody else would. If, as Tracey Thorn puts it, “toffs dancing in puffball skirts to Duran Duran” have become the “shorthand used to locate and define the era,” then the songs in this book give us a way to locate (or relocate) some of the things left out of that convenient sketch. For example, in 1983, a loose coalition of hippies, punks, anarchists, anticapitalists, class warriors, and assorted pranksters, united only by the experience of living on the shadow side of Thatcher’s enterprise economy, staged the first Stop the City event. It was a PROTEST AND CARNIVAL AGAINST WAR EXPLOITATION AND PROFIT,¹¹¹ and it lived up to its billing: participants swarmed the financial heart of the City of London, taking part in spontaneous blockades, lie-ins, die-ins, sing-alongs, street theatrics, and various kinds of symbolic (and occasionally literal) sabotage.¹¹² One participant recalls, “A dozen of us formed a moving, dancing, musical blockade that ran and skipped down the streets, singing ‘I’m only doing my job’ at the top of our voices.”¹¹³ Confronted with this unstructured, leaderless, and frankly ludicrous irruption, the police were momentarily stumped, and the city was, if not stopped exactly, at least inconvenienced: in 1983, the City still relied heavily on couriers to complete many of its transactions, so the unpredictable flow of singing, dancing nuisances seriously threatened its ability to profit “from weapons dealing, destroying nature, and generally by exploiting and controlling us all,” as the event’s flyer put it.¹¹⁴

Here’s the problem: the event has very largely been scrubbed from history. Vinen’s Thatcher’s Britain makes no mention of it at all. Neither do Graham Stewart’s Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s, Alwyn Turner’s Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s, Andy McSmith’s No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s, or Mark Garnett’s From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience Since 1975. Even at the time, as Dick Lucas of Subhumans noted in the single “Rats,” “The papers played the whole thing down,” assuring the public that “there was nothing to worry about.” So it was left to Subhumans and the other bands who had been at the event (including Crass, Conflict, the Mob, Chaos UK, Flux of Pink Indians, the Alternative, Toxic Waste, and Stalag 17) to document it.¹¹⁵ “We fought their calculations,” Lucas recorded, “Money gained from third world nations / All that money spent on war.” He also recorded that, once the police had got themselves sorted out, protesters were “dragged away / to cheers of hate and ‘victory!’” He was realistic about the impact of it all, acknowledging that, for the time being, the protesters were effectively “rats in the cellars of the stock exchange,” but he promised, “We’ll be back next time around.” Conflict also gave an account of the day and concluded, “Power has been tested,” but they too were very conscious of how efficiently power had met that test and taken control of the narrative. They recited their account over the sounds of freely moving traffic and noted, “Next day most walls had been scrubbed of their graffiti messages.” Scrubbed from history indeed. But not quite: “Stop the City” appeared on Conflict’s Increase the Pressure album, which has been reissued a dozen times since 1983, most recently in 2018. “Rats” has also been reissued repeatedly, most recently in 2017, and appears on numerous live recordings and compilations. I doubt very much that, in 1983, either Conflict or Subhumans were thinking about what their songs would mean at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, but here we are: there are still rats in the cellars of the stock exchange, power is still defining the narrative, and we still need those songs.

So, forty years late, this is a thank-you letter to all the bands who recorded the 1980s, and whose songs—angry, insightful, ridiculous, hilarious, wise, naïve, nonsensical, heartfelt, knowing, ironic, and subversive—comprise a secret history of the decade they made brilliant despite the zeitgeist.¹¹⁶ Despite the rain. And despite the person my father invariably referred to as Margaret-Bloody-Thatcher.

* Boris Johnson might have if he had stuck around a little longer, of course. There were signs: Boff Whalley’s Commoners Choir reflected, “People often ask us what it is that makes us tick / It’s Boris Johnson’s head upon a stick, stick, stick! / Comes in handy when you’re mopping” (“Boris Johnson”). Or, as comedy punk band the Kunts’ top-ten single put it, “Boris Johnson Is a Fucking Cunt.”

* Other songs on this theme include Altered Images, “Dead Pop Stars”; Elvis Costello, “Radio Radio”; the Clash, “Capitol Radio” and “Radio Clash”; M, “Pop Musik”; Queen, “Radio Ga Ga”; Radiohead, “Pop Is Dead”; the Selecter, “On My Radio”; the Smiths, “Panic”; Zounds, “Loads of Noise”; and Sneex, “Radiomania,” which concluded, “It’s all a lie” except for “John Peel, he’s for real.”

PART TWOIn the Days of the Ford Cortina

The front cover of the single “Ullo John, Gotta New Motor?” features Alexei Sayle and former bank-robber John McVicar looking hard and leaning on the boot of a Ford Cortina (they’d both recently appeared in an Arena documentary about the storied line of cars). The back cover, a reproduction of the original advert for the car, reveals that it’s a 1972 Cortina MK II. And the single’s B-side (“Ullo John, Gotta New Motor? Part II”) includes a hymn to the vehicle:

What a lovely motor!

What style! What lines! What beauty!

What poetry, eh?

All that poetry in a motor!

It’s comically overblown, of course, but there were many Cortina aficionados who would have agreed—among them McVicar, who could attest to the car’s reliability as a getaway vehicle. Indeed, the Cortina held a unique if somewhat ambiguous place in the British imagination. First introduced in 1962 and named for an Italian ski resort, the Cortina was a reasonably priced family car designed with just enough sense of style to make it appealing to a Britain that had never had it so good. It rapidly became a symbol of affluence (albeit modest and sensible). It could even, with the right trim level, be a symbol of much more than that: freedom, excitement, and speed. When Tom Robinson fantasized about the car that would make him a rock ’n’ roll rebel, he imagined a “Grey Cortina” with “fur-lined seats and lettered windscreen.” Similarly, mod revivalists the Lambrettas figured a Cortina MK II was a “guarantee of sexual conquest.” And Ian Dury’s sex-obsessed “Billericay Dickie” gleefully rhymed “back of my Cortina” with “Nina,” “hyena,” and “more obscener.”

But there was a way in which the Cortina’s familiarity also bred contempt. It was successful because it was a status symbol that was within reach of Mr. and Mrs. British Public, but precisely because it was so easily within reach it also became a symbol of modest ambitions and limited horizons. Subhumans’ Sun-reading, tea-drinking family in “Apathy” are kept sedated and satisfied by “drink, sex, cigarettes / Ford Cortina [and] household pets.” The Jam’s “Saturday’s Kids” drive Cortinas (with sex stains on the back seats) because they’re one of the cheap pleasures available to working-class youth in their economically and imaginatively limited leisure time. The protagonist in the Clash’s “Janie Jones” has a Cortina too. He’s in love with the glamour of drugs and sex and rock ’n’ roll, and the car is as close as he’s going to get to any of it. But it’s also the car that keeps him in his boring job and makes him “just like everyone,” because it “just won’t run without fuel.”

In other words, if the Cortina was the preferred car of bank robbers, it was also the preferred car of faceless office workers. And, as such, it could also serve as the sign of a uniquely English, petit-bourgeois repression. In the Cravats’ single “Gordon,” while Sven Naan’s malevolent saxophone stages a panic attack, Robin Dalloway barks the story of a man who lives with his smothering mother, awakens every day to the teasmade, has some nameless job, builds Airfix models in his spare time, and “masturbates himself to sleep.” He also drives a brown Cortina, which he buffs and polishes to a shine. Occasionally he threatens his mother with a hatchet (her main concern is that he should close the blinds so the neighbours won’t see). They’re all approximately the same helpless gesture: Gordon’s future is sealed.

images MIXTAPE 3: POXY FACTORIES

The Strawbs, “Part of the Union” (1973)

The Clash, “Career Opportunities” (1977)

Sex Pistols, “Seventeen” (1977)

Chelsea, “Right to Work” (1977)

Sham 69, “I Don’t Wanna” (1977)

Steel Pulse, “Handsworth Revolution” (1978)

The Mekons, “32 Weeks” (1978)

The Skids, “Charles” (1978)

Suburban Studs, “I Hate School” (1978)

The Fall, “Bingo-Master’s Break-Out” (1978)

Madness, “Land of Hope and Glory” (1979)

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Oliver’s Army” (1979)

Crass, “Do They Owe Us a Living?” (1979)

Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” (1979)

Scissor Fits, “I Don’t Want to Work for British Airways” (1979)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Inglan Is a Bitch” (1980)

Madness, “Baggy Trousers” (1980)

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Secondary Modern” (1980)

Soft Cell, “Frustration” (1981)

UB40, “So Here I Am” (1981)

The Members, “Working Girl” (1982)

Abrasive Wheels, “Burn ’Em Down” (1982)

The Diagram Brothers, “My Dinner” (1982)

Soft Cell, “Forever the Same” (1983)

The Kinks, “Young Conservatives” (1983)

The Mob, “Raised in a Prison” (1983)

The Smiths, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (1984)

Subhumans, “Apathy” (1985)

Pet Shop Boys, “Opportunities” (1985)

The Neurotics, “Fighting Times” (1985)

We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It, “Rules and Regulations” (1986)

The Godfathers, “Birth School Work Death” (1987)

Happy Mondays, “Lazyitis” (1988)

Gordon wasn’t alone. In the video for XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel,” a bewildered young man is wheeled into a vaguely clinical room where Andy Partridge, leering through Joker makeup, prods him with various placards—foreman, policeman, clerk, worker. Eventually a choice is made for him: “He has his future in British Steel.” Nigel is issued a pair of spectacles, a briefcase, and the placard clerk, and is sent off to begin his career, set up with a job for life whether he wants it or not. Like Gordon, his “whole future is as good as sealed.” Today, in a world where such things are almost unheard of, it’s hard to imagine that lifelong employment, very often state-subsidized, and very often in the same job from school leaving to retirement, used to be more or less expected. But, for thirty years, between the end of World War Two and the middle of the 1970s, the economic policies of Britain’s governments, Labour and Conservative alike, had assumed that the ultimate goal of a properly functioning economic system was universal employment. It was an idea they had adopted from William Beveridge’s 1942 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Beveridge had taken aim at what he identified as the “five giants” of social injustice, “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness,” and his proposals for dealing with them led directly to the introduction of free public education and the National Health Service, and to the nationalization of key industries including coal mining and the railways. In short, it was the blueprint for the welfare state. At the same time, the recently created United Nations had enshrined the right to work in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, in the UK, that right was something that everyone from trade unionists to Tory finance ministers seemed to be able to accept. As Billy Bragg put it in “Between the Wars,” everyone seemed committed to “a path from cradle to grave” guided by “sweet moderation.”

Unfortunately, this path from cradle to grave didn’t necessarily guarantee rewarding or even well-paid work; as Elvis Costello pointed out in “Oliver’s Army,” throughout this period the military was populated by working-class boys “from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne” who lacked better opportunities and were stuck doing the declining empire’s dirty work around the world. Meanwhile, West Indian immigrants in the UK had to accept “poor wage, hard labour,” as Birmingham reggae band Steel Pulse put it, doing Britain’s dirty work at home. In “Inglan Is a Bitch,” Jamaican-born dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (frequently referred to just by his initials LKJ) listed some of the jobs available to West Indians through the 1950s and 60s: they included dishwashing, ditch digging, unskilled factory labour, and working on the underground—this despite the fact that most West Indian immigrants were skilled labourers.¹ It’s also worth remembering that the “full employment” that governments aimed for was full employment of the male workforce only; women’s right to work remained firmly homebound. Nevertheless, when prime minister Harold Macmillan told Britons in 1958, at the peak of the postwar economic boom, that “most of our people have never had it so good,” his assessment was by and large correct. Sociologists began to speak of the embourgeoisement of the working class,² which is to say, as Thatcher put it, “Ordinary homes began to accommodate fridges, Hoovers and electric washing machines.”³ So in terms of appliances at least, things were looking up.

In the early 1970s things were still ticking along pretty nicely. Unemployment was sitting at 3.4 percent and full employment still seemed realizable, although inflation was becoming an intractable and worrying problem. This was as much to do with rising oil prices as anything else, but it was easy to blame it on the national unions; they had become powerful enough to defy the government on the wage regulations, which had always been its principal tool for controlling inflation.⁴ In 1972, for example, the National Union of Mineworkers had paralyzed the country by striking for a pay rise three times higher than the ceiling set by the Conservative government.⁵ For its part, the government was left literally powerless: after seven weeks, reduced to holding cabinet meetings by candlelight, the government gave in to the union’s demands.⁶ Prog-rockers the Strawbs responded with the novelty song “Part of the Union.” They may have intended it as a satire on union power (“Though I’m not hard, the sight of my card / Makes me some kind of superman,” they sang), but it was promptly taken up by the unions themselves as an unofficial anthem.⁷ During the election two years later, the Conservatives campaigned, rather unwisely, on the slogan “Who governs Britain?” They were hoping to rally voters against undemocratic union power, but only succeeded in rallying them against people who ask stupid questions. Unfortunately, the subsequent Labour government wasn’t any more obviously astute or in control of things. In 1975, with unemployment nearing one million for the first time, the annual inflation rate rose to a staggering 27 percent.⁸ And then, definitively, the policy of trying to contain inflation by regulating wages went off the rails: British Rail workers negotiated a 30 percent pay rise. The National Union of Mine Workers secured themselves 35 percent, Ford workers 38.⁹ So unionized labour, at least, was staying ahead of the curve. But prices were rising faster than anywhere else in Europe,¹⁰ which meant that standards of living for many Britons were slipping dramatically and terrifyingly. In January of 1976, the inflation rate rose momentarily to 37 percent,¹¹ at which point the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, concluded that inflation, not unemployment, was the country’s most pressing economic problem. At the time, this was a radical idea, particularly coming from a Labour government; Healey’s 1976 budget, which raised taxes and reduced government spending, caused furious consternation in the government’s own backbenches. It was a watershed, the moment when Britain’s government officially (and irrevocably) abandoned the dream of full employment.¹²

The waves created by this moment, which would be amplified into an economic tsunami in the 1980s, were not yet visible to the kids who, in 1976, were busy inventing punk rock. Music critic Tony Parsons called punk “dole queue rock ’n’ roll,”¹³ suggesting that it was a reaction to the boredom of unemployment. First-wave London punks Chelsea, for example, demanded their UN guaranteed “Right to Work,” and complained about “standing around just waiting for a career.” And, no question, there were many first-wave punk songs about boredom in general; so much so that X-Ray Spex could already point to the subject as a punk rock cliché in 1977 (“I Am a Cliché”). Nevertheless, Chelsea’s “Right to Work,” inspired by the 1976 Right to Work March that had made its way from Manchester to London, clashing with the police along the way,¹⁴ was somewhat out of step with the spirit of first-wave punk. For most of the punks, unemployment (if not outright unemployability) was not the problem but the goal. Paul Weller put it succinctly, “The main reason you pick up a guitar is that you wake up one morning and you don’t wanna go and work in a poxy factory.”¹⁵ Mark E. Smith of the Fall was similarly blunt: “My ambition was to get a flat on the dole and take drugs and avoid work at all costs!”¹⁶ Even Chelsea’s own bassist admitted, “I was never that keen on ‘Right to Work’ as I actually enjoyed being on the dole.”¹⁷ Sham 69 took their refusal one step further, insisting in “I Don’t Wanna” that they didn’t want either work or the dole queue. It was an attitude shared by many of the kids who started punk zines. Dave Henderson, who created a zine called Leicester’s Biggot, recalls, “I … moved to Leicester in an attempt to continue avoiding work and enrolled on an MA in screen printing.”¹⁸ And Mark Perry, who was working as a “bored bank clerk” when he started to produce Sniffin’ Glue,¹⁹ insisted in the zine’s first issue, “We believe rock ’n’ roll, and especially ‘punk rock’, is about enjoyment and nothing else.”²⁰

If the first wave of punks did mention employment, it was generally to complain about the quality of jobs available to them, not the scarcity of them. As the Clash lamented on behalf of working-class youth, all that was on offer was office work, shop work, factory work, the civil service, the police force, the armed forces, public transit, ambulance driving … In retrospect, the sheer range of actual jobs that seem to have been available to the Clash in 1977 is pretty startling. When the Pet Shop Boys sang satirically about “Opportunities” seven years later, all they could come up with was a life of crime. In 1977, what troubled the Clash was the way working life seemed to offer nothing more than an infinite extension of the boredom and futility of school. Suggs, lead singer of Madness, managed to look back on his schooldays with something like nostalgia in “Baggy Trousers,” but even he acknowledged, “I didn’t come out of it with much.”²¹ And at least one of his bandmates, Lee Thompson, who had spent two years in reform school, remembered his school days mainly as a series of cold showers, bad meals, and toilet paper cigarettes (“Land of Hope and Glory”). Most kids probably agreed with Birmingham’s Suburban Studs, who confessed to hating school and its “stupid rules.” Some might even have agreed with Abrasive Wheels, from a little farther north, in Leeds; they raised the stakes considerably by arguing, “Kids don’t care about books or rules / All they wanna do is burn the schools.”*

On the face of it, this attitude towards schools was another thing the punks and Thatcher had in common: both had a profound contempt for Britain’s educational system. One important difference, of course, was that the kids thought it was boring, whereas Thatcher thought it was altogether too stimulating. Another difference was that Thatcher actually had the power to do something about it. In fact, she spent the 1980s doing her best to burn down the universities, or at least anything in them that smacked of intellectual autonomy.²² By her own reckoning, her efforts to rid the universities of “revolutionary doctrines” achieved a “philistine subordination of scholarship to the immediate requirements of vocational training.”²³ Ray Davies and the Kinks, remembering the intellectual foment of the late 1960s, and sounding a bit too much like middle-aged men shaking their heads at the-kids-today, complained that the revolution was dead “and the schools and universities are turning out / a brand new breed of young conservatives.” This wasn’t entirely true, of course; the universities did also continue to produce first-class scholars and intellectuals. It’s just that the Kinks didn’t see many of them because they joined the brain drain and fled en masse to the United States.²⁴

To return, though, to the Suburban Studs’ “I Hate School,” Abrasive Wheels’ “Burn ’Em Down,” and Madness’s “Baggy Trousers,” there’s an instructive contrast between those three songs and Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” Floyd’s proggy tirade was contemporaneous with the two punk songs, but it wasn’t about the late 1970s; Roger Waters was remembering the schools of his own childhood in the 1950s. So “Another Brick in the Wall” rails against patronising, authoritarian teachers and their brainwashing: “Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!” By the 1970s, though, as the Suburban Studs pointed out, secondary school teachers had largely abandoned thought control in favour of crowd control, and their rules seemed to be aimed mainly at keeping kids “out of the way.” This was particularly the case in the new comprehensive schools, which had been introduced in the late 1960s and, by the mid-1970s, had become synonymous with “low standards, ill-discipline and incompetent teaching.”²⁵ In July 1976 the Sunday Express lamented that “standards are falling almost week by week” and asked, “Has ever a nation’s youth been let down so dismally by its educators as in Britain today?”²⁶

In defence of the teachers, it should be noted that, in 1975, “a survey of members of the National Association of Schoolmasters found that the previous term had featured more than six thousand cases of classroom ‘violence and disruption.”²⁷ So the nation was pretty obviously failing its educators too. The idea behind combining grammar schools and secondary modern schools into comprehensives had been egalitarian: there was a legitimate suspicion that the kids streamed into the secondary moderns were, as Elvis Costello and the Attractions put it, being consigned to “second place in the human race” (“Secondary Modern”). There was also a reasonable hope that “mixed-ability classes drawn from diverse social backgrounds would produce an upward levelling of academic standards.”²⁸ Indeed, progressive educators had successfully demonstrated this effect in practice.²⁹ Unfortunately, the government made the switch to comprehensives without recognizing that equality in education has to mean “everybody gets what they need” not “everybody gets the same.”³⁰ So students with educational challenges (no matter how much they might have wanted to be levelled upwards) rarely got the resources they needed, while students who didn’t face such challenges were too often bullied into inactivity by those who didn’t want to be involved in upward levelling of any kind. Teachers could either “adjust to this pecking order” or “face continual disruption.”³¹ No wonder Suggs recalled his teachers hiding in the pub, nervously rolling cigarettes and “trying not to think of when / the lunch-time bell will ring again.” And no wonder he had felt compelled to write “Baggy Trousers” as a sort of riposte to “Another Brick in the Wall.”³² “In my school,” he explained, “I generally felt sorry for the teachers.”³³

Even Thatcher, who had done nothing to correct the entirely correctable shortcomings of comprehensives while she was education secretary in the early 1970s,³⁴ believed that the government had “ruined education.”³⁵ (Her own educational “reforms” of the late 1980s, of course, made things dramatically worse by turning state classrooms into “Victorian learning factories”).³⁶ Harlow punks the Newtown Neurotics suspected that the ruination was intentional: “knowledge is power,” they reasoned, and the undermining of state schools was a ploy by the ruling class, whose offspring were privately schooled, to stay “one jump ahead” of everyone else by depriving them of an education. The Neurotics may have been crediting the ruling classes with more sinister wit and foresight than they possessed (although it’s worth noting that Thatcher didn’t submit her own kids to the state school system).³⁷ But it’s hardly surprising that school-leavers demanded something better out of working life than they had got out of school life. In their rejection of unrewarding employment, the Clash were joined by dozens of other bands. Scottish punks the Skids, for example, offered a dystopian vision of working life: “Charles” gets a factory job working long hours “drilling sheet metal”; he finds himself slowly turning into a piece of machinery with “metal hands” and a “plastic box” for a brain; eventually, when he becomes obsolete, his wife is compensated for “the scrap price of his machine.” The Fall related a similarly unhappy parable in their first single “Bingo-Master’s Break-Out.” The unfulfilled bingo master of the title, after years of watching people failing to complete their bingo cards, finally ends his own life; now, Mark E. Smith intones sardonically, “There’s a grave somewhere only partly filled.” Less dour in its approach, but in its own way just as pointed, was “32 Weeks” by the Mekons. The song’s title was the band’s estimate of the number of weeks’ wages it takes to buy a car; other calculations included one week to get a mattress, two hours for a bottle of whiskey, and six minutes to buy a cake: “Get a job, get a car, get a bed, get drunk, and eat cake,” they concluded, summing up the entire business of becoming a productive member of society in one dismissive sentence. Mancunian post-punks the Diagram Brothers would make a similar point about the absurdity of it all, a few years later, in “My Dinner,” explaining that dinner is important because you need energy to work to earn money to buy toasters to make toast for dinner. The song works itself into a discordant state of nervous exhaustion, finally jabbering repeatedly, “I would like to make a special toast to my new toaster.” But, then, the Diagram Brothers’ songs tended to do that sort of thing.*

The perils and disappointments of white-collar labour were understandably a less common theme, but the Jam sympathized with “Smithers-Jones,” forced out of his pinstripe suit and into an early retirement, and the Members, whose second album came with a free tie, wrote at least two songs on the subject. “Solitary Confinement” was, as the title suggests, about how even a good job becomes a form of self-imposed imprisonment: a young man fresh from the suburbs gets himself a job in the City and a bedsit in Earl’s Court, only to discover that working all day and meeting nobody means his home life is reduced to eating out of tins and watching television. “On your own, by yourself,” the outro repeats and repeats. The Members also told the story of Brian, not really “management material,” whose quietly happy life working in a banking kiosk is ruined when he’s promoted to a middle-management position at head office. After two weeks he throws himself from the twentieth floor. The Members explain the suicide with the dubious pun, “He stepped right out of the company.”

Of course, the punks didn’t exactly pioneer complaining about jobs as a subject for popular music. Eddie Cochran had raised a fuss about “a-workin all summer just to raise a dollar” back in 1958, and the Silhouettes anticipated Johnny Rotten’s lazy sod by twenty years when they released “Get a Job” in 1957. And the genre didn’t dry up with the first wave of punk either. “Making Plans for Nigel,” released in 1979, assured the listener that Nigel “must be happy in his work,” but the song’s repetitive, machine-tight arrangement (and the observation that Nigel’s future is “sealed”) suggested that the boy wasn’t going to be happy so much as asphyxiated. Brooding anarcho-punks the Mob objected to being “raised in a prison” and then thrown into either “a job at a factory” or marriage with “a boy from the factory.” UB40 complained about working “five days a week” in the factory with “just two days left for living” in their 1982 single “So Here I Am.” Soft Cell sympathized both with the worker who “watches life slip by on the assembly line,” and with the suburbanite cursed with an “ordinary wife” and a “moderate wage” in a firm he wants to burn down (“Frustration”). And Heaven 17, who obviously had a penchant for thematically unlikely dance music, tried to get people out on the dance floor with “Crushed by the Wheels of Industry.” Later in the decade, Morrissey developed his own personal line in antiwork songs, sniffing that he’d never had a job because he’d “never wanted one” (“You’ve Got Everything Now”), wondering why he’d give his “valuable time” to bosses who couldn’t care less if he lived or died (“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”), and groaning that the job he does have, as a recording artist signed to Rough Trade, “corrodes my soul” (“Frankly, Mr. Shankly”). Meanwhile, all-girl alt-rockers We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It complained that, from the perspective of women in a heteronormative, masculinist society, the oppressive “Rules and Regulations” of working life merely anticipated the oppression of marriage. At the end of the decade, blissed out on Ecstasy, Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder sang about “Lazyitis,” and, perhaps looking back on the post office job he’d got sacked from six years earlier,³⁸ reckoned, “I did the right thing by slipping away, yeah.”

Nobody, however, was quite as dismissive of work (or school) as Crass. In “Do They Owe Us a Living?” they argued that, precisely because the education system had failed them so miserably, it was unreasonable to expect the kids to work. “Do they owe us a living?” Steve Ignorant barked, “Of course they fucking do!” Other bands sometimes came to a similar conclusion, although they tended to couch it not as an ideological imperative, but as a celebration of loafing and fecklessness, as in Madness’s “Bed and Breakfast Man,” the Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail,” or the Members’ “Working Girl,” in which the singer plots to lie around the house while his girlfriend goes off to work in the factory. Of course, the definitive statement of dedicated laziness came from Johnny Rotten’s comically self-abnegating persona in “Seventeen”: “I’m a lazy sod,” he sings gleefully. In fact, it’s the only thing he sings for the second half of the song, evidently too lazy to come up with a second verse.

Scissor Fits, from Hounslow, a noisy stone’s throw from Heathrow, took a similarly tongue-in-cheek approach in “I Don’t Wanna Work for British Airways.” Over jagged guitar and drums, Vic Watson lists in appropriately tedious detail all of the jobs he doesn’t want to do for BA and, for good measure, all of the company perks he doesn’t want either. “I don’t want to go to their poxy disco,” he announces petulantly as the song descends briefly into a squall of phased guitars. It’s evident that Scissor Fits, true to Mark Perry’s first rule of punk, are enjoying not working for BA every bit as much as the Pistols enjoyed being lazy sods. But it’s also evident that for Scissor Fits a considerable portion of that enjoyment comes from actually working. This too is, paradoxically, punk: the pleasure of doing it yourself. As Tracey Thorn recalls, the late 1970s “was the era of do-it-yourself dynamism, and there were … more fanzines and independent record releases than you could possibly keep up with.… We were as industrious and self-motivated as any conservative parents could ever have wished for.”³⁹ To illustrate the point: “I Don’t Want to Work for British Airways” appears on the EP Taut? Tense? Angular? And Other British Rail Sandwiches, on the band’s own record label, Dubious Records. Following the lead of punk pioneers like Buzzcocks and the Desperate Bicycles,⁴⁰ Scissor Fits had paid for studio time, produced their own record, designed their own record sleeve and distributed the finished product themselves. All of this labour to put “I Don’t Want to Work for British Airways” (along with the equally memorable “I Wish I Hadn’t Shaved My Pubic Hair Off” and “D.H. Lawrence Wasn’t a Mexican”) into the hands of a few hundred people.

images MIXTAPE 4: DIRTY WORK

The Wailers, “Get Up, Stand Up” (1973)

The Clash, “White Riot” (1977)

Steel Pulse, “Handsworth Revolution” (1978)

New Hearts, “Revolution (What Revolution)” (1978)

The Clash, “Clampdown” (1979)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Reality Poem” (1979)

Misty in Roots, “Sodome and Gomorra” (1979)

The Clash, “The Guns of Brixton” (1979)

Secret Affair, “Time for Action” (1979)

The Clash, “Rudie Can’t Fail” (1979)

Purple Hearts, “Millions Like Us” (1979)

The Slits, “Shoplifting” (1979)

Aswad, “Judgement Day” (1979)

The Clash, “Bankrobber” (1980)

The Exploited, “Army Life” (1980)

Judas Priest, “Breaking the Law” (1980)

Poison Girls, “Dirty Work” (1980)

The Clash, “The Call Up” (1980)

UB40, “Don’t Let It Pass You By” (1981)

The Beat, “Get-a-Job” (1981)

Miles over Matter, “Something’s Happening Here” (1981)

UB40, “Present Arms” (1981)

The Apostles, “Pigs for Slaughter” (1982)

The Clash, “Know Your Rights” (1982)

UB40, “Don’t Do the Crime” (1982)

Misty in Roots, “Poor and Needy” (1983)

Chumbawamba, “Work” (1983)

The Alarm, “Declaration” (1984)

Poison Girls, “Take the Toys from the Boys” (1984)

Abacush, “Batta Dem” (1984)

Political Asylum, “System of War” (1984)

Everything but the Girl, “Ballad of the Times” (1985)

Tippa Irie, “Complain Neighbour” (1985)

The Apostles, “Workers’ Autonomy” (1986)

So it wasn’t labour as such that Scissor Fits objected to; it was having their labour exploited by British Airways. It was a question of resisting the System, the Establishment, of resisting them. Of course, Scissor Fits weren’t alone in feeling that they were trying to rob the kids. Pop music (particularly rock) quite routinely expresses this feeling, often concocting elaborate fantasies of refusing their nine-to-five and their poxy discos. Judas Priest’s 1980s output, for example, when not preoccupied with cars (“On the Run,” “Freewheel Burning”), rock ’n’ roll (“Hot Rockin,” “I’m a Rocker”), cars and rock ’n’ roll (“Ram It Down”), sex (“Eat Me Alive,” “Pain and Pleasure,” “Fever”) cars and sex (“Turbo Lover,” “Love Zone”), or, of course, cars and sex and rock ’n’ roll (“Rock Hard Ride Free”), often turned its attention to the problem of how to resist them. In “United” Rob Halford called rousingly for unity against them; in “Screaming for Vengeance” he warned kids not to let them “fill your brain with orders” and trap you in “a world that’s ruled by fear”; and in “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” he directly addressed them, announcing triumphantly, “I’m on top as long as the music’s loud.” For all the anthemic bluster of these songs, however, there’s something forlorn about them, a sense of futility barely concealed. As the decade wore on, Judas Priest’s songs increasingly focused on solipsistic celebrations of heavy metal, heavy metal fans, and Judas Priest themselves, as if the only solution to the intractable problem of them and the power they wielded was to pretend they didn’t exist and just keep the loud music coming.

Of course, this is all a bit unfair to both Judas Priest and their fans. It’s not as if empty, blustering, ill-defined defiance is unique to heavy metal. Flipping off them (parents, employers, teachers, cops, popular kids, all of the foregoing) has always been part of rock ’n’ roll’s posturing.⁴¹ “What are you rebelling against?” Mildred asked Johnny in 1953; “Whaddya got?” he replied, and it’s been going that way ever since. It certainly went that way in 1981, for example, when Welsh punk band the Toilets changed their name to the Alarm, swapping the posture of comic abjection implied by the former for the posture of revolutionary heroism implied by the latter. It was a choice of name which may or may not have been inspired by the Swansea anarchist paper Alarm started by Ian Bone, in 1977. It too wanted to know “Whaddya got?” Bone recalls, “The political ideas flowed thick and fast—abolish the council, scrap the mayor, we don’t need no fucking council, occupy the Guildhall and the Mansion House … Reports from factories and workplaces flooded in—shit and scandal on the factory bosses … News from schoolkids, from nurses and porters in the hospitals slagging off the consultants and the rip-offs.”⁴² So its defiance, though broad, was nevertheless aimed at specific targets; its rhetoric was aimed at inspiring direct and immediate action. And this is where Alarm and the Alarm part ways. When the Alarm put out their first album Declaration, though they were eager to strike a revolutionary tone, they were also careful to keep things nebulous. They started with a “Declaration” which laid the groundwork perfectly:

Take this song of freedom

Put it on and arm yourself for the fight

Our hearts must have the courage

To keep on marching on and on

Freedom from what, in which fight, and to what purpose where not specified. The rest of the album suggested that some sort of reckoning was coming (“Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke”), that some sort of iniquity needed addressing (“The Deceiver”), that something had to be done by the righteous (“We Are the Light”), and that there probably ought to be an exodus of some sort (“Marching On”), but details were scarce.

The contrast here isn’t between effective and ineffective rhetoric. It’s not as if Alarm, despite having a circulation of five thousand copies a week, radicalized Swansea.⁴³ In fact, Bone folded the paper after the 1981 riots when, as he put it, “every town and village in the country erupted apart from fucking Swansea.”⁴⁴ The contrast is between rhetoric that offers itself as incomplete action (hence Bone’s disappointment when Swansea failed to follow through and riot), and rhetoric that offers itself as a self-contained posturing. On later albums the Alarm would find a subject that matched their biblical rhetoric: Thatcherism’s nearly biblical destruction of the Welsh economy. But this was more a happy coincidence than either an inevitability or a necessity: the rhetoric remained self-contained and freestanding. And the emptiness of this posturing is actually its strength; it permits listeners to fill the vacuum with their own fantasies of defiance. The crucial thing, of course, is not to demand any real action.

For some genres of popular music this isn’t just an occasional strategy, it seems to be a defining principle. Mod revival outfit Secret Affair had a top-twenty hit in 1979 with the misleadingly titled “Time for Action.” The song takes aim at a punk movement and a “punk elite” which has failed to seize the moment, before its chorus, a pleasingly shouty, horn-driven sing-along, announces, “This is the time for action!” One might expect specific instructions about the post-punk revolution to follow. Perhaps it’s time to fight the recently elected Tories? Time to start a riot (there are, after all, vaguely riotous noises in the background)? Or time to get your hands dirty and finish what punk started? Nothing nearly so demanding as it turns out: it’s actually time to dress up and “be seen,” to be, in the parlance of the original mod scene, a face. Not so much time for action, then, as time for standing still and posing. And the video for the song helpfully cuts together footage of the band performing the song in concert with shots of well-dressed mods standing very, very still indeed. It’s a comically and intentionally deflating payoff, but the mods dancing up a storm in front of the stage are clearly getting very worked up about doing absolutely nothing. The band Miles over Matter, part of the “new psychedelia” scene which flourished briefly in London as a sort of footnote to mod revival, pulled off a similar trick with “Something’s Happening Here.” Sounding like a slightly angry version of the Monkees, they sing, “We’ve got to get down to it! It’s up to you!” What exactly it might be remains unclear, although the “love generation” and the “blank generation” both “blew it.” The mistake both groups made, it seems, was allowing their respective moments to pass. So what Miles over Matter are demanding is a “happening” that will prevent anything from happening. Meanwhile, Purple Hearts, who were also part of the mod revival scene, and who also sounded like disgruntled Monkees, offered the song “Millions Like Us.” The title promises a mass movement of some sort, but the chorus clarifies, “There’s millions like us with tunnel vision / making indecisions.” So, as in “Time for Action,” what’s being announced is less a mass movement than a mass standing still.

Although they couched it in cool, mod cynicism, all three of these mod revival bands were confronting the same problem as Judas Priest: refusing to be brought down by them doesn’t reliably lead to a meaningful course of action—unless you count making loud noises with an electric guitar as in itself a meaningful thing to do. Judas Priest, to their credit, knew this. In “Breaking the Law,” they’ve been cheated by a system that’s broken every promise and stolen their dreams. Julian Temple’s video for the song has Halford explaining all this while being chauffeured around in a Cadillac convertible, which undercuts his complaint a bit but establishes that what’s at stake here is a particular kind of American rock ’n’ roll outlaw fantasy. (Imagine how different the video would be if Halford were driving around in a Cortina.) Halford decides to “put some action” into his life by turning to a life of crime. The song isn’t explicit about what this entails, but the video helpfully fills in the blanks. Halford and the rest of the band burst into a high street bank and set about robbing it with their terrifyingly loud guitars and drums. Eyeglasses shatter! The bank vault springs open! The band make off with a gold record! It’s an almost perfect distillation of the rock ’n’ roll outlaw posture (and arguably Judas Priest’s finest moment). After all, every rocker must at some point attempt a variant of “I Fought the Law” or “I Shot the Sheriff,” though few manage to embrace the absurdity of it as fully as Priest do in “Breaking the Law.”

By comparison, the Clash took themselves altogether too seriously, particularly when they were being “the last gang in town.” Their catalogue reflects a fascination with outlaw behaviour (“I Fought the Law,” “Last Gang in Town,” “Tommy Gun,” “Guns of Brixton,” “Police on My Back,” “Guns on the Roof”) and a desire to frame it as ethical in a world where the system is bankrupt. In “Bankrobber,” for example, the narrator’s father is a thief but he “never hurt nobody”; he simply refuses to “grovel” and prefers the risk of serving jail time to the prospect of working on a production line all his life. Faced with either, mind you, the bank robber advises his listeners to find a hole and “run, rabbit, run.” It was advice the Clash gave frequently, especially when the kind of labour on offer was military. They urged kids not to accept the jobs they were raised to fill in both “Clampdown” and “The Call Up,” aligning factory labour with neofascist violence and suggesting that industrialism, racism, militarism, and neocolonialism are all part of global capitalism’s clampdown. Like “Bankrobber,” “Clampdown” advised the listener to “get running.”

Pacifist anarcho-punks Poison Girls, led by the duo of Vi Subversa and Richard Famous, made a similar point about complicity with the system in “Dirty Work.” Juxtaposing “bombing cities” and “washing dishes,” they argued that both serve a consumer culture in which “easy living” depends upon “easy killing.” Similarly, in “Take the Toys from the Boys,” they punned on the phrase “gotta make a killing” to connect the global trade in coffee, sugar, and other commodities (all grounded in the violence of plantation slavery) with the international arms trade. All these industries, Poison Girls note, “made a bomb” both literally and figuratively. The song ends by focussing reflexively on the music industry, which has “made a bomb out of music.” This is not, in itself, a new observation; in 1972, for example, a bewildered (but very rich) Keith Richards had complained to Rolling Stone, “We found out … that all the bread we made for Decca was going into making little black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam.”⁴⁵ But both the Clash and Poison Girls conclude that any form of work within the system is dirty. When the Clash list the citizens’ rights (“all three of them”) under the global clampdown, the United Nations’ right to work is pointedly not one of them. “Food money” is, as long as you’re prepared to accept some humiliation, but to demand the right to work would be to demand one’s own oppression and to become complicit in the oppression of others. “Know Your Rights,” like “Clampdown” and “Bankrobber,” concludes, “Run!”

Other bands also made the connection between industrial and military labour, and the Skids’ image of the factory worker slowly turning into a machine was frequently echoed in songs about life in the army. The Exploited’s ”Army Life,” for example, deplored the way the soldier is trained to become a “killing machine.” UB40 sympathized with young men who joined the army for lack of any other work, becoming, as they put it in “Present Arms,” part of the “khaki ranks of flesh and steel / learning how to smile and kill.”⁴⁶ The Beat, like the Clash and Poison Girls, explicitly aligned the factory and the army as similarly destructive to the human body: cancer or mutilation, training courses or training camps, there’s no real choice to be had. The Beat might have followed the Clash in recommending running away from this “funfair,” but they recognized that if you try “you get caught between the lines” (of a battlefront, of a contract, it’s all the same). “War,” Political Asylum concluded, “is part of the system.”

Everything but the Girl also suggested that the Clash’s advice to simply “run away” from dirty work may have been a little naïve. In their “Ballad of the Times,” they pointed out that the whole capitalist system the Clash inveighed against was designed to make running away from it difficult to imagine, much less accomplish. “Narrow streets breed narrow minds,” they sang, condensing into proverb the observation that the whole apparatus of the capitalist state—including education and urban planning—is articulated to ensure that if you’re a working-class kid “you’ll never find your feet to walk out of this avenue.” So it’s all very well for the Clash to insist that “you must not act the way you were brought up” (“The Call Up”), but, “Ballad of the Times” argued, if you’ve been bred and brought up on the idea that what makes a man—what gives a man agency—is work (be it in the mine or in the military), to refuse to act the way you were brought up is to lose the ability to act at all.

Chumbawamba put it all together in “Work.” Interspersing the defensive refrain “I’m only doing my job” with shouted tirades against the system that work supports, the song ends with the plaintive spoken lyric, “I’m only doing my job for the United Kingdom Company / The war machine, the bomb factory”; someone miserably sings the chorus from Sheena Easton’s hymn to inescapable, humdrum employment, “My baby works from nine ’til five,” and then the song fades out, “work … work … work … work … work …” It’s a pretty bleak outlook. But Andy Martin of hard-to-define punk band the Apostles offered a sing-along, anarcho-syndicalist solution: “Singing a song in the morning, as we lock the boss in the lavatory / taking charge of the factory, we work autonomously!” The nursery rhyme quality of “Workers’ Autonomy” notwithstanding, the Apostles were quite serious. As they put it in “Pigs for Slaughter,” “We’re laughing at the law / we’re taking no more / of this class war … Blow it up / burn it down / kick it ’til it breaks.” More constructively, the Apostles were involved in establishing several anarchist centres, including the Wapping Autonomy Centre, an influential if short-lived anarchist centre in London’s East End. They were also, mind you, purposefully and dangerously silly, treating themselves and their audiences with merciless irony; Andy Martin dismissed self-serious punk music as an “insignificant side show to the real assault on global capitalism.”⁴⁷ Little more than a nursery rhyme, in fact.

Be that as it may, the Clash remained optimistic both about the kids’ ability to refuse the clampdown and about the role their music could play in spreading that refusal. This was perhaps because their critique of dirty work was informed as much by Rastafarian beliefs as by socialism or anarchism, and Rastafari has always valued music as central to its resistance against Babylon. One of the core tenets of Rastafari is the refusal of complicity in a system (or shitstem, as it often rendered by Rastas) which extracts labour from an enslaved population. That is, although slavery was ostensibly abolished in the West Indies in 1833, Rastas argue that enslavement continues in more subtle and complex forms: for example, in the forms of economic and mental slavery explored by Bob Marley in “Redemption Song.” For this reason, one strain of Rasta thought holds that any attempt to ameliorate the condition of the enslaved (through economic or social uplift, for example) only makes the sufferers complicit in the shitstem. It is not for man to improve Babylonian captivity; it is for Jah to destroy Babylon altogether and restore the exiled sufferers to Zion.⁴⁸ London-based reggae bands Misty in Roots, Aswad, and, later, Abacush tended to follow this line of reasoning in their lyrics. Misty in Roots called on Jah to “deliver the poor and needy out of the hands of the wicked” (“Poor and Needy”), and they warned all “workers of iniquity” that this latter-day Sodom “will be destroyed by brimstone and fire” (“Sodome and Gomorra”). Aswad similarly anticipated “Judgement Day,” warning the perpetrators of “constant police brutality” that Jah “will nah let his sheep be slaughtered.” When the day comes, they asked, referencing Peter Tosh’s “Downpresser Man,” “Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide?” Abacush nodded, “One day Jah Jah a go batta dem to pieces.”

To the sympathetic ear, these songs have the power of Old Testament psalms, alternately lamenting, chastising, warning, and praising. To its critics, however, this line of reasoning produces an unacceptable passiveness (though not impassiveness) in the face of oppression; as Linton Kwesi Johnson put it in “Reality Poem,” “Some get vision / Start preach relijan / But dem can’t mek decishan.” LKJ was writing from outside Rastafari, but by the 1970s the passivist line was being challenged from within Rasta as well: since Jah promises real rewards in this life (rather than duplicitously promising imaginary ones in some “afterlife”), it is for the sufferers to chant down Babylon and claim those rewards. “If you know what life is worth / You will look for yours on earth,” Bob Marley sang, telling people to “Get Up, Stand Up.” The result of this reasoning, particularly in Britain, was a politicized form of Rasta. Whereas in Jamaica many Rastafari continued to eschew politics (dismissed as “politricks”), for British youth, both black and white, Rastafari’s end-of-the world rhetoric had very clear political implications and applications.⁴⁹ Steel Pulse, based in Handsworth (an area of Birmingham boasting a large West Indian, Asian, and Black British population), articulated this political Rasta particularly forcefully. They rejected the “poor wage / hard labour” that their parents had accepted as an unavoidable part of the British Babylon, and sang, “Handsworth shall stand firm / Like Jah rock fighting back.”

Steel Pulse were the front edge of a wave of reggae (and more broadly Jamaican-inspired) music which originated in the Midlands in the late 1970s. They were followed by the Specials and the Selecter (both from Coventry), and by the Beat, UB40, and Beshara (all, like Steel Pulse, from Birmingham). What characterized all of them was the way they used “Jah language” to demand political action of their audiences. For example, UB40 got together the same year “Handsworth Revolution” was released, and their consistent message over their first three albums was “Stop waiting for your ticket to the promised land … Don’t let the only world you’re ever gonna live in pass you by.” For them, as for the Clash and Poison Girls, the problem then became how to live in the world without becoming complicit in its inequities, and, just as vexing, how to prevent refusal of the shitstem’s “poor wage / hard labour” becoming an easy justification of mere criminality (in the vein of “Bankrobber”). Reggae artists in Jamaica had been struggling with this problem for years, finding themselves simultaneously drawn to Kingston’s rebellious rudeboy culture and repelled by its pointless violence. The problem had been given its fullest exploration in Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, in which Jimmy Cliff played Ivanhoe Martin, a singer turned cop-killer and, briefly, folk hero. Whether he’s a revolutionary, a petty thug, or simply a fool is left for the audience to argue; in any event, he ends up dead, gunned down by the police when he confronts them with two empty revolvers. Paul Simonon of the Clash transposed this story to London in “Guns of Brixton,” nicely capturing its ambiguities. In his version, an unnamed gunman waiting for the police to knock down his front door, “feels like Ivan … at the end of the Harder They Come,” and in his imagination, he warns the police that they can crush him and bruise him, but they’ll “have to answer to the guns of Brixton.” It’s not clear whether the guns of Brixton are, like Ivan’s, empty.

It was certainly not the Clash’s intention, but the way they looked to reggae and rudeboy culture for ways to express their own sense of oppression tended to conflate the principled “fighting back” that Steel Pulse advocated with simple lawlessness, in a way that evoked racist stereotypes about black criminality.⁵⁰ In “White Riot,” for example, they celebrated the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riot with the observation, “Black man got a lot of problems / But they don’t mind throwing a brick.” What they meant was that they admired the way West Indian youth were prepared to take action against racism and police harassment; what they implied was that black culture is prone to violence and disorderliness. As music journalist Dotun Adebayo points out, “It was the kind of thing the National Front would say.”⁵¹ They also misrepresented the direction in which bricks tended to get thrown. As Brixton MC Tippa Irie pointed out, West Indians were less likely to throw bricks than to have bricks thrown at them:

Take my good friend that named Deborah …

One day she and Hyacinth sit down ’pon sofa

And the music was high, them under sensimilla

All of a sudden Deborah scream and Hyacinth holler

And the two young ladies had to run for cover

‘Cos about ten bricks come through the window

Don’t you agree, don’t you agree that is out of order …

And all because the bass was high on her amplifier.

Tippa Irie’s dramatization was characteristically humorous, but his point was serious: West Indians were more often the victims of violence and disorderliness than the instigators of it.⁵² Ironically, the Clash, who were motivated by genuine appreciation of Jamaican music and equally genuine sympathy with black youth, were particularly prone to getting this wrong: “Rudie Can’t Fail,” “Revolution Rock,” “Safe European Home,” even the reggae covers they chose to record tended to focus on the “rude and reckless” or the “crude and feckless” (“Rudie Can’t Fail”). But the Clash were hardly alone; when punk bands looked to reggae for inspiration, they often ended up using it as a signifier of criminality. The Slits, for example, adopted reggae and the rhetoric of Rastafari to justify shoplifting: “Babylonian won’t lose much / And we’ll have dinner tonight,” they rationalized. And it can’t be entirely coincidental that Elvis Costello’s one and only foray into reggae, “Watching the Detectives,” was a story of violence and murder intended to evoke a “British style of urban paranoia.”⁵³

“Don’t Do the Crime,” UB40 enjoined their listeners, but admitted they didn’t have a happy alternative to offer. Sympathising with anyone who had worked their whole life with nothing to show for it, they acknowledged that your moral code gets shaken when you realize “they’ve been stealing from you.” Mind you, by the time UB40 released “Don’t Do the Crime” in 1982, the refusal of unrewarding or even dehumanizing work was becoming gratuitous; even bad and boring jobs—the office and factory jobs that the Clash had rejected in “Career Opportunities”—were increasingly hard to come by.

Not entirely coincidentally, Ford stopped making the Cortina in 1982.

* Other people who couldn’t resist rhyming “schools” with “rules,” by the way, included Madness (“Baggy Trousers”), the Cortinas, (“Independence”), Subhumans (“From the Cradle to the Grave”), Bow Wow Wow (“W.O.R.K.”), Rockpile (“Teacher Teacher”), Conflict (“They Said That”), the Clash when they came to rewrite the lyrics to “Career Opportunities” for Sandinista!, and Garry Johnson in the spoken-word poem “Dead End Yobs.” Of course, Chuck Berry had beaten them all to it with “School Days,” back in 1957.

* I could go on. Other songs on the horror of work included the Sex Pistols’ “Problems,” 999’s “I’m Alive,” the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” ‘O’ Level’s “‘O’ Levels,” the Adverts’ “Bored Teenagers,” Generation X’s “Youth Youth Youth,” the Notsensibles’ “Don’t Wanna Work Anymore,” and Elvis Costello’s “Welcome to the Working Week.”

PART THREEThe Procession of Popular Capitalism

You may have noticed that I’m not making a lot of value judgments about the songs included in these mixtapes. It may even have troubled you a bit; how could I pass over “Ghost Town,” for example, without pausing to acknowledge how terrific it is? There are two reasons for this. First, as Simon Frith has pointed out, although arguing about whether songs are good or not is one of life’s great, cheap pleasures, that pleasure hinges to a large extent on the subjectivity of the assessments we make.¹ When I express the opinion that the Specials’ rediscovery of ska was timely genius, or that the Style Council’s rediscovery of bland soul-pop wasn’t, I’m telling you a lot more about myself than about either the Specials or the Style Council. And since this isn’t a book about me, I’ve been trying to interject as little as possible.

Second, the fact that some of the songs in this book are indisputably better than others isn’t really relevant to the account I’m giving here. In some accounts, of course, it’s very important indeed. John Street, for example, argues that the meaning of popular music is inextricable from the pleasure it gives: “It is only in listening and dancing to music that people bring it alive. Only then does it take on a meaning; only then are its politics fully apparent.”² So, for Street, the aesthetics of a song are crucial. If a song is ugly, or dull, or inept, if it fails to be musically engaging, if it fails as a song, it will also fail as a political statement. This leads him to argue that Tom Robinson’s “Glad to Be Gay” “fails musically and politically” where Rod Stewart’s “The Killing of Georgie” succeeds because “it is a better pop song.”³ Stewart, he reckons, “has a better understanding of pop’s conventions than Robinson, and this enables him to write a much more effective song about the plight of homosexuals.”⁴ My problem with this argument is precisely that it tells me much more about John Street than about the songs he’s discussing. As for me, “Glad to Be Gay” has given me great pleasure for almost forty years, whereas “The Killing of Georgie” makes me want to tear my ears off.

I started out by observing that there were so many songs written about Thatcher that you could reconstruct her career just from their titles. The relative aesthetic merit of the songs behind those titles is beside the point. The same principle applies to the whole assemblage of songs in this book; that is, I’m telling a story that’s less about the value of the individual songs than about the value of the collected body of work. I admit, as the instances of popular music supporting lost causes and futile gestures start to pile up over the next two hundred pages, that value may not be immediately clear. But stick with me.

images MIXTAPE 5: GOVERNMENT SCHEMES

The Passage, “16 Hours” (1979)

The Members, “Solitary Confinement” (1979)

Adam Ant, “Kings of the Wild Frontier” (1980)

Poison Girls, “Persons Unknown” (1980)

The Exploited, “I Believe in Anarchy” (1981)

Aswad, “Tuff We Tuff” (1981)

Abrasive Wheels, “Vicious Circle” (1981)

The Exploited, “Dole Q” (1981)

Bow Wow Wow, “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No! No! My Daddy Don’t)” (1981)

Abrasive Wheels, “Voice of Youth” (1981)

Potential Threat, “Cheap Labour” (1982)

The Exploited, “Disorder” (1982)

Wham!, “Wham Rap!” (1982)

Vice Squad, “(So) What for the Eighties” (1982)

Level 41, “The Chinese Way” (1982)

The Partisans, “No U Turns” (1983)

Billy Bragg, “To Have and to Have Not” (1983)

Misty in Roots, “Poor and Needy” (1983)

Newtown Neurotics, “Living with Unemployment” (1983)

Red Guitars, “Steeltown” (1984)

The Alarm, “Deeside” (1985)

Simply Red, “Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)” (1985)

The Exploited, “Maggie” (1985)

New Model Army, “Young, Gifted and Skint” (1985)

Style Council, “With Everything to Lose” (1985)

Roy Harper, “Government Surplus” (1988)

The Neurotics, “Keep the Faith” (1988)

Easterhouse, “Stay with Me (Death on the Dole)” (1989)

James, “Sit Down” (1989)

By the spring of 1982, the world was shaking off the global recession that had gripped it through the late ’70s.⁵ Not so the United Kingdom. A year after Thatcher’s “no-hope” budget, as the number of unemployed rose above three million and the nine o’ clock news made a regular feature of reciting the latest factory closures,⁶ Thatcher shrugged, “I feel deeply concerned when I have people who want jobs and can’t get them. But I know that I can’t conjure them out of thin air.”⁷ This wasn’t strictly speaking true. Throughout the 1970s, both Labour and Conservative governments had done just that, subsidizing unprofitable nationalized industries like British Steel as a way of maintaining employment levels, particularly in Wales, the North, and the Midlands. Thatcher’s innovation was to conjure those jobs back into thin air. When XTC threatened the hapless young Nigel with an immutable future in 1979, they picked British Steel as his workplace because it suggested permanence, lifelong employment. But one of the first things the new Conservative government did was announce the closure of the Corby steelworks in Northamptonshire. A campaign to resist the closure was hastily organized; a fundraising EP by Mike Carver, Save Corby, was released; demonstrations in September and November drew, by the campaign’s estimate, a quarter of Corby’s population into the streets. But things got worse the following year: Thatcher appointed American businessman Ian MacGregor to chair British Steel and tasked him with returning it to profitability. The Iron and Steel Trades Conference responded by going on strike, demanding higher wages and a stop to plant closures. The three-month action was partially successful on the first count, but nothing could stop the cuts. “As the picket lines fell,” the Alarm sang, “the industry died.” Hull’s Red Guitars pointed out that this was the real “second industrial revolution.” The so-called Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century had created jobs and made steel “the backbone of every modern nation.” This new revolution undid everything. “Steal away a steeltown,” they sang, “Steal away a way of life.” Within three years, plant closures and redundancies had eliminated some eighty thousand jobs.⁸ And XTC’s Nigel suddenly went from having a sealed future to having no future.

In some ways, it was hard to tell the difference. In “Tuff We Tuff,” Aswad’s Brinsley Forde sounded fatalistic: either you’re stuck in a job which you “can hardly survive,” or you’re stuck “waiting in the labour queue,” again, barely surviving. The Newtown Neurotics made a similar point by rewriting the Members’ “Solitary Confinement” and retitling it “Living with Unemployment.” In the Members’ song, the protagonist spends his evenings alone watching television because work leaves him no time to make friends. In the Neurotics’ version, the protagonist has no job and can’t afford to go out, so he never meets anyone. The result is the same: he stays at home, eating out of tins and watching television. After two years of being “left to rot” like this, he takes the only way out available to him: “I’ve joined the army and believe it or not / I’m going to Northern Ireland and I’m going to get shot.”

The feeling of becoming vanishingly insignificant that this all engendered was captured by Manchester post-punks the Passage, in “16 Hours.” The song turned the celebratory cliché “one in a million” inside out, explaining that watching “time turn sour” as you scour the newspapers for jobs makes you “one in a crowd of well over a million.” Suggestively, the music threatens to overwhelm the spoken-word vocals, as if the speaker might at any moment be swallowed up and lost without anyone noticing. Easterhouse, also from Manchester, picked up on this feeling of drowning in insignificance in “Stay with Me (Death on the Dole).” Both musically and lyrically evoking downbeat, mid-1980s Bruce Springsteen (somewhere between “My Hometown” and “Human Touch”), the song reports a news story about two teenagers who committed suicide rather than face “death on the dole,” and then asks the listener to “stay with me, if there’s nowhere you should be.” It’s both a hopeless appeal for friendship and an offer of friendship to anyone who, like the two teenagers, has nowhere to go. By a different route it arrives at the same sort of place the band James (perhaps not coincidentally also from Manchester) would reach a couple of years later when they invited “those who feel the breath of sadness” to “sit down in sympathy.”

A certain end-of-it-all misery also pervades “Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)” as covered by yet another Manchester band, Simply Red. The song was originally recorded by American soul/funk group the Valentine Brothers as a complaint about the failure of Reaganomics to produce the promised trickle-down prosperity. So you can see how Simply Red reckoned the song would resonate with a British audience, and on some level it clearly did, becoming the band’s first top-twenty hit. But I’m not sure how well the song actually translated. In the original version, after unsuccessfully hitting up the bank and then his brother for money, the singer calls on “The Father … Almighty Father” who turns out his pockets with a divine shrug and says, “Money’s too tight to mention.” It’s a wry joke that probably works best on an audience familiar with the blues and gospel conventions it nods to. Simply Red don’t even try it on their British audience, substituting the line “I call on my father … oh my father.” In other ways too Simply Red’s version of the song lacks the humour of the original. The Valentine Brothers, asking what you do when the economy (rather than love, say, or the blues) “has got a hold on you,” end up singing an unrequited love song to Money. Simply Red, asking instead what to do when “money’s got a hold on you,” shudder self-righteously at the thought and imagine Ronald Reagan getting some sort of sexual pleasure from the trickle-down economy: “Nancy, did the earth move for you?” he asks. The video underlines all this by featuring people having a depressing time playing billiards, with the occasional cut-away to the singer’s depressing brother and even more depressing father. It’s all a bit angry and hopeless, in a way that the original never was.

Hopelessness, again overcast with anger, also shapes “Vicious Circle” by Abrasive Wheels. The band had started out in Leeds in 1976, right on the heels of the first wave of punk rock, and by 1981 they had witnessed the decline of both punk and the northern economy. They’d also seen the refusal to participate in the working world that characterized punk turn into aimless self-destruction: the title “Vicious Circle” is, at least in part, a reference to Sid Vicious, whose death by overdose in 1979 had announced the end of more than just the Sex Pistols. Now, the song observes, the kids are “sniffing glue … walking streets, signing on,” and being subjected to various “government schemes.” The schemes in question were the so-called Youth Opportunities Programme, introduced in the late 1970s and expanded by the Thatcher government in 1980 (replaced by the Youth Training Scheme in 1983). Ostensibly designed to give school leavers on-the-job experience and life training, these government schemes too often provided neither, while forcing youth to grind out hours “sweeping floors and filling shelves,” as the Style Council put it. The Neurotics may have overstated things a bit when they called training schemes “the new slave trade” (“Keep the Faith”), but it was certainly the case that placements rarely led to continuing gainful employment. “Them and their fucking outrageous schemes / It’s just cheap labour, a cover-up,” Blackburn punks Potential Threat concluded.

Very, very occasionally, these schemes accidentally provided young people with valuable resources. For example, Simon “Nogsy” Nolan of punk band Anti-System recalls the Youth Opportunities Programmes run at the Cathedral Centre in Bradford: “There was a waiting list of young punks trying to get onto the screen-printing course. It was brilliant; we may have only been paid £25 a week but we were able to print T-shirts, fanzines and gig posters free of charge.”⁹ Overwhelmingly, though, the programmes could not have been better designed to reinforce Potential Threat’s impression that young people were being robbed, and that the government couldn’t possibly care less. “At sixteen you were top of the class,” Billy Bragg sang in “To Have and to Have Not,” but “at twenty-one you’re on top of the scrapheap”; you become, as the folk singer Roy Harper punned bitterly, “government surplus.”

The Partisans, a punk band from South Wales, an area which had been particularly hard hit by unemployment, explained the government’s indifference: “There’s no U turns now Maggie’s in / more unemployment as the weeks go by / but that’s not so in Number 10.” They were alluding to Thatcher’s famous celebration of her own intransigence in the face of rising unemployment. When asked to soften the economic policies which were killing jobs, she declared, “The lady’s not for turning.”¹⁰ Economics were not by any means the only area of policy in which she was unyielding (as Kwasi Kwarteng observes, “Of all leading politicians in Britain in the twentieth century, she arguably developed the least and showed the least change over the course of her career”¹¹), but it was an area Thatcher approached with a particularly rigid religious fervour. Controlling inflation was, for Thatcher, “a moral issue not just an economic one,”¹² and, if unemployment was the result, that was regrettable but not a reason to increase social spending.¹³ Indeed, for Thatcher, the social safety net itself was an evil: it not only tended to “reduce the role of the individual, his importance and the desirability that he should be primarily responsible for his own future,”¹⁴ but it also robbed the wealthy of the opportunity to perform acts of charity and compassion.¹⁵ It was no coincidence, she explained to a gathering of bankers, that “the Victorian era—the heyday of free enterprise in Britain—was also the era of the rise of selflessness and benefaction.”¹⁶ Not that Thatcher felt either selflessness or benefaction should be exercised gratuitously. Addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988, she argued that “the Biblical precept to love our neighbours ‘as ourselves’” is also an imperative to despise them if they “fall below the standards and beliefs we have accepted.”¹⁷ As her husband, Denis, explained, sympathetically, “She can’t find a sustainable argument that people should be paid for not doing any work.”¹⁸ Abrasive Wheels suggested giving Thatcher a taste of her own medicine: “Put Maggie Thatcher on the dole,” they chanted in “Voice of Youth,” but it’s unlikely the experience would have shaken her religious faith in monetarism or her belief in the fecklessness of the unemployed.¹⁹ She firmly believed that poverty was caused by a “personality defect.”²⁰ As John Campbell notes, Thatcher “regarded the young homeless on the streets as social misfits who should go back to their families—ignoring the fact that many had not got families, had been thrown out, abused by their families, or simply (in approved Thatcherite manner) had left home in areas of high unemployment … looking for work.”²¹ Edinburgh punks the Exploited concluded pithily and characteristically, in the song “Maggie”: “Maggie, you fucking cunt.”

The Exploited’s lead singer, Wattie Buchan, had enlisted in the army in the 1970s (one of Costello’s boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne) and had emerged a furious critic of a system which gave working-class kids no good alternatives (“Another Day to Go Nowhere,” “False Hopes”). Like the Newtown Neurotics, he saw that the only things on offer were “life on the dole” (“Dole Q”) or the opportunity to get shot at (“Alternatives”). It made him an anarchist of sorts, although more in the nihilistic mould of Johnny Rotten than of contemporary anarcho-punks like Crass, Conflict, or Poison Girls. His songs were trenchantly antiwar (“War,” “Should We, Can’t We,” “Let’s Start a War”), but he had very little time for Crass’s pacifist collectivism. His was a highly individualistic anarchism which, in its simplest articulation, boiled down to “Chaos, chaos, chaos, don’t give a fuck” (“Disorder”) and “I don’t care what you say; I believe in anarchy” (“I Believe in Anarchy”). It may not have been particularly constructive—Deek Allan of Oi Polloi dismisses it as a “sad cartoon of punk”²²—but it spoke to many young people’s real frustrations with an unresponsive system. The back cover of Let’s Start a War … Said Maggie One Day included “thanks to all the punks and skins who believe in chaos as a form of protest.”

Not everyone accepted the Hobson’s choice between death on the dole and death on the job, of course. Wham! didn’t believe in chaos, but in 1982 they were cultivating an image of themselves as rebellious young guns, and, in pursuit of that image, they invoked the spirit of first-wave punk and rapped about life on the dole as liberation from the workaday world of “Mr. Average.” Their advice was “Don’t let hard times / Stand in your way / Give a Wham! / Give a Bam! / But don’t give a damn / Cos the benefit gang / Are gonna pay!” But then, it seems unlikely that “Wham Rap!” was addressed to anyone old enough to be employed, let alone unemployed: in the video for the song, George Michael’s and Andrew Ridgely’s leather jackets said danger, but, when the camera panned down, their cropped jeans and espadrilles said Ooh! fun! Bow Wow Wow, the band concocted by the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren after the Pistols collapsed, had a similarly upbeat position on unemployment. They decided that the best thing to do was confirm Thatcher’s worst suspicions about youth and See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy (the title of their debut album). Or, as they put it in the single “W.O.R.K”: refusing to work and hopping off to the jungle “takes us to the age of primitive!” “Voodoo on it goes!” they added. Somewhere in there, Bow Wow Wow managed to affirm a number of racist assumptions about jungle dwellers, of course, but then fantasies of escape from the malaise of late capitalism are prone to this sort of casual racism. The Pop Group signalled their search for a primitive wholeness that “existed before civilization’s debilitating effects” by putting a photograph of Asaro tribesmen performing in Mudmen costume on the cover of their first album.²³ Similarly, Adam Ant celebrated the “wild nobility” of Native Americans and his belief that, beneath his workaday white skin, there was “a redskin suffering / from centuries of taming.” And Level 42’s “The Chinese Way” invited those weary of Western modernity to “take a journey back in time” to Peking, where they will receive “secret knowledge” and hear Cantonese spoken softly under the paper lanterns (because, apparently, in colonial fantasy Beijing, they speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin).

Poison Girls had a more considered and thoughtful answer to Thatcher’s “no-hope” economy and young people’s frustrations with it. They were sympathetic to the politically and economically marginalized, but they argued that frustration and alienation were a dead end (“Alienation”). Instead, they called on all frustrated people, including both “rioters and pacifists” to form anarchist collectives. In their single “Persons Unknown” (a 7″ split with Crass’s “Bloody Revolution”) they call for everyone from “housewives and prostitutes” to “accountants in nylon shirts” and “cleaners of lavatories” to become visible and accountable to a shared humanity. As the single’s sleeve notes explain, the song’s title is a reference to the 1978 trial of several anarchists on the dubious charge of conspiring with “persons unknown” to “cause explosions.” It became known in anarchist circles as “the persons unknown trial,” and the name Persons Unknown was taken up by supporters of the imprisoned anarchists as they raised money for their defence. The sleeve notes also testify that Persons Unknown were “repeatedly harassed … arrested, held, questioned, followed, photographed and fingerprinted” but were not deterred. Ultimately, the defendants were acquitted, and the liner notes draw this lesson: “it’s up to us as individuals and groups of individuals to work for our own liberation … make yourself known … it is your responsibility, my responsibility AND OUR RESPONSIBILITY.” To that end, all proceeds from the record were donated to help set up the Wapping Autonomy Centre.²⁴

Several such social centres were created in the early 1980s; Conflict’s 1984 album Increase the Pressure came with contact information for more than a dozen of them up and down the UK. Many were short-lived, but at least one of them, the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford, survives to the present day. Named in response to a government report, which concluded (somehow) that one in twelve welfare claims in West Yorkshire were fraudulent,²⁵ the 1 in 12 Club set out “to provide an alternative social scene for those … with little money, free from sexist, racist, statist hassles.”²⁶ This enterprise included providing a space for local bands to perform and releasing a series of recordings on their collectively run label 1 in 12 Records. “The club’s continuing survival & enthusiasm depends on the collective co-operation of all the bands, artists and members,” said the sleeve of 1984’s Enemies of the State. “We have no hierarchy—no leaders—no elite, we just work together to take back control over our lives!”²⁷ The first-wave punks had demanded personal autonomy (X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours”; Penetration, “Don’t Dictate”; the Clash, “Complete Control”), and some of the post-punks had elevated this into a critique of capitalism (the Pop Group, “We Are All Prostitutes”; Scritti Politti, “Hegemony”; and Gang of Four, whose entire catalogue seemed obsessed with the ways in which capitalist ideology exercises hegemonic control over all human relations). But this was something different. In the 1970s, the problem had been a welfare state that promised cradle-to-grave boredom, a repressed world in which, Johnny Rotten joked, giving someone “a wrong time” qualified you as an anarchist. By the mid-1980s, the problem was a state that promised nothing and seemed, in fact, to have abandoned large parts of the country to chaos.

images MIXTAPE 6: NOWT BUT MISERY

Hawkwind, “Urban Guerrilla” (1973)

The Human League, “Circus of Death” (1978)

The Fall, “Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow” (1979)

999, “English Wipeout” (1979)

Tubeway Army, “Down in the Park” (1979)

The Fall, “The N.W.R.A” (1980)

The Clash, “Something about England” (1980)

Echo and the Bunnymen, “All That Jazz” (1980)

David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes” (1980)

Anti-Nowhere League, “So What?” (1981)

Dick Gaughan, “Both Sides the Tweed” (1981)

The Specials, “Ghost Town” (1981)

Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Fireworks” (1982)

The Exploited, “False Hopes” (1983)

Big Country, “Steeltown” (1984)

Dream Academy, “Life in a Northern Town” (1985)

Fine Young Cannibals, “Move to Work” (1985)

Everything but the Girl, “Anytown” (1985)

The Style Council, “All Gone Away” (1985)

Fine Young Cannibals, “Blue” (1985)

The Three Johns, “Sold down the River” (1986)

The Three Johns, “Coals to Newcastle” (1986)

The Proclaimers, “Letter from America” (1987)

Thrashing Doves, “Northern Civil War Party” (1987)

Thrashing Doves, “Biba’s Basement” (1987)

The Housemartins, “We Are Not Going Back” (1987)

The Alarm, “Hallowed Ground” (1987)

Anti-Nowhere League, “Not My England” (1987)

The Cleaners from Venus, “Living with Victoria Grey” (1987)

The Proclaimers, “Cap in Hand” (1988)

London punk band 999 looked around them in 1980 and concluded, “Doesn’t matter where you go to / north, south, east, or west / it looks as though there’s been another A bomb test.” But in reality the economic damage was far from evenly distributed. In 1979, the national unemployment rate had been a little less than 6 percent, but in the North-East and Scotland the rate for those under twenty-five was closer to 50 percent.²⁸ This disparity only worsened during the prolonged recession of the early 1980s, polarizing the country between a prosperous South and a depressed North, Scotland, and Wales.²⁹ In 1981, after youths in Liverpool and Manchester expressed their frustration by rioting, Thatcher’s Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit chided them that his father hadn’t rioted when he was unemployed in the 1930s; “He got on his bike and looked for work.”³⁰ It was a profoundly irrelevant observation. Pluck and determination might have got Tebbit’s father to work in 1930s Middlesex, but kids in the North of Thatcher’s Britain weren’t getting within two hundred miles of a job that way. As more and more young people were forced to migrate south, the Alarm sang about how the crippled dockyards and emptied valleys were becoming “Hallowed Ground.” They had seen this process firsthand in their native Wales, and they explored the changes it brought in a series of releases, most notably perhaps on their Welsh-language album Newid (released in English as Changes). Birmingham’s Fine Young Cannibals, watching the same process at work in the Midlands, sang to their loved ones, “All I want to do is stay with you / [but] I’ve got to move to work.” “Blue,” they added in the eponymous song, “It’s a colour so cruel.” With the same thought in mind, Edinburgh duo the Proclaimers sang a lament addressed to the descendants of the Scots who had emigrated to Canada and the United States in the nineteenth century as economic refugees. With Thatcher’s economic policies again making refugees of Scottish workers (the picture cover for the “Letter from America” single superimposed an image of nineteenth century emigrants on a photograph of an abandoned factory), the Proclaimers wondered, “Will you ever return / To help us kick the life back / to a dying mutual friend?”

Southern bands were sympathetic: the Style Council sang about “the ghosts of the men taking the morning shift” in “All Gone Away,” and the Thrashing Doves, echoing the Specials, lamented that everything was shutting down in “the northern ghost town” even as the “wheels of the south” kept turning. They wondered if this were not, perhaps, cause for insurrection; why not begin an after-work celebration of sorts and have a “Northern Civil War Party” they asked.

The Thrashing Doves threatened insurrection in “Biba’s Basement” too: “Something’s ticking in Maggie’s basement,” they warned. “It’s all going up in smoke.” The song alludes to the 1971 bombing of trendy London clothing store Biba, by the tiny revolutionary group the Angry Brigade. Inspired by the French Situationists, who had revolted against the stupefying effects of consumer society and turned Paris upside down in 1968, the Angries went on a bombing spree in the early 1970s, hitting more than two dozen targets (carefully chosen to avoid casualties), including the Spanish Embassy, various banks, a BBC truck outside the Miss World contest, the homes of several Conservative MPs, and, of course, Biba.³¹ They issued a communiqué after the Biba bombing: “Life is so boring there’s nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt. Brothers & Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN,”³²

Rock band Hawkwind, responding sympathetically to the subsequent arrest and trial of several Angry Brigade members (the band performed at a benefit concert for the so-called Stoke Newington Eight),³³ released the single “Urban Guerrilla.” That single, banned by the BBC, was an important link between the Angries and the punks: lyrically, it anticipated all the themes of “Anarchy in the UK,” which was written four years later by Hawkwind fan John Lydon:³⁴

I’m a political bandit, and you don’t understand it

You took my dream and you canned it,

It’s not the way I planned it

I’m society’s destructor,

I’m a petrol bomb constructor.

The bomb, in the case of Biba, was a small one, detonated in the stockroom. It didn’t exactly blow Biba up or burn it down; it did momentarily interfere with people’s shopping, but in the end it was a largely symbolic disturbance, like giving a wrong time or stopping a traffic line. So why the Thrashing Doves resurrected this episode as a warning to Margaret Thatcher is unclear. Even when “Biba’s Basement” connects the Angry Brigade with the spirit of “old Guy Fawkes” (who had attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605), the revolutionary threat is obscure. After all, Guy Fawkes rather famously failed to blow up the government and start a rebellion. As for Biba, two years after the bombing (and as if to definitively erase that anticonsumerist gesture) the store moved into much, much larger accommodations. It instantly became a symbol of London as an international centre of stylish consumption. For two years, its promise of egalitarian consumerism was a smash; millions thronged its seven storeys of clothing and home furnishings. But it was financially unsustainable, and it all came crashing down, undermined not by revolutionaries but by a bad business model. So perhaps that was what the Thrashing Doves heard ticking in Maggie’s basement: the bad business of Thatcherism.

The Thrashing Doves were not the only ones to speculate about the probability of a northern uprising. Hailing from Prestwich, the Fall declared themselves “Northern white crap that talks back” (“Crap Rap 2 / Like to Blow”) and announced, “The North will rise again” (“N.W.R.A.”). A civil war was on its way, “N.W.R.A.” predicted, and London’s Soho would shortly echo with the sounds of drunken highlanders taking long-deferred revenge for their defeat at the Battle of Culloden. A general collapse of society would follow, and we would all end up in a postapocalyptic dystopia wearing feathers and face paint. Or perhaps not; even as he unfolded the prophecy, Smith calculated it wouldn’t happen in “ten thousand years” because “too many people cower to criminals and government crap.” For just a moment, when rioting broke out in Liverpool and Manchester a year after the song’s release, Smith thought he might have to eat his words;³⁵ it looked like the North really was about to rise again. But the moment passed, and, in 1988, the Proclaimers were still beset by a characteristically Caledonian mixture of pride and self-loathing: “We boast, then we cower,” they fumed, “I can’t understand why we let someone else rule our land.”

The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid called this conflict in the Scottish psyche “Caledonian Antisyzygy,” a state induced by the struggle to contain irreconcilable polarities: defiance and capitulation, bravado and cowardice, optimism and despair. Glaswegian folk singer Dick Gaughan articulated precisely this conflicted sensibility in “Both Sides the Tweed,” written after the failed 1979 referendum on devolution (i.e., the creation of an independent Scottish parliament). The referendum had failed because a late amendment to the act providing for it had strategically tilted the odds against the “yes” vote, so that despite 52 percent of participants voting in favour of a semiautonomous Scottish Assembly the end result was a “no.”³⁶ Scottish nationalists, not unreasonably, felt there had been something underhanded about the whole thing. In “Both Sides the Tweed,” Gaughan seemed to strike a conciliatory tone, “Let friendship and honour unite / And flourish on both sides the Tweed,” but he immediately added, “No sweetness the senses can cheer / Which corruption and bribery bind.” It was the musical equivalent of extending the hand of friendship and giving the two-fingered salute at the same time. Nevertheless, Gaughan offered, Scots would take the high road and “place riches in lowest degree.” It was an oblique reference to one of the immediate drivers of the Scottish independence movement at the time: oil money. Huge reserves of oil had been discovered off the coast of Scotland in the late 1960s, and the Scottish Nationalist Party had popularized the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil.”³⁷ England had disagreed. So one of the things the failure of the referendum meant was that the revenue from North Sea oil would continue to flow south, and Scots would continue, as the Proclaimers put it, to “beg for a piece of what’s already ours.”

Leeds post-punk band the Three Johns expressed the feelings of many Northerners (both English and Caledonian) when they sang about being “Sold down the River.” The song was ostensibly about the economic decline of Liverpool symbolized by the shutting down of “all the factories in Knotty Ash.” On the face of it, it was an odd sort of thing to complain about because Knotty Ash was and still is a residential area. Strictly speaking, it never had any factories to begin with. What it did have, however, was the distinction of being the home of one of Liverpool’s most successful cultural exports, the comedian Ken Dodd. At the height of his popularity in the 1960s, wild-haired, bucktoothed Dodd and his Diddy Men had almost rivalled the Beatles. The Diddy Men, beloved of a generation of children (which would have included the Three Johns), were cheerfully daft string puppets who supposedly worked in the Jam Butty Mines and Broken Biscuit Repair Works of Knotty Ash. Revealingly, a spoken-word interlude in “Sold down the River,” delivered in a cartoon Liverpool-Irish accent, explicitly recalls the Diddy Men, even repeating the phrase “I’ll marmalize ’em!” which the Diddy Men’s “Mick the Marmalizer” had popularized. (To marmalize someone is, of course, to pulverize them into marmalade.) This is a dose of nostalgia mixed with very real anger about what’s been lost: not just manufacturing but making of all kinds. In “Coals to Newcastle,” a song about what was at stake during the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the Three Johns sang, “This country, it made my family / The Tories, they made redundancy.” This making of nothing, or making into nothing, was precisely what infuriated Wattie Buchan of the Exploited. Thatcher and the Tories “create nowt but misery,” he shouted in “False Hopes.” They were trying, he said, to make the working class “redundant from the human race.” The Three Johns’ “Sold down the River,” in its furious outro, made the same point, asking repeatedly, desperately, “Why don’t you kill me?”

Other bands shared the Three Johns’ nostalgia for a time before “all the work shut down,” although not necessarily their sharpened anger. For example, the Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” recalls fragments of a fading childhood: the Beatles, the Kennedy assassination, ephemera floating above the song’s ambient, dreamlike arrangement. And the song’s refrain finds nothing cogent to say about it all: “Ah, hey, ma ma ma, life in a northern town.” But perhaps this is the point: the near-nonsense, sung over a swell of incongruous kettle drums, clarinet, and keyboards, like some sort of otherworldly world music, communicates longing for something that can’t be articulated. The object of nostalgia, it suggests, is mostly the creation of nostalgia itself: suggestive, beautiful, unreal. So “Life in a Northern Town” speaks to some ambivalence about what’s been lost. After all, less than a decade earlier, the kids had been complaining about the jobs that were now vanishing. “Anytown,” by Everything but the Girl, picks up on this ambivalence. It laments the loss of Oldham’s cotton mills, which had been the centre of both the city’s economy and its sense of community: “They took the heart when they ripped it down / and in its place sent Anytown.” But at the same time the song “can’t forget and won’t forgive” the living conditions which characterized Oldham before the mills closed. “Anytown” sounds emotionally drained (particularly when heard next to the fury of the Exploited’s “False Hopes,” say, or the Three Johns’ “Sold down the River”). Its rather dull, country-inflected sophisti-pop arrangement doesn’t have the energy to be properly angry about anything. In this respect it shares an affliction with the Style Council’s “All Gone Away,” in which Paul Weller croons, over a feckless bossa nova, “Come and walk upon these hills / and see how monetarism kills / whole communities.” The result isn’t so much dissonant as null. Everything but the Girl’s “Anytown” is similarly flattened, as disheartened as Anytown itself, unable to look either backwards or forwards with anything but ambivalent sadness.

Dunfermline’s Big Country, who had a way of making their guitars sound like bagpipes echoing heroically across a deserted glen, approached the problem with more energy, but the result was no less ambivalent. Their song “Steeltown” was written about Corby, where the closure of the steelworks in 1981 had destroyed ten thousand jobs. Lyrically, it hints at Blake’s “Jerusalem,” particularly in its stubborn assertion of hope in the face of the long fight, but the song is haunted by the knowledge that now, “at the end of everything,” we have failed to build that city of light. Throughout the song there is a push and pull, an antisyzygy, between despair and determination: on one hand, the landscape was once dominated by dark satanic mills “grim as the reaper with a heart like hell”; on the other, those mills promised some sort of future and allowed people to dream. On one hand, the mills reduced men to a “river of bodies” flowing in and out at the bell every day; on the other, they raised them up as builders of the future. Now it seems that everything they built was “built on sand,” and “finally the dream has gone”—but the guitar outro still sounds like defiant refusal.

Northerners certainly had more cause than most to feel that a world had been lost, but the sense that history was coming to an unhappy conclusion was quite general. In popular music, this feeling that things were winding inexorably down found expression in several ways. David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” was a farewell transmission from Major Tom, stuck in a decaying orbit, “strung out in heaven’s high / hitting an all time low.” Echo and the Bunnymen’s “All That Jazz” imagined gathering at the barricades as “the wheels turn around” and a million years of history fade irresistibly to black. Killing Joke’s “Eighties” imagined the end of this human gyre as the beginning of a new one, in which a “coming race” of posthumans push and struggle to emerge. Similarly, Gary Numan imagined a world, after “the lights fade out,” where friends are electric and “Mach Men meet the machines to play kill by numbers.” The early Human League also offered a vision of a near future in which humanity is subjected to an unstoppable “Circus of Death,” a putative version of the Fascist Groove Thang, intent on exterminating humanity. The last verse of “Circus of Death,” the song’s spoken word intro explains, is “a shortwave radio message from the last man on earth.” Bowie, the Bunnymen, Killing Joke, Gary Numan, the Human League—they were all articulating the same feeling that Irish poet W.B. Yeats had had at the end of World War One, another moment when humanity seemed to have reached a terminal point:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

For Yeats, this falling apart announced the rise of the antichrist, a “rough beast” that would obliterate all that had come before it. He didn’t call it the Fascist Groove Thing but could have.

Another response to this end-of-it-all feeling can be heard in the music of the goth scene that emerged in the early 1980s: Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy, Southern Death Cult, Blood and Roses, Sex Gang Children, Siouxsie and the Banshees. These bands had, as Simon Reynolds says of the Banshees, a “preoccupation with the dark side of human nature, obsession, unreason, and extreme mental states.”³⁸ They also had a preoccupation with looking fabulous. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that both preoccupations had something to do with the sense that Thatcher’s Britain was heading into the darkness. Siouxsie Sioux explained it in “Fireworks”: the goth kids identified with Guy Fawkes, or at any rate with the effigy of him burned on Fireworks Night: “His fuel is our frustration,” Siouxsie Sioux sang, “And dreams begin to ache. … We are fireworks / burning shapes into the night.”

Perhaps the most common response to the feeling that mere anarchy had been loosed upon the world, however, was helpless nostalgia of the kind expressed by the Dream Academy. Throughout the 1980s, the whole nation seemed to be in the grip of it. In 1979, the BBC aired The Antiques Roadshow for the first time, treating viewers to the weekly spectacle of people queueing up to say, like belated T.S. Eliots, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”—and to have experts tell them exactly what their fragments were worth in sterling. Its mixture of nostalgia for a better past, on one hand, and depressing commodification of that past on the other was symptomatic. The late 1970s and early ’80s showed the first signs of what Simon Reynolds has diagnosed as “retromania,” the compulsive revisiting of “fashions, fads, sounds and stars that occurred within living memory.”³⁹ In popular music that meant one musical revival after another: first mod, then ska, then psychedelia, and rockabilly. These in turn were followed by a massive soul revival, announced by Phil Collins’s cover of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and proselytized by the likes of Simply Red, Wet Wet Wet, and Culture Club.⁴⁰ The Style Council, who were caught up in that revival, seemed to recognize, however unwillingly, that there was something dubious about it. Their second album was a sustained and articulate critique of Thatcher’s Britain: “Homebreakers,” “All Gone Away,” “A Stones Throw Away,” “The Lodgers (or She Was Only a Shopkeeper’s Daughter),” “With Everything to Lose,” and “Walls Come Tumbling Down” all documented the economic injustice and incipient fascism of Thatcherism. The album’s title though was Our Favourite Shop, and the cover depicted Weller and Talbot happily browsing through vintage clothing and memorabilia. Beatles posters, a cappuccino machine, copies of 1960s mod magazine Rave, a Rickenbacker guitar, a rack of old paperbacks: The Style Council’s own personal antiques roadshow. It seemed to suggest that, despite the album’s repeated calls to action, what the band were really doing was retreating, unwisely, into Biba’s basement.

The Anti-Nowhere League, who came from Tunbridge Wells and had not previously been known to ask soul-searching questions (they were best known for their anthem “So What?”: “Well I’ve fucked a sheep / and I’ve fucked a goat … So what?”), were also looking longingly over their shoulder by the middle of the decade. They asked their listeners to remember when a united Britain “ruled the waves” and to recall “the strength of ’44.” Then they looked around at the fag ends of empire and shook their heads sadly, “I don’t believe this is my England.” It was their England, of course, and the only one they’d ever known; neither the League nor their fans were anywhere near old enough to remember either 1944 or a time when Britannia could reasonably have claimed to rule the waves. But those historical points of reference were purposeful. They gave concreteness to a nebulous feeling that history had ended, that the sun had set not just on the Empire but on Britain itself, leaving nothing but twilight and leftovers. Britain was, as the Cleaners from Venus put it, “Living with Victoria Grey,” an indifferent but seductively lovely ghost who persuades the living to work, fight, and die for the past. “She looked so good,” Martin Newell sang, “sometimes it was convincing.”

The Clash were not convinced. Nostalgia for the Victorian height of the British Empire too easily shaded into the xenophobic belief that “it would be wine and roses if England were for Englishmen again.” And it depended on a distorted understanding of England’s modern history. In “Something about England,” Joe Strummer dramatizes a conversation with an old man, barely more than a memory propped up in a dirty overcoat (an impoverished counterpart to the aristocratic Victoria Grey), and asks him what he thinks of the gloomy state of the nation. “You really think this is all new?” the old man replies. The Great Depression and hunger marches in the North, the Second World War, brutalist postwar reconstruction, the nuclear arms race—it’s all a history of “masters and servants, and servants and dogs.” England’s current woes, this conscience of the nation says, aren’t because of the immigrants; they’re because the country has never dealt with its inherent inequalities. The country, divided between North and South, working class and ruling class, rich and poor, has never closed those gaps.

images MIXTAPE 7: SHOPKEEPERS ARISE!

X-Ray Spex, “Germ Free Adolescents” (1978)

Joe Jackson, “Sunday Papers” (1978)

John Cooper Clarke, “(You Never See a Nipple in the) Daily Express” (1978)

X-Ray Spex, “Plastic Bag” (1978)

The Pop Group, “We Are All Prostitutes” (1979)

The Slits, “Spend Spend Spend” (1979)

The Clash, “Lost in the Supermarket” (1979)

Gang of Four, “At Home (He’s a Tourist)” (1979)

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Sunday’s Best” (1979)

The Passage, “Locust” (1980)

Girls at Our Best, “Getting Nowhere Fast” (1980)

Diagram Brothers, “Put It in a Bigger Box” (1981)

Gang of Four, “Capital (It Fails Us Now)” (1981)

Anthrax, “Capitalism Is Cannibalism” (1982)

Gang of Four, “Call Me Up” (1982)

The Jam, “The Great Depression” (1982)

Crass, “Nineteen Eighty Bore” (1982)

Gang of Four, “I Will Be a Good Boy” (1982)

The Exploited, “Daily News” (1982)

ABC, “Date Stamp” (1982)

Hit Parade, “Media Song” (1982)

Billy Bragg, “The Busy Girl Buys Beauty” (1983)

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Pills and Soap” (1983)

Heaven 17, “Key to the World” (1983)

Depeche Mode, “Everything Counts” (1983)

Depeche Mode, “Work Hard” (1983)

Billy Bragg, “It Says Here” (1984)

Cock Sparrer, “The Sun Says” (1984)

Dexys Midnight Runners, “This Is What She’s Like” (1985)

Robert Wyatt, “The Age of Self” (1985)

Instigators, “The Fix” (1985)

Age of Chance, “Kiss” (1986)

Depeche Mode, “New Dress” (1986)

Leon Rosselson, “Jackboot Democrats” (1986)

McCarthy, “The Procession of Popular Capitalism” (1987)

Pet Shop Boys, “Shopping” (1987)

Close Lobsters, “From This Day On” (1988)

Culture Shock, “Colour TV” (1988)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik, “Success” (1988)

Harry Enfield, “Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up the House)” (1988)

Tears for Fears, “Sowing the Seeds of Love” (1989)

Phil Collins, “Another Day in Paradise” (1989)

The Man from Delmonte, “My Love Is Like a Gift You Can’t Return” (1989)

McCarthy, “And Tomorrow the Stock Exchange Will Be the Human Race” (1990)

McCarthy, “I’m on the Side of Mankind as Much as the Next Man” (1990)

McCarthy, “The Drinking Song of the Merchant Bankers” (1990)

Bradford, “Greed and Peasant Land” (1990)

The gaps pointed to by the Clash’s old man were, if anything, only getting wider under Thatcher’s regime. If the consequence of Thatcherism was, for many, an “English wipeout,” for some it was a wave of prosperity. For those lucky enough to catch this wave (and capable of averting their gaze from what was happening elsewhere), the mid to late 1980s were good times. Maybe even “dancing around in frilly shirts and pretending to be in Rio” good times. Robert Wyatt called it “The Age of Self”; Tears for Fears called it “the politics of greed.” Thatcher, for her part, called it “nothing less than a crusade.” In her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1986, she said:

In Scotland recently, I was present at the sale of the millionth council house: to a lovely family with two children, who can at last call their home their own. Now let’s go for the second million! And what’s more, millions have already become shareholders. And soon there will be opportunities for millions more, in British Gas, British Airways, British Airports and Rolls-Royce.… Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation.⁴¹

By “popular capitalism” she meant two things: first, the ability of tenants to buy their council houses, which had been made possible by the 1980 Housing Act, and, second, the ability of the general public to buy shares in newly privatized national industries—in both cases at a steep discount.⁴² The former, touted as the “Right to Buy” was particularly successful; by 1983 half a million council houses had been sold; by 1986, as Thatcher noted, a million.⁴³ And wherever working-class voters bought their houses at a discount, Thatcher got the same deal on working-class (now property-owning middle-class) voters.⁴⁴

This is no knock on those who took the opportunity to improve their economic situation; who in their right mind could have refused? But to the band McCarthy (Barking’s second most important cultural export after Billy Bragg), the whole thing suggested nothing so much as Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market.” In Rosetti’s poem, two penniless young girls hear goblins calling “come buy, come buy,” offering an array of delicacies, which, it turns out, will enthral and corrupt the soul of the consumer. One of the girls, Laura, is seduced into tasting their wares and pays the various rat-faced and cat-faced goblins with a golden lock of her hair. In McCarthy’s “The Procession of Popular Capitalism,” the goblins become a parade of “top civil servants and captains of industry” parading down Whitehall calling “Come buy our shares!” “Come along buy your council home!” The singer is, like Laura, penniless; unlike her, he is not seduced. He watches as a host of “MPs, careerists and gutter-press editors” join the procession, while the police silence any dissenters who would point out that, despite its populist appeal, the procession of popular capitalism is not open to everyone. Among those left standing on the margin are all those without the financial resources to “come buy, come buy.” That included the hippies, punks, and anarchists who had tried, in 1983 and ’84 to “Stop the City.” As the procession of popular capitalism wended its way through the City, the protesters couldn’t even get in the way anymore; the introduction of electronic trading in 1986 meant that clogging the streets no longer had any impact on business. As the City financier in the Pet Shop Boys’ song “Shopping” gloated, “We’re buying and selling your history.… I heard it in the House of Commons: everything’s for sale!”

Depeche Mode, in a sudden and dramatic turn away from the lightweight love songs that had been their stock-in-trade, reacted with the single “Everything Counts” and its B-side “Work Hard.” The two songs contrasted the pinched world of the working man, in which “you’ve got to work hard if you want anything at all,” with the world of the corporate overlords, in which “grabbing hands grab all they can / all for themselves after all.” In that world “everything counts in large amounts.” Glasgow’s Close Lobsters made the same point (at least I think it was the same point; Close Lobsters lyrics tended to be a bit inscrutable): “In banana republic UK / everything’s up for grabs.” This, after all, was the basic scam behind popular capitalism: the common wealth of the nation—British Steel, British Telecom, British Aerospace, British Airways, British Leyland, British Gas—was stolen by the government and the City and then sold back to those individual Britons who could afford it, typically the middleclass Britons Thatcher was fond of referring to as “our people.”⁴⁵

It was a process of turning citizens into consumers, and Thatcher wasn’t coy about it; in the same speech celebrating popular capitalism, she explained: “The great political reform of the last century was to enable more and more people to have a vote. Now the great Tory reform of this century is to enable more and more people to own property.” Of course, Thatcher’s reforms were also producing more and more people who couldn’t afford to own property and who were being turned not into consumers but into vagabonds. Blackburn indie band Bradford, who had a knack for the aptly turned phrase, noticed that England’s “green and pleasant land” was rapidly becoming a “greed and peasant land.” And Leon Rosselson condensed the situation memorably in the song “Jackboot Democrats”:

The jackboot democrats are on parade:

The ones who’re made of money and the ones who’ve got it made

The top brass, the upper class, the highest of the high;

You can watch them on the giant screen that’s blocking off the sky.

…

Here comes a frenzied mob of money-mongers, stockbrokers galore,

Bankers, company directors, speculators by the score,

And they’re trampolining skyward with great singleness of mind

Propelled by jets of noxious gases that they’re burping out behind.

By the end of the decade this “singleness of mind,” combined with rising house prices and rising unemployment, produced unprecedented levels of homelessness in Britain’s major cities.⁴⁶ Musical trampolinist Phil Collins observed the homeless with a gush of sentiment and a pleasurable shudder, in “Another Day in Paradise,” and wondered, “Is there nothing more anybody can do?”—as if he and the Conservative Party had done everything they could think of and yet people still insisted on living in the streets. The problem, Bradford pointed out, was that “All the wealth in the world today / Can’t buy a heart.”

In any case, from here on in, the citizen’s right to choose their government would be supplanted by the consumer’s right to choose their home furnishings (Thatcher’s “fridges, Hoovers and electric washing machines”). In their study of rock and gender, Simon Reynolds and Joy Press suggest that this gilded disenfranchisement was especially complete for women, and they argue that the rise of consumer culture in the 1980s effectively “stifled women’s political speech and then redirected self-expression to the shopping mall.”⁴⁷ Already at the beginning of the 1980s, though, the Slits had pointed out that it wasn’t just political speech that was being replaced by shopping. In “Spend Spend Spend,” Ari Up’s persona, unable to communicate with her sexual partner, complained, “I have to buy / I need consoling / I need something new / something trivial to do.” Women weren’t the only ones to fall victim to shopping-as-self-improvement, but the beauty industry had spent decades preparing women to become consumer-subjects. As the Slits noted, “typical girls” had always been required to “worry about spots, fat, and natural smells,” ideally becoming what X-Ray Spex called “germ free adolescents,” deodorized and antiseptic. So consumerism tended to look like a feminine disorder. Billy Bragg, in an uncharacteristically condescending moment, noted, “The busy girl buys beauty / the pretty girl buys style / and the simple girl buys what she’s told to buy.” But increasingly through the 1980s, the message communicated by the media, not just to women but to men too, was “you have the power to change your life, to maximize your potential for health, fitness, pleasure.”⁴⁸ Or, to quote Thatcher on Acid and the Fall, respectively, “Buy Yourself Better” and “Eat Y’self Fitter.” Crucially, as Reynolds and Press remark, the responsibility for this improvement rested not with society but with the individual, not with the citizen but with the consumer.⁴⁹

There were several economic innovations facilitating this transition from citizenship to consumerism, including mortgage tax relief for homeowners (a subsidy that represented a straightforward transfer of wealth from the poor to the propertied),⁵⁰ a reduction in the base rate of income tax,⁵¹ and the increasing availability of easy credit. All of it had the effect of encouraging people to take on unprecedented levels of debt. Gang of Four commented, in “Capital (It Fails Us Now),” “The moment I was born, I opened my eyes / I reached out for my credit card.” Heaven 17 sang about a man who similarly finds capital failing him; after deciding to buy himself a “better life” on credit, he goes to the ruinous brink “trying to fill the luxury gap.” And the Godfathers, in a crashing, blues-rock number aptly entitled “Birth School Work Death,” described the same experience, but this time explicitly connecting it to Thatcher. “I’ve kissed Margaret Thatcher’s shoes,” they sang, “I’m living on the never, never, never.” The point was that despite Thatcher’s rhetoric of thrift and personal responsibility (her political philosophy, she claimed, was dedicated to the inculcation of “honesty and thrift and reliability and hard work and a sense of responsibility for your fellow men”),⁵² the most visible effect of popular capitalism was the promotion of intemperance.⁵³ This effect was massively amplified in 1986 when the so-called Big Bang of stock market deregulation produced a new breed of City financiers, more unscrupulous and more ruthless in their sociopathic pursuit of wealth than their bowler-hatted forebears could ever have dreamed of being.⁵⁴ McCarthy satirized this capitalist crusade pretty thoroughly. In “I’m on the Side of Mankind,” Malcolm Eden sang, in the most heartfelt way, “Oh human life, we would like to value it / but if there’s no profit in it, what’s the point?” And in “And Tomorrow the Stock Exchange Will Be the Human Race,” he sang rousingly, “Profit is the only thing worth dying for. … Businessmen and shopkeepers, Arise! Arise! Arise!” Finally, in “The Drinking Song of the Merchant Bankers,” he raised a glass to celebrate: “The oiks have been scattered, the commies smashed / This government has done alright by us!”

McCarthy’s merchant banker was wrong about the oiks, of course.⁵⁵ Some of them, in the South at least, were doing very nicely indeed in the afterglow of the Big Bang. Dexys Midnight Runners dismissed them as “the newly wealthy peasants / with their home bars and hi-fis” for whom everything is “fabulous and super!” And comedian Harry Enfield satirized them mercilessly in the character Loadsamoney, a suddenly (and obnoxiously) affluent cockney plasterer living high on the boom in home renovations. Enfield introduced Loadsamoney on Channel 4’s Saturday Live, where he delighted audiences by telling them to “shut your mouth and look at my wad,” but the character is mainly remembered for the novelty single “Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up the House).” Loadsamoney raps over samples of “Money, Money, Money,” “Big Spender,” “Money (That’s What I Want),” and “Money (Makes the World Go Round),” leering, “Loadsamoney is a shout I utter / as I wave my wad to the geezers in the gutter!”⁵⁶ “On your bike!” he adds, echoing Norman Tebbit’s advice to the unemployed in the North, and, just to properly rub it in, “So the final score / Manchester United: nil / Loadsamoney United: loads!” The satire was spot-on, but Enfield underestimated how immune to criticism the targets of his satire were. In much the same way that trade unionists had adopted the Strawbs’ “Part of the Union” as an anthem in the 1970s, Sun readers adopted Loadsamoney as their mascot in the ’80s, his grinning celebration of his “wad” validating their own self-congratulatory mood.⁵⁷ Enfield responded by dropping the character from his repertoire, but it was too late: “loadsamoney” had already become shorthand for the zeitgeist.

Of course, popular music has always kept a sceptical eye on consumer culture. The Rolling Stones were leery of the satisfaction derived from choosing the right brand of cigarette or the right laundry powder. The Who, announcing themselves for sale, sang about lives ruined for want of the correct deodorant or pimple cream. The Sex Pistols complained about shopping schemes, and Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex complained about being a shopping bag stuffed with “Kleenex for breakfast” and “soft hygienic Weetabix” (“Plastic Bag”). So there was nothing substantively new in the way popular music in Thatcher’s Britain railed against consumerism. What was new, perhaps, was the sheer number of voices raised in protest. The Passage called consumerism “the way of the locust,” a self-defeating round of production and consumption: “eight hours a day to earn a living / eight hours to sleep it off / eight hours to lose it.” Anthrax (not the American metal band but the punk band from Kent) saw it as part of the process of capitalist cannibalism, a system in which you feed yourself by “producing crap,” which you then buy back, in various expensively health-destroying forms, when it’s “displayed on the supermarket shelf.” Leeds post-punks Girls at Our Best saw it as a process of “Getting Nowhere Fast”: “My baby’s buying me another life,” Judy Evans sang, “We’ve lost the warranty; we’ll never get our money back.” The Jam called it “The Great Depression,” a condition in which the logic of consumerism comes to define all human relations: “You buy a house, you buy a car / You buy a marriage and a bed of roses.” The Pop Group put it simply: “We Are All Prostitutes.” Sounding uncannily like Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, they squawked and gurgled through their trout masks, “Consumer Fascism! … Department stores are our new Cathedrals!” It was a theme Gang of Four also explored, almost obsessively, between 1979 and 1983. Drawing on theories borrowed from what their guitarist Andy Gill suggestively calls “the Benny Hill end of Marxism,”⁵⁸ they routinely conflated the language of commerce and the language of love. In songs such as “At Home He’s a Tourist” (“at home she’s looking for interest”), “I Will Be a Good Boy” (“as they dance the dollar is falling”), and “Call Me Up” (“consume me with a new passion”), they tried to keep their sense of humour even as they worried about the totalitarian reach of consumerism.

Other bands picked up on the commercial metaphor but generally seemed less tormented by its theoretical, sociopolitical implications. ABC’s Martin Fry offered his heart for sale, new and improved in a redesigned package, and hoped to find “the girl that meets supply with demand.” But, he warned coyly, “Love has no guarantee.” Manchester band the Man from Delmonte would revisit this theme, at the end of the decade, from the perspective of a suitor who refuses to accept that his attempt at commerce has failed. Unlike other goods, which you can send back if they’re faulty, he tells the object of his affection, “my love is like a gift you can’t return / Even if you want to.” Heaven 17 explored the theme too. In “I’m Your Money,” Glenn Gregory implored his would-be wife to “buy the pleasure commodity” and “order now our emotional life.” Heaven 17, particularly, seemed a lot less worried than Gang of Four about the implications of being money. The cover of their first album, Penthouse and Pavement, depicted them all in business attire, hard at work at the keyboard and on the phone, conferring at the office, and shaking hands over their production company B.E.F., “The New Partnership—That’s opening doors all over the world.” This was band as corporation, album as business prospectus.

Performance artists Throbbing Gristle had already done something similar with their label Industrial Records, through which they “conspired to parody the music industry, issuing annual reports, newsletters and promotional material for product that defied the conventions of popular music.”⁵⁹ And the New Pop artists who were coming up around Heaven 17 happily and unironically embraced the principle that every successful band is a multinational corporation.⁶⁰ For them, the inspiration didn’t come from Throbbing Gristle, of course, so much as David Bowie, who had demonstrated that “a pop star was not a passive commodity but an auteur, whose creative field was the marketplace itself.”⁶¹ So Heaven 17 were only half joking in their business suits; the other half was part imitation of electronic pop pioneers Kraftwerk (who had also affected business attire to emphasize their corporate identity), part assertion that B.E.F. meant business (they were going to beat the music industry at its own game), and part fashion (as Dave Rimmer points out, “Corporate chic was in”).⁶² That this all meant Heaven 17 had to dress up as the living embodiment of international capital to sing “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” was more than a little ironic. But, then, implicit in their adoption of entrepreneurial drag was an acknowledgement that pop music and the Fascist Groove Thing are made of the same stuff; there is more than a merely syntactical possibility that the adjective this in the phrase “this fascist groove thang” actually refers to the song itself. After all, the song does begin with the distinctly totalitarian command, “Everybody move to prove the groove.”

This was exactly what had worried cultural theorist Theodor Adorno about popular music back in the 1940s, when it seemed (to him) that fascism, the masses, and popular music were intimately related problems:

To be musical means to [the masses] to be capable of following given rhythmical patterns.… This is the way in which their response to music immediately expresses their desire to obey. However, as the standardized meter of dance music and of marching suggests the coordinated battalions of a mechanical collectivity, obedience to this rhythm by overcoming the responding individuals leads them to conceive of themselves as agglutinized with the untold millions of the meek who must be similarly overcome. Thus do the obedient inherit the earth.⁶³

This was all pleasingly ambiguous in “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang.” By the mid-1980s, unfortunately, Heaven 17 had lost control of the irony, releasing a series of indistinguishably boring dance singles, like failed businessmen shopping around an increasingly unpersuasive business prospectus. They’d given up pretending that success meant anything other than success on the Fascist Groove Thing’s terms.

By contrast, cartoonish cyberpunks Sigue Sigue Sputnik, whose experiments with the rock-band-as-corporation motif echoed Heaven 17’s, never pretended that this wasn’t the case. Tony James, formerly of Generation X, said he was “interested in the idea of the rock star as businessman and advertising mogul.”⁶⁴ Indeed, his intention was to emulate Malcolm McLaren’s Situationist-inspired marketing of Generation X’s contemporaries the Sex Pistols.⁶⁵ The cover of their first album Flaunt It (a “Sputnik Corporation Record” released by “Sputnik World Enterprises”) featured a side panel offering advertising space for sale. In fact, the band had already sold advertising space on the album itself, Tony James confidently explaining to Melody Maker that this would “drastically change the record industry.”⁶⁶ In the end, L’Oréal and i-D magazine bought space between tracks, but the other slots had to be filled with phoney adverts, so not quite the paradigm shifting breakthrough Tony James had anticipated. Nevertheless, side one ended with the announcement, “Sex, technology, excitement, records, films, products, real estate and video games. Sigue Sigue Sputnik provide all this and more. Let Sputnik World Enterprises handle your ultimate fantasy.… Pleasure is our business.” The album itself was little more than the same song repackaged eight times—its producer Giorgio Moroder was, apparently, “a little perplexed the songs all sounded the same”⁶⁷—a knowing, hilarious triumph of marketing. Never mind that advertisers were not necessarily willing to play along at their own expense. In any case, by the mid-1980s, the integration of music production into the advertising and entertainment industry was already more total and more sophisticated than Sputnik’s heavy-handed satire suggested.⁶⁸

Sputnik’s follow-up album Dress for Excess continued in the same vein, although a note on the back cover betrayed some anxiety that people weren’t getting the joke. “THE GENIUS OF SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK * 3 CHORDS* $1m SYNTHESIZERS * GET ON SOCIETIES’ NERVES.” The real genius of Sputnik, however, was to create a form of postmodern irony so hermetic that there was no escape. The album’s single, “Success,” simultaneously revelled in and critiqued the conspicuous consumption made possible by the band’s previous singles “Love Missile F1-11” and “21st Century Boy,” while managing to both wink and sneer at its audience. “I’m your God, I’ve just arrived / A beatbox Jesus dancing jive.” It sounded like a band grinning madly while slowly running out of air.

Age of Chance, best known for their raucous cover of Prince’s “Kiss,” also had a try at Situationist subversion, offering themselves as indigestible anticommodity. They released a string of crashingly noisy 12″ singles, which they characterized as “sonic metal disco.” “Be Fast! Be Clean! Be Cheap!” they demanded. Their record covers were filled with slogans jumbling vague socialism, Situationist irony, and crass self-promotion into an overstimulated mess: “WE DIG EVERYTHING AND ARE SHOCKED BY NOTHING”; “Radio is the medium of frenzy”; “YOU CAN LIVE FOREVER WITH AGE OF CHANCE”; “LOUDNESS IS A FORCE”; “ACTION MUST BE WEIGHED & SOLD LIKE ANY OTHER COMMODITY”; “THIS IS MORAL CHAOS, AS WAS PLANNED …” The band’s guitarist, Neil Howson, explained their cover version of “Kiss”: “if a Rolls-Royce drives past it’s no good just swearing or shouting at it—you have to stop the car, smash its bodywork, kick the windows in and then drag out the occupants and stone them to death. Well, that’s what we’ve done to ‘Kiss.”⁶⁹ Delightfully, they were inspired to do this violence when they heard Edinburgh art-punks the Fire Engines doing the same thing to Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” on the John Peel show.⁷⁰

Most pop critiques of the commodity, though, looked outwards at other forms of mass media. Advertising, naturally, was a particular object of criticism. Billy Bragg (“The Busy Girl Buys Beauty”), Thatcher on Acid (“Buy Yourself Better”), Joe Jackson (“I’m the Man”), Culture Shock (“Ten Per Cent Off”), and performance poet John Cooper Clarke (“Gimmix”) all had a go at it. The Diagram Brothers, though, offered what was probably the definitive digest of the industry’s methods in “Put It in a Bigger Box”: “We will sell you something pointless / Put it in a bigger box than it needs to be in / It will make you someone special.” But mass media as a whole came in for some serious scrutiny. In “Pills and Soap,” Elvis Costello expressed contempt for the way TV news approached human tragedy “with a microphone in one hand and a chequebook in the other.” He also summarized the lurid contents of the average Sunday paper in “Sunday’s Best,” beginning with the headline “Times are tough for English babies” and concluding with “Blame it all upon the darkies,” with stories about dismembered corpses hidden under beds, adverts for slacks, and complaints that the country is going “to the dogs and down the drains” in between. Billy Bragg execrated the way “politics mix with bingo and tits” in the tabloids (“It Says Here”). And Cock Sparrer catalogued the toxic contents of the Sun specifically: red scares, pictures of topless women, interviews with mass murderers’ wives, Lady Di, celebrity gossip, and at least one headline identifying some portion of society as “scum.” It was a term the Sun used indiscriminately for “all prisoners, all criminals, drug-takers, football hooligans, most blacks, homosexuals, militant trade unionists, muggers, students, the Greenham Women, demonstrators, hippies, dossers, tramps, beggars, social security scroungers, squatters, terrorists (especially the IRA), vandals, graffiti artists, prostitutes, gypsies, the mentally ill, winos, essentially all foreigners especially the Filthy Frogs and Cheating Krauts and all social deviants.”⁷¹ Everyone, basically, except Loadsamoney. Ironically, despite its reactionary conservatism, the majority of the Sun’s readers were Labour voters.⁷² Billy Bragg begged them to “wake up to the fact / that your paper’s Tory,” but many of them continued to believe it was a Labour newspaper.

Punk poet John Cooper Clarke pointed out that it wasn’t just the papers with page three girls that traded in right-wing sleaze. “You Never See a Nipple in the Daily Express,” he commented, but it’s “boring, mindless, mean / Full of pornography, the kind that’s clean”: hysterical, sensational attacks on communists, unions, and blacks, all “in the grim pursuit of happiness.”* And Depeche Mode commented on the levelling effect of the tabloid press’s indiscriminate sensationalism and the way the mass media hardly seemed to distinguish between murder, bombings, terrorism, famine, natural disasters, riots, and the news that “Princess Di is wearing a new dress.” It was all just entertainment. Others went further, arguing that mass media was weakening people’s grip on reality. In Joe Jackson’s “Sunday Papers,” the singer’s mother has reached a point where she never leaves the house and no longer has any use for the real world because the TV and the Sunday papers deliver a convenient simulacrum of it to her. So now her world consists of naughty bishops, crazed punk rockers, gay politicians, and novel sex positions. And the whole thing presents itself to her as so seamlessly real that she never questions it.

The advent of colour television had something to do with this (it wasn’t until the late 1970s that colour sets outnumbered black and white ones in the UK). As Culture Shock, the band started by Dick Lucas after Subhumans broke up, noted sardonically, as more and more people were afforded the luxury of colour televisions, they were also discovering it was all more entertaining in colour, “Cos the blood runs redder on colour TVs.” In “Nineteen Eighty Bore” Crass warned that the entire culture was in thrall to this spectacle.⁷³ “Big brother ain’t watching you, mate,” they warned. “You’re fucking watching him.” Others in Crass’s circle took up the critique. Hit Parade, a quirky electronic project from Belfast, recorded “Media Song” with some help from Crass’s Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine on vocals:

Third world wars and TV riots:

Anything to keep us quiet.

Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet,

Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet,

Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet,

Hahahahahhahahahahah!

Participation is prevented.

Whatever the ostensible subject of the broadcast, what people were really watching, quietly, on the giant screen blocking off the sky was Power admiring itself as it shook its Fascist Groove Thing. “We don’t need your TV,” Hit Parade said, but they were wrong. Britain was in thrall to “video nasties.”* Riffing on Guy Debord’s description of the modern world as “the society of the spectacle,” Yorkshire punks the Instigators said Britain had become “the race of the media.” They were signalling that the transition from citizen to consumer was complete. And the transition from consumer to consumed was well under way.

* Other bands who had things to say about the nation’s newspapers included the Boomtown Rats (“Don’t Believe What You Read”), the Jam (“News of the World”), the Clash (“The Leader”), Instant Automatons (“Armchair Politics”), Angelic Upstarts (“Power of the Press”), the Newtown Neurotics (“Kick Out the Tories!”), and the Exploited, who, as usual, got straight to the heart of the matter: “They’re just a bunch of arseholes / They’re all insane.”

* That term is usually used to refer to the pornographic VHS tapes that flooded into Thatcher’s free-market Britain, but take it here to include all manner of nastiness: wars and disasters, royal weddings, Live Aid, The Antiques Roadshow, Duran Duran’s frilly shirts, and the rest.

PART FOUREnemies of the State

The Falklands War was conceived as a spectacle by both Margaret Thatcher Productions and by the Argentinian junta, and in fact neither Britain nor Argentina ever actually declared war.¹ Both governments simply announced that the Falkland Islands were a “war zone”; viewers could follow the adventures of the Thatcher simulacrum as it clobbered the General Galtieri simulacrum, in lurid colour, in their newspapers and on their televisions, reassured that the show would remain safely contained in the circus arena of the South Atlantic. Raymond Briggs, best known as the author of the children’s books Fungus the Bogeyman and The Snowman, satirized this spectacle by producing what was also, ostensibly a children’s picture book, The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman. On the book’s cover, Galtieri and Thatcher glare at one another and shout “Mine!” over a “sad little island” in a big blue sea.² “Help!” says the little island. Neither leader is “real” in this story. The former is “made of tin pots,” the latter is “made of iron”; both are obscene. The colourfully illustrated narrative explains how the Tin Pot General “bagsied the sad little island” and the Old Iron Woman “got all her soldiers and guns and she put them into boats … to bagsy the sad little island back again.” But the bright colours and clear lines yield to murky charcoal sketches when the story reaches the confession, “Some men were shot.”

images MIXTAPE 8: WINSTON THATCHER

Spizzenergi, “Soldier Soldier” (1979)

The Exploited, “Army Life” (1980)

M, “Your Country Needs You” (1980)

Varukers, “Soldier Boy” (1981)

The Cockney Rejects, “The Power and the Glory” (1981)

UB40, “Present Arms” (1981)

Crass, “Sheep Farming in the Falklands” (1982)

Mayhem, “Patriots” (1982)

Robert Wyatt, “Shipbuilding” (1982)

The Fall, “Marquis Cha Cha” (1982)

Cock Sparrer, “England Belongs to Me” (1982)

Abrasive Wheels, “Army Song” (1982)

Madness, “Blue Skinned Beast” (1982)

Anthrax, “Violence Is Violence” (1982)

Icons of Filth, “Your Military” (1983)

UK Subs, “After the War” (1983)

Crass, “How Does It Feel (to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)?” (1983)

Icons of Filth, “Virus” (1983)

Crass, “Gotcha” (1983)

The Exploited, “Let’s Start a War … (Said Maggie One Day)” (1983)

Danbert Nobacon, “Declaring Peace” (1984)

Cock Sparrer, “They Mean Murder” (1984)

The Bluebells, “South Atlantic Way” (1984)

New Model Army, “Spirit of the Falklands” (1984)

Bronski Beat, “No More War” (1984)

Passion Killers, “Judging by Headlines” (1984)

The Faith Brothers, “Easter Parade” (1985)

Twa Toots, “A New Depression” (1986)

Joe Jackson, “Tango Atlantico” (1986)

The Neurotics, “You Must Be Mad” (1988)

John Cale, “The Falklands Suite” (1989)

In the years immediately before the Falklands War, antiwar songs had often treated the figure of the soldier unsympathetically as a “killing machine” (the Exploited, “Army Life”), a monster made of “flesh and steel” (UB40, “Present Arms”), a hysterical Dalek (Blah Blah Blah, “In the Army”), a “vampire” (Varukers, “Soldier Boy”), a thug kitted out in “fascist jackboots” (Spizzenergi, “Soldier Soldier”), or simply as an “arsehole” (M, “Your Country Needs You”). Crass even carried this critical attitude into the first weeks of the Falklands War, satirizing the British soldiers as sheep fuckers in a hurriedly released 7″ flexi-disc, “Sheep Farming in the Falklands.” A genuinely childish piece of satire, Crass clearly regretted it as soon as reports of casualties started to arrive from the South Atlantic. “How Does It Feel (to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)?” quickly followed, rehumanizing the soldiers sent to fight and die, and addressing Thatcher: “Your inhumanity stops you from realising the pain / that you inflicted, you determined, you created, you ordered / It was your decision to have those young boys slaughtered.”

Others made the same point, including the Exploited (“War”), and Stoke-on-Trent punks the Skeptix (“So the Youth”). Crass also rerecorded “Sheep Farming” with very different lyrics and issued it with a new B-side “Gotcha” in 1983. The revised version of “Sheep Farming” offered a damning assessment of why Thatcher had sent so many boys to die. Eve Libertine, doing a quite good Thatcher impersonation explained:

My political neck means more to me than the lives of a thousand men,

If I felt it might be of use to me I’d do it all over again.

The Falklands was really a coverup job to obscure the mistakes I’ve made,

And you know I think the gamble I took could certainly be said to have paid.

With unemployment at an all-time high and the country falling apart

I, Winston Thatcher, reign supreme in this great nation’s heart.

Even Thatcher’s most sympathetic biographers concede this point: she sent troops into the Falklands in a desperate bid to salvage a politically disastrous situation of her own making.³ Her decision to reduce the size of the Royal Navy had signalled to the Argentine junta that Britain was not committed to defending her outposts from invasion.⁴ And her subsequent decision to withdraw Britain’s token naval presence—the patrol vessel HMS Endurance—signalled to them that the time to invade had arrived. In her relentlessly self-justifying autobiography The Downing Street Years Thatcher insists that “the invasion could not have been foreseen or prevented,”⁵ but by her own logic her actions made it inevitable. The Downing Street Years heaps derision on the antinuclear movement’s belief that disarmament was the best road to peace, explaining, “History has repeatedly demonstrated quite the opposite.”⁶ But attempting to explain away her failure to defend British troops in the Falklands, Thatcher argues that “nothing would have more reliably precipitated a full-scale invasion … than if we started military preparations on the scale required to send an effective deterrent.”⁷ Of course, one of the nice things about being absolutely convinced of your own rectitude is that you can offer contradictory self-justifications without any shame at all.

Be that as it may, when Argentina accepted the tacit invitation to invade the Falklands (along with South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands) Thatcher realized her political neck was in the noose. In the name of monetarist fiscal restraint, she had brought Britain’s unemployment levels to an all-time high; also in the name of monetarist fiscal restraint, she had brought the British Empire to an all-time low, humiliated by a dim-witted and frequently drunk South American dictator.⁸ Thatcher’s political career was over: even before this blunder, the Conservative Party had been firmly on track for a historic defeat in the next general election, stuck in third place behind the new Social Democratic Party–Liberal alliance and Labour.⁹ So Crass may have been giving Thatcher too much credit as a political strategist when they had her calculating that the Falklands War was a worthwhile “gamble.” Since military defeat could hardly have made her situation worse, sending troops to the South Atlantic on the off-chance of victory wasn’t much of a political gamble at all.

Yet Crass were right that, having started a quite unnecessary war, Thatcher relished the opportunity to identify herself with Winston Churchill.¹⁰ She convened her war council at Checkers, the prime minister’s country residence, recalling that “Churchill had used it quite a lot during the Second World War and its atmosphere helped to get us all together.”¹¹ Indeed, the opportunity to invoke and appropriate the memory of the Second World War was probably more politically valuable to Thatcher than the conflict’s convenient distraction from the failure of monetarism. Kwasi Kwarteng remarks, “All through her life Thatcher revelled in bold, concrete and binary thinking. There would be no compromise, no shades of grey in her forthright world view. There was freedom and slavery, justice and injustice, right and wrong. This binary thinking was perhaps the most fundamental legacy of her strong Biblebased upbringing.”¹² Between 1979 and 1982, she had applied this binary logic relentlessly to Britain’s economy: on the side of freedom, right, and justice were monetarism and the free market; on the side of wrong were Keynesian economics and the welfare state. On one side, “our people”; on the other, as John Campbell puts it, “a ragtag army of shirkers, scroungers, socialists, trade unionists, ‘wets’, liberals, fellow-travelling intellectuals and peace campaigners.”¹³ To Thatcher this was all very black and white. But most Britons inconveniently persisted in seeing shades of grey. Even Thatcher’s own backbenchers—even her own cabinet, until she purged it of the so-called wets in 1981—had reservations about the rightness of leaving three million people unemployed. War, however, was a different matter. Once war was declared, most Britons eagerly embraced the binary logic of us against them, instantly becoming Thatcher’s people.

In “Tango Atlantico,” Joe Jackson sneered at Thatcher’s Churchillian pretensions (as she dances the tango with General Galtieri, “she flashes victory signs and smokes cigars”), but she played the part to the hilt, painting the outcome of the war as a moral victory as well as a military one. In a speech made two weeks after the end of the conflict, Thatcher said, “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead found a new confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true eight thousand miles away.”¹⁴ With Britain’s victory in the South Atlantic, she was happy to say, “Right had prevailed.”¹⁵ This conflation of the “rightness” of the Falklands War and that of Thatcher’s economic policies was as potent as it was spurious, something Thatcher’s “enemies within” would shortly discover. But, as Crass remarked in “Gotcha,” Britain in the aftermath of the Falklands was truly “Thatcher’s Britain, built on national pride / built on national heritage and the bodies of those who died.” Scottish indie band the Bluebells, best known for their slightly annoying but basically harmless hit “Young at Heart,” made the same point: “I believed what the papers say / and I believed all that yesterday,” they sang, but today “another vote’s been won” with “another masked, official lie / another dead son.”

The title of Crass’s “Gotcha” was a reference to the notorious Sun headline which had celebrated the sinking of the Argentine ship General Belgrano, and the loss of 323 lives, with the headline “Gotcha!” What had horrified Crass about the headline, as it did many people, was the profound hatefulness of it. What outraged Anthrax about it was the hypocrisy: the Sun routinely ran dismayed reports on “violent Britain,” and gasped, “Could you really believe this is happening on a British street?” But, at the flip of a switch, they were suddenly celebrating “lost limbs, ugly vengeance and hate.” “One minute they’re deploring it / The next they’re adoring it,” Anthrax pointed out, “But violence is violence, no matter who inflicts it.” Others would expand upon this critique of the media’s role in supporting the war. New Model Army characterized the Falklands as a cynical calculation on the part of the government that the unemployed “cooped up on estates” would “die if they only had something to die for,” and an equally cynical calculation, on the part of the media, that they could profit by providing that something. Indeed, they stood to profit twice: first from the sale of jingoistic propaganda, and then from the sensationalized results, “plugging the Falklands and the Falklands spirit … ’til the next war comes around.” In “Your Military,” Cardiff punks Icons of Filth critiqued the way movies sell the “glory” of war and television capitalizes on the sacrifice of those who become glory’s scapegoats: “tattered khaki in foreign mud / for the world war cameras and the lovers of blood.” Like the Skids’ decommissioned industrial labourer, in the song “Charles,” the soldier ends up as scrap. But in this system the scrap price of the soldier is claimed not by his widow but by the media which produced it.

Cock Sparrer pointed out that the reach of the media was even deeper than this critique of film, newspapers, and television suggests: even kids’ war comics (“murder disguised as fairy tales”) are articulated with the jingoistic apparatus of flags, anthems, and parades which the ruling class use to disguise their murders (“They Mean Murder”). Icons of Filth offered the suggestive image of “hypodermic lies syringed at birth” to describe the way “media glorifies and poorly justifies what we die for” (“Virus”). The Exploited concluded that it should be obvious: “You fight for your country / you die for their gain.” But when they imagined Thatcher saying, “Let’s start a war … They won’t suss us,” they probably weren’t far off the mark.

This was a recurring theme in songs about the Falklands: the irony that the deaths of hundreds of young men, which should have been a reason to question Thatcher’s decision to go to war, became the occasion for uncritical support of it as people rallied behind “our boys.” The Neurotics told people “You Must Be Mad” to reward Thatcher for “that training scheme in Port Stanley.” Bronski Beat begged, “No more sending young men to fight / as they die for false glory and false pride.” Abrasive Wheels insisted, “There’s no honour in dying for the love of your country” when the fight isn’t for your country but for the profit of the ruling class. The UK Subs’ “After the War” pointed out that all of the things people tell themselves (or are told by the media) that they’re fighting for are illusions. After the war, the song says, there will be celebration and song and an end to fighting, guns, machines, red tape, and armies. But the relentless repetition of the phrase “after the war” at the beginning of every single line eventually drives home the point that there is no “after the war,” no “when we’ve won.” The only people who win are the industrial, military, and political leaders who make guns, machines, red tape, and wars. The album that includes “After the War” is called Flood of Lies, and its cover depicts a Thatcher-headed demon holding court while a host of lesser demons grovel at her feet. A pile of human skulls tumbles down behind her. Less hyperbolically, John Cale was moved to write settings for several poems by fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas. Recorded as “The Falklands Suite” they included “Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed,” a poem for drowned sailors, and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” Thomas’s appeal to the dying. In the context of “The Falklands Suite” it also becomes an appeal to the living: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Listening to all these songs, one might get the impression that the Falklands had been an unpopular war. But so many bands felt compelled to warn against propaganda and uncritical patriotism precisely because the war had been very popular indeed, not least of all among the troops doing the actual fighting. As John Campbell notes, “To the men in the South Atlantic ‘Maggie’ was not just a civilian Prime Minister playing politics with their lives. She was a leader they were proud to fight for.”¹⁶ And this wasn’t just a matter of uncritical patriotism. As Mark E. Smith pointed out in the Fall’s “Marquis Cha Cha,” the Argentinian government was a vicious, right-wing military dictatorship. It struck Smith as deeply ironic that Britain’s left-leaning “intelligentsia” and “educated kids” should object to combatting it. Many agreed with Smith and believed that England had a responsibility to protect the Falkland Islanders.

There were also economic reasons why, for some, the war seemed an occasion for celebration. For example, in the shipyards of Tyneside, which were in a steep decline that Thatcher’s proposed cuts to the navy would have accelerated, the declaration of war meant new commissions. In “Shipbuilding” Robert Wyatt and Elvis Costello asked, “Is it worth it?” Are “a new coat and shoes for the wife” worth it when you know that people will die in the ships you build? But, if the question was meant to be directed at Tyneside’s working-class families, then the answer was obvious: yes. After all, these were people who had been building ships and dying in them for generations. As the song has them reply, “It’s all we’re skilled in.” And this points to another reason why the working class (if not the intelligentsia and the educated kids) overwhelmingly supported the war: class pride. Cock Sparrer may have been critical of the jingoism that surrounded the war in retrospect (“They Mean Murder” was released in 1984), but in 1982 their anthemic single “England Belongs to Me” expressed a widespread sentiment: after years of humiliating unemployment and being told “our country’s going bust,” the Falklands War was a chance to “show the world the boys are back … fighting all the way / For the red, white and blue.”

It’s worth noting here that this class pride—built on the working class’s historical contribution to British power and prestige—was the reason why bands associated with the so-called Oi! movement tended to sound flag-wavingly right-wing even when they weren’t.¹⁷ The term Oi! was coined by music journalist Garry Bushell to identify a distinctively working-class strain of second-wave punk which, at its best, wedded a refusal of the “dodgy politics” of “right-wing nutters” and “communist loonies” (as Oi Polloi put it in “Commies and Nazis”) with a beery sense of humour about itself. The manifesto on the back cover of the compilation The Oi! of Sex had it about right; it began:

Oi is … having a laugh and having a say.

Oi is … thinking for yourself.

Oi is … not getting conned.

Oi is … bigger than any uniform.

Oi is … knowing no one is better than you.

Oi is … standing up for your rights.

So, for example, the Cockney Rejects’ “The Power and the Glory,” released in 1981, explicitly critiques the appeal to patriotism, observing that whenever ships are sent out “to restore England’s pride” it’s working-class boys who are sent off in them by the laughing wealthy and told it’s a “privilege to be murdered for your king.” Paradoxically, the song also acknowledges the appeal of “the power and the glory.” In 1981, the Cockney Rejects reckon, the only thing the working class has left to hang its pride upon is “our boys who died,” so they can look back and see how Britain’s wars have both exploited the working class and been its finest hours. When they sing about “the power and the glory / the power and the pride,” they may be ambivalent, but they’re also sincere. Released a year before the Falklands War, “The Power and the Glory” goes a long way towards explaining why so many people were eager for the fight. “We will rise again” the song promises; with the Falklands War it looked like the resurrection had arrived.

Finally, for the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne who had spent most of their careers in what Elvis Costello called “Oliver’s Army,” an army of endless and inglorious occupation in Ireland, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, deployment to the Falklands represented a welcome change of role. Members of the Parachute Regiment explained to Conservative MP Alan Clark “that they felt happier defending ‘our people’ than ‘mucking around in the Third World.”¹⁸ While there may have been more than a hint of racism in the observation, a complaint about the “white man’s burden,” the point was that, instead of being used as killing machines sent off to “smile and kill” on “foreign shores,” as UB40 put it, soldiers were being given an opportunity to defend their own against a fascist dictator. In that respect, it was like World War II, a good war.

It was only after the victory celebrations had died down and the red, white, and blue had been packed away that popular music started to count the cost. This is hardly surprising; the war had only lasted ten weeks (April 2–June 14, 1982), allowing little time to record and release a response. The only song about the Falklands to actually come out during the war was Crass’s flexi version of “Sheep Farming in the Falklands.” The only other band who came close were the Southport punk band Mayhem, whose first EP was recorded in May and released a couple of weeks after the conflict ended. It included the song “Patriots” which they intended as a warning to Britons “not to be led into war blindly.”¹⁹ Unfortunately, the only comprehensible lyric was the chorus that opened the song: “What shall we do with the Argie bastards?” Coming so soon on the heels of Britain’s victory, it sounded like nationalist gloating. “There was a backlash in the New Musical Express,” lead singer Mick McGee recalled ruefully. NME hadn’t really earned the right to take the moral high ground; the paper was happy enough to write about police violence, race riots, and antinuclear protests, but, as Danbert Nobacon (aka Nigel Hunter of Chumbawamba) pointed out, “When the Falklands War was happening / The New Musical Express didn’t say a word about it.” Nevertheless, Mayhem understandably wished they had put the song’s lyrics on the record sleeve.²⁰

The backlash Mayhem experienced reflected the fact that, once the war was over, popular music was unwilling, as the Passion Killers (aka Darren, Mave, and Boff of Chumbawamba) put it, to “just accept and push to the side / the thought of a thousand people that died.” And it wasn’t just the punks; bands of all musical stripes demanded an accounting of the human cost.* Joe Jackson, for example, pointed out that, eighteen months after the war, the price of Thatcher’s Churchill fantasy was still being paid: prosaically by soldiers still stationed in the Falklands, spending Christmas in “the pissing rain” under “clouds like dirty sheep,” and tragically by soldiers crippled and maimed in the war. Similarly, the Faith Brothers sang “Easter Parade” from the perspective of a soldier who has returned from the Falklands both physically and emotionally damaged, “too estranged to talk about it / or get close to anyone.” In April 1982, as British troops recaptured South Georgia and prepared to move on to the Falklands, a reporter had asked Thatcher, “What happens next?” Thatcher had replied, triumphantly, dismissively, “Just rejoice at that news!” The Faith Brothers’ soldier reflects, “The mother of the nation cries, ‘Rejoice!’ / And I can hardly shuffle.” As Madness put it in “Blue Skinned Beast,” “I can fly you to your loved ones, but I can promise no return.” Twa Toots, a duo from the Isle of Sheppey, contributed “New Depression,” a song recorded for the John Peel show. Musically, it suggested what Althea and Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking” might have sounded like if it had been written in the sheeting rain of the English Channel rather than under a Jamaican sun. Over this rain-dampened reggae, the Twa Toots explain, “For the sake of an island in the ocean / In the town there’s a new depression.… We’re all under the blue oppression.” There was a lot packed into that phrase “blue oppression,” not just the blues, as in the burden of sorrow, but Tory blue, the strutting, triumphant, self-congratulatory posture of the victorious Thatcher. “Three cheers for the blue skinned beast!” sang Madness, “Hip! Hip! Hip!”

images MIXTAPE 8½: SMASH HITS

Nick Heyward, “Take That Situation” (1983)

Shalamar, “Dead Giveaway” (1983)

Aztec Camera, “Walk out to Winter” (1983)

Ultravox, ”We Came to Dance” (1983)

David Bowie, “China Girl” (1983)

Booker Newbury III, “Love Town” (1983)

Meat Loaf, “If You Really Want to” (1983)

Robert Palmer, “Johnny and Mary” (1983)

H2O, “Dream to Sleep” (1983)

Mari Wilson, “Wonderful” (1983)

Orange Juice, “Flesh of My Flesh” (1983)

George Benson, “Lady Love Me (One More Time)” (1983)

Flash and the Pan, “Waiting for a Train” (1983)

Twisted Sister, “The Kids Are Back” (1983)

Agnetha Faltskog, ”The Heat Is On” (1983)

The 1983 general election was held on June 9, almost exactly a year after the end of the Falklands War. It was a Thursday, so the music magazine Smash Hits happened to come out that day. It featured singer Leee John on the cover; his soul-funk band Imagination had had a huge hit with “Just an Illusion” a year earlier, but they were struggling to repeat the success. Inside, the issue featured the lyrics to all the songs that make up this mixtape. It had features on the Eurythmics and Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice, a poster of the Beat, and part one of a who’s who of “the 48 most famous faces in British pop.”²¹ There was a competition in which you could win the monstrous ghetto blaster featured on the cover of Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock. In the “Get Smart” column, where readers could have their questions about “absolutely anyone or anything to do with music”²² answered, Faith from Amersham had a question about Buzzcocks references in “Rip It Up” by Orange Juice, and Karen from Tarnock, Somerset, wanted to know “how Bananarama get their teeth so white.”²³ The answer, apparently, was Colgate. There were ads for new singles by Toto, Flock of Seagulls, and Bucks Fizz, and for the Commodore VIC-20 computer, £139.99 while stocks last.

There was also an Election Special, which asked pop stars what they’d do if they were prime minister. Mark E. Smith, after halving the price of cigarettes, would “declare war on France and introduce conscription for all members of CND.”²⁴ David Grant of soul-funk duo Linx would declare “a two-party system: the Party Party and the All-Night Party.” Eddie Tudor-Pole, of the very silly punk band Tenpole Tudor, promised to “paint the front door of Number Ten pink,” and restore the monarchy. “I’m very patriotic,” he explained.²⁵ Malcolm McLaren would replace the Union Jack with a picture of a banana.

Others took the exercise more seriously though. Nick Heyward of Haircut 100, after admitting he’d “probably get the sack for being too lazy,” said he’d “pull the troops out of Northern Ireland.” Beehived jazz-pop singer Mari Wilson would “do something about unemployment.” Paul Weller’s protégé Tracie Young, who clearly didn’t share her mentor’s political priorities, would “cut income tax.” Steve Severin of the Banshees had a long list of priorities that included stopping the cruise missiles, banning fox-hunting, and ending censorship. Boy George, forty years ahead of the pack, would “lean towards ecology.” Heaven 17, anticipating a Conservative victory, couched their answer in satire: “We’d build a wall across Britain from the Severn to the Wash and declare U.D.I. [Unilateral Declaration of Independence] for the North. Subsequently, we would convert London to an adventure playground for all the rich Scottish people so that they could enjoy their new-found wealth with the revenue from the North Sea oil.” By way of explanation, they added, “We say this because we’re from Sheffield and we live in London and people there don’t realise how bad things are up North.”²⁶

Nobody took the exercise quite as seriously as Robin Campbell, however. The UB40 guitarist and vocalist promised to “educate people into a dramatic revision of the work ethic and implement these four changes—1) total nationalization; 2) a three-day week without any drop in wages; 3) an across-the-board rise in state benefits to a living wage level; 4) education to 20 and retirement at 50.” In contrast to this magnificent idyll, Gary Numan offered a vision for Britain that was every bit as dystopian as the future he’d explored on his albums Replicas, The Pleasure Principle, and Telekon. “I’d like to see all the closed-down factories being incorporated into the school system,” he said. As context for this horrifying idea, he added, “I really like Maggie Thatcher—she’s everything that we needed and made me feel proud to be British. The way the country’s going I really think that we’re on the way to recovery. Business is picking up and I like the way she handled the Falklands’ crisis.”²⁷

Sounds magazine had come out a day earlier (all the weeklies, Sounds, Melody Maker, NME, and Record Mirror came out on Wednesday, Tuesday if you lived in London). It too featured a “General Election Special” in which the editors asked a few people how they were voting. Pete Townsend, Paul Weller, Gary Kemp, Phil Oakey, Ben Watt, Tracy Thorne, Mark Bedford (Madness), David Jaymes (Modern Romance), Malcolm Mayher (Crown of Thorns), Kazumi (Frank Chickens), Mick Bevan and Joe Sax (the Decorators), Yvonne French (presenter on the short-lived music program Switch), both Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe of Blancmange, all of Heaven 17, Croydon punk band Case, and Liverpool hard rock band Spider were voting Labour. Ozzy Osbourne simply said, “Maggie Thatcher’s a complete arsehole.”²⁸ Boy George gave Sounds the same answer he’d given Smash Hits: Ecology Party. Sting was tired of being asked. Lynval Golding was going Labour or SDP; Romany Rokko (One the Juggler) was definitely going SDP. Mick Box (Uriah Heep), Cheryl Baker (Bucks Fizz), Lori Chacko (Amazon), Nicholas Dingley (Hanoi Rocks), and heavy metal musicians Paul Samson, Pete Way, and Vivian Campbell, were voting Conservative. Other rockers hedged: Lemmy was voting the Werewolf Party, Noddy Holder of Slade, and Denise Dufort of Girlschool were for the Monster Raving Loony Party, and Ian Gillan fudged the question. Malcolm McLaren, who had never voted, wasn’t about to start. Lee Brilleaux (Doctor Feelgood), Bill Nelson (Be-Bop Deluxe), and Tim Dry (Tik of the duo Tik & Tok) weren’t voting either. Edwyn Collins wasn’t voting because there was no Marxist candidate to vote for in Hackney. On the same page, music journalist Garry Bushell printed an opinion piece entitled “Warfare or Welfare?” He argued that Thatcher’s policies were “a liability to the British people and an insult to the young,” and that “another five years of Tory mis-rule promises nothing but more scrimping and scraping, more going without, more hopelessness.”²⁹ And he was scathingly critical of anyone not planning to vote, adding, “I’m not saying Labour have got all the answers but at least they have got their priorities right.”

Bushell had actually started his election coverage a week earlier, while previewing the third in Anagram Records’ series of punk compilations, Punk and Disorderly. The album included the Newtown Neurotics’ “Kick Out the Tories” (originally released in 1981 but still urgent), and the Angelic Upstarts’ “Woman in Disguise,” which explained Thatcher as the incarnation of an archetypal and immortal evil. It also featured UK Subs’ “Police State,” Abrasive Wheels’ “Burn ’Em Down,” and appropriately disorderly contributions from the Expelled, the Ejected, the Violators, and half a dozen others. Bushell concluded his review with the optimistic observation that Anagram had done the “near impossible” and produced a “good and remarkably relevant album from the declining mess of ’82/3 punk.” And, he added, “If that’s possible then so is a Labour victory.”³⁰ In retrospect, unfortunately, the most relevant thing about the album was its cover: a photomontage of Thatcher standing next to Hitler, outside a swastika-festooned Downing Street, waving cheerily as a firing squad prepared to dispatch a line of blindfolded punks and antiwar protesters. Since the album was scheduled to be released two days after the election, Anagram’s choice of cover image could only be read as a grim (and correct) prediction of her victory. As Heaven 17 had anticipated, on election day people south of an imaginary line from Gloucester to King’s Lynn overwhelmingly agreed with Gary Numan and voted Conservative: outside of London, the South went almost entirely blue. Even to the north of Heaven 17’s wall, Labour was driven back to its strongholds. This, of course, made it easy for Thatcher to locate her enemies. Her notes for a speech delivered to Conservative backbenchers, in 1984, included the following details: “Enemy without—beaten him & resolute strong in defence. Enemy within—Miners’ leaders … Liverpool and some local authorities—just as dangerous … in a way more difficult to fight … just as dangerous to liberty.”³¹ She would subsequently explain to the Sunday Mirror what she meant by “The Enemy Within”: it was “people who turn to violence and intimidation to compel people to do what they can’t persuade them to do.”³² That this definition applied just as well to Thatcher as to the miners’ leaders clearly didn’t occur to her. It’s also worth noting that the definition didn’t apply at all to the “local authorities” she identified as enemies within. What bothered her about left-leaning councils like the one in Liverpool was that they had the power to undermine her transfer of resources from the poor and marginalized to the middle class.³³ The Greater London Council, for example, “made a point of giving grants to blacks, gays, prostitutes and provocative minorities, as well as subsidising London Transport.”³⁴ But, then, the Fascist Groove Thing has no sense of irony.

So this is the part of the story where the monster that Heaven 17 had seen advancing in 1981 arrives in its fully developed, blue-skinned and unstoppable form. In 1985, as the Clash fell apart around him, Joe Strummer wrote “This Is England,” an update on the band’s state of the nation report “Something about England.” It put the Falklands War in the global context of Britain’s imperial and industrial decline, and the inverse rise of xenophobia, backwards-looking nationalism, and repressive policing. “This Is England” doesn’t make the relationship explicit, but the recurring image of England as a “knife of Sheffield steel” is suggestive. Given the association of Sheffield with Britain’s industrial power at the height of empire, it could just about be mistaken for an expression of defiant pride in the face of the motherland’s industrial decline. But every time the chorus “This Is England” repeats, it becomes clearer that, if England is a knife, it is a weapon turned against the nation by its own political leaders. This is an England where men are dying in the Falklands for a sentimental attachment to the imperial past, where protest is suppressed, where the statement “This Is England” communicates not defiant pride but a warning to immigrants. Curiously, the voices chanting the phrase don’t seem to register Strummer’s deepening anger. This is partly because the same vocal sample is used on every iteration of “This Is England,” giving the song a strange emotional flatness. It’s an impression emphasized by the song’s arrangement: rinky-dink drum machine, cheap synthesizer, anaemic guitar; it suggests a band (or rather the remains of one) too enervated by it all to pick up their instruments. The singers dourly chanting the phrase “This Is England” seem to have literally no idea what the song is about; the phrase repeats mechanically, emptily, an anthem for a defeated nation.

images MIXTAPE 9: WHISTLING IN THE DARK

Steeleye Span, “Blackleg Miner” (1970)

Fallout, “Salt Mines” (1983)

Redskins, “Unionise” (1983)

The Enemy Within, “Strike” (1984)

Council Collective, “Soul Deep” (1984)

Billy Bragg, “It Says Here” (1984)

Robyn Hitchcock, “Bells of Rhymney” (1984)

The Alarm, “Bells of Rhymney” (1984)

The Redskins, “Bring It Down (This Insane Thing)” (1985)

Alan Hull, “Heroes” (1985)

Style Council, “A Stones Throw Away” (1985)

The Mekons, “Abernant 1984/5” (1985)

The Country Pickets, “Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?” (1985)

The Mekons, “Lost Highway” (1985)

Sting, “We Work the Black Seam” (1985)

The Mekons, “Country” (1985)

Dick Gaughan, “Which Side Are You On?” (1985)

Billy Bragg, “Which Side Are You On?” (1985)

The Mekons, “Hard to Be Human Again” (1985)

South Wales Striking Miners Choir and Test Dept., “Comrades” (1985)

The Style Council, “The Lodger (or She Was Only a Shopkeeper’s Daughter)” (1985)

Robert Wyatt, “The Age of Self” (1985)

Easterhouse, “Whistling in the Dark” (1985)

The Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band & G.C.H.Q. Trade Unions with 7:84 Theatre Co. England, “Raise Your Banners High” (1985)

Easterhouse, “Ain’t That Always the Way” (1985)

Chumbawamba, “Fitzwilliam” (1985)

Easterhouse, “Confrontation” (1985)

Redskins, “Turnin’ Loose (These Furious Flames)” (1986)

The Housemartins, “Think for a Minute” (1986)

Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl, “The Media” (1986)

The Housemartins, “We Are Not Going Back” (1987)

The Alarm, “A New South Wales” (1989)

Some sort of clash between Thatcher’s government and Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was inevitable. On one side, you had a leader dedicated to neoliberalism, privatization, and free-market competition; on the other side, a leader committed to socialism, nationalization, and closed-shop trade unionism: two leaders, in other words, committed to one another’s total destruction. The two sides didn’t even speak the same language. The government spoke “the language of change, innovation, moving on and social mobility,”³⁵ the miners the language of history, continuity, and community. Indeed, the miners had a sense of their own identity that was deeply bound up with the symbolic place held by coal mining in labour history: the mines were, as historian Peter Hennessey puts it, “where the excesses of capitalism had left blood in the seams.”³⁶ Sting, who grew up in Wallsend, Northumberland, where more than two hundred men died underground before the colliery was closed in 1935, argued that the miners had “tunnelled deep inside the nation’s soul,” and should “matter more than pounds and pence.”

When the clash came, it was the miners’ conviction that they were fighting for the soul of the nation that gave the strike its unique character. It wasn’t a strike for wages or even improved working conditions; it was a strike in defence of a way of life. And not just the miners’ way of life either: when, ten months into the strike, Paul Weller’s Council Collective released the single “Soul Deep” in support of the strikers, Weller sang, “Don’t say this struggle does not involve you / If you’re from the working class this is your struggle too.” The B-side to the 12″ version, “A Miner’s Point,” was an interview with two striking miners, Bob and Chris, who explained, “If the NUM lose this battle, it’s the end for all the unions … [because] this isn’t just a strike.… What we’re coming to now is a class war.” Arguably, neither Weller nor the miners went far enough: the miners were fighting on behalf of anyone who opposed neoliberal greed even when it was represented as “change, innovation, moving on and social mobility,” anyone who could agree that people mattered more than pounds and pence.

The immediate cause of the strike was the National Coal Board’s announcement, on March 5, 1984, that the Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire was one of twenty scheduled to be closed, a move which would have destroyed the community. The announcement, it turns out, was erroneous: Cortonwood was not scheduled to be closed at all.³⁷ Before the mistake could be corrected, however, the colliery’s one thousand miners had walked off the job in protest, and within a week about half of the country’s miners had followed suit. The government may not have intended to provoke a strike (it seems they had intended, rather, to provoke a national strike vote, which they calculated Arthur Scargill would lose), but when it was handed to them, at a time of year disadvantageous to the miners, they accepted it.³⁸ Certainly, no one in government or at the National Coal Board (NCB) bothered to disabuse the Cortonwood miners about the threat to their livelihood.

In fact, the government had been quietly preparing for this strike for several years. In 1978, not even in power yet, the Conservatives had drafted a “strategic report” on how to “defeat union militancy,”³⁹ and its recommendations included building up coal stockpiles in anticipation of a conflict with the NUM. They had not immediately acted on this recommendation when they came to power, but in February 1981 they were humiliatingly forced to back down from plans to close twenty-three mines when the NUM threatened a strike. The press pounced: the Express announced, “Surrender to King Coal,” and the Daily Star, based in Manchester, congratulated the miners, “You’ve won, lads.”⁴⁰ Thatcher responded by creating a “secret Cabinet committee” tasked with drawing up contingency plans, and the stockpiling of coal began.⁴¹ The government had also taken other measures in anticipation of a strike. In 1980, they had passed the Social Security Act, which made strikers ineligible for welfare benefits. Legislation to make secondary picketing illegal followed.⁴² Billy Bragg saw this as a move to make it “illegal / to fight for the union” (“Which Side Are You On?”), and Clapham punks Fallout thought they could see what was coming next:

Shoot the Marxists, gas the Trots

Get back to the bench, work ’til you drop …

Back to the salt mines,

Back to Victorian times,

Back to slave labour lines.

The Redskins agreed and unleashed their unique brand of skinhead soulpunk against their antagonists: “If police make crimes of picket lines,” they sang, they’re just “turning loose these furious flames.” But Thatcher was determined to prevent a repetition of the 1972 strike, when the NUM had used flying pickets (strikers sent, often en masse, to picket secondary sites) to devastating effect against her predecessor Ted Heath.⁴³ Finally, unrelated events had put Thatcher in an unexpectedly strong position in 1984. Her military success against Argentina two years earlier had equipped her with both confidence and a landslide electoral victory. It had also “exacerbated her worst characteristics,” her biographer John Campbell notes. “After 1982 she used her augmented authority to pursue more self-righteously than before her particular vision of British society, and to trample those groups, institutions and traditions which did not share it.”⁴⁴ So Thatcher prepared to trample the miners, confident that the majority of Britons, many of them from the comfort of their newly purchased council houses, would support her.

The NUM’s executive, on the other hand, quite aside from getting manoeuvred into striking at the wrong time of year,⁴⁵ had chosen the wrong historical moment for a revolution. Perhaps misled by the antiestablishment spirit evident in early 1980s protest movements (from antinuclear and antiwar to antiracist and antifascist), they miscalculated the extent to which this energy could be directed into coordinated antigovernment action. In 1983, the Redskins, who were committed Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members,⁴⁶ argued that you can talk about riots, petrol bombs, and revolution all you like, “But if we fail to organize / We’ll waste our lives on protest songs.” The song was called, simply and directly, “Unionise!,” but it tacitly acknowledged that disaffected youth were unlikely to embrace a union movement that was part of the Establishment that had so badly let them down. Meanwhile, within the union movement, relative prosperity had blunted the militancy of the union rank-and-file, particularly in Nottinghamshire. The political historian Mark Garnett observes that “many miners had … bought their own homes; and in accordance with the Thatcherite game plan, their new status was making them more inclined to vote Conservative than to plot the downfall of capitalism.”⁴⁷ One Nottinghamshire miner noted at the time, “The miners here have got washing machines, fitted carpets, and two televisions in their houses.”⁴⁸ In “Bring It Down (This Insane Thing)” the Redskins tried to remind them and anyone else who’d listen, “‘You’ve never had it so good’ / [is] the favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better.” But the fact was, in accordance with the Thatcherite game plan, even the unionized were starting to measure well-being in terms of Thatcher’s “fridges, Hoovers and electric washing machines.” This, combined with a complicated history of ill will between the Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire branches of the NUM,⁴⁹ led to the Nottinghamshire miners refusing to go on strike (and eventually establishing their own breakaway union). The NUM ran into similar problems when they appealed belatedly to the other national unions for solidarity. They had hoped that the member unions of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) would come out in sympathy, but neither the rail unions, nor the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC), nor the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) felt compelled to sacrifice their own members’ jobs on the “altar of the coal strike,” as the leader of the ISTC put it.⁵⁰ The TGWU did strike half-heartedly four months into the conflict, briefly closing the docks in Liverpool and Southampton.⁵¹ But six months later it was clear that there would be no general strike in support of the miners, and Paul Weller, in “Soul Deep,” asked angrily, “Just where is the backing from the TUC?” and added, “If we aren’t united there can only be defeat.”

Weller, Diane Sealey, Jimmy Ruffin, and several other artists had collaborated as the Council Collective to record “Soul Deep” in support of Women Against Pit Closures, and it raised some ten thousand pounds for the cause. Weller recalls that the other objective of the record had been to “get across the miners’ point of view and why people should have supported them.”⁵² But as he acknowledges, this may have been “a bit naïve”; if the NUM were losing the battle for labour solidarity, they were also slowly losing the battle for public opinion. At the beginning of the strike, it had been fairly evenly divided between sympathy for the miners and suspicion of their intentions. The journalist Andy McSmith observes, “For many [the strike] was a moving story of pit villages withstanding great adversity and immense political pressure to defend their communities against cold economic logic and a hostile government.”⁵³ “To me,” Alan Hull sang, “Every one of them was a hero.” But then Hull, a founding member of Newcastle folk-rock band Lindisfarne, was a lifelong labour activist.⁵⁴ To others the strike “was an attempt by an almost insanely ambitious and dictatorial union boss to use the tough young men manning picket lines to taunt the police and defy the will of an elected government—parliamentary democracy versus Arthur Scargill’s thugs.”⁵⁵ For many, indeed, Scargill was the real sticking point; even people inclined to sympathize with the miners tended to distrust and dislike him personally.⁵⁶ The benefit record “Strike,” recorded by Adrian Sherwood and Keith Leblanc of industrial techno group Tackhead, collected only £1,332⁵⁷ because, it turned out, not many people wanted to listen to samples of Scargill at his most stridently polemical, shoehorned into a stuttering, metallic breakbeat for four and half minutes, even for the benefit of the Miners Solidarity Fund.

The division in public opinion about the strike could be seen in the polarized attitudes towards those miners who either refused to come out or went back to work before the strike ended. To Thatcherites it was clear that they were brave men, asserting the rights of the individual and exercising their right to make money. To Thatcher, addressing her own party, these miners were nothing less than heroes: “‘Scabs’ their former workmates call them,” she scoffed, “Scabs? They are lions!”⁵⁸ On the other side, it was equally clear that the strike-breakers were traitors to their class and their communities. Folk singer Ewan MacColl, referencing the famous World War I recruitment poster, asked, “Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?” Did you stay loyal to the union, he wondered, or did you turn traitor and become “a scab, a blackleg, one forever cursed?” As hyperbolic as the question may seem, he was not wrong that the rifts between former strikers and former scabs would prove to be permanent.⁵⁹ The song was recorded by one-off group the Country Pickets for the compilation album Which Side Are You On (in support of the organization Women Against Pit Closures). And MacColl’s was by no means the only song released during the strike which condemned so-called blacklegs. The Three Johns’ “Coals to Newcastle,” referencing the Great Miners’ Strike of 1844 which had been broken with the help of blackleg labour, argued it was the “same story” in 1984: “worker against worker.” Indeed, the folk song “Blackleg Miner,” written during the Great Miners’ Strike,⁶⁰ was revived in 1984–85 when Steeleye Span’s recording of the song was used to intimidate scabs.⁶¹ In case this form of persuasion failed, the song included some bloodthirsty advice for striking miners: “Across the way … stretch a line / To catch the throat and break the spine / Of the dirty blackleg miner.”

Other old folk songs were revived during the strike as well. In 1984, the Alarm and Robyn Hitchcock both released versions of Pete Seeger’s “Bells of Rhymney,” based on Idris Davies’s poem Gwalia Deserta (“Wasteland of Wales”). The song laments the failure of the 1926 general strike, which left miners wondering, “Is there hope for the future?” Its relevance almost sixty years later was clear. In 1985 two versions of Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” were released, one by Billy Bragg and one by folk singer Dick Gaughan. Like “Bells of Rhymney,” it was a natural song to cover under the circumstances: based on a widely known folk tune, it had been written in Kentucky in 1931 at the beginning of the Harlan County War, an epic series of mining-related strikes and conflicts that lasted the better part of a decade and ended in union victory. So covering it invoked both tradition and the power of the union movement. Both Bragg’s and Gaughan’s versions are free rewritings of Reece’s 1931 song. For Reece the two sides in question had been the miners and the mining company’s strikebreaking “gun thugs.” For Bragg, the battle lines were more complex: the government versus the miners, the police versus the picketers, the strikebreaking scabs versus the strikers. Consequently, his approach to the problem of scab labour was more nuanced and less hysterically biblical than MacColl’s had been in “Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?” Focussing not on the accursedness of the scabs but on the humanity of the strikers, Bragg’s version of “Which Side Are You On?” tries to explain the hurt experienced by families whose breadwinners are staying out, and suffering for it, when scabs say, “Sod you, Jack.” It is a necessary shift in rhetoric because, whereas Reece’s song had been simply a rallying call to striking miners, Bragg’s is addressed to both the miners and a public called upon to sympathize with them (he dedicated the EP Between the Wars, which includes “Which Side Are You On?,” to the Miners Wives Support Groups). Despite this appeal to a general public, however, in Bragg’s song (as in Paul Weller’s “Soul Deep”), the strike remains essentially a conflict between the government and “the working man.” Dick Gaughan, by contrast, in his version of “Which Side Are You On?” tries to reframe the question entirely, addressing it to “all you good people” (Reece’s song had begun, “All you good workers”). What’s really at stake, he argues, is not a conflict between pickets and scabs, or between the working man and the government, but between Thatcher’s “bully boys” and the people of Britain; the strike is just Thatcher’s opening gambit. “Support the miners’ struggle,” he concludes, “Or the next in line is you.”

One group of people who should have listened to Dick Gaughan were the members of the printers’ union EETPU (Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union). During the strike, the EETPU took no action against the pro-Thatcher newspapers the printers worked for, and it was rewarded two years later: virtually its entire membership in the newspaper industry was laid off when Rupert Murdoch replaced them with computers. Neither a yearlong strike, nor calls for a boycott of Murdoch’s newspapers saved the printers from being “the next in line.” No one felt unduly sorry for them.⁶²

Sadly, during the miners’ strike, the public were no more persuaded than the printers that the threat was real and general. Paul Weller and the Style Council, weighing in on the tactics employed by Thatcher and her police, warned that in Chile, Poland, South Africa, or South Yorkshire, violent dictatorship is only “A Stones Throw Away,” the title of a song from their second album, and that it must be resisted at whatever cost. But by the summer of 1985 public opinion had turned definitively against the strike.⁶³ This was largely because the national media (unopposed by the EETPU) had aligned themselves with the government, deciding, as Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl put it in “The Media,” to show the striking miners as “traitors,” “paid agitators,” and “brutes,” while strategically not showing “the coppers / Teaching ’em with their boots.”

Popular music dissented and remained solidly on the miners’ side, at least when it paid attention. Let’s not forget that Paper Lace’s “Agadoo” came out in 1984; so did Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” Coal miners’ strike or no, some people were focussing mainly on pushing pineapple and not coming prematurely. The year 1984 also saw comedian Nigel Planer, in character as the hopelessly thick and permanently strung-out hippie Neil from The Young Ones, enter the charts at number five with a cover of Traffic’s “Hole in My Shoe,” a psychedelic number about the “really heavy bummer” of having a hole in your shoe. When he performed it on Top of the Pops, he improvised the line “Listen to the lyrics, Paul Weller.” Nevertheless, Weller, Bragg, MacColl, and Gaughan were joined by dozens of bands who participated in benefit concerts for the striking miners and their families. The jazz ensemble Happy Ending, “making politics swing” as they put it, played over 150 benefit shows,⁶⁴ but others did their bit too, including A.C. Temple, Aztec Camera, Big Flame, Carlton B. Morgan, the Cleaners from Venus, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Crass, Everything but the Girl, the Ex, Mike Harding, the Housemartins, Alan Hull, the Mekons, the Membranes, Newtown Neurotics, Orange Juice, Nigel Planer, Poison Girls, Red Guitars, Red London, Redskins, Sisters of Mercy, Vicky Talbot, the Three Johns, Yeah Yeah Noh, Wham!, Working Week, Alexei Sayle, and many others.

Something of a “miners’ benefit circuit” developed, with bands like the Three Johns playing tirelessly, sometime every night of the week.⁶⁵ John Robb recalls that these benefit shows became a mainstay of the noisy independent music scene he was part of: “It was a bizarre time, with extreme bands playing dislocated riffs to rooms full of aggrieved miners in communities at the frontline of a political battle, but somehow it worked.”⁶⁶ G.W. Sok of anarcho-punk band the Ex says, “We wanted to help somehow. Not that digging deep down underground for coal was our kind of fun, but we saw whole communities being destroyed.… So we organised a benefit-tour, raised about six thousand quid.… Drops in the ocean, really, but we hoped the strikers would realise that they were not totally on their own in the struggle.”⁶⁷ This circuit took a toll on bands. In fact, Crass’s last gig was a miners’ benefit in Aberdare, Wales. Penny Rimbaud recalls, “We’d put a fair amount of work into helping the miners’ families, and we saw all these people broken by the vicious despot we had in power.… And we started to think it was wrong to be jumping up and down and shouting onstage, when these people didn’t even know where their next fucking meal was coming from.… There was a time when we felt that we could really make a difference to things … but that gig somehow made us realise the futility of it all as well.”⁶⁸ In this, the bands’ experiences echoed the miners’. Despite the rallying cry used on the picket lines, “We’re not going back,” by the time the strike formally ended in March 1985, more than half of the country’s striking miners had already admitted defeat and drifted back to work.⁶⁹

Paul Heaton of the Housemartins, who had spent time on the picket line,⁷⁰ was at first dispirited, singing, “I can’t help saying told you so / … Now apathy is happy / it won without a fight” (“Think for a Minute”). But he also took inspiration from the miners who had stuck it out to the bitter end. Adopting their rallying cry, he reminded listeners what the union movement had done to secure living wages, job security, and decent working conditions, and he begged people not to surrender those gains to Thatcherite individualism: “We’re not going back,” he sang, “‘I’m alright Jack’ is an easy trap” (“We Are Not Going Back”). Chumbawamba, meanwhile, tried to find some consolation in the thought that mining communities were “wiser and stronger” after a year of being betrayed on all sides, that there’s a sort of freedom in knowing you’re on your own. In Fitzwilliam, site of the Kinsley Drift Mine and of violent clashes between the police and miners during the strike, “Cage and canary are left in the mine,” they sang, “Canary still sings as machinery dies / Song breaks the bars which imprison its life / Flies from the pit shaft and into the skies.” Alan Hull remained confident that “when the book has finally been written / you know the heroes always beat the villains in the end.” Easterhouse, however, utterly refused to be philosophical about the betrayals experienced by the miners, particularly at the hands of the Labour Party (which had failed to come out definitively in support of the strikers), the TUC (which had failed to join the strike), and the miners’ own “union bureaucrats” who had been “busy saving their own skins” when the strike was defeated (“Ain’t That Always the Way”). They recorded their Whistling in the Dark EP five months after the end of the strike, still spoiling for a fight. The EP comprised three songs: “Ain’t That Always the Way” which warned, “The time has come for drastic measures”; “Whistling in the Dark” itself, which added, “There ain’t no turning back / You can bet your life on that”; and “Confrontation,” which reasoned, “Now that you have to learn to fight / You’re going to need some good advice.” The advice was: “Forget democracy. And opportunity. And national unity.” Easterhouse used the back cover of the EP to expand on this theme, concluding, “We will only be able to defend ourselves when we take control of our unions out of the hands of bureaucrats educated in the realities of capitalism … . We will only be able to fight effectively when we smash the influence of the Labour Party which is committed to this economic system, to its social order and to Britain itself. The Miners paid for this knowledge by hard experience. It is our duty to see it is not wasted.”

By the end of 1985, though, the miners were thinking less about revolution than about getting through the next winter. Alan Hull’s “Heroes” gave its title to a compilation released as a benefit for the Durham Miners Support group, with proceeds going “to help support the 625 sacked miners and their families.” Similarly, Chumbawamba’s “Fitzwilliam” was recorded for the compilation Dig This: A Tribute to the Great Strike as a benefit for the Miners Solidarity Fund. (Other contributors to the album were Poison Girls, the Mekons, the Men They Couldn’t Hang, Steve Lake, Leningrad Sandwich, the Ex, and Omega Tribe.) Robert Wyatt collaborated with poet Adrian Mitchell and various members of Henry Cow and News from Babel on the album The Last Nightingale to benefit the Miners Strike Fund. Wyatt also released the single “The Age of Self,” whose proceeds went to the TUC Miners Hardship fund. In that song, Wyatt lamented Thatcher’s ideological victory but didn’t call for fresh insurrections as Easterhouse did; instead he called on workers not to accept defeat, to hang onto their roots and not allow the union movement to disintegrate. Pointedly, the B-side of “The Age of Self” was “Unity (Raise Your Banner),” a song written by John Tams for a 1984 production of the play Six Men of Dorset and subsequently taken up on the miners’ picket lines.⁷¹ “Brother, sister, make a stand / Unity will win the day,” it promised, a somewhat forlorn hope in the immediate aftermath of the miners’ strike. But performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band, with vocals provided by the 7:84 Theatre Company and the GCHQ Trade Unions, the mere fact of it meant something. The brass band, formed in South Yorkshire, had been active since 1917 and would survive the closure of the colliery; the theatre company, an agitprop theatre group active since 1973, had recently folded its English company after losing its Arts Council funding (although that hadn’t prevented them spending much of 1985 on tour with their play The Garden of England, performing it for and in support of the miners). The trade unionists were members of the Government Communications Headquarters Union, which Thatcher’s government had recently banned, arguing that it threatened national security.⁷² The ban would not be lifted until 1997. So “Unity (Raise Your Banner)” was a defiant gesture: three groups banding together at their lowest point and refusing to be erased from Thatcher’s Britain.

Test Dept. undertook a similar collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir, touring with them and recording the album Shoulder to Shoulder. Keith Hufton, leader of the miners’ choir, wrote on the cover, “We were relieved and surprised how our way of singing was accepted by the younger generation, and as comrades in arms, a binding friendship was formed.” Indie record label CNT Productions, meanwhile, rereleased their catalogue of early singles by the Redskins, the Sisters of Mercy, the Three Johns, the Newtown Neurotics, and the Mekons as the compilation They Shall Not Pass. Dedicated to “the striking miners and their families” it announced, “DEATH TO ROCK AND ROLL MONETARISM.”

In other words, the singles and albums released in support of the miners served two purposes. Most immediately, of course, they addressed a need for financial support, helping to raise somewhere between five and ten million pounds for miners’ families.⁷³ This assistance was vital: many mining families had been financially wiped out by the strike, and, in most cases, the end of it brought no relief; miners who had been sacked during the strike were not rehired, and sweeping mine closures began immediately.⁷⁴ The second purpose the records served was to be records. The insert that came with Which Side Are You On: Music for the Miners, from the North East expressed the hope that the LP might “provide an historical record of the fact that support for the miners’ struggle was and is widespread and stimulated much creative activity.” This need for witnesses to history was in some ways just as pressing as the need for economic relief, because the government seemed intent on erasing both the coal industry and the memory of it as quickly as possible. The Mekons’ “Abernant 84/85” said it all; surveying a weed-choked and rusted colliery that looked as though it had been closed for decades, the song reflected, “Vengeance is not ours; it belongs to those / Who seek to destroy us.” The song appeared on the Mekons’ Fear and Whiskey, part of a suite of songs about lives “fragmented and broken up” (“Last Dance”) because “for many years there’s been no country … nothing here but the war” (“Country”). The Falklands War, fighting in the streets, and violence on the picket lines are all contextualized as parts of the same prolonged, dehumanizing conflict, and the songs’ protagonists are all left trying to figure out how to start over and “be human again” or, failing that, how to “burn the house and start from scratch” (“Hard to Be Human Again”). The album ends with a cover of the country song “Lost Highway”: “Now I’m lost. Too late to pray / I’m rolling down that lost highway.”

The Alarm would address the same theme in their 1989 song “New South Wales.” As the last piece of coal is cut from the mines and the Davey lamps doused for the last time, a solitary man walks past a church where worshippers are singing, and he reflects that this is what the miners have fought for and given their lives for: “To hear the congregation sing / ‘Cwm Rhondda, Oh my Lord.’” The reference is to a tune often used as a setting for the hymn “Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r anialwch” (“Lord, lead me through the wilderness”). The man outside the church prays for a “New South Wales,” an ambivalent prayer since it recalls another passage into the wilderness: the history of penal deportations to Australia. The Alarm enlisted both the Morriston Orpheus Male Voice Choir and the Welsh Symphony Orchestra for the recording, and as the chorus swells, it’s hard not to be moved by the communal effort to come to grips with a bewildering future.

images MIXTAPE 9½: EVERYBODY’S ON TOP OF THE POPS

The Rezillos, “Top of the Pops” (1978)

Scritti Politti, “The Sweetest Girl” (1981)

The Insane, “El Salvador” (1982)

Adam Ant, ”Goody Two Shoes” (1982)

Madness, “House of Fun” (1982)

Soft Cell, “Torch” (1982)

ABC, “The Look of Love” (1982)

Tight Fit, “Fantasy Island” (1982)

Duran Duran, “Hungry Like the Wolf” (1982)

The Enemy, “Fallen Hero” (1982)

The Exploited, “Alternatives” (1982)

Subhumans, “Reason for Existence” (1982)

Conflict, “Wargames” (1982)

The Higsons, “Conspiracy” (1982)

Billy Bragg, “Between the Wars” (1985)

Philip Bailey and Phil Collins, “Easy Lover” (1985)

The June 6, 1980, issue of Melody Maker, under the headline “The Politics of Rock,” printed a letter from an angry Thatcher supporter from Durham. He was upset about a Paul Weller quotation the magazine had published the previous October (“Thatcher, she ain’t patriotic. She’s for power alone”),⁷⁵ and, more generally, about the “totally anti–right wing” tone of the magazine and the musicians it reviewed. He didn’t like UB40 at all. He concluded his letter with some advice: “Take a tip from the likes of Phil Collins … Leave politics to the politicians.”

Easier said than done, of course. Even the most frivolously apolitical entertainment has a way of being profoundly and inescapably political. Take Top of the Pops, for instance, which ran on BBC for more than forty years and was, by any measure, a frivolous affair. It was a half-hour program that interspersed a countdown of the national music charts with “live performances” in which bands mimed to the recorded versions of their hits, music videos, and dance numbers by the show’s resident dance troupe. Because it aired in the early evening, it was understood to be entertainment for the whole family, which meant two things. First, bands were sometimes asked to sanitize their songs. (Gang of Four famously scuppered their opportunity to be on Top of the Pops by refusing to remove a reference to condoms from their song “At Home He’s a Tourist.”)⁷⁶ Second, you never knew quite what you were going to get. It could be the Sex Pistols; it could be the Wombles. If you tuned in on the right night, you could see the Angelic Upstarts performing alongside Showaddywaddy and disco group Kandidate, or the UK Subs sharing airtime with Cliff Richard. I don’t remember this seeming odd at the time. Perhaps it was because we were all so used to television variety shows (some comedy bits, a little singing and dancing, some psychic spoon-bending, a ventriloquist, a few performing ferrets, and a lot of sexual innuendo), that Top of the Pops’s dance troupe Legs and Co. performing a scantily clad dance routine to the Clash’s “Bankrobber” just made sense. In retrospect, though, some of these juxtapositions do seem intentionally provocative. For example, in the last days of the miners’ strike, you might have caught Billy Bragg singing, not miming, “I was a miner / I was a docker / I was a railway man” (“Between the Wars”) on the same show as a slickly produced video of Phil Collins and Philip Bailey singing about “the kind of girl you dream of” (“Easy Lover”). Top of the Pops just programmed whatever happened to be on the charts. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling there was something significant in the counterpoint of Billy Bragg singing earnestly about the dignity of being working class, and video footage of Phil Collins thoroughly enjoying the privileges and comforts of being Phil Collins.

A few pages ago, I said that popular music was on the miners’ side when it paid attention. I need to expand on that, because not paying attention isn’t quite as simple or as neutral as it sounds in that formulation. In July 1981, as riots flared across Birmingham, Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon reassured the band’s audience inside the Birmingham Odeon, “What’s happening out there has nothing to do with what’s happening in here.”⁷⁷ Looking back on the moment forty years later, Le Bon explained, “We were in this theatre, talking, and we could hear the riots going on outside. And we thought, ‘If they could harness that energy into doing something useful, there wouldn’t be a fucking problem,’ Which sounds like a very callous statement, but that was very much our attitude: don’t wait for somebody else to change your life, don’t sit there complaining, ‘Why isn’t my life better?’ Do it yourself. And that was very much part of the core of eighties thinking, and possibly Thatcherism as well.”⁷⁸ Le Bon’s right, of course; do-it-yourself was “part of the core of eighties thinking.” What he forgets, or perhaps never understood, is that there was also a fundamental disagreement about what “do-it-yourself” actually meant. To Thatcher (and Le Bon and Phil Collins and even quite a few of the first-wave punks) it meant get yours first and devil take the hindmost. To the grassroots activists who, throughout the 1980s, worked in opposition to Thatcher’s vision, it meant doing it yourself as a way of taking responsibility for the hindmost, as a way of paying attention to the fact that “what’s happening out there” is always connected to “what’s happening in here.”

Of course, popular music frequently obscures that connection, and it’s probably fair to say that 99 percent of pop music isn’t paying attention to anything except the blindingly obvious. For example, the top twenty for June 6, 1982, at the height of the Falklands War, had Adam Ant at number one, insisting, coaxingly, that even the most “Goody Two Shoes” must have something naughty inside. Madness were at number two with “House of Fun,” a song about a boy just turned sixteen trying to buy condoms at the chemist’s but too embarrassed to use the word. His discomfort mounts as the chemist fails to understand his requests for, first, a “box of balloons,” and then “party hats”; it is complete when a neighbour stops to wish him a happy birthday. Incidentally, Top of the Pops had no problem at all with this song about condoms; if only Gang of Four had been willing to sing about balloons and party hats. Number three was Soft Cell’s “Torch,” in which Marc Almond is “looking for love in a sad song.” Number four had ABC singing about the deceptive “Look of Love.” At number five an imaginary band called Tight Fit, a rotating cast of sessions musicians, were singing about love on “Fantasy Island.” Duran Duran were at six, singing about sexual stalking in “Hungry Like the Wolf.” And so it went down the list, with a few interruptions, song after song affirming that most people are mostly thinking about sex most of the time. Meanwhile, in the Falklands, despite Argentinian bombers sinking HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope, and HMS Coventry, British troops were beginning to retake the islands. The war had everyone’s attention, nationalistic fervour was running high, and the Union Jack was everywhere, but you wouldn’t know it from the charts. Well, there was some flag waving going on: if you go far enough down the list you’ll find “We Have a Dream” and “This Time (We’ll Get it Right),” by the Scottish and English national football teams respectively, at number thirty-seven and number forty-five (they’d both peaked in the top ten a few weeks earlier). But, if anything, this would seem to suggest that the British public cared more about the World Cup than about the Falklands. And while I want that to be true, it just wasn’t.

In other words, the songs that people were listening to don’t appear to tell us much about what they were thinking.⁷⁹ Or, at any rate, the songs that people bought as singles in the major retail chains surveyed for the national charts don’t seem to. It’s tempting to argue that the independent charts, which started to appear at the beginning of the 1980s, were more revealing. Take, for example, the week discussed here, the first week of June 1982.⁸⁰ Songs about war figured largely. The Enemy’s “Fallen Hero,” challenged soldiers, “[You’re] fighting for your country, but what the hell for?” The Exploited’s ”Alternatives” asked anyone considering signing up for military service as an alternative to signing on for unemployment benefits, “Do you really want to die … Kill other people just to survive?” Subhumans’ “Reason for Existence” asked, “Are you happy signing up in the army just to get some pay? / Fighting a war without a cause?” The back cover of System’s The Warfare EP declared, “I’m not going to end up a poppy on your lapel.” And Conflict’s “Wargames,” one of four songs on their The House That Man Built EP, warned, “War is not a game, not a game of fun / Shooting real people with real guns.”

There were other subjects on bands’ minds, of course. The other three songs on Conflict’s EP took on violence against women (“I’ve Had Enough”), the Troubles (“Conflict”), and the stupidity of violence between mods and skins (“Blind Attack”). The Insane, meanwhile, were thinking about the El Salvadorean junta “killing rebels with aid from the USA”; Riot/Clone were concerned about animal rights and figured the answer was “Death to Humanity”; Special Duties were warning about the rise of the “Police State,” and the Higsons wanted to know “Who stole my bongos? Did you steal my bongos?” But war and the existential angst it precipitated seemed to be dominating the discussion. Or, at any rate, it was dominating discussion among the punks. The indie charts that week also featured Depeche Mode’s “The Meaning of Love,” Toyah’s “Brave New World,” UB40’s “Love Is Alright,” Yazoo’s “Only You,” and New Order’s “Temptation.” And what these indie love songs did, which virtually none of the punk songs mentioned above managed to do, was get onto the national charts as well. (The punk song that was an exception was the Exploited’s “Attack/Alternative,” which had cracked the top fifty at the beginning of May).

This makes me want to argue that there’s a difference of some sort between the way punk (or punk-influenced) music is made and consumed, and the way mainstream music is made and consumed (even if it happens to be on an independent label). Surely, you can see it in the difference between Billy Bragg’s “Between the Wars” and Phil Collins’s “Easy Lover” on Top of the Pops. The former is made by a bloke picking up a guitar and singing his truth; the latter is made by a music industry proudly advertising the artificiality of its product (the video begins with Collins explaining, in a fake interview, “We’re doing a video making a video of making a video,” before he and Bailey pretend to sing for cameras that aren’t recording anything). “Between the Wars” asks its audience to think critically about what it’s saying; “Easy Lover” asks its audience to just enjoy the ride as Collins and Bailey demonstrate how by spending part of the video flying around pointlessly in a helicopter.

But, then, this is all complicated by the fact that both “Between the Wars” and “Easy Lover” are, in the end, on Top of the Pops. That is, as striking as the contrast between the two songs is, they’re both fundamentally in the same business. Both are calculated, commercial productions and, as the musicologist Keith Negus would point out, both are consumed by audiences in a struggle for symbolic capital.⁸¹ That the former trades in the currency of authenticity while the latter trades in the currency of artificiality doesn’t change the fact that they’re both selling something. Eccentric Edinburgh band the Rezillos, all dressed up in their dayglo spacesuits and rockabilly leathers, had it about right in their song “Top of the Pops” (which, perfectly, they got to play on Top of the Pops when it made the top forty in 1978):

Doesn’t matter what is shown

Just as long as everyone knows

What is selling, what to buy,

The stock market for your hi-fi.

Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between “Between the Wars” and “Easy Lover”: “Between the Wars” wants its audience to know they are being asked to make a choice with political implications; “Easy Lover” doesn’t. The choice is between the former’s assertion that Thatcherism is destroying the “heart of the nation,” and the latter’s assertion that, on the contrary, this is all quite normal, nothing to worry about and, oh, look, a helicopter.

In other words, not paying attention is not neutral. If Billy Bragg was actively trying to draw attention to the cost of Thatcherism, Phil Collins was actively trying to distract people from it. He wasn’t alone, of course. “Easy Lover” was at number one on the charts the week it shared screen time with “Between the Wars,” but Alison Moyet’s “That Ole Devil Called Love” was at number two, Madonna’s “Material Girl” at number three, Paul Young’s “Every Time You Go Away” at four, Stephen Duffy’s “Kiss Me,” at five, and so on down the list, song after song affirming, again, that most people are mostly thinking about sex most of the time. Which is to say that those national charts from the middle of the Falklands War do, in fact, tell us something about what people were thinking. They were thinking, “This is all quite normal, nothing to worry about. Leave politics to the politicians.”

images MIXTAPE 10: YOU’RE NOT AN ARMY

The Wolfe Tones, “A Nation Once Again” (1972)

Wings, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (1972)

John & Yoko, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1972)

Francie Brolly, “H. Block Song” (1978)

The Pop Group, “Amnesty International Report” (1979)

Gang of Four, “Ether” (1979)

Moving Hearts, “Irish Ways and Irish Laws” (1981)

The Passage, “Troops Out” (1981)

The Boomtown Rats, “Banana Republic” (1981)

Au Pairs, “Armagh” (1981)

Conflict, “Conflict” (1982)

Metro Youth, “Brutalised” (1982)

Crass, “Nineteen Eighty Bore” (1982)

Christy Moore, “Section 31” (1983)

Fun Boy Three, “The More I See (The Less I Believe)” (1983)

UB40, “You’re Not an Army” (1984)

Subhumans, “Heads of State” (1985)

Dexys Midnight Runners, “One of Those Things” (1985)

Fallout, “Tell Me About It” (1985)

Christy Moore, “The Peoples Own M.P.” (1985)

Ruefrex, “The Wild Colonial Boy” (1985)

The Style Council, “The Stand Up Comic’s Instructions” (1985)

Angelic Upstarts, “Brighton Bomb” (1985)

Easterhouse, “Inspiration” (1986)

Easterhouse, “Nineteen Sixty-Nine” (1986)

The Pogues, “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six” (1988)

McCarthy, “I’m Not a Patriot But” (1989)

Culture Shock, “Northern Ireland” (1989)

Danbert Nobacon, “Why Are We Still in Ireland?” (1989)

Aztec Camera, “Good Morning Britain” (1990)

Denim, “Osmonds” (1992)

By the end of 1985, then, Thatcher had dealt with one of her enemies within, and, as the miners Bob and Chris had predicted, neither the NUM nor the union movement as a whole ever recovered.⁸² But other enemies remained intractable, most notably the Irish Republican Army (and perhaps, as far as Thatcher was concerned, the Irish in general). The ongoing Troubles in Northern Ireland, a thirty-year conflict which would claim over three thousand lives before its end in the late 1990s, posed a challenge to Thatcher’s English-flavoured Law-and-Orderism, and became, increasingly, a source of international embarrassment. Her inability to make the problem go away was dramatically underscored when, in the middle of the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the Provisional IRA detonated a bomb at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, killing five people, injuring thirty-one others, and narrowly missing Margaret Thatcher herself.

The bombing provided Thatcher with an opportunity to pose for another “Churchillian moment.”⁸³ The following morning, by all accounts cool and resolute, she addressed the conference and condemned the attack: “The bombing … was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared. And the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that the attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”⁸⁴

It’s worth remembering Thatcher’s definition of terrorism: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence—and the threat of it—to achieve political ends.”⁸⁵ Since that definition could be applied, unmodified, to the British government’s approach to Northern Ireland, the Angelic Upstarts were more than justified in asking Thatcher in “Brighton Bomb,” “Are you so holy? Have you the right?” After all, they pointed out, “It’s only your democracy.” Others made the same point: Conflict, weighing “the squaddies on the corner” against “the gunman on the roof,” asked, “Who’s the real terrorist?” and Fallout told the troops in Ireland, “You shoot and kill and you justify it / If the truth were known / you’re the terrorist.” Thatcher’s composure, as she hypocritically defended her democracy, could not quite conceal her astonishment that the IRA was in a position to threaten it in the first place. She shouldn’t have been surprised though—it was at least partly her fault that the IRA could have a go at crippling Her Majesty’s government.

As momentous as the Brighton bombing was, the defining moment in Thatcher’s violent interactions with the IRA had come three years earlier when Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone and member of the Provisional IRA, died on hunger strike in Maze Prison. Sands and the nine other men who would die in the following weeks were striking to have their status as prisoners of war restored. In the early years of the Troubles, the Heath government had recognized paramilitaries as political detainees, which meant they were interned in their own compounds where they were able to associate freely and where they could wear their own clothes rather than prison uniforms.⁸⁶ But, in 1976, Callaghan’s government ended this Special Category Status for new prisoners: they were, instead, to be housed with the general prison population in the so-called H-Blocks.⁸⁷ In short, they were to be treated as convicted criminals. Folk musician Francie Brolly, who would later become a Sinn Féin MLA, contributed his “H. Block Song” to a compilation protesting this decision; it became “the unofficial anthem of the protest”:⁸⁸

I’ll wear no convict’s uniform

Nor meekly serve my time

That Britain might brand Ireland’s fight

Eight hundred years of crime.

But it was a point that both Labour and Conservative policy (not to mention Thatcher’s personal prejudice) agreed upon:⁸⁹ the paramilitaries were to be treated as criminals not soldiers, and the conflict in Ireland as a “security matter” not a war.⁹⁰ As UB40 satirically explained to the IRA, “We can shoot at you, but you can’t kill we / Don’t you see … you’re not an army.”

UB40 and the Angelic Upstarts were not alone. Other bands who commented on Thatcher’s hypocrisy in branding others as terrorists while her own government was involved in terrorist activity included the Au Pairs (“Armagh”), Gang of Four (“Ether”), Riot/Clone (“H-Block”), and the Pop Group (“Amnesty International Report”). Subhumans’ Dick Lucas wasn’t talking specifically about this example of hypocrisy when he wrote “Heads of State,” but the song is on point: the phrase heads of state actually derives from government leaders having a variety of replaceable heads, none of them screwed on right, each one capable of thinking about only one thing, usually in a way that contradicts all the others. This explains why leaders so often appear to be “two-faced.” McCarthy had their satirical eye on the similarly two-faced hypocrisy of leftist intellectuals who celebrated anticolonial rebellion in Central America but drew the line at Irish republicanism with the questionable distinction, “You are terrorists and they are freedom fighters / You are murderers and they are revolutionaries” (“I’m Not a Patriot But”). Kevin Rowland made much the same point in Dexys’s “One of Those Things.” A conversation with a couple of “so-called socialists” reveals that they’re firm in their support of Sandinistas, Cuban militants, the PLO, and the MPLA, but ask them “what do you think about Belfast” and they become evasive: “It’s just one of those things.” The Pop Group, meanwhile, culled details from the 1978 Amnesty International Report on Northern Ireland to piece together their own “Amnesty International Report” on the British Army’s treatment of Irish prisoners. The band could be accused of cherry picking, but the accumulated allegations of mistreatment (including prisoners being “choked until unconscious,” “burnt with cigarettes,” and having “teeth knocked out”) is damning. As Gang of Four pointed out, though, somehow all of this remained obscure to the British public, becoming the “dirt behind the daydream.” Also drawing on the Amnesty International Report, they reflected on how the white noise used to torture H-block prisoners became white noise in the ears of Mr. and Mrs. British Public “looking out for pleasure.”

Even more than the Amnesty International Report, though, it was the hunger strikes that exposed the duplicity of criminalizing the enemy: it was difficult to explain why a bunch of common criminals would starve themselves to death over a matter of political principle, or for that matter why dozens of others, men and women, were prepared to go naked (in some cases for more than three years) rather than put on prison uniforms.⁹¹ And, as the Au Pairs pointed out, it was equally difficult to explain why the government would not only let this happen but would subject these prisoners to abuse verging on torture in an effort to break their spirits. The Au Pairs’ song “Armagh,” with lyrics pieced together from “political pamphlets and little booklets smuggled out [of Northern Ireland],”⁹² describes the beatings, filthy conditions and other indignities faced by female detainees in Armagh Prison, in a grim call-and-response with an imaginary government official. Each detail meets the same refrain, “We don’t torture; we’re a civilized nation.”

Thatcher’s sangfroid, which would serve her so well after the Brighton bombing, had also been at work in her response to the hunger strike.⁹³ Matching what she called the “calculated ruthlessness” of the IRA, she refused to “make any concessions of any kind while the hunger strike was continuing,”⁹⁴ even if that meant people would die. She reassured herself, “The hunger strikers who committed suicide are not … in any meaningful sense Christians.”⁹⁵ She was not about to concede to them a political prisoner status that would confer “a kind of respectability, even nobility.”⁹⁶ But, of course, ironically that’s exactly what her calculated ruthlessness did. Christy Moore (founding member of Planxty and Moving Hearts, and in his own right one of Ireland’s great folk musicians) expressed a widespread sentiment when he eulogized Bobby Sands in “The Peoples Own M.P.” Moore placed him alongside other Irish nationalist martyrs and remembered him as a “man who died in pain / That his country, North and South / Be united once again.” Easterhouse echoed the sentiment in their 1986 single “Inspiration.” Looking for working-class heroes in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, which in their opinion had failed for a lack of resolve among the movement’s leadership, they remembered the hunger strikers “standing against all odds.” “Picture the lives of soldiers like these,” they said. “The hand of a people reaching out for freedom.”

The hunger strike ended with the government making several concessions to the republican prisoners, including the symbolically important right to wear their own clothes. Formally, Thatcher stuck to her principles; the concessions were made after the IRA called off the strike to prevent further loss of life. Somehow, Thatcher convinced herself “the outcome was a significant defeat for the IRA.”⁹⁷ She was also confident that the IRA had played what she called “their last card.”⁹⁸ But the reality was that the strike had a galvanizing effect on the republican movement.⁹⁹ Sands’s election had signalled to the IRA that there might be a way to pursue its goals politically, a possibility it had always dismissed, and this led to the growth of its political wing, Sinn Féin. In “The Peoples Own M.P.” Moore promised that the republican cause would be made “strong / with ballot box and Armalite” (the preferred rifle of the republican paramilitaries). He was echoing Sinn Féin spokesman Danny Morrison, who, at the party’s annual conference shortly after the end of the hunger strike, had asked, “Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot box in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?”¹⁰⁰

Arguably, the rise of Sinn Féin was one of the things that eventually made the peace process possible.¹⁰¹ But the more immediate result of the hunger strike was a surge in both recruits and financial support for the armed wing of the IRA.¹⁰² The recruits came from among those radicalized by the strikers’ martyrdom.¹⁰³ The financial support came largely from the USA, where, Belfast band Ruefrex observed sardonically, a certain kind of Irish American, moved by a sentimental attachment to “the Emerald Isle” and a degree of hypocritical outrage, discovered that it was “a thrill / to kill from far away.” Just two weeks before the Brighton bombing, British and Irish security forces had intercepted seven tonnes of arms and ammunition on their way from the United States to Ireland, but other shipments certainly got through.¹⁰⁴ This support revitalized an organization that had been starting to lose its momentum after more than a decade of conflict.

Even as this revitalized IRA bombed the Conservative Party Conference in 1984, however, it was clear that strength in arms (whether Armalite rifles or homemade bombs) was never going to bring about an end to the Troubles. In claiming responsibility for the Brighton bombing, the Provisional IRA announced, “Mrs Thatcher will now realize that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it.”¹⁰⁵ They were wrong, of course: Thatcher had learned nothing of the sort. Her positions on Ireland, the Irish, and the IRA were as permanently fixed as her positions on the economy, the miners, or the unemployed. And no amount of bloodshed was going to persuade her to concede what she thought of as part of the United Kingdom to the Irish.¹⁰⁶ When, in 1984, an all-parties forum in Dublin proposed three models for ending the Troubles, Thatcher summarized her position on Irish television, “I have made it quite clear … that a unified Ireland was one solution that is out.… A second solution was a confederation system of two states: that is out. A third solution was joint authority: that is out.”¹⁰⁷ For Thatcher, anything that involved Irish self-rule was out.

One of the reasons for this inflexibility was her basic, racist distrust of the Irish. “You don’t expect anything decent to come from an Irishman,” she told friends,¹⁰⁸ and when Peter Mandelson took over as secretary of state for Northern Ireland, she warned him, “You can’t trust the Irish. They’re all liars—liars, and that’s what you have to remember so just don’t forget it.”¹⁰⁹ Another, obviously related reason was her simplistic politics of Us versus Them. It had worked a charm when dealing with Argentina and the NUM, but it was hopelessly inadequate, and deeply counterproductive, as a way of dealing with the Troubles. After all, many of the political issues that provoked the Troubles went back at least as far as the English colonization of Ireland in the seventeenth century and arguably much further; in “Irish Ways and Irish Laws” the Celtic rock band Moving Hearts drew a direct line from the Troubles, back through Oliver Cromwell’s invasion, all the way to the marauding Vikings of the tenth century. In any case, after the 1800 Act of Union, which annexed the whole of Ireland to the United Kingdom, barely a generation passed without an Irish nationalist effort (either armed or constitutional) to reestablish independence. In 1921 one of those efforts, a guerrilla campaign now remembered as the Irish War of Independence, ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, by the terms of which the country was formally divided into two parts. It was this partitioning of the country, considered a betrayal by nationalists, which led directly to the Troubles. After 1921, the disagreement between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland played out more or less along sectarian lines. The Catholic minority felt, with good reason, that they would always be second-class citizens in the Protestant-dominated North and so, overwhelmingly, supported union with the Catholic-dominated South.¹¹⁰ The Protestant majority, conversely, feared that in a united Ireland it would be their rights that were threatened.¹¹¹ It was not an entirely unreasonable fear. The Boomtown Rats, from Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin, reviled their homeland as a “Banana Republic” controlled by a corrupt cabal of priests and businessmen, “the purple and the pinstripe,” who were guilty of “violence worse than they condemn.” The song didn’t win Bob Geldof many new fans in the Irish establishment,¹¹² but it clearly articulated some of the reasons why Protestants in Northern Ireland (even those who were not staunch loyalists) might resist the idea of union with the Republic. They were reasons, it would seem, many young people in the Republic itself sympathized with: the song went to number three in Ireland.

Inevitably, the division between nationalists and unionists dominated Northern Irish politics, with Sinn Féin, the Republican Labour Party, and the National Democratic Party on one side, and the Ulster Unionist Party and the Protestant Unionist Party (later the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP) on the other. Complicating the political situation further, both sides of the political and sectarian divide gave birth to paramilitary organizations. On the Protestant side, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) dedicated themselves to fighting republicanism with violence. On the Catholic side, the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) were just as violently dedicated to fighting unionism. The police didn’t help much; the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and the quasi-military Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), were not above contributing to the sectarian violence (under Thatcher the former even created its own murder squad known as E4A).¹¹³ Nor, unfortunately, was the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), which replaced the USC in 1970.¹¹⁴ In any case, between the UVF, UDA, Official IRA, Provisional IRA, INLA, RUC, USC, and the UDR, the DUP, the SDLP, Sinn Féin and Official Sinn Féin, the conflict had about two dozen sides, each with a long-standing investment in the conflict. Something of the long histories involved here can be gathered from the fact that in 2002, Irish listeners of the BBC World Service ensured that an independence song written in the 1840s, and recorded in 1972 by a band named for one of the leaders of the United Irish Rebellion of 1798 (the Wolfe Tones), was voted the number-one song of all time:

A Nation once again,

A Nation once again,

And Ireland, long a province, be

A Nation once again!

So, as I grew from boy to man,

I bent me to that bidding

My spirit of each selfish plan

And cruel passion ridding;

For, thus I hoped someday to aid,

Oh, can such hope be vain?

When my dear country shall be made

A Nation once again!

More than two hundred years of struggle were bound up in the recording. As Tim Pat Coogan, longtime editor of the Irish Press, puts it in his history of the IRA, “Historically, a nation on the run did not sculpt or paint portraits, but it could, and did, sing and recite poetry.”¹¹⁵ Similarly, more than two hundred years of struggle informed every move and every statement made by both republicans and loyalists during the Troubles.

This deep history meant nothing to Thatcher. Despite her occasional, opportunistic appeals to the past, her politics were basically ahistorical; her sense of right and wrong depended upon essentializations and eternal verities. That the Irish, whom she dismissed so easily as liars, might be wary of dealing plainly with the British government after centuries of betrayal was clearly not part of Thatcher’s calculations. It was much simpler to believe that they were essentially and eternally untrustworthy. It didn’t help that she held an active grudge against the Irish Republic for its neutrality during World War II (more active than her grudge against Germany for starting it, apparently),¹¹⁶ or that she considered the Republic’s desire for a united Ireland comparable to Nazi German imperialism.¹¹⁷ In any case, the tendency to view the world in simplistic, self-justifying terms left Thatcher ill-equipped to deal with a political situation as multifaceted as the Troubles.¹¹⁸

To be fair to Thatcher, though, it wasn’t as if previous British governments had approached the situation with much more nuance or intelligence. In the late 1960s, the predominantly Catholic civil rights movement in Northern Ireland had been met with a backlash from Protestant vigilante groups, and the situation had rapidly deteriorated into sectarian violence.¹¹⁹ After this violence reached a crescendo with the 1969 Derry riot that came to be called the Battle of the Bogside, Harold Wilson’s Labour government sent in the army to keep the peace—principally, as it turned out, by suppressing Catholics.¹²⁰ Looking back on the decision to send British troops into Northern Ireland, Easterhouse identified it as the moment when “the workers’ own party / brought out their true colours” and chose the Union Jack over the working class (“Nineteen Sixty-Nine”). But, of course, Easterhouse were working with the benefit of hindsight. It wasn’t until 1972 that it became tragically clear that the army was not in Northern Ireland to keep the peace. On Sunday, January 30, again in the Bogside area of Derry, British paratroopers shot and killed fourteen unarmed protesters (many of them as they tried to run away) and injured fourteen others.¹²¹

Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, brought international attention to the Troubles and led many, including Paul McCartney and Wings, to demand that Britain “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.” McCartney’s song with that title spent two months on the charts, peaking at number sixteen, despite being banned by the BBC, and despite being, by every available measure, pretty feeble. It contains what may be the most timid protest lyric ever written: “Great Britain you are tremendous … But, really, what are you doin’?” (John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” released the same year, asked the same question but was an altogether less diffident proposition, demanding that the “Anglo pigs and Scotties” bring down the “bloody Union Jack,” close the “concentration camps,” and get the hell out.) But the success of “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” was a measure of the British public’s dismay at what they had seen on television. The government—now Conservative, under Ted Heath—weren’t about to give Ireland back, but they did recognize the need to massage public perception. Adopting a policy of involving the army as little as possible in Northern Ireland, they handed “peacekeeping” duties over to a militarized local police force (the RUC), and the Ulster Defence Regiment.¹²² This policy, known informally as “Ulsterization,” had two advantages: it minimized the chances of a repetition of Bloody Sunday, while reducing the likelihood of paramilitaries killing British soldiers. Tim Pat Coogan explained the logic, “In plain language: get the natives to do the fighting and the dirty work.”¹²³ As a way to minimize the British public’s interest in Northern Ireland, it was a successful manoeuvre. Historian Dominic Sandbrook notes, “For the rest of the decade, the news from Belfast was like a grim soundtrack playing quietly in the background.”¹²⁴ It was, as Exeter punks Metro Youth pointed out, a soundtrack designed to be ignored: “Another youth dies / it’s not surprising / It’s hardly worth analyzing / It’s last on the news / both sides losing.” “Funny,” they added, “how murder can be so boring.”

The government did occasionally resort to straightforward censorship, of course. As John Campbell points out, Thatcher “did not really understand the idea of journalistic freedom,”¹²⁵ and her government was not above applying pressure to ensure that broadcasters offered the correct perspective on the Troubles.”¹²⁶ In 1988, for example, the government banned the broadcasting of the voices of representatives of several organizations (both republican and loyalist) including Sinn Féin. In Ireland, Section 31 of the Broadcast Act went even further, banning the voice, image, or content of any representation by Sinn Féin or the IRA, leading Christy Moore to wonder, “Who are they to decide what we should see?” and “What do they fear that our reaction might be?” This kind of overt censorship had a tendency to backfire, however. As John Campbell notes, “The ban was a propaganda gift to the IRA … and ineffective, since broadcasters simply used actors to read the Sinn Fein leaders’ words.”¹²⁷ But, then, television had other, more effective ways of obfuscating the information it broadcast. As Crass pointed out, sharpening their general critique of mass media spectacle by applying it to coverage of Northern Ireland:

Another plastic bullet stuns another Irish child,

But no-one’s really bothered, no, the telly keeps ’em mild …

Was it Coronation Street? Or was it Londonderry?

Oh, it doesn’t fucking matter, Paul Daniels’ll keep us merry.

Yes, I’ve heard of Bobby Sands; wasn’t it Emmerdale Farm?

As if by one of Paul Daniels’s magic tricks, the suffering in Northern Ireland is made to disappear, and then returned as a television soap opera. “No one thinks of it as war,” sang Culture Shock, “That’s what television’s for.” Assisting in this magic trick were various TV comedians for whom, as the Passage pointed out, jokes about the “taigs” (a derogatory term for Irish Catholics) were part of their stock-in-trade. The Irish Catholics, and especially the “provos,” were understood to be “thick,” with “potatoes for brains.” The Style Council made the same point in “The Stand up Comic’s Instructions”: to cap off jokes about homosexuals, blacks, and Asians, “Tell Irish jokes and you can’t miss / Do the building site one and how they’re all thick.” Aztec Camera, with guest vocals from the Clash’s Mick Jones, commented on the effect of this programmatic racism: through all the funerals and fear, “Paddy’s just a figure of fun / It lightens up the danger.” Fun Boy Three (Terry Hall, Neville Staple, and Lynval Golding of the Specials), similarly understood that the whole point was to ensure that when “another kid with a brick gets shot in the back and gets left on the pavement to bleed,” the question the public asked was, “Does anybody know any jokes?” Danbert Nobacon, one of the founding members of Chumbawamba, responded with “Why Are We Still in Ireland?,” in which he offered a few jokes of his own:

When is a joke not a joke?

When the punchline is the Union Jackboot.

When is a war not a war?

When those who started it know it can’t be won.

And when is a country not a country?

When it’s partitioned and ruled by British guns.

Irish jokes were part of a process of psychological Ulsterization—a process by which the British public were persuaded that the Troubles were endemic to Ireland (a result of some congenital deficiency in the Irish character) and so not really their concern. The back cover of Danbert Nobacon’s “Why Are We Still in Ireland?” asked, “Why do we assume that if British troops withdrew from Ireland then Irish Catholics and Protestants would kill each other in a bloodbath, when we can’t even get it into our thick skulls that it is the British military, economic and administrative presence there which divides Ireland? How dare we presume that there can ever be a British solution to the ‘Irish Question’ when we refuse to acknowledge that WE are the problem?”

Eventually, the Provisional IRA realized that “the Irish could kill each other off until Tibbs Eve … without anyone in England becoming unduly worried”¹²⁸ and started a terrorist bombing campaign in Britain. But, even then, the public were generally able to persuade themselves that it had nothing to do with them. Coogan observed, after almost two decades of bombings up and down the mainland, “Mr and Mrs British Average do not think about Northern Ireland or help to form any part of a political consensus on the subject, rather than apathy and distaste, except in the wake of ‘the atrocity nearby’, when the reaction is likely to be of the kneejerk variety.”¹²⁹ The justice dispensed after these atrocities tended to be of the knee-jerk variety too. After bombings in Guildford and Birmingham in 1974, for example, the police moved swiftly to convict the ostensible culprits. But, as evidence started to emerge that false confessions had been beaten out of the so-called Guildford Four and Birmingham Six (Danbert Nobacon catalogued the abuses pretty thoroughly in “Birmingham Six,” the B-side to “Why Are We Still in Ireland?”), demands for a retrial mounted and the Pogues released “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six.” The song argued that the men were “doing time / for being Irish in the wrong place / and at the wrong time.” The Court of Appeal would eventually agree with the Pogues (who celebrated with the song “Six to Go”), and both the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were released. They had spent more than fifteen years in prison for acts they had not committed while, as Birmingham band Denim pointed out, the real killers were never apprehended. So the victims of the bombings were deprived of justice too:

They blew my home town up and lots of people were killed.

On the news relatives cried; everyone knew someone who’d died

They’ll never forget for the rest of their lives,

And all around, people say, we hate the IRA,

And we asked for justice but it never came.

This, sadly, was a recurring theme throughout the Troubles. From Bogside to Belfast, from Birmingham to Brighton, the victims of terrorism (state sponsored or otherwise) were too frequently civilians. And rarely was there any justice to be had.

images MIXTAPE 11: MAD THATCHER DISEASE MIX

Sham 69, “Ulster” (1977)

Stiff Little Fingers, “Alternative Ulster” (1978)

Sham 69, “They Don’t Understand” (1978)

Stiff Little Fingers, “Suspect Device” (1978)

The Undertones, “Teenage Kicks” (1978)

Stiff Little Fingers, “Wasted Life” (1979)

Stiff Little Fingers, “No More of That” (1979)

The Undertones, “It’s Going to Happen!” (1981)

The Passage, “Troops Out” (1981)

Dick Gaughan, “Song for Ireland” (1981)

Angelic Upstarts, “Soldier” (1982)

Marianne Faithfull, “Ireland” (1983)

U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1983)

The Bluebells, “The Patriot Game” (1984)

Ruefrex, “Paid in Kind” (1984)

Exit-Stance, “Ballykelly Disco” (1984)

Toxic Waste, “Burn Your Flags” (1985)

Conflict, “Neither Is This” (1985)

Toxic Waste, “Listen Margaret” (1986)

Toxic Waste, “As More Die” (1986)

Anathema, “Your Ulster” (1987)

Ruefrex, “Playing Cards with Dead Men” (1987)

That Petrol Emotion, “Big Decision” (1987)

Simple Minds, “Belfast Child” (1989)

Energy Orchard, “Belfast” (1990)

Bloody Sunday established the basic pattern of conflict over the next twenty years: sectarian violence resulted in civilian casualties, which deepened divisions and perpetuated the violence.¹³⁰ Or, as Belfast hardcore band Toxic Waste put it, loudly, in “Burn Your Flags”: “More tricolours and more union jacks / More house searches and more homes wrecked / More bloody bullets and more bloody riots.” Toxic Waste were unambiguous about who was to blame for all of this. In a string of songs—“Traditionally Yours,” “Song for Britain,” “Listen Margaret,” “As More Die,” “We Will Be Free”—they used the twin vocal assault of Patsy (no last name) and Roy Wallace to hurl invective at the villains. First the politicians, especially Margaret Thatcher: “You bleed us, you cheat us, you treat us like shit / You wound us, you shoot us, and you justify it / … Listen, Margaret / Armed occupation means all-out civil war” (“Listen Margaret”). And then the clergy, who capitalized on “fear, suspicion and suffering” to maintain control (“As More Die”). “School, church, and history,” Toxic Waste explained, conspire to “keep us blind, keep us stupid.”

By contrast, when Dublin’s U2 looked back on Bloody Sunday and “the trench … dug within our hearts,” they concluded that the answer was not less religion but more, a greater commitment to Christianity and “the battle just begun / to claim the victory Jesus won.” The band’s bassist Adam Clayton explains, “We were part of finding a spiritual dimension to it rather than just standing at the barricades.”¹³¹ But as the abstractness of the sentiment suggests, U2 were really less interested in the specifics of the Bogside Massacre than in the universal problem of human conflict it symbolized. After all, the album that led off with “Sunday Bloody Sunday” wasn’t called The Troubles; it was called, much more generically, War. Bands from Northern Ireland found the need to address local realities as local realities more pressing. At any rate, this was certainly the case for Stiff Little Fingers (SLF) and Ruefrex, both, like Toxic Waste, based in Belfast. SLF’s first single “Alternative Ulster” was addressed not to a global or even national audience, but specifically to the kids in their city. Its title was a reference to the local punk fanzine of the same name, which in turn took the cue for its name from the book Alternative London. A guide for squatters and others marginalized by the failure of conventional society, Alternative London had gone through several editions in the 1970s, offering advice on how to survive and cultivate viable alternatives. In Belfast, where young people’s options seemed to be limited to “football hooliganism, joining a gang and street fighting, or enlisting with the various paramilitary groups,”¹³² the song “Alternative Ulster” argued that this kind of advice was precisely what was needed. The answer was to “ignore the bores and their laws,” “be an antisecurity force,” and “alter your native Ulster.”

It’s worth noting that Ulster was a term for Northern Ireland preferred by unionists (who certainly didn’t want the country altered) and rejected by nationalists (who did); so the term “Alternative Ulster” had built into it an assertion that neither side was going to get everything it wanted. On the album that followed, SLF expanded considerably on this theme. “Wasted Life” rejected the idea, perpetuated by “fascists brought up to hate,” that sectarianism is inevitable, and refused the false choice these fascists offered between living and dying for either “a united nation / or an independent state.” “State of Emergency” and “Suspect Device” similarly rejected the sectarian vision of Northern Ireland: the former asked kids to break down imaginary walls and redraw the map; the latter explained how those walls, put up by the army, the paramilitaries, the British government, and the police, were designed to create “bitterness and spite,” priming civilians to become “suspect devices.” In other words, in SLF’s alternative map of the conflict, the walls and dividing lines (Protestant/Catholic, Unionist/Nationalist, Loyalist/Republican) were exposed as lies designed to conceal the only dividing line that really mattered: the line between predatory governments and militias on one side and unarmed civilians on the other. “They never ask us if we want a war,” the band pointed out in “No More of That”; so “who do they think they’re talking for?”

Ruefrex too were critical of the ways in which those with power exploited sectarian identities for their own gain. In “Playing Cards with Dead Men,” they railed against the way the British government had for generations “played the orange card” to keep Irish Protestants in line and persuade them to fight for the Empire. They were also just as committed as SLF to nonsectarian critique; where the two bands diverged was in their lyrical approach. SLF’s antisectarian lyrics relied on well-turned slogans for their effect, a technique adopted from earlier punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Paul Burgess’s lyrics for Ruefrex, by contrast, relied on narrative and small, resonant details for their impact. The technique probably owed something to Paul Weller’s lyrics for the Jam, but there were no doubt other influences in there too, including another Protestant Belfast songwriter, Van Morrison. In much the same, vivid way that Morrison’s Astral Weeks evoked a pre-Troubles Belfast, Ruefrex’s Flowers for All Occasions evoked the same city at the depths of its suffering. For example, in “Paid in Kind” a paramilitary assassin, MacLaverty, lies in a doorway waiting to pick off the last man in an army foot patrol:

The street lamps wash blue silhouettes

Dogs bark and howl somewhere,

For effect, MacLaverty warbles “The Londonderry Air.”

Strangled notes that slur together,

Forgotten words are forced to rhyme,

Shop front windows: “Cut Price Discount,”

The only witness to the crime.

In this moment, the song suggests, MacLaverty has suspended his humanity. As the patrol approaches, however, a young boy named Eamon Duffy stops to ask MacLaverty if he’s alright and then sits down beside him in sympathy. MacLaverty has been given a gift. His own humanity recalled by Duffy, there’s a moment here where he might return the gift, not just to the boy but to the British soldiers on patrol. After all, they are barely more than boys themselves, “feeling lost / more statistics, more reminders / of a weary, pointless cost.” MacLaverty declines the gift, however, thinks only, “I’m not the one to blame.” The result is that two boys die pointlessly in the exchange that follows, and MacLaverty himself dies, just as pointlessly, “three months later, in Armagh, paid in kind.”

Other Northern Ireland punk bands, most notably the Undertones from Londonderry, confronted the pointlessness of sectarian violence by steadfastly refusing to confront it. As Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone put it, in their study of Irish popular music, “If Stiff Little Fingers preached about an alternative Ulster, then the Undertones lived the alternative and wrote about it by ignoring the political situation completely.”¹³³ Their first hit “Teenage Kicks” set its sights, with studied naiveté, on a “girl in the neighbourhood” and refused to look away, determined to “get teenage kicks right through the night.” The Undertones had a point. They took on board punk’s energy but decided there wasn’t much to be gained by its anger and chaos; in a country where innocent passersby (like Eamon Duffy in “Paid in Kind”) were altogether too frequently killed, Johnny Rotten’s desire to “destroy the passerby” must have seemed both gratuitous and childish. (Was there, perhaps, an acknowledgement of this in the last verse of “Anarchy in the UK”? Rotten glances overseas at Angola and Northern Ireland, sites of real social disorder, admits befuddlement, and concludes blissfully, “I get pissed! Destroy!”) Not that the Undertones were entirely apolitical. According to guitarist and songwriter Damian O’Neill, their 1981 single “It’s Going to Happen!” was conceived as a song about the hunger strikes,¹³⁴ a warning to the government: “It’s going to happen, happen, ’til you change your mind.” Bassist Michael Bradley qualifies, “The truth is, it was and then it wasn’t.”¹³⁵ By the time the band came to record it, the song had evolved, becoming instead a story about a girl trapped in an abusive relationship with a “fat Mr. X.” The opportunity to say something overtly political had been missed, although a poignant rumination on abuse and despair was the result. Ironically, the band’s appearance on Top of the Pops to promote the single happened to coincide with the death of Bobby Sands on May 5, 1981. Damian O’Neill performed “It’s Going to Happen!” wearing a black arm band, and viewers, taking their cue from that symbol and the song’s chorus, reasonably assumed the song was about the hunger strike after all.

Damian O’Neill and his brother John seem to have gleaned from this experience that a single could carry a political message without having to do any of the heavy lifting itself. After the Undertones disbanded in 1983, the O’Neill brothers formed That Petrol Emotion; like the Undertones, none of TPE’s singles were explicitly or even obliquely political (with the possible exception of “Big Decision” which could have been taken to refer to the 1987 election). But they used the covers of their singles, especially the 12″ versions, which provided lots of room for commentary, to expand on the political statement made by Damian’s black armband. They used the back cover of 1985’s “V2” to alert people to the practice of strip-searching female prisoners awaiting trial in Armagh, and the back cover of “Keen” the same year to remind listeners “that a war is being waged in N. Ireland and that political prisoners of all persuasions … are deprived of the basic human right of contact with their immediate family.” The back of “It’s a Good Thing” included the information that “by 1986 twelve people had been killed in the North of Ireland by plastic bullets, six of these were children.” The cover of 1987’s “A Natural Kind of Joy” reproduced the first part of Seamus Heaney’s “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” perhaps the poet’s most famous statement on the Troubles. The back of “Genius Move” quoted Liam Mellows, a member of the IRA during the War of Independence who rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty as a betrayal of the Irish Republic. The back cover of “Swamp” (also 1987) quoted Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “How can an elite of usurpers, aware of their mediocrity, establish their privileges? By one means only: debasing the colonized to exalt themselves, denying the title of humanity to the natives, defining them simply as an absence of qualities.” It paired the quotation with a cartoon of a comedian starting a joke: “There were these thick paddies …” Later that year, the “Big Decision” 12″ provided space for information about the Diplock Courts, which were set up to process accused paramilitary members expeditiously by dispensing with a jury and accepting both uncorroborated evidence (provided by so-called supergrasses) and confessions obtained under duress.¹³⁶ The cover of 1988’s “Cellophane” demanded, “Surely it’s time for a lasting solution,” and invited people to write to Labour MP Clare Short for more information. “Groove Check” (1989) opened up a new front, warning “THE IRISH SEA IS DYING” and giving contact information for Greenpeace. Finally, 1990’s “Hey Venus” 12″ gave up on the paratextual commentary, but it did come with several remixes including the “Mad Thatcher Disease Mix.”

Whether overtly political or not, what SLF, Ruefrex, and the Undertones all had in common was a desire to understand the humanity of those involved in a conflict where all sides routinely dehumanized one another.¹³⁷ Bands from elsewhere in the UK sometimes found that humanity more difficult to see. For example, Sham 69’s “Ulster” (using the Unionists’ preferred term for Northern Ireland without any apparent sense of the political significance of doing so), made no effort to understand why an “Ulster boy” of either stripe would throw bricks or plant bombs. In fact, it made no effort of any kind. Musically an enervated rip-off of the Monkees’ “Stepping Stone” the song sneered condescendingly at the “fun” the Ulster boys were having and eventually shrugged, “You’re all losers.” Ironically, “Ulster” shared a side on Sham’s first album with “They Don’t Understand,” which whined about the police not understanding that, “when you smash a phone box / or you break into a shop,” it’s really an expression of despair. The unselfconscious hypocrisy is startling, but then Sham 69 were never the clearest thinkers on the punk scene,¹³⁸ and in “Ulster” they were taking on a subject they knew very little about. As Jake Burns, lead singer of SLF pointed out, “Punks in England moan about hassles on the street … [but their] cops don’t carry sub-machine guns.”¹³⁹

Conflict, meanwhile, felt about the British soldiers in Northern Ireland more or less the same way Sham 69 felt about the “Ulster boys”:

There’s a bomb gone off in Harrods yet another in Belfast

Well I say bollocks to the army, in fact—kiss my arse.

That army aims for one thing, it inflicts misery and pain;

Well for what you do to others you must expect the same.

Of course, Conflict were taking a hard line, as they did on everything. Other bands did a better job of distinguishing between the army (as an instrument of colonial oppression, capitalist exploitation, and state terrorism) and the soldiers (often themselves victims of the foregoing). Like the Newtown Neurotics (“Living with Unemployment”) and the Exploited (“Alternatives”), the Passage had sympathy for the working-class squaddie who just wants a job and gets packed off to Belfast “to help our bosses profit from their orange/green divide.” Overwhelmingly, in fact, the impulse in popular music was to struggle towards sympathy for all of the victims of the Troubles. As Conflict’s associates Exit-Stance affirmed in a song about the INLA bombing of the Droppin Well (a club frequented by British soldiers in Ballykelly), “Irish or English—we are all human beings.”

Sometimes this struggle to empathize ended in anger, as in the Au Pairs’ “Armagh”; sometimes in bafflement, as in anarcho-punk band Anathema’s “Your Ulster,” which included the immortal and perfect anarcho-punk chorus, “I don’t know why the fuck I care / But I do / Do you?” Often the struggle ended in lamentation, usually accompanied by a suitably Irish-sounding folk melody. The Bluebells, for example, rewrote Dominic Behan’s ballad “The Patriot Game” as a lament for young Irish men radicalized into killing and dying by “old frauds,” and the Angelic Upstarts recorded a cover of Harvey Andrews’s “Soldier,” a lament for British soldier Michael Willetts, who was killed by an IRA bomb while saving a room full of civilians in Belfast. And Glasgow’s Simple Minds had a UK number-one hit with “Belfast Child.” Built on the melody of the traditional Irish folk song “She Moved through the Fair,” it lamented that war was “raging in the emerald isle,” that Belfast’s children were dispersed, and that there was “sadness abound.” Yet it promised a glimmer of hope: “life goes on,” it reasoned, and there may be a day when “the Belfast child sings again.” The recording tugs at the heartstrings rather more effectively than this sketch suggests. But the sketch is not wrong if it suggests that lamentation has a way of drifting into sentimentality. For example, Dick Gaughan’s “Song for Ireland” begins with the singer’s fond recollections of walking through the history-rich countryside and whiling away happy days in quaint pubs full of cheerful fiddlers. It ends with the singer waking from this dream of a land where, apparently, “no one had to fight” to find a lachrymose Ireland “crying in the morning light.” Similarly, Marianne Faithfull’s “Ireland” juxtaposes the “pure land,” where the singer goes when she’s tired and needs a bit of scenery and the company of “people who can laugh and drink,” with an Ireland of “blood and guilt and pain” and “sorrow at the hearth side.” In its own way, this tearful sympathy with a suffering Ireland is as problematic as Sham 69’s condescension. By imagining Ireland as a choice of immobile stereotypes (the postcard idyll or the tragic war zone) it refuses the country a way forward; the only way out of the Troubles is to retreat into a past of old pubs and cottagey hearthsides. Faithfull’s song, particularly, veers dangerously close to complaining that the Troubles are ruining a rather nice holiday spot.

But perhaps this is unfair. After all, the Dubliners did a version of “Song for Ireland” a couple of years after Dick Gaughan, so there must have been something to it. Perhaps what songs like “Ireland” and “Song for Ireland” reflect is the fact that even at the height of the conflict Northern Ireland was more than just a tragic war zone to those who lived there. In Britain, with that “televised spectacle of suffering” playing on a permanent loop, it was easy to imagine that the Troubles entirely and permanently defined life in Northern Ireland. So much so that the Police, for example, were able to deploy Northern Ireland as a trope, as a metaphor for life in the joyless, alienating wreckage of industrial modernity, filmed exclusively in grainy black and white, under an “Invisible Sun.” But, as Belfast band Energy Orchard pointed out, Northern Ireland was home to more than a million people, and it was beloved: “Belfast,” they sang, “how I know you so well / You’re like heaven, you’re like hell.”

The Provisional IRA announced a ceasefire in 1994. The peace process that followed was not simple or straightforward, but having Thatcher out of the way helped.¹⁴⁰ Having the Conservatives out of the way after 1997 helped even more,¹⁴¹ and in 1998 referenda in both Northern Ireland and the Republic overwhelmingly endorsed the Good Friday Agreement, which charted a way forward. Ireland had survived the Troubles. Even as Thatcher warned Peter Mandelson not to trust the Irish in 1999, she was tacitly acknowledging that Ireland had survived her too.

* Hear, for example, A-Heads, “Forgotten Hero”; Billy Bragg, “Island of No Return”; Dire Straits, “Brothers in Arms”; Pink Floyd, The Final Cut; Flux of Pink Indians, “The Falklands War”; Eddie Grant, “War Party”; Ian Hunter, “Death and Glory Boys”; Kissing the Pink, “Victory Parade”; Living Legends “Island Wars”; Mekons, “Trouble Down South”; the Mob, “No Doves Fly Here”; the Varukers, “Thatchers Fortress.”

PART FIVENew Clear Days

For a few years in the early 1980s, it had looked as though nobody was going to survive Thatcher. That was certainly the way it looked to Discharge (possibly the loudest thing to ever come out of Stoke-on-Trent) and the Varukers (without any doubt whatsoever the loudest thing to ever come out of Leamington Spa). Between them, Discharge and the Varukers recorded a torrent of singles, EPs, and albums between 1980 and 1984, each harder, louder, and more furious than the last, overwhelmingly focused on the horrors of war and the threat of nuclear destruction. Discharge’s contributions included “Realities of War,” “War’s No Fairytale,” “Never Again,” “Death Dealers,” “Two Monstrous Nuclear Stockpiles,” “Visions of War,” “Maimed and Slaughtered,” “Massacre of Innocence (Air Attack),” “The Nightmare Continues,” “The Final Bloodbath,” “A Hell on Earth,” “Cries of Help,” “The End,” “Doomsday,” and “Q: And Children? A: And Children.” The titles are so pointed that quoting the lyrics is almost gratuitous; let’s just say that the catalogue of “mutilated corpses” and “charcoaled flesh” is relentlessly grim. Ian Glasper, one of the punk scene’s most devoted chroniclers, correctly admires the album Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing, on which several of these songs appear, as “a blood-curdling blast of outrage, the band locked so tight, they sound like one of their despised war machines bearing down on you.”¹ Not fun, exactly, but hard to ignore. The Varukers meanwhile added “Never Again,” “Die for Your Government,” “Massacred Millions,” “Will They Ever Learn,” “The Bomb Blast,” “Led to the Slaughter,” “The End Is Nigh,” “You’re Dead,” and, reaching a crescendo, the bludgeoning assault of their Another Religion Another War EP: “No Escape,” “The Last War,” “Who Pays,” “Deadly Games” and “Seek Shelter in Hell.” And this, as pop music’s reaction to nukes, was just the tip of the irradiated iceberg.

images MIXTAPE 12: KEEP THIS BOOKLET HANDY

The Art Attacks, “Neutron Bomb” (1978)

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “Enola Gay” (1980)

The Vapors, “Bunkers” (1980)

Jethro Tull, “Protect and Survive” (1980)

The Freshies, “Wrap Up the Rockets” (1980)

Discharge, “Realities of War” (1980)

T.V. Smith’s Explorers, “Tomahawk Cruise” (1980)

The Varukers, “Protest and Survive” (1981)

Heaven 17, “Let’s All Make a Bomb” (1981)

Anti-System, “Government Lies” (1982)

Modern English, “I Melt with You” (1982)

Anne Clark with David Hammond, “Poem for a Nuclear Romance” (1983)

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Two Tribes” (1984)

Ultravox, “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” (1984)

Ian Dury, “Ban the Bomb” (1984)

Oi Polloi, “Resist the Atomic Menace” (1986)

Poly Styrene, “Big Boy Big Toy” (1986)

The Smiths, “Ask” (1986)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik, “Love Missile F1-11” (1986)

Oi Polloi, “No Filthy Nuclear Power” (1987)

Oi Polloi, “Nuclear Waste” (1987)

James, “Charlie Dance” (1988)

Julian Cope, “5 O’Clock World” (1988)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik, “M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction)” (1988)

Both Discharge and the Varukers released songs entitled “Protest and Survive.” The phrase summarized their collective attitude towards state violence, social injustice, global capitalism, and the arms trade, as well as war and nuclear weapons. It was also a reference to a widely read pamphlet published in 1980 by the historian and peace activist E.P. Thompson. Protest and Survive had been printed for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a response to a pamphlet circulated by the government earlier in the year: Protect and Survive. That publication had helpfully advised Britons on how to “make your home and family as safe as possible under nuclear attack.” They were to build a “fall-out room” insulated with “bricks, concrete or building blocks” or, if those were unavailable, “books and furniture,”² and then prepare a “lean-to” made out of the dining room table or “doors taken from rooms above.”³ The fallout room was to be stocked with everything its occupants would need to survive for two weeks, including a toilet improvised from a bucket and a chair with the seat kicked out. Upon hearing an attack warning, they were to send the kids to the shelter and then “turn off the gas and electricity.” Instructions for dealing with fires, fallout, and casualties (“place the body in another room and cover it as securely as possible”⁴) followed. The booklet concluded with a checklist and the advice, “Keep this booklet handy.”

Protect and Survive tried to sound reasonable, calm, and informative, but the attempt to be reassuring backfired horribly. “If anyone’s clothing catches fire, lay them on the floor and roll them in a blanket, rug or thick coat,”⁵ it advised, and then blandly moved on to discuss what to do about the water mains. The idea seemed to be that a nuclear attack can be coped with as if it were a series of (admittedly rather extreme) inconveniences; the best thing to do was to turn your fall-out room into a smaller version of your normal life and carry on. Ian Dury’s “Ban the Bomb” offered a spot-on parody of the booklet’s tone: “Crawl inside your fall-out shelter underneath your garden shed / Boil an egg, have a cuddle, cut your toe-nails, make the bed.” Anarcho-punks Anti-System were equally spot on in their own way, deriding Protect and Survive as “Government Lies”: “stupid leaflets … show us how to cope” by “hiding under tables,” they complained, but “what’s the fucking use?” And Jethro Tull probably gave an accurate assessment of the public’s ability to “cope,” when they had the victims of a nuclear attack respond to the advice “protect and you’ll survive” with the bewildered lament, “But our postman didn’t call!”

E.P. Thompson’s Protest and Survive argued that spuriously telling people a nuclear war could be survived simply made one more likely. The Varukers summed up their reaction: “I don’t wanna fucking die!” They weren’t alone; for a period in the early 1980s, this preoccupation with nuclear war threatened to overtake the whole punk scene. Crass’s Steve Ignorant later complained, “You’d end up with 40 bands doing songs about Cruise missiles, all dressed in black. I got to the point where I thought, if I hear one more bastard song about Cruise bastard missiles …”⁶ In other words, war and nuclear destruction occupied approximately the space in punk’s imagination that love and sex usually occupy in popular music.*

The general public may not have shared this almost total preoccupation, but fear of nuclear war certainly colonized the popular imagination, working its way even into the pleasures designed to be an escape from it.⁷ Heaven 17’s black and white video for “Let’s All Make a Bomb” captured the phenomenon nicely: the immaculately dressed trio stalk nervously through deserted, rubbish-blown London streets, past abandoned cars, twisted bicycles, and empty buildings. “Ignore the sirens,” Glenn Gregory sings, “Let’s have fun. Put on your best; go out in style.” The double meaning of “go out” hangs there, a grim joke, as Gregory adds, “Let’s celebrate and vapourize.” In a different register, Manchester punk jokers the Freshies made the same point. Since there was no avoiding a nuclear war, they reckoned, the UK should scrap its defence plans and share out the savings. With their share, the Freshies planned to buy a sports car, drive to the Ripon theme park and “spend the four minutes warning sipping champagne with a bird on the big wheel.” This intrusion of apocalyptic fear into the pursuit of hedonistic leisure reached a sort of saturation point in 1984, when Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes” spent nine weeks at the top of the charts. As music critic Dorian Lynskey says, “The record is so insanely, exhilaratingly de trop that it turns a battlefield into a dance floor, and vice versa.… [It] conflates war, sex, and dancing to the extent that you are unsure which of these activities is right and which wrong.”⁸ But, then, Sigue Sigue Sputnik would take this all one grotesque step further in “Love Missile F1-11,” a song which conflates the launching of nuclear missiles with the male orgasm. “US bombs cruising overhead, there goes my love rocket red,” Martin Degville sings with a salacious wink. Now, popular music includes a long catalogue of roosters, snakes, trombones, bamboos, needles, wieners, lemons, submarines, tractors (thanks to the Wurzels), and other assorted substitutes. And Sputnik certainly weren’t the only people to connect nuclear missiles with toxic masculinity. In 1977, art-school punks Art Attacks had sung “Neutron Bomb” from the perspective of an amphetamine-addled punk who gleefully tells his girlfriend that he’s going to blow up her parents, her neighbourhood, and, for some reason, her furniture. And T.V. Smith’s Explorers sang about a sociopath who revels in his own capacity for violence, warning anyone foolish enough to become intimate with him, “You have to choose between living and Tomahawk Cruise”; and both Poly Styrene and the Membranes satirized “big boys” and their compensatory missiles. “Big Boy Big Toy,” Poly Styrene sang, her voice brittle with contempt, “Naughty little boy, he’s in the nuclear arms race.” The Membranes put a cartoon of a musclebound meathead waving his “Big Boy Missile” about on the front cover of their album Kiss Ass … Godhead (on the back, it was shoved up his arse). But, arguably, “Love Missile F1-11” added something new to the list. Its juxtaposition of nuclear destruction and puerile innuendo (like its juxtaposition of starvation and blowjobs later in the song) was either a condemnation of fin de siècle hedonism or a witless celebration of it. With Sigue Sigue Sputnik it was always difficult to tell whether they were trying to make a point or just making a desperate effort to be shocking. In any case, “Love Missile F1–11” seems to answer Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s question in “Two Tribes”: “Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?” The answer, for Sigue Sigue Sputnik was a cheerful “Yes!” (They would return to this delightful theme on their second album with “M.A.D.”: “Oh baby shake / Firebomb fury / Sex bomb rape.”)

The colonization of mundane human experience by nuclear horror could take more nuanced forms, of course. The cover of the Vapors’ album New Clear Days was a pixelated image of a television weatherman pointing at a map of the UK: rainy and seven degrees in Scotland, cloudy in Wales, radiation in the Midlands, mushroom clouds in the Southeast. It’s the map of a country where the prospect of the apocalypse has become as predictably dull as teatime television and everyone lives, both literally and metaphorically, in bunkers. “I got no idea where we go from here,” the Vapors admitted. Julian Cope’s poppy cover of the Vogues’ “5 O’Clock World” described the same bunkered country. It mashed up the Vogues’ song with Petula Clark’s “I Know a Place,” freely rewriting the lyrics to both and hijacking their celebrations of the end of the working day: the Vogues’ anticipation of when “the whistle blows” becomes anticipation of when “the missile blows,” and Petula Clark’s promise, “I know a place where the music’s fine,” becomes “I know a place where we can hide.” By the time the song gets to the Vogues’ line, “In the shelter of her arms everything’s okay” (which Cope leaves unchanged), the word “shelter” has taken on obvious connotations. The lovers’ embrace, which for the Vogues and Petula Clark had been the reward for slogging through the workaday world, has become comfort in the face of the apocalyptic end of it.

Others also wrote interestingly about love at the end of the world. The Smiths’ “Ask,” a song about frustration with one’s own sexual timidity, offers the bomb as a reason to stop hiding indoors “writing frightening verse / to a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg.” On the face of it, it’s a pretty simple variation on carpe diem. But then Morrissey’s persona takes such sensual delight in repeating the sing-song phrase “the bomb, the bomb, the bomb” that the threat doubles back on itself and becomes a promise: one way or another the bomb will save us from our shyness, and it doesn’t really matter much which way. The end of sexual innocence or the end of the world; either would be lovely.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark offered “Enola Gay,” a song in which the titular character is simultaneously the B-52 bomber which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and a woman, a prodigal daughter perhaps, who has sent word to her family that all is well. “Conditions normal,” she explains; she is returning home a “proud mother” of a “little boy.” The inspiration for the song seems to have been the historical detail that Enola Gay’s crew radioed their base after dropping the bomb, codenamed “Little Boy,” to confirm, “CONDITIONS NORMAL IN AIRPLANE FOLLOWING DELIVERY.” That is to say, the song hinges on this double sense of the word delivery: of a baby boy and of a bomb. What sort of massive self-deception, the song asks, does naming a bomb Little Boy entail?

Ultravox’s “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” similarly relies on a doubling. It is either a story about the end of a relationship or a story about the end of the world. The song’s video nudges its audience (probably too much) by panning across TV screens with the frozen warning NUCLEAR EXPLOSION IMMINENT. But the song itself is ingeniously ambiguous. It never mentions nuclear war or nuclear disaster directly, referring only to “the coming storm.” As the song’s protagonist drives home to be with his lover for the last time, “the man on the wireless cries again, it’s over, it’s over.” Either this is about an emotionally shattered radio announcer reporting that universal destruction is at hand or it’s about how, when we’re facing the end of a relationship, every song on the radio seems to be about our particular pain. Or, rather, it’s about both; the song draws upon the universally familiar experience of emotional loss as a way to imagine the unimaginable: if a broken heart always feels like the end of the world, perhaps the end of the world will feel like a broken heart.

Apparently, Modern English attempted this kind of doubling in “I Melt with You.” On the face of it, the song is about world-stopping ecstasy, but according to lyricist Robbie Grey, it was meant to be “about a couple making love as the bomb dropped.… As they make love, they become one and melt together.” Not so much world-stopping ecstasy, then, as world-ending horror. It’s tempting to interpret “I Melt with You” as a sort of limit case. Its central image, comically repulsive if taken literally, was universally mistaken for a rather nice metaphor; perhaps this is evidence that at some point the saturation of private life with fear becomes intolerable and we simply refuse it, internalizing Heaven 17’s command to “ignore the sirens.” Mainly though, I think, listeners who missed Grey’s point were just taking their cues from the song itself: it sounds like an entirely benign love song, not like a grotesque melodrama about people becoming atomic soup.

When Anne Clark and David Harrow approached the same theme a year later, in “Poem for a Nuclear Romance,” they didn’t leave any room for similar misinterpretations about what love at the end of the world will look like. Over Harrow’s moody keyboard setting, Clark forecasts, “Your marble flesh will soon be raw and burning / And kissing will reduce my lips to pulp.” She adds, correctly, “You don’t have to sleep to see nightmares.” As disturbing as the image is, though, what makes the poem properly nightmarish is the tone: competing with the obvious anger and horror, there’s a yearning in it. Like Morrissey, the speaker is half asking for the romance of the end of it all.

images MIXTAPE 13: KIFDNEY MACHINES AND ROCKETS

Gang of Four, “Guns before Butter” (1979)

Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Mittageisen” (1979)

The Clash, “London Calling” (1979)

The Fall, “2nd Dark Age” (1980)

The Sound, “Missiles” (1980)

Def Leppard, “When the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down” (1980)

The Jam, “Going Underground” (1980)

Young Marble Giants, “Final Day” (1980)

The Diagram Brothers, “Isn’t It Interesting How Neutron Bombs Work” (1981)

Discharge, “A Look at Tomorrow” (1981)

Special Duties, “CND (Campaign for Nuclear Destruction)” (1982)

Tom Robinson, “Merrily Up on High” (1982)

Red Guitars, “Fact!” (1983)

Amazulu, “Greenham Time” (1983)

The Style Council, “Money-Go-Round” (1983)

The Astronauts, “Typically English Day” (1983)

The Exploited, “Let’s Start a War … (Said Maggie One Day)” (1983)

Kissing the Pink, “Greenham” (1984)

The Three Johns, “Atom Drum Bop” (1984)

Television Personalities, “You’ll Have to Scream Louder” (1984)

Crass, “You’re Already Dead” (1984)

Red London, “C.N.D.” (1984)

Television Personalities, “How I Learned to Love the Bomb” (1986)

Shop Assistants, “Before I Wake” (1986)

Morrissey, “Everyday Is Like Sunday” (1988)

Peggy Seeger, “Carry Greenham Home” (1988)

So how did it get to the point that songs about people melting seemed like a good idea? And how did the fear of nuclear war reach such a pitch that imagining humanity’s final moments became a common theme in early 1980s pop music?* Between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, the threat of nuclear war had actually receded significantly. So much so that, in a 1975 episode of Doctor Who, the Brigadier could speak of a disused nuclear bunker (now occupied by evil scientists) as having been built “back in the Cold War days.”⁹ The thaw had started with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), signed by the USA and the Soviet Union in 1972, and had accelerated with ongoing negotiations towards a broader agreement (SALT II). In Britain, its effects could be measured in the declining fortunes of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: in the early 1960s, the CND had been able to rally upwards of 150,000 Britons for antinuclear marches, and the campaign’s logo had been adopted worldwide as the peace symbol; by the end of the 1970s it was almost moribund. Its membership had withered to a few hundred.¹⁰ It might have vanished entirely had Britain not elected a prime minister who was, by her own reckoning, “preoccupied with the balance of power.”¹¹ In a speech in 1976 she explained: “The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet politburo don’t have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.”¹²

It was this speech that led the Soviet press to dub Thatcher the “iron lady.”¹³ It was also, no doubt, this speech that Gang of Four had in mind in 1979 when they sang, “I hear some talk of guns and butter,” and added, “That’s something I can do without.” They had good reason: the rhetoric of “guns and butter” had been popularized, forty years earlier, by the Nazis. Joseph Goebbels, propagandizing for the German war machine in 1935, had said, “We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.”¹⁴ Hermann Goering had made the same point a couple of months later: “Iron has always made states strong, butter and lard have only made them fat.”¹⁵ At the time, Goering’s speech inspired John Heartfield’s famous photomontage of a happy German family eating scrap metal and celebrating, “Hurrah, the butter is all gone!” Forty years later, Siouxsie and the Banshees reproduced the poster on the cover of their single “Mittageisen.” The song imagined a future where “metal will rule” and families will dine in the flickering glow of televised propaganda: “I’ll serve metal,” the good housekeeper vows ambiguously. It’s not clear whether Thatcher’s revival of the guns and butter theme directly inspired the Banshees song, but it certainly speaks to the same dread Gang of Four were experiencing. The latter could draw a straight line from the warmongering “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck through Nazi Germany to the Iron Lady, and it made them reflect, “All this talk of blood and iron / Is the cause of all my shaking.”

They were right to be worried. Just a few months earlier in 1979, Margaret Thatcher, now convinced that “the Soviets were approaching parity in strategic missiles with the United States,”¹⁶ had started lobbying her NATO partners to support the deployment of several hundred US cruise missiles in Europe (including 160 in England).¹⁷ She had also arranged to purchase American Trident II missiles, then under development, for Britain’s four nuclear submarines (“Britain’s brand new passport to Armageddon,” NME called them, next to a full page ad for the Beat’s “Stand Down Margaret”).¹⁸ In June 1979, this Trident deal was threatened by the imminent SALT II agreement, which would have banned any new missile programs. But then Russia intervened in Afghanistan (just as the USA would intervene in Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Libya, and more over the next decade). The USA, interpreting this as an attempt at world dominance, retaliated by refusing to ratify the SALT II agreement, and suddenly the Cold War was firmly back on track.¹⁹ This came as a relief to Thatcher, who was convinced that the détente of the 1970s had merely been a pretext for the Soviet Union to pursue “a policy of covert aggression, while the West had let slip its defences.”²⁰

Some people responded to the rising tensions with gallows humour. The Astronauts (not the American surf rock group but the Hertfordshire psychedelic post-punk prog group) joked drily that the English were so set in their ways that a nuclear war would be just another “typically English day,” just something else to complain about like the weather and the communists. And, in “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” Morrissey offered Armageddon as the cure for the typically English day, begging someone to drop a bomb on the seaside town where he had accidentally gone on holiday. The Diagram Brothers asked, with mock scientific interest, “Isn’t It Interesting How Neutron Bombs Work?” Eschewing anything as sentimental as a melody, they explained that when a neutron bomb is detonated, “many components are removed; not many buildings are removed. This can save you lots of money.” The song’s arrangement, even by the Diagram Brothers’ standards, is tortured; they specialized in creating soundscapes with serrated edges, but “Isn’t It Interesting” is exceptionally unforgiving, a jagged squall that eventually overwhelms the affectless vocals, atomizing and disintegrating into a room-clearing noise. (Presumably the joke is that while many people are removed, the room is not removed.) And, in “How I Learned to Love the Bomb,” the Television Personalities’ Dan Treacy explained how, after becoming disillusioned with demonstrating on behalf of the CND, he stole a Polaris Missile from Greenham Common, which he now keeps in his bedroom. It becomes a masturbatory version of Sputnik’s love missile; “I’ll polish it every day,” he says defiantly, “and I don’t care what the neighbours say.”

Most people, however, found nothing much to laugh about in the prospect of being blown up (Tom Robinson sang glumly, “All my friends talk and joke and laugh about Armageddon / But like a nightmare it’s still waiting there at the end of every day”). Greenham Common, which Dan Treacy alludes to in “How I Learned to Love the Bomb,” was the RAF base where ninety-six of the cruise missiles assigned to Britain were stationed and, from September 1981, the site of a nineteen-year-long antinuclear protest. It was initiated by thirty-six women from the organization Women for Life on Earth who chained themselves to the base’s fence. At its peak, the protest movement was able to rally thirty thousand women to encircle that nine-mile fence “hand-in-hand,” as Peggy Seeger put it in “Carry Greenham Home,” to assert “not the nightmare, not the scream / just the loving human dream / of peace.”²¹ Synth-pop band Kissing the Pink recorded that, predictably, “The rain came down, pouring down.”

Women for Life on Earth were not alone; dozens of other local, national, and international organizations emerged, as Amazulu put it with dub-laden dread in “Greenham Time,” to “scream about peace.” At the peak of the antinuclear movement, there were more than a dozen peace camps operating outside military bases up and down the United Kingdom, as well as the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, Friends of the Earth, Parents for Survival, Women for World Disarmament, European Nuclear Disarmament, and the World Disarmament Campaign. And a resurgent CND’s membership rocketed into the hundreds of thousands.²² In 1981 they rallied a quarter of a million antinuclear protesters in London, and a couple of years later they exceeded that, getting three hundred thousand out to protest the deployment of cruise missiles (mind you, to put this figure in perspective, in 2002 the Countryside Alliance got over four hundred thousand people to march through London in defence of fox hunting).²³ Not everyone was impressed. Class War, the paper started by Ian Bone after Alarm had run its course, scoffed, “IF YOU THINK BUILDING CHAPELS, PLANTING SEEDS, AND PUTTING BALLOONS ON FENCES CAN STOP NUCLEAR WEAPONS … THEN YOU’RE A FUCKING IDIOT.”²⁴ Ever the belligerent drunk of radical politics, they added, “FUCK THE DEAD END OF PACIFISM.”²⁵ Crass were not impressed by all the marching either, commenting, “Four hundred thousand people marched for CND.… They’re already dead.” And Mark E. Smith of the Fall was skeptical about both peace groups and the pop groups who supported them. “I could join a pray-peace group,” he sang in “2nd Dark Age,” adding sarcastically, “Cause groups can change the world.” In the same song he sneered at the way “commune crapheads sit and whine,” taking a passing swipe, it would seem, at Crass. A similarly contrary opinion came from Colchester punks Special Duties, who seem to have read Class War religiously. The prospect of unilateral disarmament struck them as patently absurd; how, they wondered, was marching for the CND going to stop the Russians dropping the bomb: “CND, it don’t fool me,” they reasoned, “I don’t wanna live in a weak country.” CND, they concluded, stood for “Campaign for Nuclear Destruction.”

Special Duties’ pronuke stance, the Fall’s skepticism, and Crass’s pessimism notwithstanding, however, the antinuclear campaign had some of popular music’s best acts on its side: the Jam, the Clash, Bad Manners, the Specials, Peter Gabriel, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Madness, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Beat, XTC, the Stranglers, the Undertones, and the Au Pairs all contributed to the compilation album Life in the European Theatre, for the benefit of the CND, the Anti-Nuclear Campaign, Friends of the Earth, and European Nuclear Disarmament. Peter Gabriel, Madness, and the Beat’s Dave Wakeling (who had organized Life in the European Theatre) also contributed tracks to a second CND benefit album put together by Tom Robinson, Let the Children Play. It featured songs by Poison Girls, Billy Bragg, Mari Wilson, Pauline Black, Captain Sensible, the Flying Pickets, Amazulu, and Martin Ansell; a second disc featured a virtual who’s who of the alternative comedy scene, with stand-up by Arnold Brown, Emma Thompson, Ben Elton, Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, and Jenny LeCoat among others. These benefit albums would continue to appear throughout the decade. In 1989, Dub Syndicate, Beats International, Massive Attack, Coldcut, the Orb, the Shamen, and the KLF, all contributed to Give Peace a Dance: A CND Compilation. The CND would also collaborate with NME to release a VHS tape, Carry on Disarming in 1989, an international effort including videos by American bands Pussy Galore and Throwing Muses, Iceland’s the Sugarcubes, and Canada’s Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, as well as the La’s, Kitchens of Distinction, My Bloody Valentine, Inspiral Carpets, and two dozen others. Even more impressive in its international scope was the 1984 double album International P.E.A.C.E Benefit Compilation, which included songs by fifty-five punk bands from the USA, Japan, Denmark, Holland, Canada, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Spain, and the Netherlands. Representing the UK were Conflict, Subhumans, and, putting their skepticism aside for a moment, Crass. Perhaps the most interesting of these compilations, in its conception at least, was Wargasm. Its cover featured a drawing of a mushroom cloud made of starving African children; royalties for the songs on the album (by the Danse Society, Flux of Pink Indians, Angelic Upstarts, Captain Sensible, and Rat Scabies among others) were variously contributed to No Nukes Music, Friends of the Earth, the CND, the El Salvador Relief Organization, Cancer Research, Women’s Centres in Belfast and Dublin, the Donkey Sanctuary at Sidmouth, and the Sheffield Libertarians. It’s a fascinating artefact of the political alliances and collaborations that proliferated in response to Thatcher’s policies.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other bands performed at antinuclear benefits, including the Glastonbury Festival,²⁶ or wrote antinuclear songs. Red London (who were, perversely, from Sunderland) caught the mood of it all in “CND,” the first track on their album This Is England: “If we want to, we can change the world.… Support the CND!” Paul Weller, while fronting the Jam, had taken a pessimistic view of this possibility, reckoning that most people were too sheep-like to object to, let alone change anything. In “Going Underground” (a number-one hit for the Jam in March 1980, just a few months after the announcement that the UK would be home to 160 cruise missiles), Weller complained that people were too passively willing to accept both Thatcher’s monetarism and her militarism. He added with a cynical shrug that, on some level, “the public gets what the public wants” even if it’s “kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns.” His reaction was summed up in the song’s punning title: all the objector can do is drop out of society and head for the fallout shelter. Revisiting the subject three years later with the Style Council in “Money-Go-Round,” Weller was just as angry about the fact that the government was “too busy spending on the means of destruction / To ever spend a penny on some real construction.” And he was just as frustrated that the government were not being held to account for the American nuclear weapons “to which we play midwife.” But, now, rather than heading for the fallout shelter, he allowed himself a glimmer of optimism: the profits from “Money-Go-Round” went to Youth CND.²⁷

Most antinuclear songs of the period shared Paul Weller’s anger. Some focused it on nuclear power, nuclear waste, and the danger of “nuclear errors,” as the Clash put it in “London Calling.” After a nuclear error at Chernobyl released an unprecedented cloud of radiation into the atmosphere, James complained that the government’s hapless response was effectively “put your hands on your head / try and breathe through your nose / flat on the floor, bum in the air.” Oi Polloi were incensed: “They try to tell us it’s safe; try telling that to those dying slowly of leukemia” (“No Filthy Nuclear Power”). Compounding these lies about the safety of nuclear power, they argued, were more lies about its purpose: “Nuclear energy is a con,” they explained in “Nuclear Waste,” “It’s just a cover for making their bombs.” And, in “Resist the Atomic Menace,” they argued that the industry was willing to commit murder to maintain this cover-up. Antinuclear activist Hilda Murrell, they suspected, had been “murdered by the British Nuclear Industry” to silence her criticism.

The vast majority of antinuke songs, however, focused on the bomb. The Beat’s “Man at the C&A” and Queen’s “Hammer to Fall” echoed the fury of “Money-Go-Round” at the indifference of politicians to public opinion; “You’ll have to scream louder,” the Television Personalities suggested, “Because no one is listening.” Others expressed anger about “Living Through Another Cuba,” as XTC put it, caught in the middle of what was essentially an imperial conflict between Russia and the USA. Others criticized the politicians who had put them there and who, in the event of a nuclear conflict, would be safe in their bunkers. For the rest of us, the Three Johns, reckoned, there’d be “fifteen minutes warning to construct a sandbag shelter,” and then “apocalypse for breakfast.”* Red Guitars focused on the military industrial complex, adapting the Book of Common Prayer to their purpose and offering a burial service for civilization. “Ground to air, and dust to dust / The sirens sound collusion,” they sang, and concluded with the refrain, “Take the profit out of war / We don’t need it anymore.”

A few songs took a quite different approach, focussing not on the horror of nuclear war, but on what’s worth saving from it. This is what Ultravox did so effectively in “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” and what Young Marble Giants, the Shop Assistants and Everything but the Girl did, just as effectively, in “Final Day,” “Before I Wake,” and “The Night I Heard Caruso Sing” respectively. The Young Marble Giants’ minimalist arrangements and breathless vocals always lent their songs a kind of bleak tranquillity, and they make “Final Day” a kind of lullaby for when the baby cries “as the light goes out on the final day.” Alison Statton sings the lyrics as if she’s recited this lullaby a thousand times, no longer hearing the words, feeling and understanding only the reassuring melody. Underneath that reassurance, though, there’s something deeply disturbing about the lack of emotion in Statton’s voice.

The Shop Assistants’ jangly guitar pop shared none of Young Marble Giants’ bleakness, but “Before I Wake” was similarly unsettling. When the end approaches, Alex Taylor sings:

I want to lie with you beside me …

And hold you so close against me

That I can see no further than your eyes.

It’s a helpless prayer for the smallest of mercies, the right not to see the end coming. Everything but the Girl’s “The Night I Heard Caruso Sing” similarly tries to focus on what’s beloved, but it can’t ignore the horror in its peripheral vision. It’s a song about continuity, about embracing one’s family, even as “the chains are loosed and the world runs wild,” but it has no illusions about the limits of the safety offered by that embrace. Its sentimental recollections of childhood holidays on the West Coast of Scotland are interrupted by the uncomfortable knowledge that, today, nuclear submarines armed with Trident missiles are based at Faslane, on Gare Loch. The safety of childhood is lost, and Ben Watt wonders if it even makes sense to have children if they will fear their birthplace. In the face of this uncertainty, inspired by a recording of Caruso singing, he resolves to defy chaos and fear with the simple, elegiac beauty of his own song. And, when Tracey Thorn’s harmonies join Watt’s melody, there really is a kind of power in the tender melancholy of it all. But, the song asks, is this beauty enough? It ends with a partial verse, an incomplete thought—“They’re loading bombs onto a white train / How can we afford to ever sleep / so sound again?”

images MIXTAPE 14: SEE YOUR FAMILY AND FRIEND PERISH!

The Clash, “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” (1978)

Crass, “White Punks on Hope” (1979)

The Sound, “Missiles” (1980)

UB40, “The Earth Dies Screaming” (1980)

Jona Lewie, “Stop the Cavalry” (1980)

Def Leppard, “When the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down” (1980)

The Beat, “Dream House in NZ” (1981)

Discharge, “A Look at Tomorrow” (1981)

Special Duties, “Bullshit Crass” (1982)

The Mob, “No Doves Fly Here” (1982)

Political Asylum, “Disarm or Die” (1983)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Di Eagle an’ Di Bear” (1984)

Culture Club, “The War Song” (1984)

Terminus, “Propaganda War” (1986)

The Three Johns, “Atom Drum Bop” (1986)

Conflict, “The Day Before” (1986)

Everything but the Girl, “The Night I Heard Caruso Sing” (1988)

Pop Will Eat Itself, “Def.Con.One” (1989)

All of these songs, glimmers of optimism notwithstanding, reflected the sense of impotence Thatcher’s brinksmanship engendered: “They make the missiles that run our lives,” observed the Sound. To some bands, however, it was clear that this powerlessness wasn’t just a product of the arms race, it was the whole point of it. “While you slash our hospitals and our schools …” Political Asylum told Thatcher, “you think you’ll control us with the Russian threat.” But Political Asylum weren’t being fooled; they recognized that, despite being quite real, the threat of extinction was fundamentally a spectacle. The Beat, in their woozy “Dream House in NZ,” called the nuclear arms race “a family entertainment,” a wonderfully compelling television gameshow in which everyone tries to “beat the others to the button!” The Three Johns called it “the great modern fiction” written half in the lingo of marketing and half in the “jargon of the playground brawl.” The Clash lampooned it as a suicidal and ultimately boring disco dance-off, in “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe.” Pop Will Eat Itself suggested that Armageddon was just another consumer choice, like a “Big Mac and fries to go.” And Linton Kwesi Johnson pointed out that the West’s obsession with “impending nuclear warfare” and the possible destruction of the whole human race conveniently obscured the fact that millions worldwide were already living with the reality of wars created by the West. To those people the survival of the “human race” was a gratuitous abstraction.

What LKJ’s observation highlights is a general problem with pop songs that try to say something critical about the world: they tend to become part of the spectacle they’re critiquing. This problem becomes acute when what’s at stake is a source of profound human suffering such as war. For example, in 1980, singer-songwriter Jona Lewie released an antiwar song called “Stop the Cavalry,” which contrasted the self-congratulatory confidence of military leaders, sending orders from behind the lines, with the fear and loneliness of soldiers at the front. At least I assume Lewie intended it as an antiwar song. What it actually turned out to be, unfortunately, was a Christmas novelty song—and a very successful one at that. It was only kept out of the coveted Christmas number-one spot by the sentimental appeal of “Starting Over” (by the recently deceased John Lennon) and the even more sentimental appeal of “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” by St. Winifred’s School Choir. Only in the early 1980s could a song that rhymes “home” with “nuclear fallout zone” have been taken for a singalong Christmas song, but in “Stop the Cavalry,” the oom-pah-pah horns, Lewie’s reassuringly banal vocal performance, and the line “Wish I was at home for Christmas” do all encourage a certain kind of reception: not as protest but as a sentimental representation of protest.

The cultural theorist Theodor Adorno, complaining about antiwar protest songs in the 1960s, grumbled:

Attempts to bring political protest together with “popular music”—that is, with entertainment music—are doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from … consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial. And I have to say that when someone sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Viet Nam … by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable it somehow ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.²⁸

In some ways, Adorno was simply observing that the pop song, like any other art form, runs into a conundrum when it tries to depict the horrors of war. All art (film, literature, painting, sculpture as much as music) is under a compulsion to make its subject aesthetically interesting. When that subject happens to be something it would have us turn away from (war, drug addiction, or sexual violence for example), art finds itself in the position of representing it as both attractive and repellent. But for Adorno, the problem is compounded, in pop music, by the requirement to be a mass-marketable commodity. Its negotiation of this aesthetic ambivalence is compromised because it must sell. So Lewie’s “Stop the Cavalry” tips into maudlin sentimentality because there’s a market for maudlin sentimentality.

Looking at the fate of “Stop the Cavalry,” it’s tempting to agree with Adorno, and it’s not difficult to find further examples to support his argument. Take Culture Club’s “The War Song.” An instance of what Bono scathingly calls “Rock against bad things,”²⁹ its contribution to antiwar rhetoric was, “War is stupid and people are stupid.” It made the music writer Dorian Lynskey muse that perhaps “greed and bloodshed weren’t so bad after all.”³⁰ The indescribable dog’s dinner of a video made to promote the song didn’t help by witlessly throwing together scenes of children playing war games with some sort of military fashion show, and a bit of dancing, and Boy George wearing various wigs … a tank … stock footage of a nuclear test … more kids, in skeleton costumes this time … and the overwhelming impression it left was that pop is stupid and videos are stupid. But, then, the most generous possible interpretation of it all is that this was precisely Boy George’s point: a three-minute pop song simply isn’t equipped to say anything penetrating about something as complex as war. So why bother taking it seriously?

Mind you, “The War Song” sounds positively thoughtful next to Def Leppard’s “When the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down.” According to lead singer Joe Elliot, “When the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down” “explains exactly what would happen if there’s a massive atomic war … give or take the odd thing … like the women bein’ captured an’ chained.”³¹ Right from its portentous, spoken-word intro (“On the first day of the first month of some distant year …”), it doesn’t so much fall into melodrama as leap headfirst into it screaming. Of course, heavy metal is prone to melodrama, but antiwar songs generally have this problem, especially when they reach for a vivid image to convey the horror of war. The Mob’s dirge-like “No Doves Fly Here” offers a picture of a war’s aftermath, lingering grimly over empty playgrounds and the “limbless corpses” of children; UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming” includes a postapocalyptic domestic stilllife of “half-eaten meals … rotting on the tables / Money clutched within a bony hand”; Discharge’s “A Look at Tomorrow” imagines how, after a nuclear blast, the victims’ skins will “shed like that of a snake”; Conflict’s “The Day Before” warns that you will “see your family and friends perish! The eyes melting! The skin shrivelling!” In each case, the intention is to create something more evocative and potent than the average “wanky war song,” as Conflict put it, to avoid the feeble, feckless abstraction of “The War Song” or the sentimentality of “Stop the Cavalry.” Unfortunately, by focussing on horrifying details, the singers often end up sounding like revivalist preachers titillating their delighted congregations with the torments of the damned. Again, what’s on offer is a spectacle.

This is what convinced Chumbawamba that they would only be able to accomplish something politically meaningful if they found a way (as they put it in the liner notes to their self-released cassette Be Happy! Despite It All) to “communicate outside the capitalist rock n roll systems.” Indeed, at its core, the whole anarcho-punk scene Chumbawamba moved in was a sustained effort to create such an anticapitalist space, a space from within which one could stage an authentic and autonomous critique of the system. This project faced a couple of intractable problems. As Terminus pointed out, maintaining this autonomous space tended to mean that “you preach your message to your circle of friends,” and this left Terminus wondering, “Is preaching to the converted all we’re gonna do?” It was a thorny problem because, when bands did try to preach to the uncoverted, it threatened to undermine the autonomy of the project because doing so usually meant “selling out” and signing to major labels. Crass, on their self-released Stations of the Crass album, made a point of distinguishing themselves from the Clash, who had initially been an inspiration,³² before they (in)famously signed with CBS³³:

The name is Crass, not Clash

They can stuff their punk credentials

Cause it’s them that takes the cash;

They won’t change nothing with their fashionable talk.

The Clash had, of course, made the same disparaging noises about groups like the Jam, who, in their “Burton suits,” were “turning rebellion into money.” And Crass themselves would be accused, by Special Duties, of commodifying anarchy “just for cash.” And, no doubt, there were some very serious punks somewhere in Colchester who had questions about the ideological rigour of Special Duties.³⁴ In other words, if music’s ability to stage a meaningful critique of society hinges on the purity of its punk credentials, on its autonomy from consumer capitalism, we’re in trouble. As Keith Negus notes, this line of thinking leads us “to a fatalistic despair about the way that capital is able to determine how popular music is produced and consumed,”³⁵ and a belief that the only way out is “a revolutionary socialist transformation of the entire capitalist system.”³⁶ And, sadly, no such transformation was forthcoming in Thatcher’s Britain.

Perhaps this is why, even when popular music did seem to have accomplished something, such as the eventual removal of the cruise missiles, it still didn’t feel like a victory. Between Ireland, the Falklands, and the 1990 Gulf War, Thatcher was constantly involved in one stupid war or another, but she did eventually recognize that there wasn’t much to be gained from being blown up by the Americans and the Russians. In 1986, she got the two tribes back to the bargaining table she had been so happy to see them abandon in 1979, and they subsequently signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Thousands of nuclear weapons on both sides, including the cruise missiles stationed in Britain, were decommissioned. It seemed like a major victory for the peace movement, of course, and for all those musicians who had supported it in both song and action. But it also appeared, irritatingly, to vindicate Thatcher’s decision to station cruise missiles in Britain in the first place: she could argue that, without them, there would have been nothing to bargain with. Regardless of whether this was true (and in hindsight it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t), popular music lost interest immediately and moved on. Perhaps it’s not surprising that there were no songs written about the removal of the cruise missiles: even in its protest mode, pop music (unlike folk music) rarely celebrates political victories, and in a situation where the victory celebration would have to have been shared with the Fascist Groove Thing, it was out of the question. Even so, it’s striking that only four of the more than four dozen antinuclear songs referenced in the last two mixtapes were released after the INF Treaty was signed.

The Greenham Common protesters remained doggedly at the peace camp, even after the last missiles had been removed in 1991, to remind people that the threat of nuclear war and nuclear power was still there. But for popular music, without the immediate and concrete danger represented by the cruise missiles, nukes had ceased to be a transfixing topic.

* Not all of the songs made it onto vinyl or cassette, of course, but those that did included Alternative, “Where Are Your Hiroshimas?”; Anti-System, “No Longer to Choose” and “Bomb Threat”; Captain Sensible, “The Russians Are Coming”; Conflict, “The Day Before”; Crass “Nagasaki Nightmare” and “You’re Already Dead”; the 4-Skins, “I Don’t Wanna Die”; Flux of Pink Indians, “Tapioca Sunrise”; Instigators, “Genocide,” “Wrong Word”; Six Minute War, “Protest and Survive”; the Partisans, “Arms Race”; Passion Killers, “Why?” and “Start Again”; Political Asylum, “Disarm or Die”; Potential Threat, “Nuclear Threat”; Reality, “N.A.T.O.”; Red Alert, “We’ve Got the Power”; Riot/Clone, “Neu-vastation”; Special Duties, “There’ll Be No Tomorrow”; Stalag 17, “Doomsday Machine”; Vice Squad, “Last Rockers”; Zounds, “Target/Mr. Disney/The War Goes On.” I could go on.

* It wasn’t just Modern English and Anne Clark: hear, for example, the Blow Monkeys, “Atomic Lullaby”; Kate Bush, “Breathing”; John Cale, “Dr. Mudd”; Captain Sensible, “Glad It’s All Over”; Depeche Mode, “Two Minutes Warning”; Gillan, “Mutually Assured Destruction”; Robyn Hitchcock, “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus”; Mood Six, “Just Like a Dream”; Scars, “Your Attention Please”; U2, “Seconds.”

* On the perils of nuclear power, hear also Metro Youth’s “Meltdown,” Flux of Pink Indians’ “They Lie, We Die,” Moving Hearts’ “Hiroshima Nagasaki Russian Roulette,” the Radio Actors’ “Nuclear Waste,” Subhumans’ “Someone Is Lying,” and Sting’s “We Work the Black Seam.” On living through another Cuba, hear UK Subs’ “Warhead,” Heaven 17’s “Contenders,” Icons of Filth’s “One Second to Midnight,” and the Exploited’s “Rival Leaders.” And on politicians and their atomic bunkers hear AOA’s “Who Are They Trying to Con?” Political Asylum’s “System of War,” the Exploited’s “Safe Below,” Anti-System’s “Government Lies,” the Clash’s “Stop the World,” Anthrax’s “All the Wars,” Dougie’s “War without Winners,” Jethro Tull’s “Protect and Survive,” Captain Sensible’s “Hey Jo,” Faction’s “Obligatory War Song,” and Hazel O’Connor’s “Who Needs It.”

PART SIXThe Police Have Been Wonderful

images MIXTAPE 14½: IN SPITE OF THESE TIMES

Funboy Five, “Compulsive Eater” (1980)

Stump, ”Buffalo” (1980)

Scritti Politti, “The Sweetest Girl” (1981)

Diagram Brothers, “Seals/Fur Coats” (1981)

Zounds, “Great White Hunter” (1981)

Flux of Pink Indians, “Blinded by Science” (1982)

ABC, “The Look of Love” (1982)

Bananarama, “Give Us Back Our Cheap Fares” (1982)

Conflict, “Meat Means Murder” (1983)

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Pills and Soap” (1983)

Anathema, “Six Seconds” (1984)

Antisect, “Tortured and Abused” (1984)

Instigators, “All Creatures” (1984)

Madness, “Michael Caine” (1984)

Exit-Stance, “They Kill Dogs” (1985)

The Colour Field, “Cruel Circus” (1985)

Captain Sensible, “Wot? No Meat?” (1985)

Varukers, “Animals an Animal” (1985)

The Smiths, “Meat Is Murder” (1985)

Conflict, “This Is the A.L.F.” (1986)

Robb Johnson & The Barnyard Chorus, “The Animal Song” (1986)

Fuzzbox, ”Bohemian Rhapsody” (1986)

Electro Hippies, “Sheep” (1987)

Hue & Cry, “Strength to Strength” (1987)

Close Lobsters, “In Spite of These Times” (1987)

Electro Hippies, “Run Ronald” (1988)

God’s Little Monkeys, “Reynard” (1988)

The Stone Roses, “(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister” (1988)

Electro Hippies, “Scum” (1988)

Shelleyan Orphan, “Suffer Dog” (1989)

Citizen Fish, “How to Write Ultimate Protest Songs” (1990)

Howard Jones, “Don’t Be Part of It” (1991)

Danbert Nobacon, “McDonald’s” (1991)

Paul McCartney, “Meat Free Monday” (2009)

The original working title for this book was This Is Not Enough, borrowed from the Conflict song. I chose it partly because I knew I was never going to get everything and everyone I wanted into these pages. And I was right, there are several mixtapes I imagined that, in the end, didn’t quite fit in. One of them was about gender, sexuality, and sexual politics. Punk had broached the subject in the 1970s in a way that mainstream pop simply couldn’t.¹ Punk songs had interrogated pop’s mystification of sex (the Slits, “Love und Romance”; Alternative TV, “Love Lies Limp”), and asked questions about patriarchal expectations and gender roles (X-Ray Spex, “O Bondage, Up Yours”), the masculine gaze (Elvis Costello, “This Year’s Girl”), domestic abuse (Stiff Little Fingers, “Hits and Misses”), and sexual assault (Crass, “Bata Motel”; the Raincoats, “Off-Duty Trip”; Honey Bane, “Girl on the Run”); various strains of post-punk extended and expanded this discussion over the course of the 1980s. Perhaps not surprisingly, the bands most engaged with this discourse were often driven by female lyricists and vocalists: the Bodysnatchers, Au Pairs, Delta Five, Poison Girls, Lost Cherrees, the Special AKA. They did this, Helen Reddington notes, even as “Thatcher’s enterprise culture” increasingly left “no space for [women’s] voices to be heard except within the narrow parameters of mainstream stereotypes.”² I gesture towards this problem in Mixtape 7: Shopkeepers Arise! But, really, there’s a whole other book to be written about it.

There was also going to be a mixtape about animal rights, a prominent topic of debate in the 1980s. It would have started with Robb Johnson’s “Animals Song,” a sort of nursery rhyme, or rather what a nursery rhyme sounds like when it’s having a nightmare:

I’m a little animal, I go moo (moo moo)

Then the farmer says, “Surprise, Surprise!”

And he shoots this bolt between my eyes

Now I’m in steak and kidney pies

Boo hoo, little moo moo.

In performance, though not on the original recording, “The Animals Song” would work its way around the barnyard until one particularly politicized little animal reflects, “I’m a little animal just like you / and I never see the sun and I never see the sky / Sometimes I wonder why / If Margaret Thatcher can live / Why can’t I?” This question notwithstanding, though, neither Thatcherism nor Thatcher herself particularly endorsed meat eating, fur wearing, vivisection, whaling, or fox hunting. So songs about animal rights are somewhat peripheral to the story I’m telling in this book. It’s a pity, because there were a lot of powerfully articulate songs on the subject.* Some called out the hypocrisy that allows people to pick and choose which animals’ lives they value: Exit-Stance, for example, wondered how a country that calls itself a “nation of dog lovers” can condemn so many “to suffer every fucking day” in laboratories; the Varukers asked pet lovers who wear fur, “Why don’t [you] just wear the next-door neighbour’s cat?”; and Conflict asked meat-eating conservationists who “moan about the seal cull” why they don’t have the same concern for “the cow, pig or sheep.” Other songs appealed to people’s sense of kinship with animals: “Heifer whines could be human cries,” sang Morrissey. “Your blood, their blood, serves the same.” Citizen Fish went further, arguing that because we are all flesh and blood, when we eat meat, “We are no more than cannibals.” Others again appealed to people’s basic sense of fairness: “Why am I punished when I have committed no crime?” a lab animal asks in Antisect’s “Tortured and Abused.” “Animals don’t drink, animals don’t smoke, animals don’t wear make-up,” the Instigators reasoned, so why do they have to die “for us, for vanity?”—a question echoed by any number of bands, including Anathema (“Six Seconds”), Shriekback (“Hanging Fire”), Flux of Pink Indians (“Blinded by Science”), and ethereal indie rockers Shelleyan Orphan (“Suffer Dog”). They all wanted to know why, in Flux’s words, “Four million animals die in experiments each year in Britain.” “Six hundred animals an hour,” Anathema calculated, one every six seconds.

The most consistent message in songs about animal rights, however, was that the way we exploit animals damages our humanity. “Human Freedom, Animal Rights. It’s One Struggle, One Fight,” was a common chant at animal rights demonstrations (one quoted by both the Varukers, in “One Struggle One Fight,” and by Conflict in “This Is the A.L.F.”). It’s one fight, Conflict explained, because “when animal abuse is stopped then human abuse will soon stop also.” Others made the same point in various ways. “There’s a war going on between man / And the birds, beasts, and cattle,” Captain Sensible sang. “And you wonder why the hell there are wars?” And Howard Jones put it elegantly, “As long as there are slaughterhouses / there will be battlefields.” The Diagram Brothers wondered, in “Seals/Fur Coats,” at the suppression of human compassion needed for someone to think of animal abuse as just “the job that I do”; the increasingly hysterical repetitions of that refrain at the end of the song—“It’s just the job that I do, it’s the thing that I sell!”—suggested that the human cost is an inevitable and violent return of the repressed. Wigan hardcore punks Electro Hippies came to the same conclusion in “Sheep”: a farmer who is just doing his job slaughtering sheep, tells his weeping daughter, “It was very quick and none of them felt pain.” The girl replies, “Daddy, if they die straightaway, why are you hitting it again and again?” The Colour Field, Terry Hall’s post-Specials pop outfit, recognized this as an irony of so-called human progress: the further humankind separates itself from other animals, the more its capacity for “human kindness” is diminished. We either anthropomorphize animals—delighting in “tea-drinking chimps on TV” and “Disneyland dreams”—or use them as “scapegoats and guinea pigs.” In either case we “swallow them whole.” As Berkshire punk band Zounds put it, Western civilization’s entire post-Enlightenment project—scientific positivism, missionary Christianity, genocidal colonialism, the arms industry—has conspired to create the “Great White Hunter,” who proudly declares, “Oh yes! I am the great exploiter / Oh yes! I am the great destroyer.”

It’s not surprising, then, that so many of the songs that would have been on this mixtape tried to imagine animals’ subjectivity (including Robb Johnson’s “The Animals Song,” Antisect’s “Tortured and Abused,” Icons of Filth’s “Show Us You Care,” and Attrition’s “Monkey in a Bin”). One of the most powerful of them is Robert Wyatt’s talking-song “Pigs,” which is so profoundly affecting precisely because Wyatt fails in his efforts to imagine what animals must go through. He recalls driving through the countryside on a sunny day, “all very lovely,” and seeing “a sort of low grey concrete thing surrounded by fields,” “the foundations of a building that hadn’t been built” with a low, flat roof. His travelling companion explains, “That’s where they keep pigs.” It takes Wyatt a moment, and then suddenly he imagines “what that building must have been like from the inside.” He tries to grapple with the thought: “Pigs in there? Pigs? In there? Pigs?” He repeats the question, unable to get past it; the song has no wisdom for us, no advice, no warning, just this terrible, blank, enormous incomprehension.

Although these songs don’t directly address Thatcher or Thatcherism, the fight for animal rights was often linked both metaphorically and literally to the struggle against the dehumanizing injustices of Thatcher’s Britain. Nowhere is that clearer than in songs about fox hunting. “It’s a symbolic sport and a symbolic story,” folk-rockers God’s Little Monkeys explained: it’s about the aristocracy revelling in their power over the weak, whether that’s “a fox or a human.” In either case the victim is named “Reynard the Fucked … [and] the best he can hope / Is there’s enough of him to stuff.” But, as Robb Johnson says in “Boxing Day,” Reynard is also, at least in the English ballad tradition, a trickster capable of turning the tables. “One day,” Johnson warns gentlefolk, “we’ll wipe the smile / clean off your bloody face.” It was a sentiment echoed by many punk bands, usually in support of hunt sabbing (the risky practice of sabotaging fox hunts) or animal liberation (the even riskier practice of freeing animals from labs and factory farms).

Not everyone was willing or able to go out and sabotage hunts or free laboratory animals, of course; as one of the Astronauts’ songs put it, “All you fellow rebels, you go out and fuck the system / Sorry I can’t be with you; I’ve got to mind the kids.” But the fight for animal rights was nevertheless an arena in which it was possible to practice a kind of entry-level direct action. Conflict pointed out that even the most tentative punk could “stop contributing to the abuse … don’t eat meat, don’t buy leather / buy non-animal-tested make-up / herbal soap and shampoo.” Most important, perhaps, this was all do-it-yourself world changing. Robb Johnson’s “The Animals Song” was originally recorded in 1986 as an antibloodsports benefit single, and Johnson recalls that it was a properly do-it-yourself affair, right down to taking “the punk rock/cheap route of us having to Pritt Stick the covers together.”³ This DIY element of it was crucial, he says, to “politicise vegetarianism (as opposed to feeble lifestyly healthy green option, the middle classes thinking they can live forever if they eat quinoa).”⁴ That is, without the extension of self into the world demanded by the punk do-it-yourself ethos, animal rights becomes just another consumer choice, another thing (like poverty relief or environmentalism) that the well-off can feel good about buying. What you’re left with is Paul McCartney singing, “Meat free Monday, it’s a fun day!”

The animal-rights mixtape would have ended with an example of local, do-it-yourself activism that ended up having a global impact. At the end of the 1980s, the restaurant chain McDonald’s had become a focus of protest; the Electro Hippies dubbed the corporation “McDollars, McGreedy, McCancer, McMurder … McDeadly, McDisease, McProfits, McHunger … McRipoff, McTorture, McWasteful, McGarbage” (“Scum”). They warned Ronald McDonald himself, “Look out, Ron, we’re always here, and we’ll get you, you bastard” (“Run Ronald”). Neither McDonald’s nor its corporate mascot were publicly alarmed by any of this, but their lawyers were certainly paying attention. In 1990, the tiny anarchist group London Greenpeace distributed a leaflet entitled What’s Wrong with McDonald’s to a few hundred people; it offered “SOME FACTS TO CHEW ON WITH YOUR BIG MAC,” including: “The pigs and chickens they electrocute and knife spend all their existence in concrete cells with no daylight.” The lawyers leapt into action. And in doing so they precipitated what became known as the McLibel Trial. It cost McDonald’s millions to prosecute and, for the better part of a decade, drew worldwide attention to the company’s catastrophic environmental practices and animal rights abuses. “Rainforests / are being cut down / at the rate of an area / the size of Wales every month … so that McDonald’s can steal the land / to grow the wheat / to feed to the cows / to produce the meant / for the beef burgers which / Ronnie would have us all eat,” Danbert Nobacon explained (on a McLibel benefit tape also featuring Robb Johnson, Hit Parade, the AK47s, and Political Asylum).

The mixtape I most regret having to leave out, though, was going to be called “Give Us Back Our Cheap Fares,” after the Bananarama instrumental. The track’s title was a reference to the subsidized transit fares introduced by the Labour-controlled Greater London Council (GLC), in 1981, and then scrapped later the same year when the Conservative-controlled London Borough of Bromley raised a legal challenge. The instrumental was the B-side to Bananarama’s single “Really Saying Something,” and it was going to be the title of the mixtape because, as an instrumental, it wasn’t really saying something. Or rather (allowing that instrumental music is always saying something),⁵ it wasn’t saying anything about cheap fares or the GLC or Bromley. That is, the mixtape was going to be about songs that are supposed to be making a point of some sort, at least according to the songwriters, but which do it so obliquely that we just have to take their word for it. For example, Madness’s “Michael Caine” is supposedly about IRA informants,⁶ though there is no explicit evidence of this in the lyrics. Hue & Cry’s “Strength to Strength” is, according to songwriter Patrick Kane, a joke at the expense of the English working class “aspiring to the next set of double glazing or automated garden gnomes,”⁷ although it’s hard to see how, even after Kane explains it to you. Scritti Politti (“The Sweetest Girl”) and ABC (“The Look of Love”) wrote what they insisted were deconstructions of the banal love song,⁸ but which were so cunningly disguised as banal love songs that it was impossible to spot the difference. And “Pills and Soap,” Elvis Costello claimed, was about animal welfare, but the claim was based entirely on the song’s reference to “children and animals” being melted down to make the pills and soap of the title.⁹ That Costello didn’t argue it was also a song about child welfare is perhaps troubling, but then he was just talking nonsense in response to the BBC, who had banned the song because it was supposedly “party political in intent.”¹⁰ How the BBC came to this conclusion is unclear. The song is certainly very angry about various things, but the Conservative Party isn’t obviously one of them, unless you assume, as the BBC seem to have done, that anyone willing to melt down children and animals must, by definition, be a Tory.

There are also several bands I’d have loved to shoehorn into the dialogue somewhere, but they just wouldn’t fit. Does Ian Brown’s vision of a future in which “every member of parliament trips on glue” (“Sugar Spun Sister”) give me a way to squeeze the Stone Roses into the conversation? How about the regicidal snippet “Elizabeth My Dear”? It’s a stretch. And there are other even greater stretches I couldn’t figure out how to make. Stump’s “Buffalo,” a standout track on the legendary C86 compilation, is one of my favourite songs of all time. With its preposterous bassline and near-nonsense lyrics (it might be about an obnoxious lady dressed in “blubbery Burberry” holding up the line in a fish and chip shop, but I’m not sure), it still has the power to undo my worst moods. So do Fuzzbox’s ramshackle, a cappella version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Funboy Five’s wobbly “Compulsive Eater” (“Compulsive eater munchies way to freedom / No respect for the legal system!”). None of them is exactly a pointed critique of Thatcherism, but their omission does make me feel that perhaps … this is not enough.

Maybe I’m just feeling that way because we’re about to embark on the bleakest part of the story and I’m looking for some light. At the end of decade, Dick Lucas, drawing on his experiences writing songs on a range of gloomy subjects for Subhumans, Culture Shock, and Citizen Fish, offered some advice on “How to Write Ultimate Protest Songs”:

Insert a little optimism now and then

Before complaining becomes a trend.

Repetition defeats the point in the end;

It numbs imagination ’til it can’t comprehend.

So, walk the line between humour and gloom;

Amongst the debris, there’s just enough room.

It was good advice. And, certainly, many of the songs in the mixtapes that follow managed to find a seam of wry humour in the situations they were addressing, but even so you’re about to be confronted with a litany of horrors. I can only echo the Close Lobsters, whose song “In Spite of These Times” reflected on the moment when, in the midst of “problems and maelstrom and pestilence and plague,” you catch a glimpse of clear sky: “Don’t let it slip through your hands,” they advised, “never forget, in spite of these times.”

images MIXTAPE 15: DO POLICEMEN SING?

Junior Murvin, “Police & Thieves” (1977)

Leon Rosselson, “Whoever Invented the Fish Finger” (1979)

Stiff Little Fingers, “Law and Order” (1979)

UK Subs, “Bomb Factory” (1980)

UK Subs, “Brand New Age” (1980)

The Human League, “I Am the Law” (1981)

Robyn Hitchcock, “Do Policemen Sing?” (1981)

UK Subs, “Police State (Part 1)” (1982)

Charged GBH, “Heavy Discipline” (1982)

Cock Sparrer, “Riot Squad” (1982)

Red Guitars, “Good Technology” (1983)

Antisocial, “Official Hooligan” (1983)

Red Alert, “The Art of Brutality” (1983)

Lindsay Cooper, Chris Cutler, Bill Gilonis, Tim Hodgkinson & Robert Wyatt, “In the Dark Year” (1984)

Ranking Ann, “Kill the Police Bill” (1984)

Style Council, “A Stones Throw Away” (1985)

Conflict, “Neither Is This” (1985)

Chumbawamba, “The Police Have Been Wonderful” (1985)

Conflict, “Force or Service” (1986)

Toy Dolls, “PC Stoker” (1986)

Culture Shock, “Stonehenge” (1987)

Military Surplus, “Time of the Dispossessed” (1987)

Hippy Slags, “Sunlight on the Truncheons” (1987)

McCarthy, “The Home Secretary Briefs the Forces of Law and Order” (1989)

Dire Straits, “Iron Hand” (1991)

The Levellers, “Battle of the Beanfield” (1991)

Roy Harper, “Back to the Stones” (1992)

Leon Rosselson was not a fan of fish fingers. He believed that the monster who invented them should be “skinned, mashed, and boxed into uniform blocks” as punishment for his crimes against fish. Nor was Rosselson a fan of the Daily Mail, whose inventor deserved to be “pulped and reduced to a nauseous juice” for his crimes against trees. Fish fingers and Tory newspapers notwithstanding, though, Rosselson’s profoundest contempt was reserved for “whoever invented the policeman.” After all, he explained, “who would do that to a child?”

It’s the same sort of question Poison Girls and others had asked about soldiers during the late 1970s and the beginning of the ’80s. But, then, after the tragic loss of hundreds of soldiers’ lives in the Falklands, antimilitary rhetoric in popular music had shifted its focus from the soldiers themselves to the government which had put them in harm’s way. Soldiers were, for the time being at least, given a pass (well, mostly; Conflict remained uncompromising, arguing that soldiers make a choice to side with Thatcher and “shit upon the poor”). The police, though, experienced no such rehabilitation. In popular music they remained, irredeemably, the Babylon, the pigs, the filth, or worse. This was partly because, just as they had always been, the police remained symbols of everything that teenage rebellion is necessarily directed against: authority, sobriety, and social responsibility. So you’re about as likely to hear a rock song in favour of the police as you are to hear one in favour of parents, teachers, or bosses. The exception that proves the rule here is the Human League’s “I Am the Law.” After the departure of Marsh and Ware from the band, Phil Oakey boldly set forth down the safest-possible middle of the road, by which path he shortly arrived at the album Dare. It was an ironic title for an album whose instincts were so conservative that it actually sympathized with the perspective of an aggrieved policeman: “I know rules are a bore,” Oakey sang, but, he explained, “You’re lucky I’m here to stop people doing things / that you know they’re dying to do.” No matter how true this might be, it’s a sentiment that sits oddly on a pop record, even one as eager to stay safe as Dare is; the agents of law and order are, by definition, out of place in pop.

Ironically, in Thatcher’s Britain, the police became a common topic in pop music precisely because they so frequently failed to be the agents of law and order. Stiff Little Fingers made a schoolyard chant of it: “Talkin’ ’bout their law and order / They don’t do what they oughta.” In fact, the police often seemed to be agents of chaos. Cock Sparrer sang about a schoolmate who, in order to better pursue a life of criminal violence, joined the police force: “Now he’s in the riot squad / the wanna fight squad.” And Sunderland punks Red Alert sang about “The Art of Brutality”: policemen driving around looking for “black bastards” to beat up and arrest for “a crime they’ve just invented.” As the UK Subs put it in “Police State (Part 1),” “Police violence is all around / Pretty soon your town’s burning down / With police, drugs and organized crime.” The Subs were echoing Junior Murvin’s criticism of the police in Jamaica: “Police and thieves in the street, yeah / Scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition.” But they were also interested in why the police state functioned this way; whose interest did it serve to turn London or Belfast into a bomb factory “burning down your world” (“Bomb Factory”)? Was it a pretext for the increasing government surveillance the Subs criticized in “Brand New Age”? Or, as they suggested in “Organized Crime,” simply cover for government-by-theft?

Whatever the case, the police often seemed less committed to law and order than to pursuing Thatcher’s political agenda. Many people, including Conflict, observed that the police under Thatcher operated not as “service” but as a “force” to be deployed against the government’s internal enemies, including the CND, Greenpeace, Rastas, punks, itinerant hippies, immigrants, and coal miners. Just how widespread this perception was can been seen in the reaction to the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Its ostensible intention was to balance police powers of investigation with citizens’ rights and freedoms, the hope being that clarity in these matters would improve police-community relations after the 1981 riots. But, when the bill was introduced in Parliament, Robert Kilroy-Silk (MP for Knowsley, North) pointed out, “Whatever benefits there may be in the Bill in terms of better police-community relations, particularly with the ethnic minorities, they are more than likely to be offset by the increased conflict and tension that will result.”¹¹ After all, he noted, the Home Department’s own research showed “that blacks are three times more likely to be stopped by the police and twice as likely to be searched as whites.”¹² Reggae MC Ranking Ann released a 12″ single, “Kill the Police Bill,” which articulated the same concerns:

Dem have de power to set up roadblock

So you better watch out if you poor or you black

You drive you car you bound to get stop.

Significantly, the record was produced by the GLC Police Committee Support Unit. The Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone made a point of supporting the arts,¹³ but in this instance the support was particularly motivated because Ranking Ann was articulating a concern that the Council shared: that Thatcher was trying to introduce to mainland Britain the kind of militarized policing practiced in Northern Ireland. This had begun in 1981, when, as Ranking Ann put it, “dem fire CS gas pon de mainland” for the first time. But the bill gave police in England the power, already exercised in Northern Ireland, to apprehend anyone suspected of carrying a weapon, so that:

Dem seh you carry offensive weapon

Stop and search you pon suspicion

Next ting dem carry you downa station

Ninety-six hours inna detention

And there subjected to interrogation

And also to humiliation.

Gerald Kaufman (MP for Manchester, Gorton), pointed out that the briefing guide to the bill allowed almost anything, such as a bunch of keys, to count as a weapon, “So it is open to any constable to stop anyone in the street, with the ominous warning, ‘You look like the kind of person who may be carrying a bunch of keys,’ search him, and haul him off to the jug.”¹⁴ Kaufman also pointed out that the bill gave the police the ability to set up road checks anywhere they thought they detected a “pattern of crime.”¹⁵ So, he said, “Give a district a bad name—Brixton, say, or Moss Side—and the police can have road checks there to their heart’s content.”¹⁶ He added, by way of contrasting these largely black and South Asian neighbourhoods, “But it would be very different in Richmond, Yorkshire, or Witney, Oxfordshire.”¹⁷ Ranking Ann concluded that the police bill wasn’t intended to control crime but to criminalize entire populations, so that if it were made law, “Pon de street we a go have pure war.”

Kaufman was wrong about Yorkshire, of course: the new powers of stop and search would prove extremely useful to the police during the 1984–85 miners’ strike.¹⁸ Indeed, it was one of the things that allowed the police to function efficiently, and quite transparently as a “centralized and politicized tool of the Tory Government.”¹⁹ Red Guitars, listing the dubious technological innovations that characterized modern Britain (among them, instant coffee, low tar cigarettes, slimming pills, frozen chickens, plastics, nuclear missiles, and detergents) included “policemen [who] can tell us who we are.” That is, police forces’ increased powers of surveillance meant a similarly increased capacity for symbolic violence; the police could now tell entire populations who they were and where they were permitted to be. And, of course, they could back up that symbolic violence with physical force. The Style Council commented that the police bussed in to break the picket lines in Yorkshire were only “a stone’s throw away” from the police who were “stripping skin with rhino whip” on behalf of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Robert Wyatt and members of Henry Cow warned that “a country dies” when “violence parades as law.”

Perhaps the most memorable comment on the role of the police in Thatcher’s war on the miners was Chumbawamba’s “The Police Have Been Wonderful.” The recording splices together several clips of the prime minister talking about the police and dubs them over a looped dance beat. It begins with Thatcher justifying scenes like the Battle of Orgreave, during which mounted police in riot gear repeatedly charged picketing miners. The police would eventually pay almost half a million pounds in compensation for assaults, wrongful arrests, unlawful detentions, and malicious prosecutions stemming from the incident, but at the time Thatcher insisted: “Most of us who have watched the scenes on television have only the highest praise for the police. They indeed have kept the right of miners to go to work open and they’ve done it marvellously.” The way in which Thatcher coos “they’ve done it marvellously” is pretty creepy. But the really troubling part of the clip is the way she appropriates the concept of the right to work.²⁰ A basic tenet of left-wing politics, the right to work was something Thatcherism was, in fact, fundamentally and violently opposed to; the miners’ strike had happened precisely because Thatcherism put the miners’ right to work in second place to the profitability of the coal industry. That Thatcher should then turn around and justify deploying the police to clear a way for strike-breakers as a defence of the right to work is simply grotesque. Playing on that grotesquery, Chumbawamba cut to Thatcher saying, in a dreamily breathless voice, the police have been wonderful. They let the phrase repeat several times, lingering over Thatcher’s weirdly erotic tone, as if the police’s efforts have left her in a gratified stupor.

Thatcher would express similar satisfaction a few months later when the police violently “decommissioned” a group of New Age travellers who called themselves the Peace Convoy. The convoy comprised some six hundred people who had rejected the striving, atomizing malaise of Thatcher’s Britain in favour of a nomadic, communal lifestyle, people who had decided, as Roy Harper put it in “Back to the Stones,” to “walk away, [and] take a deep breath.” The convoy was on its way to the Stonehenge Free Festival to see Roy Harper, Hawkwind, and the Enid when it ran into a police blockade. Or, rather, it ran into an Establishment desperate to quash a festival which, by the mid-1980s, was running for a month every summer and attracting tens of thousands of participants. Most people came, as Dick Lucas sang, in “Stonehenge,” “to escape for a few weeks,” to experience “freedom of speech, religion, and mind,” or, as Military Surplus put it in “Time of the Dispossessed,” to find “some space, some place, somewhere.” Mo Lodge, one of the Travellers in the Peace Convoy, explained, “It [the festival] had its own economy. It had its own system for everything, and was so successful in that sense that it must have been a huge threat to the state. It was anarchy in action and it worked.”²¹ Dick Lucas makes the same point: the festival was “too successful … showing how the counter-culture can work, without hierarchies, policing itself, subverting capitalism by being ticket-free and engaging the disillusioned youth with realistic examples of both self-sufficient and communal ways to work outside of the system.”²² In 1985, the authorities got a High Court injunction to stop it.

So, on June 1 that year, as the Peace Convoy approached Stonehenge, they were rudely reintroduced to the realities of Thatcher’s Britain: “the iron will and iron hand / in England’s green and pleasant land,” as Dire Straits put it in their song about the Battle of Orgreave. The police were keen to employ the tactics they had used against the miners at Orgreave against other “enemies within,”²³ and the men, women and children of the Peace Convoy were an obvious target. As folk-rockers the Levellers explained in their song about the events that followed, “They were committing treason by trying to live on the road.” The police descended on the unarmed Travellers with riot shields and sticks, smashing and burning their homes as the press “allowed themselves to be herded like sheep away from the field so that they didn’t see what was going on.”²⁴ Over the next few hours, the police (“600 Hitlers,” Roy Harper reckoned, although the number was more than double that) injured dozens of Travellers, destroyed their homes, and arrested more than four hundred of them, in what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield. It was a misleading name for a conflict so completely asymmetrical, but it seems to have caught on by analogy with the Battle of Orgreave, as a way of highlighting the connection between the two instances of state violence.

As with the Battle of Orgreave, the police were eventually obliged to pay damages for assault, false imprisonment, and damage to property.²⁵ But the damage could not be repaired. The Hippy Slags, an unfortunately short-lived all-girl dub-psych outfit, were defiant: “The stones will always be there, people! / That will never change / We’ll be back in stronger numbers / To the edge of Salisbury Plain.” And Dick Lucas’s Bluurg Records released a benefit EP with “all profits geared towards getting more people to the Stones” (it included the Hippy Slags’ “Sunlight on the Truncheons,” Military Surplus’s “Time of the Dispossessed,” and Citizen Fish’s “Stonehenge”). There was even a Travellers Aid Trust established “by people interested in the travelling way of life.”²⁶ But the reality was that the Battle of the Beanfield, combined with the Public Order Act passed the following year, effectively suppressed the Travellers (and put the last nail in the coffin of the free festival movement that had flourished through the 1960s and ’70s). With their vehicles smashed and their income from the festival season lost, much of the community dispersed, many of its members forced onto the dole.²⁷ “I am only too delighted to do anything I can to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys,” Thatcher gloated.²⁸

News coverage of the police’s actions, despite being generally hostile to the Travellers,²⁹ caused outrage:³⁰ “I’ve seen the pictures on TV,” Simon Friend of the Levellers wrote, “There’s nothing here that you can call free.” He understood the look in the eyes of the policemen too: “They’re getting their kicks / They’re laughing at you and me.” In most quarters, the outrage faded quickly (within weeks, Live Aid would give the nation permission to put the Battle of Orgreave and the Battle of the Beanfield behind them). But day-to-day instances of the police taking gratification from the violence they inflicted kept piling up. It became a common trope in popular music. The Toy Dolls sang about one “PC Stoker,” often to be seen “smiling with delight” because “he’s took somebody down.” Conflict imagined themselves into the terrifying headspace of police sergeant in the middle of an arrest, laughing to his colleagues, “Pile in everyone, c’mon, c’mon / That’s it, lads, ha, ha, ha, let me have him / Let me kill him, yeah, nice one, lads.” Stiff Little Fingers related the experience of a friend arrested by policemen who “kicked him in the head / and then laughed when he bled.” Even Robyn Hitchcock, who was generally more interested in lizards, fish, and furry green atom bowls than troubling social issues, asked, “Do Policemen Sing?”:

Oh, do policemen sing?

Yes, when they’re in the mood.

And when their truncheons swing,

That’s when they’re in the mood.

But what really rankled wasn’t so much the way police inflicted violence with pleasure, it was the way they did it with impunity, on Salisbury Plain, in Northern Ireland, in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and anywhere else where there were communities under suspicion of being enemies of the state. Irish Catholics and Black Britons, particularly, found uncomfortable common ground in the shared experience of violent, institutional racism.³¹ At the end of the 1980s, the band McCarthy imagined Home Secretary Douglas Hurd briefing the police on dealing with Catholic suspects in Northern Ireland, and encouraging them, “When you catch them / Pump them all full of lead / Tear them limb from limb / For the law will be on your side.” Similarly, Guyanese-British writers Mike and Trevor Phillips, recalling encounters with the police in England, in the 1980s, wrote, “If you were a black boy, implicit in all these confrontations was the certain knowledge you were facing a white man who could beat you, or send you to prison, or even kill you, just because of the colour of your skin, and there would be very little that anyone could do about it.”³² None of this was new with Thatcher, of course. Relations between the police and the black community had been poisonous since the late 1960s, and relations between the police and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had been murderous for at least as long. But Thatcher did her bit to make both worse.

images MIXTAPE 16: THE SWAMP THING

Desperate Bicycles, “Don’t Back the Front” (1977)

Steel Pulse, “Ku Klux Klan” (1978)

The Specials, “Doesn’t Make It Alright” (1979)

Bob Marley, “Punky Reggae Party” (1977)

The Specials, “It’s Up to You” (1979)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem)” (1979)

The Ruts “SUS” (1979)

Steel Pulse, “Jah Pickney—RAR” (1979)

Light of the World, “Liv Togevver (the Greater London Funkathon)” (1979)

The Specials, “Concrete Jungle” (1979)

Amebix, “University Challenged” (1980)

The Beat, “Two Swords” (1980)

Basement 5, “Riot” (1980)

Light of the World, “The Boys in Blue” (1980)

The Ruts, “Staring at the Rude Boys” (1980)

XS Discharge, “Lifted” (1980)

4-Skins, “One Law for Them” (1981)

Steel Pulse, “Blues Dance Raid” (1982)

Angelic Upstarts, “Flames of Brixton” (1982)

Eddy Grant, “Electric Avenue” (1982)

UK Subs, “Countdown” (1982)

Violators, “Government Stinks” (1983)

The Special AKA, “Racist Friend” (1983)

The Astronauts, “It’s All Done by Mirrors” (1983)

Antisocial, “Official Hooligan” (1983)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Di Great Insohreckshan” (1984)

Smiley Culture, “Cockney Translation” (1984)

Subhumans, “British Disease” (1985)

Conflict, “The Ungovernable Force” (1986)

Pato Banton, “Handsworth Riot” (1987)

Big Audio Dynamite, “Funny Names” (1988)

The Exploited, “Boys in Blue” (1990)

Campaigning before the 1979 election Thatcher had warned Granada Television that there would be four million African, West Indian, and South Asian immigrants in Britain by the end of the century, and added: “Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.… The British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.”³³ It was a potent statement, partly because its reference to people feeling “rather swamped” was carefully designed to recall Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech from a decade earlier:

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants.… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family.… Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off.³⁴

Powell had warned that if the “inflow” were not stopped immediately, England’s rivers would run with blood. Black and Asian immigrant communities had been subjected to racial discrimination and violence throughout the 1950s and ’60s,³⁵ but Powell’s speech marked something new in British racism: it welded “patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, Englishness, Britishness, militarism and gender difference” to an obsession with “who may legitimately belong to the national community.”³⁶ It made him a hero to the Far Right. Thatcher’s innovation was to restate this pathological mess in innocuously homey language, which nevertheless made a clear distinction between immigrants and “people.” Four million immigrants are “an awful lot” and “people” might be “rather swamped” and “rather hostile,” mightn’t they?

An inebriated Eric Clapton had certainly been feeling that way in August 1976 when he explained to his audience in Birmingham that Enoch Powell was right and that it was time to get the “wogs” out.³⁷ When this was reported in Sounds magazine, it provoked the photographer Red Saunders to write a letter to the editor: “You’ve got to fight the racist poison, otherwise you degenerate into the sewer with the rats and all the money men who ripped off rock culture with their chequebooks and plastic crap. Rock was and still can be a real progressive culture, not a package mail-order stick-on nightmare of mediocre garbage.”³⁸ He concluded by announcing the creation of an organization called Rock Against Racism (RAR) which, with the support of the Anti-Nazi League, eventually staged hundreds of concerts, including the massive 1978 Carnival Against the Nazis in London. That concert began with one hundred thousand people, led by Misty in Roots, marching from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park; there the performers included the Clash, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, and the Tom Robinson Band. This mixture of black and white bands was characteristic of RAR concerts; the whole point being to bring blacks and whites together under the banner of popular music.³⁹

London BritFunk pioneers Light of the World expressed the spirit of the thing in their 1978 recording “Liv Togevver (the Greater London Funkathon).” The song begins with unidentified voices (they could be black or white, but they’re all undeniably British) raised in good-natured disagreement about who’s paying for the next round. Glasses clink, the bass kicks in and, after a couple of introductory verses, the song settles into the refrain, “Why can’t we live, live together / Let the funk live forever?” A couple of years later, though, Light of the World would partially answer their own question with the song “Boys in Blue,” which lamented racial profiling and police harassment: blacks and whites weren’t going to liv togevver if the forces of Law and Order had anything to say about it.

Reggae DJ Smiley Culture’s “Cockney Translation” implicitly made the same point. On the face of it the fast-talking single is simply about how much blacks and Cockneys have in common when you translate their idioms:

Seh Cockney have mates while we have spar

Seh Cockney live in a drum while we live in a yard

But as the rap progresses it becomes clear that what the two languages most have in common is that they both come from outlaw communities. “Cockney fire shooter, We bus’ gun,” Smiley Culture explains: “Cockney say tea leaf, We jus’ say sticks man”; “Cockney say grass, We say outformer man”; “Cockney say Old Bill, we say dutty Babylon.” As Smiley Culture points out early in the song, cockney rhyming slang was invented by a criminal underclass, as a coded language to baffle the Old Bill. “Cockney Translation” implies that, in the eyes of the dutty Babylon at any rate, Jamaican English is an equally coded (and equally suspect) language—especially when it takes on elements of Rastafarian Dreadtalk like “Babylon” and “outformer.” The difference is that, unlike cockney rhyming slang, the intention of Dreadtalk is not to obscure meaning but to illuminate it. For example, the correction of informer to outformer in Dreadtalk reflects the reasoning that the grass isn’t letting information in he’s letting it out. It’s a clarification. In other words, the difference between rhyming slang and Dreadtalk is between a criminal underclass doing its best to be misunderstood and a criminalized community doing its best not to be misunderstood.

This distinction aside, what makes “Cockney Translation” such an effective defence of multiculturalism is precisely its emphasis on translation. A few years later Big Audio Dynamite’s Mick Jones and Don Letts would tie themselves in knots trying to advocate for multiculturalism in their song “Funny Names.” They argued that, because “variety’s the spice of life,” cultural differences ought to be celebrated; we should be glad that “we ain’t the same.” But they also argued that we are all the same “under the skin,” so we should all be able to get along with one another. The contradiction is troublesome, first because it suggests that culture is only skin deep, and second because it suggests that the condition for living togevver is a fundamental, if concealed, sameness. Smiley Culture’s “Cockney Translation,” by contrast, had advocated for a multiculturalism that translates difference without seeking to erase it. The Rasta-derived term “Dutty Babylon” translates the cockney “Old Bill,” but they’re not the same thing under the skin; they articulate quite different relationships to the forces of Law and Order. To be fair to Mick Jones and Don Letts, they certainly understood this more clearly than “Funny Names” suggests. Back in his days with the Clash, Jones had recorded a cover of Junior Murvin’s reggae hit “Police & Thieves” which achieved the kind of translation that multiculturalism depends upon. Billy Bragg explains, “The Clash made few concessions to the original, performing it over a straight 4/4 beat which gave the song an urgency that Junior Murvin’s languid version lacked. It was the first attempt by any band to extend the parameters of punk and was an impressive success. Here was the Clash’s multi-racial rhetoric made flesh, a coming together of punk and reggae in which both retained their dignity.”⁴⁰

Punky reggae notwithstanding, another answer to the question “Why can’t we liv togevver?” was suggested by the fact that Light of the World, along with the rest of the BritFunk scene, never really got involved with Rock Against Racism. Reggae was one thing, but funk, it seems, was a step too far for the white kids RAR was principally aimed at. Some of that had to do with the funk scene itself, of course. A case in point: Mike Wilson, a Manchester DJ, started a funk night at Manchester club Legend in 1980, and he recalls, “Most whites felt extremely uncomfortable in the heady reefer-intoxicated atmosphere of the club—it was pretty much a matter of ‘spot the white man.’ The idea of going to a ‘black club’ and experiencing what it might be like to now find themselves in the minority, evoked far too threatening a scenario for most white lads.”⁴¹ RAR didn’t want to threaten the white lads—that would have been counterproductive—but as some of RAR’s detractors pointed out, there was something ironic about promoting racial harmony while cultivating a mainly white audience. It risked making (absent) black and Asian people a cause, like the CND or animal rights, for lefty kids to adopt. Anarcho-punks Amebix put it uncompromisingly in the liner notes to their song “University Challenged”: “This song is for the people who support RAR when it’s just a way of treating the blacks as animals by patronising them through your left wing shit.” As hyperbolic (and frankly unfair) as Amebix’s accusation was, it did point to a paradox that RAR never quite managed to escape. Focussing on the black community as victims of racism and systemic marginalization was no doubt well-intentioned, but, coming “at a time when black people in the UK were starting to take charge of their own destiny,” this solicitousness could seem “almost colonial,”⁴² especially if it was matched with an indifference to black cultural productions which didn’t reassuringly fixate on suffering. Music journalist Lloyd Bradley gives the example of lovers rock in the late 1970s, which, with its “middle class aspirations, happy sophisticated music and celebration of dressing up and having a good time didn’t display a great deal of obvious disadvantage” and consequently never achieved the popularity with white audiences that roots reggae did.⁴³ The same could be said for bhangra music, a cheerful fusion of Punjabi folk music and western pop; it emerged in the UK at about the same time as lovers rock, and was, like lovers rock, “good time” music. It quickly became popular with South Asian youth, but it found no place in the mainstream or in Rock Against Racism. Dennis Bovell, who pioneered lovers rock, reckoned the problem was that “as soon as they [white audiences] had to stop feeling sorry for us, they didn’t want to know.”⁴⁴

So RAR didn’t have all the answers to racism, but in the late 1970s especially it was an important response to those people in society who were most determined that that there just shouldn’t be any answers. And those people were legion. Tom Robinson recalls, “It really felt to us like end times. … with Thatcher in the wings, and actual certifiable fascists marching through areas like Lewisham and Wood Green.”⁴⁵ The actual certifiable fascists Robinson refers to were the National Front (NF) and the British Movement (BM), whose political rise in the 1970s⁴⁶ was the most visible symptom of the xenophobia expressed by Enoch Powell. In 1977, at the peak of their influence, the NF got more than 5 percent of the vote in the GLC elections, and almost a quarter of a million votes nationwide.⁴⁷ The Specials were not overstating the street-level threat represented by these neo-Nazis when they sang about having to carry a knife to defend yourself against the NF thugs threatening your life (“Concrete Jungle”). And violent invasions of the kind documented in the Ruts’ “Staring at the Rude Boys” became an altogether too-common occurrence at punk and two-tone gigs. When “a bunch of BMs march in on DMs” and start “saluting the air,” the Ruts warned, somebody’s going to get hurt.⁴⁸

RAR made it their primary objective to end the NF as a political force by diverting young people away from it. They operated on the principle that most of the kids who were drawn into the NF’s violent orbit were not certifiable. As Penny Rimbaud noted, a “kid who lives in pretty dire poverty, who’s been given virtually no education, who lives in some shitty unbelievable place” isn’t motivated by political ideology; he “wouldn’t even know what Mein Kampf was.”⁴⁹ Rather, the average NF youth was motivated by the same mixture of boredom and frustrated machismo that would make football hooligans of their younger siblings a decade later. What they needed was a better alternative.

The Desperate Bicycles famously offered DIY recording as that alternative, arguing in “Don’t Back the Front” that if kids were given the opportunity to write their own music, “cut it, press it and distribute it,” then they’d have “something that they want to do,” something better than being “phoney fascists.” The Specials, beneficiaries of that DIY inspiration, offered a two-tone space in which black and white kids could dance and reason together as another alternative. Again, the idea was empowerment. “It’s up to you,” they insisted: up to you whether you want to dance, whether you join the “morons” when they come for you (“It’s Up to You”). They also insisted that there was no escape from the responsibility of choice; being a “nobody” doesn’t absolve you of moral decision-making, and having a “reason” for racism “Doesn’t Make It Alright.” Eventually though, even the Specials began to rethink the wisdom of allowing racists space on the dance floor, even if the idea was to reason with them. In 1983, exhausted by the rehabilitation effort, the Special AKA threw up their hands and sang, “If you have a racist friend … now is the time for your friendship to end.”

Others felt that even this gave racism too much space. Steel Pulse, notwithstanding their staunch support of RAR, were among those who argued that rocking against racism wasn’t enough: antiracists and antifascists were also going to have to throw a rock—both literal and metaphorical—against racism and “smash it.” It was a “tough decision” they acknowledged in “Jah Pickney—RAR,” but “We’re gonna hunt the National Front.” As they put it in “Klu Klux Klan”:

Black man do unto the Klan

As they would do to you.

In this case hate thy neighbour.

The self-conscious references to the biblical commandments that they’re breaking suggests how difficult the decision was for a band whose natural instinct, expressed in “Handsworth Revolution,” was to “join hands,” “make the way for our children,” and ensure “justice for all mankind.”

The Beat’s Dave Wakeling too had misgivings about the use of violence. Recalling a confrontation between NF supporters and antifascists in Handsworth, he reflected, “Somehow the National Front had managed to get us lot to act just as animalistic as they were and in some ways they’d won by that, in the same way as Margaret Thatcher by being so bitter and divisive could force us to become bitter and divisive.”⁵⁰ In the Beat’s “Two Swords,” he made a case for not meeting violence with violence, asking the kids to consider, “Are you fighting the Front or just fronting a fight?” He had a point; as Reynolds and Press put it, a bit reductively, “The militancy of the left is sometimes hard to distinguish from the belligerence of the right” because “similar hormonal energies fuel both.”⁵¹ Besides, confronting the NF not only gave the fascists the racial conflict they were looking for,⁵² it also gave them the media attention they would not otherwise have had. Worse, because the police and the media tended to side with the racists, the antifascists generally got blamed for the violence that resulted.⁵³

In the end it wasn’t RAR or the Anti-Nazi League that defeated the National Front, it was Thatcher. She simply stole their constituency by bringing their anti-immigrant platform into the political mainstream.⁵⁴ In the most mealy-mouthed way possible, Thatcher’s talk of “swamping” identified immigrants as a threat not just to British culture but also to democracy and the rule of law, legitimizing racism and xenophobia as natural and inevitable. The Granada interview, Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore notes, caused “widespread outrage in the broadsheet press and at Westminster” but met with “widespread approval in the country.”⁵⁵ Indeed, Thatcher received some ten thousand congratulatory letters from Britons who were feeling “rather swamped” and “rather hostile.”⁵⁶ Come the election those Britons voted for her instead of the National Front.

The police also got the message. After Thatcher’s victory they felt emboldened in their efforts to contain, by any means necessary, the “swamp” of immigrants. In the 1970s, the Metropolitan police had focused their efforts on West Indian businesses. Famously, in 1969 and ’70, they had raided the West Indian restaurant the Mangrove a dozen times without cause (and without turning up any evidence of illegal activity). A peaceful protest in support of the Mangrove was met with an excessive police response, which provoked violence ending in nine arrests. The trial of the so-called Mangrove 9, which the judge acknowledged exposed “racial hatred on both sides,” subsequently became a touchstone for black activists.⁵⁷ By the late 1970s the police were also taking an interest in West Indian cultural events. In 1976, for example, heavy-handed policing at the Notting Hill Carnival produced precisely the threat to order that the police insisted the West Indian community represented. The so-called Notting Hill Carnival Riot came at the end of the hottest summer on record, and London’s Basement 5 observed, in their punk-reggae song “Riot,” “We’re having a hatewave.” It was a particularly apt term to set beside Powell’s “rivers of blood” and Thatcher’s “swamp.” And the sheer, abrasive noisiness of the song made its own political point. By the end of the 1970s, anywhere West Indians were making an un-British “noise” the police were sure to “come a raid,” as Steel Pulse put it in “Blues Dance Raid,” and “come a kick up I speaker / Come a mash up I tweeter.”

This sort of petty intimidation continued into the 1980s.⁵⁸ But Thatcher’s rhetoric also authorized a much broader attack on black communities. In 1981, the Metropolitan Police initiated a campaign of organized harassment against black residents of Brixton, which they provokingly called “Operation Swamp 81.”⁵⁹ Over the course of five days in April, the Brixton Division and members of the Special Patrol Group stopped and searched almost a thousand people and arrested eighty-two on suspicion of criminal intent; this sustained assault on the community, the culmination of “an entire decade of police harassment, aimed at suppressing black resistance,”⁶⁰ predictably triggered riots, first in Brixton and then sympathetically in Handsworth (Birmingham), Chapeltown (Leeds), and Moss Side (Manchester).⁶¹ To Thatcher’s mind, the cause of these riots was simple: ill-discipline and lawlessness.”⁶² That there might have been underlying social factors, such as high unemployment or the long-standing social and political marginalization of black communities, eluded her completely.”⁶³ Not surprisingly, the possibility that these complex social issues were being exacerbated by her own policies also eluded her; as Kronstadt Uprising (“Receiver Deceiver”) and the Reggae Regular (“Violence in the Streets”) noted, politicians were as happy as the police to point fingers at everyone but themselves.

“It’s all done by mirrors,” the Astronauts commented: the parish gentry invent monsters—ill-discipline, laziness—and set the police to hunting them “among the buildings / through the woods and through the hedgerows” while they get back to feeding the poodles and playing croquet. The police might even shoot a non-existent monster or two, but “No matter how many monsters [they] shoot … / There’ll always be another lurking near / Because the hungry never sleep.” Unfortunately, the fact that hunger would have to be addressed thoughtfully and intelligently if further insurrection were to be avoided never even crossed Thatcher’s mind. “The riot lasts a day,” Subhumans shook their heads, but the “British disease” of willful ignorance ensures “the problem lasts for years.” Nine years later, as riots broke out yet again, this time prompted by the introduction of the poll tax, the Exploited had to point out that riots can be suppressed, but “the problems still exist,” and will continue to do so until “they face the facts / that their policies are wrong.” But Thatcher’s solution to the problem was as simple as her understanding of it: more Law and Order.⁶⁴ In the aftermath of the Toxteth riot, she told BBC viewers, “Nothing can justify, nothing can excuse and no-one can condone the appalling violence we’ve all seen on television which some of our people have actually experienced and so many fear.”⁶⁵ And then, with absolutely no sense of irony whatsoever, she offered monetarism, explicitly framed as a form of violence, as the only alternative: “keeping prices down,” she explained, “is the Number One task in the fight for jobs.” The hypocrisy was not lost on the Violators, who prefaced their song “Government Stinks” with a sound clip of Thatcher’s speech. The song’s lyrics are largely indecipherable, but the message is clear enough: nothing can justify and no one can condone violence (economic, social, and physical) inflicted on people by their own government. The Violators offered to meet violence with violence, arguing, “it’s a battle we must win.”

After some thirty buildings and more than a hundred cars had been destroyed, after hundreds of injuries to policemen and members of the public, the result of the Brixton riot was an official report which prevaricated about the police force’s “unwitting discrimination” and which the police and Thatcher ignored anyway. Almost twenty years later an inquiry into the police handling of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence reported that the Metropolitan Police had not learned from the 1981 Scarman Report and remained “institutionally racist.”⁶⁶ The Brixton riot also produced a number of unofficial reports. Linton Kwesi Johnson pointed out, in “Di Great Insohreckshan,” that rioters in Brixton had actually acted with some restraint. Over defiantly high-spirited dub reggae (provided by Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band) LKJ explained: yes, they had burned down a pub, but they “nevah bun di lanlaad,” and, yes, a few police vans got “mash-up” but “soh it goh sometime inna war.” He concluded by promising that, next time, plastic bullets and water cannons would be met with a less measured response. And he wasn’t the only one anticipating that open insurrection would recur. The Angelic Upstarts, celebrating the “Flames of Brixton,” warned Thatcher, “All those eyes are watching you with bottles and with bricks.” Eddy Grant warned that, if things didn’t change, the poor would continue to “rock it … in the Brixton Riot.” And the UK Subs started a countdown, predicting “someday soon / this place is gonna go.” They weren’t wrong. Four years later, riots would break out again (first in Handsworth, then in Lambeth, Peckham, Tottenham, and Toxteth), again sparked by racist policing and fed by frustration with the economic and political marginalization experienced by inner-city communities.

Birmingham toaster Pato Banton was bewildered by the apparent aimlessness of the violence, particularly in Handsworth. He was all too familiar with the fact that people were getting beaten up by police officers, but he couldn’t see that as a justification for coming “like gorilla an’ a fling rock stone.” Nor could he see it as justification for the deaths of two South Asians, “decent law abiding chachas [uncles]” who were killed when looters torched their post office. “What was the riot for?” he asked, “Please give me an answer.” But the question was unanswerable; the riots weren’t for anything. They were, as Conflict recognized, about ungovernable forces. The title of their 1986 album The Ungovernable Force was a reference both to the police force, which frequently acted as if it were beyond the law, and to the brutalized communities which were responding to this violence by becoming increasingly ungovernable. “You ain’t got a clue what you’re facing,” Conflict warned the police, and added, “Eat bricks, you het-up bastard shits.” In a variety of registers, Public Disgrace (“Toxteth”), the Straps (“Brixton”), Cook Da Books (“Piggy in the Middle 8”), Violators (“Summer of 81”), Abacush (“Sufferah Style (Brixton Riot 1981)”), and Sugar Minott (“Riot Inna Brixton”) all tried to communicate the same message.

One opinion about race riots that Thatcher might have agreed with was offered by Oi! band 4-Skins. After the Southall riot in 1981, they complained that one little brick thrown at a football game can get you months in prison, but when bricks are thrown during riots “in the ghetto” the guilty go free. It seemed to them that there was “one law for them, and another law for us,” and they added ominously: “We’ve been warned of rivers of blood / see the trickle before the flood.” The Southall riot had occurred three months after the Brixton riots, when Asian youths confronted hundreds of skinheads bussed in for a concert featuring the 4-Skins, the Business, and the Last Resort. In the aftermath of the riot, the Business and the 4-Skins both felt, with some justice,⁶⁷ that they had been misunderstood and unfairly held responsible for the behaviour of their neo-Nazi fans. The Business called their next tour the Oi against Racism and Political Extremism but Still against the System tour.⁶⁸ The 4-Skins similarly insisted that they, personally, were “apolitical.”⁶⁹ But “One Law for Them” didn’t exactly make their case. Tellingly, the cover of the single tried to obscure the song’s target by featuring an image of upper-class spectators at Royal Ascot, implying that the song’s “them” was not black and South Asian Britons but Britain’s top-hatted aristocracy. It was a slick manoeuvre, obfuscating racial politics with class-consciousness.

The irony (and lost opportunity) of “One Law for Them” was that, if there were any people who could sympathize with punks’ experience of being targeted by the police, it was England’s racial minorities. Bob Marley had made this point a couple of years earlier; the two groups, “rejected by society [and] treated with impunity,” should have been able to come together for a “punky reggae party.” During Swamp 81, the police had aggressively used the so-called SUS law, part of the antiquated Vagrancy Act of 1824, which permitted them to apprehend anyone they suspected of being “a rogue and vagabond” or, as jazz-funk outfit Light of the World put it in “The Boys in Blue,” anyone they thought had “a special look.” The Metropolitan Police took this to include all black people (to the police, Light of the World noted, all blacks “look the same”), perhaps on the grounds that they were in the wrong country and hence, by definition, rogues and vagabonds.⁷⁰ The police also seem to have taken it to include all punks because, like the blacks, they were under suspicion of being a threat to democracy, law, and Britishness in general. This was certainly the case when two members of Belfast punk band Rudi were arrested in London, charged with vagrancy, and given suspended sentences only on condition that they return to Northern Ireland.⁷¹ Police hostility to punks and vice versa was, not surprisingly, well documented in punk songs, including Rudi’s “Cops” and the Defects’ “Brutality” (both Belfast bands, both of the opinion that the Royal Ulster Constabulary were akin to the SS), the Members’ “Police Car,” Toxic Ephex’s “Police Brutality,” the Neurotics’ “Bored Policemen,” Charged GBH’s “Heavy Discipline,” the Abnormal’s “Local Copper,” Barbed Wire’s “Fuck the Polis,” Oi Polloi’s “Pigs for Slaughter!” and Antisocial’s “Official Hooligan.” The last of these, released as a single, came with a drawing of two policemen beating up a Union Jack-clad skinhead while a punk they’ve clearly just finished with lies bleeding in the background (“They got orders from the queen / to put us down ’cause we’re obscene,” the song explained). Meanwhile, Paisley punk bands the Fegs, XS Discharge, Defiant Pose and Urban Enemies squeezed four tracks onto a 7″ EP called Ha! Ha! Funny Polis. The spoken intro to XS Discharge’s contribution explained, “This is a song dedicated to the police when they lifted me and broke my nose,” and the back cover expanded with a DECLARATION OF WAR: “This record was made in the face of continued police harassment of Paisley’s punks.” Street punks in most locales could tell the same story, and the slogan “all coppers are bastards” spread widely through the scene, popularized by the 4-Skins’ track “A.C.A.B.” and promulgated as a core belief by Class War:

LOOK WANKERS … we don’t need any moral justification to attack the cops, we won’t wait to be attacked before we fight back. The police and the bosses are the enemies of the working class and class violence is not a moral issue but a necessary part of our daily struggle to get rid of these bastards.⁷²

Class War were always a bit vague about how race and class intersected, but the police weren’t; to them both blacks and punks just looked like trouble. As Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Ruts both pointed out, this meant that you could get arrested just for standing in a bus queue. In “S.U.S.” the Ruts sang about what had become a distressingly routine event:

Standing on the street just waiting for a bus

This cop pulls up, they’re giving me the S.U.S.

They say “Hey sonny, I think you’re on our file

Well, you better come with us for a while.”

The Ruts’ protagonist stares at the ground as the police try to provoke him into retaliating. The song doesn’t go into details about what follows, but it doesn’t have to: as the swirl of distorted guitars draws a tightening circle of noise around the vocals, it becomes clear that there is no escape from this pressure. LKJ tells a similar story in “Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem).” Sonny explains, “Mi an Jim stan up waitin pon a bus / Not causin no fuss / When all of a sudden a police van pull up.” The police attack Jim, kicking and punching him, and Sonny, coming to his defence, accidentally kills one of them. Sonny relates all this apologetically but matter-of-factly to his mother, by letter, from Brixton prison.

As far as I can tell, although the police harassment in “Sonny’s Lettah” had plenty of real-life precedents, the accidental murder of the offending policeman is speculative, an attempt to imagine what would happen if someone met police violence with equal violence. Most victims of the SUS law, though, reacted like the punk kid in the Ruts’ “S.U.S.,” by staring at the ground and trying not to do anything to provoke their attackers any further. For them, and for many others, police brutality was a pervasive and unavoidable fact. So much so that there’s a wide seam of popular music from the 1970s and ’80s dedicated to documenting it.

images MIXTAPE 17: JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE

The Jam, “Time for Truth” (1977)

Crisis, “PC One Nine Eight Four” (1978)

Dave Goodman and Friends, “Justifiable Homicide” (1978)

Angelic Upstarts, “The Murder of Liddle Towers” (1978)

Bob Marley, “Punky Reggae Party” (1977)

Crisis, “UK ’79” (1979)

The Ruts, “Jah War” (1979)

Tom Robinson Band, “Blue Murder” (1979)

The Ruts, “SUS” (1979)

Mike Carver, “Murder of Blair Peach” (1979)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Reggae Fi Peach” (1980)

The Pop Group, “Justice” (1980)

The Partisans, “Police Story” (1981)

The Exploited, “SPG” (1981)

The Clash, “Know Your Rights” (1982)

The Special AKA, “Bright Lights” (1983)

Benjamin Zephaniah, “Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death (Lord Scarman Dub)” (1983)

Red Alert, “S.P.G.” (1983)

Smiley Culture, “Police Officer” (1984)

Demon Rockers, “Iron Lady” (1985)

Conflict, “The Ungovernable Force” (1986)

Toxic Ephex, “Police Brutality” (1987)

Macka B, “We’ve Had Enough” (1988)

Sinead O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds” (1990)

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Liesense Fi Kill” (1998)

In 1976, a thirty-nine-year-old electrician named Liddle Towers was arrested by Durham police for drunk and disorderly conduct. Three weeks later, he died of the injuries he received at the hands of six police officers while in their custody. When an inquest determined that this was a case of “justifiable homicide,” a disbelieving Mensi of Angelic Upstarts baulked at being told, “Don’t be alarmed, it was the right thing to do.” Tom Robinson was equally sceptical about the legitimacy of the ruling, pointing out that Liddle was unarmed and had no history of violence; Robinson called his death “Blue Murder.” Nevertheless, the coroner concluded that six police officers were justified in kicking Liddle to death, so Robinson advised anyone unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the police: “Button your lip and just swallow your pride / And don’t make trouble when your hands are tied.”

Others would repeat this advice, including Robyn Hitchcock in “Do Policemen Sing?” and Toxic Ephex, who warned, “Don’t hit them back or you’ll never get out.” Dave Goodman, with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, shouted “cover-up!” and added, “There is no law, they make their own.” And the Jam wrote about “killers [who] roam the streets in numbers, dressed in blue.” They demanded, “Bring forward those six pigs; we want to see them swing.” But nobody had swung, literally or metaphorically, three years later when Blair Peach, a special-needs teacher and activist, was killed by the Special Patrol Group (SPG) at an Anti-Nazi League rally.⁷³ The rally had been organized to protest a National Front meeting in Southall, and singer Mike Carver, who claimed to have witnessed the attack, asked, “Who needs the Nazis when we’ve got the SPG?”

The SPG had been created by the Metropolitan police in the early 1960s as a mobile unit to be deployed in “high-crime areas” or in response to “serious public disorder,” and it had developed an evil reputation long before the attack on the Southall rally. Antifascist punks Crisis, for example, sang about “PC One Nine Eight Four,” an SPG officer “programmed to function / with a three-foot bloody truncheon,” on their 1978 debut:

Without hesitation

He’ll get you at a demonstration

And if you dare to look

Then you’re gonna get the book.

He’s on the street, PC 1984,

And it’s the blacks he’s looking for

They ain’t heard of race relations

Down at the police station

On the day of the rally several members of the SPG had turned up to “police” the event armed with lead-weighted coshes, crowbars, and sledgehammers,⁷⁴ evidently looking to crack some antifascist skulls. By the end of the day, they had killed Blair Peach and left Clarence Baker, Misty in Roots’ manager, in a coma. The Ruts, close associates of Misty in Roots, pointed out that Baker, like Peach, was “no troublemaker” and that trouble had only been made when “hot heads in uniform” came swinging three-foot bloody truncheons. LKJ similarly emphasized the victims’ innocence:

Blair Peach he took a simple stand

Against the fascists and their wicked plans

So them beat him till him life was done

An inquest concluded that Peach had died by “misadventure.”⁷⁵ Red Alert, smelling the cover-up, commented, “SPG power no glory / SPG fuck your story.” Wattie Buchan of the Exploited was even pithier: “fuck the SPG.” The Pop Group concluded, in the song “Justice,” that the inquest’s verdict meant the SPG were effectively “legal terrorists,” and one of the bands who contributed to Bullshit Detector (a 1980 compilation of all the demos that had been sent to Crass in the preceding months), called themselves S.P.G. Murders.

Along with the killing of Blair Peach, the Pop Group’s “Justice” referenced the deaths of Kevin Gately and Jimmy Kelly. The former had been killed by police at an anti–National Front rally in 1974 (that killing had also been ruled “death by misadventure”; Crisis commented, in “UK 79,” a relentlessly ironic song about how good policing is in the UK, “Kevin Gately was an accident; know what I mean?”). The latter was killed the same year as Peach, and his death made the Pop Group wonder, “Who polices the police?” The Partisans, meanwhile, wondered how it was that nobody seemed to care that Kelly had been beaten to death simply for being drunk. These were questions that others were asking too. Michael Meacher, MP for Oldham West, speaking in the House of Commons after Kelly’s death, noted “the virtual impossibility of carrying through to a successful conclusion complaints against the police, however overwhelming the evidence.”⁷⁶ He reported that an independent post mortem had found that Kelly had received “multiple injuries” in police custody, “that his jaw was fractured in two places by an impact on the chin, which tore the jaw away in one direction while fracturing the other side as the jaw bone twisted, and that he had a crushed vertebra and no fewer than 32 bruises on his body.”⁷⁷ Yet, he added, “Six months have passed, yet no prosecutions have been initiated.”⁷⁸ This, he stressed, was not an isolated incident but evidence of a systemic problem: “Figures given to me by the Home Office show that since 1970 no fewer than 143 persons have died from unnatural causes while in police custody, and that excludes suicide. That is an average of over 15 persons a year. Moreover, the number per year has been steadily increasing. In 1970 it was three persons, and in 1978—the last full year—it was 30 persons.”⁷⁹

Thatcher, predictably, refused to see the problem. Her response to complaints about police violence, captured for posterity on Chumbawamba’s “The Police Have Been Wonderful,” was: “If there are individual complaints about policemen, there’s a well-established machinery to pursue them, and that is why British justice is renowned across the world.” Never mind that this well-established machinery was constitutionally incapable of delivering justice, particularly if the complaints concerned policing in black communities.

In 1983 this machinery concluded that Colin Roach, who died of a gunshot wound inflicted in the Stoke Newington police station, had committed suicide. “Put this in your diary / Demand public inquiry,” Benjamin Zephaniah insisted, “Who killed Colin Roach? The people are shouting / Who killed Colin Roach?”⁸⁰ The Special AKA told the same story, on the B-side to “Racist Friend”: “The people were shouting … ‘Colin Roach’s family demand an inquiry’” (“Bright Lights”). But all these demands for a public inquiry were ignored, and no charges were laid. Dancehall reggae artist Deman Rockers commented ruefully, “The Iron Lady she noh easy, Lahd.” The Roach Family Support Committee set up an independent inquiry and, in 1989, published their own report, Policing in Hackney 1945–1984. The following year, Sinead O’Connor offered a sort of update on the report. The inner sleeve of her album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got thanked the Roach family and featured a photograph of Colin Roach’s parents holding vigil for their son. The album itself featured the song “Black Boys on Mopeds,” which lamented that nothing much had changed since Roach’s death. Nicholas Bramble, the subject of the song, had recently died trying to escape from the police, who had decided (presumably because he was black) that he didn’t own the moped he was riding. He did own it but fled anyway (presumably because he knew what being black meant to the people who had killed Colin Roach). During the chase, Bramble lost control of the moped and was fatally injured. O’Connor argued that Margaret Thatcher had murdered him as surely as if she’d personally given the order.

Other evidence that nothing much had changed since Roach’s death came in 1987, when Clinton McCurbin died by “misadventure” in Wolverhampton. He had been accused of using a stolen credit card in a clothing store. Eyewitnesses reported, “The police held him face down … One had his hand cupped under his chin and was pulling back on his chin while the other was kneeling on his back. Then he went limp and lifeless.”⁸¹ Wolverhampton toaster Macka B reproduced the scene and its implications graphically in “We’ve Had Enough”:

Babylonian rush in

Jump on di yout, all siddung pon im

Draw back him head and bus di yout neck string

An skin fi dem teet like dem kill a chicken

He was only young, Lahd what a sin,

He should be walking round but is in a coffin

Dem don’t treat we as human being.

The album cover was also graphic, featuring drawings of policemen beating up blacks and a naked Thatcher worshipping Satan in the fires of hell. Wolverhampton’s Chief Constable, however, said he saw no reason to suspend the officers; the Police Complaints Authority concluded that, because McCurbin’s death had occurred while he was being restrained, “it was not a matter for legal or internal police discipline,” and the director of public prosecutions was satisfied that no charges should be laid.⁸²

Macka B observed, “When police kill a black, they never seem to get charged,” adding to the Clinton McCurbin case the names of half a dozen other black victims of police violence, including Cherry Groce and Cynthia Jarrett, whose deaths in 1985 had sparked riots in Lambeth and Tottenham respectively. Writing about the latter disturbance, ska band the AK47s reckoned that after “years and years of being pushed, downtrodden / Continually harassed … / Tottenham youth were ready to fight back.” During that fight a policeman named Keith Blakelock was stabbed and kicked to death,⁸³ a rare instance of the lethal violence LKJ had predicted in “Di Great Insohreckshan.” As the AK47s recalled, “Hundreds were arrested in the months that followed / Door smashed down in the middle of the night / Three men framed.” The so-called Tottenham Three were hastily convicted based on fabricated confessions; all subsequently had their convictions quashed.⁸⁴ Meanwhile, no one was ever held accountable for the death of Cynthia Jarrett. And LKJ would, sadly, be able to add several more names to Macka B’s litany when he recorded “Liesense Fi Kill” in 1998: Tunay Hassan, Joy Gardner, Vincent Graham, Brian Douglas, and Wayne Douglas. “Wen it come to black people,” he concluded, “Some poleece inna inglan got liesense fi kill.”

Benjamin Zephaniah may have produced the definitive statement on the situation in the nightmarish title of his poem “Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death (Lord Scarman Dub).” Recorded in 1983, the poem turned the tables on a system which treated all blacks as criminal bogeymen, by casting the police themselves as spirits, duppies “wid no hearts”:

Ina de distance of de night

You see dem moving round

Investigating and crime making

In any town.

The struggle Zephaniah describes is as much spiritual as physical or political; the police are not just agents of a racist State, they are agents of a supernatural Evil. It’s a potent statement, but a despairing one because it offers no possibility of reconciliation between Black Britons and the policemen who will, eternally, keep on kicking them to death.

Fast-talking DJ Smiley Culture offered perhaps a glimmer of hope in his humorous rap “Police Officer.” Although it’s an account of police harassment, it emphasizes a certain shared (crooked) humanity. Smiley Culture begins with the complaint that the police pull him over every time he drives his car to demand he produce proof of ownership. It’s a form of harassment many in his audience would, like Nicholas Bramble, have been familiar with. But, then, Smiley acknowledges that the police are interested in him partly because he drives a range of expensive Fiats, Mercedes, and Lancias paid for by his trade in ganja. One night he’s pulled over by plainclothes officers in a Black Maria who, unlike the general run of policemen, don’t look like they can be paid off. They’re about to arrest him for possession when one of them recognizes him as the DJ who recorded “Cockney Translation.” It turns out that both his kids and his mother love the song. So they strike a deal, “a favour for a favour”—Smiley Culture gives the policemen his autograph and they let him (and his ganja) go.

In a grimly ironic twist, almost twenty years later Smiley Culture would die (of a self-inflicted stab wound, apparently) during a drug-related police raid on his home. The Independent Police Complaints Commission would criticize the actions of police involved in the raid, describing them as “not satisfactory.” But no charges would be laid.

* In addition to the ones mentioned in the next couple of pages: Another Warcry, “Don’t Kill the Fox”; Alternative, “Sick Man’s Slaughter”; Anathema, “Useless Slaughter”; A.P.F. Brigade, “Eat Wheat, Not Meat”; the Apostles, “The Liberators March,” “The Victims Lament,” and “The Saboteurs Revenge”; Anti-System, “Wot! No Meat?” and “Animal Welfare”; the Business, “Sabotage the Hunt”; Chris and Cosey, “Silent Cry”; Chumbawamba, “Knit Your Own Balaclava” and “Animals’ Song”; Anne Clarke & Patrik Fitzgerald, “Toros”; Culture Shock, “Twenty Questions”; Dirge, “Blood Sports”; Electro Hippies, “Turkeys”; Endangered Species, “Slaughter of the Innocent”; Fallout, “Pound of Flesh”; Flux of Pink Indians, “Myxamatosis”; Icons of Filth, “Success on a Plate (for Who?)”; Genital Deformities, “You’ll Never Know”; Howard Jones, “Assault and Battery”; Lost Cherrees, “Please Don’t Hurt the Animals”; Man’s Hate, “Meat Means Money,” “Animal Farming,” and “Life Behind Bars”; Oi Polloi, “Stop Vivisection Now”; Passion Killers, “Zoo”; Political Asylum, “Symptom”; Post Mortem, “Pain”; Potential Threat, “A Cry for Help”; Reality, “Acceptable Death Loss”; Riot/Clone, “Death to Humanity”; Subhumans, “Evolution”; and Terminus, “Hunt the Hunt.”

PART SEVENNow Is the Time for an Iron Hand

In 1985, Annajoy David (vice president of Youth CND), Paul Weller (an active supporter of Youth CND), and Billy Bragg (an active supporter of youth in general—he’d just finished his Jobs for Youth tour) got together and created Red Wedge. The idea, as Billy Bragg put it, was to “stimulate debate amongst young people about whether or not it was worth voting for Labour at the next election.”¹ Paul Weller was more blunt about it: “We wanted the Tories out and a socialist government in.”² In addition to Weller and Bragg, the musicians involved in staging concerts and day events were, many of them, this book’s usual suspects: Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt of Everything but the Girl, Jerry Dammers of the Specials, Tom Robinson, Heaven 17, Madness, and the other members of Paul Weller’s Style Council. But once the ball got rolling many others became involved too, including Elvis Costello, Prefab Sprout, Sade, and Bananarama. Tracey Thorn recalls, “Anyone who’d done a benefit gig was rounded up.”³ The Blow Monkeys were optimistic about what they could collectively accomplish, warning Thatcher:

You know that power comes from unity

C’mon!

We’re gonna celebrate

’Cause this party’s overdue

It’s the day after you.

The week before the election, Smash Hits reprised its election special quiz of pop stars. This time around they baldly asked them who they’d be voting for. Paul Heaton and Billy Bragg were both voting Labour: “I can tell you that as an exclusive to Smash Hits,” Bragg quipped, “ha! ha!” Jimmy Somerville (of Bronski Beat and the Communards) was also voting Labour: “Being a gay man and a socialist,” he pointed out, “I don’t really have much alternative.” Robert Smith of the Cure admitted, sheepishly, “I’m going to vote SDP. It’s a dreadful thing, but I like Dr. David Owen.” It was also “dreadful” that Thatcher had been in power for eight years, and, besides, Labour and the Conservatives were both “dreadful.” Mick Hucknall was voting Labour because “the majority of people in our country are not enjoying the rights and privileges that they used to enjoy and unfortunately that is because of Margaret Thatcher.” George Michael was with Labour on nuclear arms, but he found the party’s promise of a million new jobs “pie-in-the-sky.”⁴

Gary Numan was sticking to his guns, and he was as skeptical as George Michael about Labour’s ability to create jobs. “I’m going to vote Conservative,” he confirmed. “A very important reason is the three million unemployed in this country.… I sincerely believe that the restrictive practices of unions for many years have created millions of unreal jobs. I now believe the Conservative government—particularly led by Margaret Thatcher—is the most likely of all the parties to create real jobs for the unemployed.”⁵

Boy George was voting for the Ecology Party again. “I saw Margaret Thatcher on TV and she was slagging off the Labour Party for giving money to gays, so she lost my vote straight away.” The Labour Party was no more appealing to him though: “I’d rather vote Green and preserve the land than promote Margaret Thatcher or any of these politicians.” Jim Kerr of Simple Minds had had enough too; he was “sick of the lot of them,” and wasn’t planning to vote.⁶ Ali Campbell of UB40 was voting Labour, but without much conviction. Zodiac Mindwarp had never voted and were not about to start. David Bowie wasn’t voting because he was well out of it, living in America.

The last four or five voices here might have tipped one off that the Blow Monkeys weren’t going to get the celebration they were hoping for. Thatcher won the 1987 election pretty handily. Nevertheless, Red Wedge was instrumental in creating a swing towards Labour among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds,⁷ and impressed upon the Labour Party the need to engage with young people and their concerns. (This insight, nihilistically stripped of any ideological substance, would help Labour win the 1997 election.) More important than these gains, though, was the cooperation Red Wedge fostered between diverse anti-Thatcher campaigners, including antinuclear activists, gays and lesbians, antiracists, Labour supporters, and socialists. In the aftermath of the election and “still waiting for the great leap forwards,” as he put it, Billy Bragg reflected that this was the real point of it all, telling Thatcher, “If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it.”

images MIXTAPE 18: SMASH CLAUSE 28

Tom Robinson Band, “Glad to Be Gay” (1978)

Buzzcocks, “Ever Fallen in Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)” (1978)

Elton Motello, “When All the Boys Are English” (1980)

Pete Shelley, “Homosapien” (1981)

A-Heads, “Isolated” (1983)

Bronski Beat, “Smalltown Boy” (1984)

Bronski Beat, “Why?” (1984)

The Apostles, “Kill or Cure” (1984)

Fallout, “AIDS Charade” (1985)

Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing” (1985)

Bronski Beat, “Hit That Perfect Beat” (1985)

The Blow Monkeys, “(Celebrate) the Day After You” (1987)

McCarthy, “God Made the Virus” (1987)

Billy Bragg, “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards” (1988)

Communards, “There’s More to Love Than Boy Meets Girl” (1987)

Chumbawamba, “Smash Clause 28!” (1988)

The Apostles, “Fucking Queer” (1988)

The Chesterfields, “Lunchtime for the Wild Youth” (1988)

Boy George, “No Clause 28 (Hi-Energy Mix)” (1989)

McCarthy, “Now Is the Time for an Iron Hand” (1990)

Oi Polloi, “When Two Men Kiss” (1990)

Jimmy Somerville, “Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)” (1990)

Kitchens of Distinction, “Breathing Fear” (1992)

Pet Shop Boys, “Can You Forgive Her?” (1993)

And, of course, Thatcher did have a blacklist. Arguably, her entire political career was about that carefully curated list—the list of enemies against whom she could define herself.⁸ Ted Heath, her predecessor as leader of the Conservatives, had been a terrific foil.⁹ Leopoldo Galtieri and Arthur Scargill had been even better. The Greenham Common women had been pretty good too, in their own way; as John Campbell remarks, “Nothing burnished her Iron Lady image more effectively than the contrast between herself, with her immaculate hair and powerful suits, and the woolly hatted feminists and mystical tree-huggers of the peace camp.”¹⁰ But, by 1987, all these enemies had been vanquished or exhausted. The woolly-hatted struggled on, but they’d lost the argument. The IRA were still there, of course, but that battle was interminable and morally ambiguous, and the public were bored of it. The immigrants were still there too, despite Thatcher’s best efforts, but there wasn’t much more to be gained from persecuting a manifestly oppressed minority. And the unemployed were still there, but by 1987 only 13 percent of Britons believed that “poor people were probably responsible for their own plight.”¹¹ So, again, there wasn’t much to be gained by picking on them. Thatcher needed some new enemies.

The alliance represented by Red Wedge looked promising. One of the Conservatives’ election posters for 1987 featured a drawing of placard-bearing punks, socialists, antinuclear protesters, and gay rights activists under the title “Labour Camp.” The implication was that life under Labour would resemble a sort of Soviet gulag in which everyone would be forced to participate in “gay sports day.” Indeed, of all the enemies of the state identified in the poster, the ones Thatcher thought she could get most political mileage out of were the gays. At the 1987 Conservative Party Conference, after celebrating her election victory and affirming her belief in “free debate” and “free political institutions,” she turned her attention to education, announcing plans to shackle local political authorities and dictate curriculum from Whitehall.¹² As John Campbell notes, “Behind her libertarian rhetoric, Mrs Thatcher’s instinct to impose her views was authoritarian, interventionist and essentially centralising.”¹³ In this instance, she wanted to make sure children weren’t being taught about “antiracist mathematics” (it was the antiracist part she objected to, presumably, not the mathematics), or “political slogans,” or homosexuality:

Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. And children who need encouragement—and children do so much need encouragement—so many children—they are being taught that our society offers them no future. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life—yes cheated.

McCarthy satirized this characterization of homosexuality as a threat to the future of the nation in “Now Is the Time for an Iron Hand”:

Once England was a place to bring up children in

We could call this country our own

But we let the queers out of the closet and then

Oh, the rot really set in.

As usual, Malcolm Eden’s plangent delivery somehow makes the satire sharper: his persona genuinely and yearningly believes that, if only the gays had been kept out of sight, the empire could have been saved, there’d have been no industrial decline, and the future would be full of promise. It’s unlikely that Thatcher could have counted on many of her people being quite so fulsomely homophobic, but she knew the temperature of the country. In the 1988 British Social Attitudes Survey, 74 percent of respondents said that homosexuality was “always or mostly wrong.”¹⁴ This represented a significant growth in antigay sentiment since the previous survey five years earlier. Indeed, in the early 1980s, it had almost looked as though Britain was getting ready to come out of the closet. Even in Northern Ireland, where Ian Paisley’s DUP had been campaigning to “Save Ulster from Sodomy” since 1977, homosexuality was finally decriminalized in 1982 (albeit only after the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights). Between Boy George’s drag in Culture Club and Annie Lennox’s in the Eurythmics; between the Eurovision camp of Bucks Fizz and the Teutonic homoeroticism of early Spandau Ballet; between Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s leather bar antics in the video for “Relax” and whatever the hell Bowie and Jagger were doing in the video for “Dancing in the Street,” a new space seemed to be opening up in the pop mainstream.¹⁵

Buzzcocks and Tom Robinson can both be credited with making important space-clearing gestures in 1978: the former with the non-gender-specific “Ever Fallen in Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?),” the latter with “(Sing if You’re) Glad to Be Gay,” which documented the denigration, discrimination, police harassment, and homophobic violence experienced by the gay community. “Glad to Be Gay” called on the punk generation to see gay rights as a necessary part of the antifascist agenda. Billy Bragg, recalling RAR’s 1978 Carnival Against the Nazis in Victoria Park, notes:

When Tom sang Sing if you’re glad to be gay, all these blokes around us started kissing each other on the lips. I’d never seen an out gay man before. My immediate thought was, “What are they doing here? This is about black people.” And literally in the course of that afternoon I came to realize that actually the fascists were against anybody who was in any way different.… I realized this was how my generation was going to define themselves, in opposition to discrimination of all kinds.¹⁶

Others followed with songs that expressed both the hope that this was true and the fear that it wasn’t. Pete Shelley himself, solo after the demise of Buzzcocks, released “Homosapien,” an urgent appeal from a “shy boy” to a “coy boy”: “I just hope and pray / the day of our love is at hand.” However, the shy boy worries, “the world is so wrong / that I hope we’ll be strong enough.” The need for strength was real. Elton Motello, best known for the magnificently seedy “Jet Boy Jet Girl,” sang about a boy finding the courage to come out, only to have the lover who supported him and helped him “abolish the crime” lose hope and commit suicide. He is left unable to “trust anything—especially love” (“When All the Boys Are English”). Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville asked, “Why is there contempt in your eyes as I turn to kiss his lips?” (“Why?”).

As Somerville’s question suggests, the reality was that homosexuality was acceptable to the British public only so long as it remained subterranean or, failing that, nonthreateningly ambiguous. So, for example, the video for Bronski Beat’s hymn to anonymous gay sex “Hit That Perfect Beat” stuck a barely plausible heterosexual fig leaf on the song by making it a song about an English girl waiting for her lover, a Russian sailor, to come into port—still a forbidden love of sorts, but a much less worrying one for Bronski Beat’s audience. Commercially, it was a prudent move, because, when pop songs too obviously alluded to gay sex, straight audiences tended to panic, even in cases where the BBC didn’t ban them, as they did Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” When Boy George got fed up with the coy is-he-or-isn’t-he posture and dropped the playful drag, his fans suddenly found him “sexually threatening” and abandoned him.¹⁷ And it would have been a mistake to imagine that pop stardom had ever come with any guarantee of respect or understanding. Too many people, viewing Boy George “as a kind of benign extra-terrestrial,”¹⁸ were as amused and contemptuous as the oafish deliveryman in Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing,” bewildered that “the little faggot with the earring and the make-up” was a millionaire. And even this highly circumscribed tolerance of queer identities in show business didn’t extend to homosexuals in general (or much beyond the geographical limits of London for that matter).¹⁹ As Jimmy Somerville pointed out in “Smalltown Boy,” being gay in a provincial town meant being “pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy.”

So “Smalltown Boy” becoming a top-ten hit for Somerville and Bronski Beat meant something. Initially, it probably had more to do with the emotional punch of Somerville’s countertenor than the song’s thematic concerns—and the same is probably true of the equally successful follow-up single “Why?” But these songs were important, picking up where Tom Robinson’s “Glad to Be Gay” had left off in 1978 and asking why homosexuality should be treated as an “illness” and a “sin.” And the fact that Somerville went on to have more than a dozen other top-thirty hits (with Bronski Beat, then with the Communards, and then solo), can’t be solely down to Somerville’s voice (or the infectious joy of his performances). Some people, at least, were listening when he sang, “There’s More to Love Than Boy Meets Girl”:

I would like to shout it from the highest mountain

To tell the world I’ve found love and what it means to me

But all around there’s violence and laws to make me think again

Maybe one day they will understand

There’s more to love than boy meets girl.

Margaret Thatcher wasn’t one of the people who were listening. For most of her career, Thatcher had, in fact, been broadly indifferent to questions of gender and sexuality. After all, neither mattered much to the money supply. And thanks to this benign indifference, the public’s attitudes towards sex evolved largely without her interference, at least until 1987, when the Fascist Groove Thing suddenly took a cultural turn.²⁰

John Campbell points out that there had always been a tension in Thatcher’s policy-making “between the philosophy of minimum government and her instinct to tell people what to do.”²¹ As long as addressing the economy was her most pressing problem, Thatcher allowed the former to predominate, but by 1987 the economy appeared to be picking up, so, as Campbell puts it, “Thatcherism moved into a new phase.… Mrs Thatcher now wanted to take on British society”²² and, in her own words, “set [the] standards by which people live their lives.”²³ It was in this new phase that Thatcher’s roving eye fell upon gays, and she decided that they represented a threat to the future of the nation. Her solution to this problem was Clause 28 of the Local Authorities Act (1988), which banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or allowing schools to teach “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”²⁴ Even before it was enacted, the Pet Shop Boys put an ad in the Independent arguing that Clause 28 was “indicative of an increasing characteristic of Mrs. Thatcher’s government: fascism.”²⁵ Chumbawamba agreed, recording “Smash Clause 28!” as a benefit for the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. The song greeted the “Third Reich morality” which would see “one in ten driven underground,” with an ironic chorus of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, His truth is marching on,” and it quoted Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, “First they came for the Jews …” Boy George, meanwhile, quoted Heaven 17 in his single “No Clause 28”: “Don’t need this legislation … Don’t need this fascist groove.”

Mercifully, as Fascist Groove Things go, Clause 28 was a relatively toothless affair, virtually impossible to enforce because there was no way to draw a clear line between “promoting” homosexuality and simply depicting it or giving advice about it.²⁶ In fact, between 1988 and 2003, when the law was belatedly repealed, not a single person was prosecuted under it.²⁷ Nevertheless, its enactment was symbolically important, validating and encouraging homophobia, and doing real violence to a community already reeling from the AIDS epidemic. Even in the punk scene, which should have inherited Billy Bragg’s opposition to discrimination of all kinds, many heterosexual punks treated queer people with hostility and even violence. There were bands who did their best to correct this: the A-Heads, for example, wrote sympathetically about the isolation and fear experienced by queer youth, and Oi Polloi explained to their Oi! audience, “You say they’re sick / But the only sickness I can see / Is the cancer of your bigotry.” The Oi! scene, although not intrinsically rightwing, was susceptible to the influence of far-right organizations such as the National Front and the British Movement, both of them hostile to homosexuality.²⁸ More surprising, perhaps, is the way homosexuality was received by punks in the ostensibly progressive anarcho-punk scene that the A-Heads were part of. For example, the Apostles, who operated on the margins of that scene, saw their record sales wither after Andy Martin and Dave Fanning came out.²⁹ Martin sang about being made to feel “guilt and fear when you’re born a fucking queer” (“Fucking Queer”). He also sang, experimenting with extremely dangerous levels of irony, “Kill, kill, kill or cure / Kill or cure the queers” (“Kill or Cure”).

So, not surprisingly, the anxiety about coming out expressed by Elton Motello and Pete Shelley at the beginning of the decade was slow to change and may even have deepened. At the end of the decade, Kitchens of Distinction could still write about “Breathing Fear”: “we suffocate every day,” they sang, for fear of being “beaten, insulted, skewered and branded.” And the protagonist of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Can You Forgive Her?” had trouble coming out even to himself. The song describes him lying in bed “short of breath” as he tries to persuade himself to remain in a damaging heterosexual relationship—better that than having to “face the fact / you’re in love and it feels like shame.”

The rise in antigay sentiment during the 1980s was partly due to the public’s anxiety about AIDS, an anxiety that the right-wing media were only too happy to fuel. AIDS claimed its first British victim in 1982; within a year, the Mail on Sunday was warning of a “gay plague.”³⁰ The Times expressed “moral and physical” repugnance at the “infection’s origins and means of propagation.”³¹ But it was the Sun that really embraced homohysteria,³² launching a propaganda campaign against “gay terrorists holding the decent member of society to ransom.”³³ Fallout scoffed at the newspaper, “Fuck off Sun, with your screams of ‘Gay Plague,’” because the cynicism was so obvious: “You can no longer ‘Bash the Argies,’ / So you’ll start on all the queers.” As author Matthew Todd recalls, “‘Pulpit poofs’ were hounded from the church, playground workers were exposed as ‘lesbians plotting to pervert nursery tots,’ [and] celebrities such as Kenny Everett, Russell Harty and Freddie Mercury were hounded as diseased vermin.”³⁴ It was an effective campaign: the British Attitudes Survey showed that, in 1988, almost a third of Britons believed AIDS was “a punishment to the world for its decline in moral standards.”³⁵ Given that less than two-thirds of Britons claimed to be religious at the time, this suggests that a lot of people developed a religious streak for the sole purpose of expressing their homophobia.³⁶ In any case, McCarthy satirized the belief in “God Made the Virus,” hailing AIDS as a “pious plague” sent to seek out sin and take a reckoning; Eden’s overjoyed and overexcited Mail on Sunday–reading persona beseeches God, “If you’d only send a special death for the lesbians and communists …”

“God made the virus” was unusual in its direct reference to AIDS. A few songs tried to address the subject, for example the Blow Monkeys’ “Digging Your Scene,” and the Chesterfields’ “Lunchtime for the Wild Youth” (with its memorable outro, “They had Peace and Revolution / We’ve got AIDS and Whitney Houston”), but, generally, pop music found the disease difficult to confront head-on. As the journalist David Keeps, writing about AIDS benefit records, noted at the time, “Forced together, pop and AIDS compromise each other, forming a contradictory alliance between an industry that markets sex as fun and a disease that links sex with death.”³⁷ Perhaps for this reason, benefit records such as Dionne Warwick & Friends’ single “That’s What Friends Are For,” and the album Red Hot + Blue relied on cover versions of familiar songs. Perhaps it’s also partly for this reason that both benefit records were slightly reticent about their purpose. The front cover of Red Hot + Blue explained that it was “a tribute to Cole Porter to benefit AIDS research and relief,” but the word AIDS was obscured by the cover design; the front cover of “That’s What Friends Are For” didn’t mention AIDS at all, relegating the information to a small box on the back. But, then, both of these projects made their point not in the songs, or on their sleeves, but through the sheer fact of themselves: both were international, both were multiethnic, both featured gay and straight artists working collaboratively to benefit AIDS research, and both affirmed that AIDS was not a “gay disease.”

This communication was almost as important as the projects’ primary fundraising function, because the moral panic around AIDS had hampered efforts to create awareness about it throughout the 1980s. The Department of Health hadn’t even placed its first public information adverts in newspapers until 1986 (three years after the Mail on Sunday announced a “gay plague”) and then only over Thatcher’s objections.³⁸ At the end of the decade, Thatcher’s government were still “ignoring uncomfortable realities,” as the AIDS activist Colin Clews puts it: the first protest staged by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the UK, in 1989, involved catapulting condoms into Pentonville Prison to protest the government’s refusal to provide them to prisoners.³⁹ Clearly, if it were left up to the Conservative government, not much was going to get done. In 1990, Jimmy Somerville released “Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)”: “Money is what we need,” he sang, “Not complacency.” And taking his own advice, he toured in support of ACT UP and contributed a cover of Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On” to the Red Hot + Blue compilation. “What urge will save us now that sex won’t,” a voice asked at the beginning of the video for the song. Somerville seemed to answer the question in “Read My Lips”: “We’ll fight for love and with pride / And we’ll fight / Standing together for the right / To live and die with dignity.”

His confidence in the gay community was well founded. The strength and dignity he celebrated was visible not just in projects like Red Hot + Blue but also in the steadily increasing size of the annual Pride London parade and, perhaps most significantly, in the creation of the organization Stonewall in 1989. Founded on the principle of “Acceptance without Exception,” and in direct response to Clause 28, Stonewall would be instrumental in advancing LGBT rights in the UK over the next thirty years. So, despite making life more difficult for homosexuals, Clause 28 didn’t get Thatcher quite the political mileage she might have hoped for. If Thatcher was going to recapture her glory days as armoured Britannia, she was going to need some different enemies. Luckily for her, there was a whole continent full of them just across the channel.

images MIXTAPE 19: ANOTHER BRITISH ARMY

John Dowie, “British Tourist (I Hate the Dutch)” (1977)

The Clash, “I’m So Bored with the USA” (1977)

Cockney Rejects, “We Are the Firm” (1980)

Cockney Rejects, “War on the Terraces” (1980)

Last Resort, “Resort Bootboys” (1982)

Chas and Dave, “Don’t Anyone Speak English Anymore?” (1981)

Serious Drinking, “Love on the Terraces” (1982)

XTC, “Everyday Story of Smalltown” (1984)

The Jazz Butcher, “Holiday” (1985)

Half Man Half Biscuit, “Fuckin’ ’Ell, It’s Fred Titmus” (1985)

The Business, “Saturdays Heroes” (1985)

The Three Johns, “Death of the European” (1985)

Martin Ansell, “Hardy’s England” (1986)

Tippa Irie, “Football Hooligan” (1986)

New Model Army, “51st State” (1986)

The Business, “Hand Ball” (1988)

The Screaming Blue Messiahs, “I Can Speak American” (1987)

The Screaming Blue Messiahs, “I Wanna Be a Flintstone” (1987)

The Housemartins, “The World’s on Fire” (1987)

The Abnormal, “Football Song” (1987)

Stitched-Back Foot Airman, “Costa Del Sol” (1988)

McCarthy, “What Our Boys are Fighting For” (1989)

Wat Tyler, “No ID” (1989)

I, Ludicrous, “Moynihan Brings Out the Hooligan in Me” (1989)

Crucial Robbie, “Fraid to Get Kickup” (1990)

The Farm, “All Together Now” (1990)

The Levellers, “England My Home” (1990)

Terminus, “Terraces to the Trenches” (1990)

Billy Bragg, “The Few” (1991)

Cock Sparrer, “Trouble on the Terraces” (1992)

The Business, “Hardcore Hooligan” (1997)

The Jazz Butcher’s “Holiday” tells the story of a “regular English-speaking gentleman” travelling abroad who seems to be determined to make himself innocuous and inoffensive. He is polite, reads quietly in his room after dinner, and takes care not to offend his hosts or disturb the peace. But, then, curious details begin to emerge. He “spends his day observing,” careful not to interact with the workers or “remove his camera when he’s near those installations”; in the evening he types letters “to his colleagues back in England.” One begins to suspect that he is not what he claims to be. It’s not just the observing and reporting that raise suspicion or the calm but insistent reassurances that he’s just a “regular English-speaking gentleman”; it’s the details about him being polite and quiet. That doesn’t sound like a British tourist at all.

A much more familiar picture of the Briton abroad is offered by comedian John Dowie’s “British Tourist,” who begins by announcing “I am very, very rude / I hate the foreigners,” before launching into a ludicrous diatribe against the Dutch: they “live in windmills and mince around in clogs” and “all they eat is tulips.” Despite the satirical hyperbole, it isn’t far off the attitude affected by most Britons towards Europeans, an attitude which the Rumour, Graham Parker’s sometime backing band, summarized in the title of their second album: Frogs, Sprouts, Clogs and Krauts. It also happened to be an attitude that Thatcher wholeheartedly shared.⁴⁰ She considered Europeans “a rotten lot” without a “strand of equity or fairness.”⁴¹ She didn’t even trust foreign words.⁴² And she made substantial political capital out of posing as a handbagging Britannia defending the nation against an ungrateful, pocket-picking European Union. As Roy Jenkins, onetime president of the European Commission noted, it served her nicely to build up “a groundswell of anti-European and particularly anti-French opinion at home.”⁴³ After all, she was on safe ground appealing to British xenophobia.⁴⁴

One of the sharpest pop commentaries on this subject came in the song “Costa Del Sol,” by Southampton indie-rock band Stitched-Back Foot Airman. The song appears to have been inspired by a newscaster’s scare line—“Dangerous foreigners go for Brits, ruining the vacation”—which unconsciously but perfectly condensed the narcissistic self-regard of the British tourist. That is, the Spanish in this formulation are interfering with Britons’ right to sunbathe unhindered on the beaches of the Costa del Sol, where the Spanish are dangerous foreigners (and the British are emphatically not foreigners) and where the dangerous foreign pickpockets are driven not by poverty but by a shocking disregard for Britons’ holiday plans. This situation has damaged the tourist trade in southern Spain, where, out beyond the poverty and the now-empty beaches, “the remaining sun hats / float by.” This moment of bathos contrasts sharply with the image that follows: “Back at home, the Brits / beat the shit out / of permanent foreigners / who never even dreamt / this would be a holiday.” In other words, the song offers a linked pair of juxtapositions: the imagined violence of “dangerous foreigners” is juxtaposed with the actual violence of Britons, and the image of white Britons as permanent tourists taking a cheap holiday in other people’s misery is juxtaposed with the image of working Asian and black Britons treated as permanent foreigners in their own home. The effect is both stark and damning.

Thatcher’s biographer John Campbell remarks sardonically, “Mrs Thatcher was remarkably free of race prejudice. She was no more prejudiced against Africans than she was against Germans, Greeks, Italians and others who had the misfortune not to be British.”⁴⁵ This may conceivably have been true, although it seems unlikely that Thatcher had Germans, Greeks, and Italians in mind when her government passed the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act. But, if it was true, it just meant that Thatcher shared Mr. and Mrs. British Average’s nearly pathological fear of foreigners: not just Spanish pickpockets and members of the former British empire, but all foreigners, friend and foe alike. I said earlier that most Britons worried about the dangers of disarmament; it wasn’t just the Russians they were worried about, it was their allies too: it would be “humiliating,” as Thatcher’s colleagues Lawson and Tebbit put it, “for Britons to rely solely on Yanks, Frogs and Krauts for their survival.”⁴⁶ So Britain’s nukes were as much a defence against its allies as against its enemies.

The inclusion of “Yanks” in Lawson and Tebbit’s list of dangerous foreigners, by the way, was probably not something Thatcher would have approved. The corollary to her Euroscepticism was uncritical faith in the UK’s “special relationship” with the USA, and starry-eyed admiration for American-style “progress.” But Lawson and Tebbit were right about Mr. and Mrs. British Average’s feelings: they were as contemptuous of America as they were of Europe, although in the case of America the contempt was sometimes complicated by a barely concealed fascination. Probably the most authentically British thing about the Clash was the way they complained about being “bo-o-o-red with the USA” while being quite obviously obsessed with it. Further complicating Britons’ attitudes towards the USA was the galling knowledge that it had, as Sellar and Yeatman had put it in 1066 and All That, supplanted Britain as “top nation.” Chas and Dave worried about the Americanization of the English language that was a symptom of this shift in power; “Don’t Anyone Speak English Anymore?” they asked. The Screaming Blue Messiahs, an adrenalized blues-rock trio emerging from the London pub rock scene, replied, “I can speak American, like Lois Lane and Charlie Chan and Superman.” They also confessed, on an album bursting with references to all-devouring American pop culture, “I wanna be a Flintstone.… Yabba dabba doo time … oh boy.” Matt Johnson of The The, faced with this upsetting cultural onslaught, lamented that the “land of red buses and blue-blooded babies,” was becoming the “51st State of the USA.” The Three Johns pointed out that it wasn’t just Britain; since World War Two, in a new world order defined by Checkpoint Charlie and American pop culture, we were witnessing the “Death of the European.” But most of their contemporaries were focused on the Death of the Briton. The Levellers, for example, wondered what had happened to their “green and pleasant land” and told England, “You’re the U.S.A.” In the same spirit, New Model Army raised a sarcastic salute to “our star-spangled Union Jack”; and Heaven 17, of course, noted that the entire Fascist Groove Thing (or, rather, thang) had an American accent.

Others, without expressly identifying America as the source of the problem, worried that so-called progress was obliterating the British way of life. XTC’s “Everyday Story of Smalltown,” for example, eulogized an England in which, whatever their differences and no matter what catastrophes had befallen them, people knew they were part of something enduringly British. A small town explains that it has sheltered its people, both “Tories and Reds,” for centuries, and, “as payment, they make love in me” in “squeaky old beds” and “in bicycle sheds.” Now, however, this provincial quietude is being threatened by “Mrs. Progress” in her “brand-new catalogue nylon nightie.” The Housemartins, who seemed to have the same small town in mind, sang, “It took this long to make it, now we’re throwing it away.” And singer-songwriter Martin Ansell imagined being confronted by an outraged Thomas Hardy (who pops out of the copy of Far from the Madding Crowd Ansell’s been reading on the train): a lifelong defender of rural England, Hardy wipes away an angry tear and asks, “What have your people done … to make this sorry land?”

None of this worried Mrs. Progress herself. It was the backwards-looking, anti-entrepreneurial socialists and communists to the east that worried Mrs. Thatcher. Ironically, some of her most natural and fervent allies in the fight against Frogs, Sprouts, Clogs and Krauts, England’s football hooligans, also found themselves on Thatcher’s blacklist.⁴⁷ To be fair, all football fans were probably somewhere on that list, along with football players and footballs. At any rate, Thatcher had no interest in (and no interest in pretending to be interested in) football.⁴⁸ In this she was unique among modern British prime ministers and almost unique among Britons. Even at its nadir in the late 1980s, football was a national obsession, a fact that popular music regularly celebrated. That’s not to say other sports didn’t occasionally inspire pop songs. Several members of Chumbawamba and some of their friends recorded 101 Songs about Sport, touching on golf, ski-jumping, karate, hurling, mountain climbing, horseracing, and, stretching it a bit, chess. Captain Sensible and Chas and Dave celebrated snooker (“The Snooker Song” and “Snooker Loopy” respectively). Rory Bremner and Half Man Half Biscuit both wrote about cricket, in “N-n-n-n-n Nineteen Not Out” and “Fuckin ’Ell, It’s Fred Titmus,” although strictly speaking the latter is less about cricket than about repeatedly bumping into the legendary bowler at the shops, in the park, and at the train station. Half Man Half Biscuit also gave nods to at least two other famous bowlers elsewhere in their extensive oeuvre—Hedley Verity (“Hedley Verityesque”) and Vanburn Holder (“Let’s Not”)—but again it would be a stretch to claim that either song is about cricket. Rugby, meanwhile, was responsible for an entire subgenre of novelty albums in the 1970s, with titles like Shocking Rugby Songs, 17 Rowdy Rugby Songs, and Rugby Songs Sing-a-Long (by Chubby Chalfont and the Chafers).

Nevertheless, it was football that generated the vast majority of sports songs.⁴⁹ Some of this can be blamed on the 1970 England World Cup Squad who recorded an entire album, The World Beaters Sing the World Beaters, which included the number-one single “Back Home” (as well as team captain Bobby Moore singing “Sugar Sugar” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”). Thereafter, it seemed, the England squad released a record every time they left the house—“This Time We’ll Get It Right” (1982), “We’ve Got the World at Our Feet” (1986), “All the Way” (1988), and “World in Motion” (1990). English football clubs picked up on the idea. Liverpool were particularly prolific, kicking off with their own LP, Sing Along with Liverpool, in 1972. In the ’80s they released half a dozen singles, including “Liverpool (We’re Never Gonna Stop),” “Sitting on Top of the World,” and “Anfield Rap (Red Machine in Full Effect),” the last two celebrating their FA cup victories in 1986 and ’88. But Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur were challengers. Manchester celebrated their FA Cup wins in 1983 and ’85 with “Glory Glory Man. United” and “We All Follow Man. United.” And Tottenham, with the help of Chas and Dave, celebrated their wins in 1981 and ’82 with “Ossie’s Dream” and “Tottenham Tottenham.” They also went to the final in 1987 singing “Hotshot Tottenham,” but lost to a sadly unmusical Coventry side.

Of course, this barely scrapes the surface of popular music’s relationship with football. In addition to songs by football players, there were songs about football players (Nine Steps to Ugly’s “Bobby Charlton’s Haircut”; Mad Jocks and Englishmen’s “Just Like Kenny”; and rather a lot of songs by Wat Tyler, including “Terry Fenwick’s Leg Takes Crack” and “Bring Me the Head of Gus Caesar”), songs about football in general (Genesis, “Match of the Day”; Billy Bragg, “God’s Footballer”; and Wat Tyler again with the instrumental “It’s Football, Not Fuckin’ Soccer”), specific football games (Barmy Army, “England 2, Yugoslavia 0”), and even at least one song about the table-top football game Subbuteo (Half Man Half Biscuit’s “All I Want for Christmas Is a Dukla Prague Away Kit”). There were songs that had nothing at all to do with football but nevertheless became popular on the terraces, usually because of their sing-along choruses (most notably Gerry and the Pacemakers’ 1963 version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which quickly became Liverpool’s unofficial anthem, and then everybody else’s too) or because they could be easily adapted to suit the situation (so, for example, Sham 69’s “If the Kids Are United” could become “If the Arsenal Kill United”⁵⁰). There were bands who had an association, as fans, with one football club or another, like Chas and Dave with Tottenham Hotspur, Tippa Irie with Arsenal, or the Cockney Rejects with West Ham. Indeed, for bands like the Cockney Rejects, football fandom—sometimes veering into hooliganism—was a core part of their identity. The Rejects established a pattern with their 1980 single “We Are the Firm,” which celebrated membership in the notorious West Ham–supporting Inter City Firm; it was backed with “War on the Terraces” which fondly recalled a legacy of fighting in the stands, drinking in the pub, and being arrested in the street. That song concluded with the satisfying thought, “Soon the younger generation / will be here to take your place.” Serious Drinking offered a riposte of sorts with “Love on the Terraces,” a ska-punk number about falling for a girl called Sharon who “liked the Cockney Rejects” and “wore a track suit.” The singer recalls seeing her for the first time, at a football match: “As my mates indulged in mindless violence / the main stand was reduced to silence / It was love at first sight.” A sentimental soul, he adds, “She’ll never walk alone.” The Business subsequently celebrated “Saturdays Heroes” out there “rucking on the terraces”; and Cock Sparrer responded to complaints that violence was ruining the sport with a shrug in “Trouble on the Terraces”: “It’s all part of the game; it adds to the atmosphere.” The Angelic Upstarts, not to be outdone, and not to have their hardness put into question, called their eighth studio album Blood on the Terraces and decorated its cover with scenes of football violence. The Last Resort, meanwhile, located football violence at the core of their “bootboy” way of life, admitting that football itself mattered less to them than the fighting it occasioned. “Di football fan outta hand,” Arsenal supporter Crucial Robbie observed ruefully:

No, watch di football match is not dem intention …

Whether their team win or lose them couldn’t give a damn

As long as dem lick down di opposition

Whether Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham or West Ham

Millwall, Man United, Liverpool, Everton …

It had got so bad, he said, “Mi no wan fi go a football; mi fraid fi get kick up.” Indeed, it had reached the point where football fans who weren’t planning a ruck felt they had to make a point of it; so, for example, football-loving punk band the Abnormal sang, “We’re not violent / We’re gonna watch the game / We won’t try to kill our mates.”

In reality, hooligans only ever counted for a tiny fraction of football fans, but they were a highly visible and troublesome fraction; so much so that by the mid-1980s, they were being called “the English disease.”⁵¹ (Incidentally but entertainingly, the term English disease has at various times also been associated with masochism and syphilis.)⁵² Thatcher professed to be horrified by them and counted them as yet another enemy within.⁵³ But in more ways than one they were her people. As the 1985 Popplewell report (commissioned to inquire into safety issues at football grounds) revealed, those responsible for football violence, particularly those who were part of organized gangs like the Inter City Firm, who planned their violent outings “as a recreation in itself,”⁵⁴ were frequently well-dressed, fully employed members of Thatcher’s aspirational society. Even the way in which they explained their own violence revealed that they were men after her own heart. “I fight,” a member of the Inter City Firm explained, … so I can make a name for meself and that, you know, hope people, like, respect me for what I did.”⁵⁵

Abroad, these hooligans were even more obviously Thatcher’s people. When England lost to Argentina in the World Cup quarter finals in 1986 (thanks in large part to Maradona’s infamous “hand of God” hand ball), the Business reminded everyone, “We lost the cup … But who won the Falklands War?” Similarly, any time England came up against Germany on the football pitch, the English fans could be relied upon for a chorus of “Two World Wars and One World Cup” (to the tune of “Camptown Races”). Neither of these songs expressed sentiments that Thatcher (who had a “virulent and unappeased loathing of the wartime enemy”⁵⁶) would have disagreed with much. Arguably, the hooligans were just a manifestation of the distorted nationalism Thatcher had been flogging for ten years.

McCarthy made this point nicely in their 1989 song “What Our Boys Are Fighting For.” The title borrows Thatcher’s preferred term for Britain’s troops—“our boys”—and the song’s opening lines evoke the spirit of the Falklands (and Thatcher’s sub-Churchillian rhetoric). As the singer puts on his boots and uniform and prepares to fight the enemy, in the air, on the beaches, and in the streets, Union Jack unfurled, he nobly predicts, “Today is the day I die for my Motherland.” From there the song rapidly descends into bathos as it emerges that the singer is an England fan preparing to run amuck on the continent. Battle commenced, one of the singer’s compatriots falls “at the hands of the Hun” while another is dealt with by “the Frogs” as he’s taking a piss. Bloodied but unbowed, the singer vows:

We’ll teach them how the English fight

We’re proud to be another British army

White like the other one

But not so well-paid.

Scunthorpe punk band Terminus drew the same line “from the terraces to the trenches,” arguing that football violence depends on the same follow-the-leader mentality demanded by the military. “The uniforms change, but the men are the same,” they observed, “They fall into their units like sheep, sing their way to the battlefield.” Billy Bragg called these easily led characters “little John Bullshits.” But unlike Terminus he could see no connection between hooligans and soldiers, particularly the British soldiers who had fought in World War II (the war England’s hooligans seemed to think they were still fighting). Armed with the “simplicities of bigotry,” they were actually more aligned with “the foes their fathers fought” than with “the bulldog breed” who had won the war.

Bragg and McCarthy were responding at least in part to the behaviour of England fans at the 1988 European Cup finals in Germany; some 250 of them had been arrested, in various cities, for rioting. What made their incontinent behaviour particularly troubling was that, only three years earlier, all English football clubs had been banned from European competition after rampaging Liverpool FC fans were responsible for thirty-nine deaths and six hundred injuries at Heysel Stadium, in Belgium.⁵⁷ The 1988 European Cup had been English football fans’ first opportunity to repair this “shame and disgrace upon the land,” as reggae DJ and football fan Tippa Irie put it. Instead, they had behaved like the Fascist Groove Thing: intransigent, belligerent, and unrepentant. Two years later, despite a campaign begging them to say No alla violenza during the World Cup in Italy, they repeated the performance. Italian police had to use tear gas on them after the Netherlands tied England in their first match. And when Germany beat England in the semifinals, five hundred German students in Brighton had to be evacuated under police protection to save them from English fans.⁵⁸

Liverpool band the Farm responded with the single “All Together Now,” which recalled the 1914 Christmas truce, during which British, German, and French troops on the Western Front laid down their weapons and played football in the no-man’s-land between their trenches: “They stopped fighting and they were one.” So, the song argues, football should bring us all together now, and if it can’t then there’s been “nothing learned and nothing gained.” In 1995, they put their money where their mouths were and recorded a version of the song to celebrate Everton’s FA Cup run, despite the fact that most of the band supported Everton’s crosstown rivals Liverpool FC. “All together now for Everton!” they sang. This was partly an act of reconciliation: the relationship between the two teams’ supporters, which had always been uniquely cordial, had been strained by the Heysel disaster and the subsequent ban on English clubs.

Meanwhile, disasters at Bradford City Stadium (where a fire killed fifty-six fans in 1985) and Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield (where a human crush killed ninety-six in 1989) had persuaded Thatcher and her sports minister Colin Moynihan that steps needed to be taken—not just to curb fan violence but also to improve fan safety. So the government mandated that the standing-room terraces where bootboys (and most other fans) gathered were to be replaced with all-seater terraces, and, if Thatcher had her way, all football supporters would be required to carry ID cards. “Please, sir, can we have our game back?” the band Wat Tyler asked sarcastically, and lampooned Moynihan as a conniving fop. The band I, Ludicrous shared Wat Tyler’s contempt for the man, calling him “a man with no stature / a man with no shame / conspiring with Thatcher / to kill off our game.” They contributed the song, aptly titled “Moynihan Brings Out the Hooligan in Me,” to the album Bananas!, which was billed as “a long-playing compilation record protesting about the introduction of identity cards for football supporters.” Other contributions included Half Man Half Biscuit’s “I Was a Teenage Armchair Honved Fan,” Attila the Stockbroker’s “Short Sharp Shock ID Card Merger Mania,” and the Freshies’ Chris Sievey, in character as balloon-headed Frank Sidebottom, doing a “Football Medley.”

The album’s title was a reference to a craze for bringing inflatables to football games that peaked in 1988–89. It started with inflatable bananas at Manchester City games (the album’s cover photo shows the Maine Road terraces awash in a sea of inflatable fruit … and a shark), but it spread rapidly. West Ham fans adopted inflatable hammers, Grimsby Town FC came equipped with inflatable fish, Stoke City with pink panthers.⁵⁹ The Sunday Telegraph reported that fans were turning up with “inflatable dinghies and airbeds,” all of which obstructed the view rather. The craze ended when, as the Sunday Telegraph gleefully put it, “Police sent in the Ludicrous Crimes Squad and began confiscating the offensive fruit.”⁶⁰

Now, this may all have had something to do with the ready availability of MDMA and the ascendancy of Madchester. Ian Brown of the Stone Roses recalls, “I thought Ecstasy was going to change the world—football violence stopped; violence stopped. It was a different atmosphere—you could bang into people and it was a laugh. Here were all the guys who had an edge to them and they didn’t have an edge any more.”⁶¹ Even so, the inflatables episode demonstrated that most football fans just wanted to have a laugh, not a punch-up. It was also an attempt on the part of fans to assert ownership of the game. As I, Ludicrous’s complaint that Thatcher was trying to “kill off our game” reflected, fans saw football as theirs, but the fact that the league was able to suppress the inflatables craze almost overnight, confiscating the game along with their bananas, was an omen. Thatcher’s ID cards never came into effect (even the police objected to the idea),⁶² but the real initiative went ahead. By the mid-1990s most grounds had replaced their standing-room terraces with seating, and the Business lamented that, between the rising cost of tickets and these all-seater stadiums, “the rucking’s no more” (“Hardcore Hooligan”).

Defenders of the changes argue, with some justification, that Thatcher and Moynihan saved the game from hooliganism. But, then, saved it for whom? The principal beneficiaries were those entrepreneurs who were in a position to capitalize on the newly marketable commodity; the principal losers were the kids who couldn’t afford the cost of admission anymore. Between 1989 and 1999, average ticket prices quadrupled; by 2008, the Premier League reckoned that “75% of its match-attending fans were middle class.”⁶³ Football, like the nationalized industries, had been built by the working class; now, like those industries, it was being sold off to those who could afford it. The hooligans weren’t the only football fans who felt this represented yet another Thatcherite attack on Britishness.

images MIXTAPE 20: BANANAS ARE MARSUPIALS

Peter Hammill, “A Motor-Bike in Afrika” (1978)

Steel Pulse, “Biko’s Kindred Lament” (1979)

Peter Gabriel, “Biko” (1980)

Benjamin Zephaniah, “Free South Africa” (1983)

Band Aid, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984)

Queen, “Is This the World We Created …?” (1984)

The Special AKA, “Nelson Mandela” (1984)

Pato Banton, “My Opinion” (1987)

Spitting Image, “I’ve Never Met a Nice South African” (1986)

Oi Polloi, “Apartheid Stinx” (1986)

Chumbawamba, “Slag Aid” (1986)

Hugh Masekela, “Bring Him Back Home” (1987)

Labi Siffre, “(Something Inside) So Strong” (1987)

Thatcher on Acid, “Riff Raff/Orthodox” (1987)

Chumbawamba (as Scab Aid), “Let It Be” (1987)

The Wedding Present, “All About Eve” (1987)

UK Subs, “Fascist Regime” (1988)

Aswad, “Set Them Free” (1988)

Steel Pulse, “State of Emergency” (1988)

The Neurotics, “Afrika” (1988)

Conflict, “These Things Take Time” (1988)

Eddy Grant, “Gimme Hope Jo’Anna” (1988)

Macka B, “Apartheid” (1988)

Robb Johnson, “The Herald of Free Enterprise” (1988)

McCarthy, “The Lion Will Lay Down with the Lamb” (1989)

Macka B, “Get Rid of Maggie” (1990)

The sense that Britain was losing its better self didn’t prevent Britons reaching out to others in the global no-man’s-land. The most spectacular example of this, in popular music at least, was certainly Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” It was easy to be critical of the thing. When the Band Aid celebrities explained that, in Ethiopia, “nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow,” they were grotesquely wrong: the source of the Blue Nile is Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, and the river runs through the country for some eight hundred kilometres. So anyone listening carefully had to wonder why people worried about Ethiopia hadn’t bothered to learn anything about it. Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp admits that his band’s participation in the recording “was more a case of us not wanting to be left out of what was obviously going to be a giant record, than about making money for African famine victims. I for one didn’t have a clue where Ethiopia was.”⁶⁴ There was something uncomfortably self-regarding about the whole project—first Band Aid and then Live Aid—as if the point wasn’t the tragedy so much as the pop stars ennobled by emotive proximity to it. Billy Bragg called it “Egos for Ethiopia.”⁶⁵ Chumbawamba entitled their first album Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records. But that wasn’t quite right: pictures of pop stars caring about starving children sold records. The centre label of Starving Children got it exactly right though; it had inscribed around its edge, in an infinite loop, “LIVE AID > CONSUMER CULTURE > COMPANY EXPANSION > LAND ABUSE > HUNGER > GUILT > CHARITY > LIVE AID.” There was also something self-deceiving about the whole thing. Potential Threat used the cover of their album Demand an Alternative to say, “WHEN MANY ARE DYING OF HUNGER IN AFRICA, HOW OBSCENE OF THE COMMON MARKET TO SPEND £270 MILLION TO DESTROY SURPLUS FOOD. THE FOOD IS NEEDED, IT IS NOT SURPLUS. THE DECISION MAKERS IN BRUSSELS DON’T DESERVE TO BE ON THIS FUCKING EARTH. DEMAND AN ALTERNATIVE.” And Thatcher on Acid pointed out that international aid was shabby compensation for the ongoing economic exploitation of Africa, calculating that “for every one pound donated to Africa from the likes of Live Aid, the West took back two pounds.” They added, “Hypocrisy is almost a euphemism for such bullshit.” Certainly, from a lot of angles, Live Aid looked a lot like shedding crocodile tears.

One effect of Band Aid was a terrifying proliferation of opportunistic charity singles. When the ferry MS Herald of Free Enterprise sank in 1987, a result of cost-saving corporate negligence,⁶⁶ it gave several artists who had missed being in Band Aid (including Kim Wilde, Nik Kershaw, Andy Bell, Mark Knopfler, and Kate Bush) the opportunity to record as Ferry Aid. Their cover of the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” recorded and promoted by the Sun, went to number one—which in turn gave Chumbawamba, recording as Scab Aid, the opportunity to repeat their criticism that “nothing sells like disaster” in their own cover of “Let It Be.” Subsequently, in support of Sport Aid, Tears for Fears rerecorded “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as “Everybody Wants to Run the World,” and Status Quo rerecorded “Rocking All Over the World” as “Running All Over the World.” An international assortment of heavy rockers got together as Hear’n Aid to fight world hunger. British soul and reggae artists, calling themselves Disco Aid, encouraged listeners to “Give Give Give” for multiple sclerosis. Chumbawamba offered to launch “Slag Aid,” promising that “for every pop star we slag off … twenty-five million pounds will be given away” to support “charity not change.” Robb Johnson made a similar rhetorical point with the 1988 song “Herald of Free Enterprise”: you can “recycle pop stars to sing let it be / sell lorries for scrap, whitewash the company,” he observed, but corporations will always take the term free enterprise to mean “profits come first and people’s losses come last.” Pointedly, Johnson recorded “Herald of Free Enterprise” to benefit the National Union of Seafarers, who were on strike protesting P&O Ferries’ plans to implement precisely the kind of cost-cutting measures that had precipitated the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster.

In some ways, I suppose, this is complaining that Band Aid and Live Aid saved lives the wrong way. No doubt, in a perfect world, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” in addition to getting its facts right, would have critiqued Europe’s role in underdeveloping Africa and thereby creating the unstable political and economic conditions that precipitated the humanitarian disaster; it would have anticipated the cycle of aid dependency that developed as a result of well-intentioned interventions like Band Aid; it would have acknowledged its own implication as a commodity within a system of global capitalism; and it would have asked its audience if they weren’t perhaps motivated by their own desire to be part of something as much as by global altruism. After all, in the middle of the miners’ strike, it was just nice to feel that Tories and Reds could still unite for a cause in Smalltown.⁶⁷ There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; Dick Hebdige has even argued that Live Aid drew on a “tradition of co-operation and mutual support, rooted in the human(e) values of good fellowship and good neighbourliness,” and was, to that extent, anti-Thatcherite. Certainly, Thatcher wasn’t having any of it (every penny made from Band Aid went to charity except for the VAT, which Thatcher declined to waive).⁶⁸

But all of that would be a lot to pack into a three-minute pop song. In other words, whatever the shortcomings of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” they had less to do with the particular situation than with the fact the 7″ single isn’t a medium well-suited to dealing with complex international issues. Johnny Rotten understood this; he could sing about the paranoia that visiting the Berlin Wall inspired in him (“Holidays in the Sun”), but he wasn’t about to start singing about Cold War geopolitics; he could see that Britain’s bleak-looking future was part of a global economy of violence (“Anarchy in the UK”), but he knew he wasn’t equipped to make sense of it for his listeners: MPLA, UDA, IRA, UK, it was all an alphabet soup. Of course, that didn’t stop people writing, with varying degrees of success and coherence, songs about everything from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Angelic Upstarts) to the Iranian Revolution (the Stranglers), the oil industry’s ruination of the Niger Delta (Zounds), the Israeli occupation of Palestine (Political Asylum), the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (Robert Wyatt), international finance and tax evasion (the Members), and American imperialism in Central and South America (the Clash, Oi Polloi, Chumbawamba, Billy Bragg, Ruff Ruff & Ready, U2, Sting, Working Week).*

More than anything else though, the international issue that got popular music’s attention was South African apartheid and the fight to end it. On this subject, as on so much else, popular music was at odds with Margaret Thatcher. Now, to be fair, she wasn’t strictly speaking in favour of apartheid—in fact, she was opposed to it on economic grounds—she just wasn’t in favour of doing anything obviously constructive about it.⁶⁹ She refused to support the African National Congress (ANC) because of its association with the Communist Party (she characterized it as “a typical terrorist organisation”⁷⁰), favouring instead the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Zulu nationalist group which spent much of the 1980s collaborating with the South African military to suppress antiapartheid organizations.⁷¹ This, by the way, was consistent with the position she had taken on Zimbabwean independence in the late 1970s, when she made it clear that given a choice between black communists and white fascists she would prefer the latter.⁷² She also opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid regime, even after they were imposed, ostensibly because they offended her neoliberal principles, but also, a bit obviously, because her husband had business interests in South Africa.⁷³ She preferred to apply pressure by appealing to P.W. Botha’s and then to F.W. DeKlerk’s economic self-interest, even arguing for Mandela’s release on those grounds.⁷⁴ The Neurotics sneered, “She puts her money where her mouth is / and out comes Afrikaans.”

It wasn’t just Thatcher, unfortunately: successive British governments had resisted economic sanctions against one of their biggest trading partners ever since they were first proposed by the United Nations in the early 1960s.⁷⁵ As Thatcher on Acid (“Riff Raff/Orthodox”) and Oi Polloi (“Apartheid Stinx”) pointed out, dozens of British companies, including ICI, TBA, EMI, Barclays Bank, Tesco, John West, and Rowntree Mackintosh, had an interest in keeping South Africa stable, and if that meant propping up the apartheid regime, so be it. Oi Polloi insisted, “Let’s hit ’em where it hurts. Boycott the scum.” Aswad, similarly, were having none of it, insisting, “Those who invest in Botha’s regime” were “living the apartheid dream.” And McCarthy found the idea of appealing to the better nature of politicians and businessmen laughable, pointing out that it wasn’t as if “business and governments / have ever been in the forefront / of the fight for freedom.” So there’s no point in waiting for “the world’s money men” to “lay down their lives at the barricades.” Macka B certainly wasn’t interested in waiting for anyone, arguing in “Apartheid”:

If sanctions they want, sanctions must be applied

And if arms they want, arms must be supplied

Whatever must be done, we cyaan run, we cyaan hide

’Til that evil regime is totally destroyed.

Despite the fact that Macka B’s polemic no doubt reflected many people’s frustration with the pace of change in South Africa, the antiapartheid movement in Britain, which had been active since 1959, remained focused on peaceful forms of resistance. Benjamin Zephaniah suspected that its activities amounted to “sell-out token gestures from the West,” but the movement promoted economic, academic, and cultural boycotts of South Africa, and it was instrumental in getting South Africa kicked out of the Commonwealth and banned from the Olympics. British musicians signed on early: The Musicians’ Union boycotted performing in South Africa starting in 1961, partly in response to the Sharpeville massacre. Mind you, the boycott didn’t discourage Rod Stewart, Elton John, Status Quo, Black Sabbath, Queen, and many others from performing there.⁷⁶ And none of them experienced any very serious blowback, although Queen did come in for sharp criticism (and fines from the Musicians’ Union) when they performed at the whites-only Sun City resort in 1984. Their mistake was partly their timing: they did it just before the song “Sun City” (recorded by a group of several dozen internationally renowned musicians) turned a spotlight on the place. And partly it was that they did it even as they were lamenting poverty and suffering in Africa and bleating, “Is This the World We Created?” The answer was so obviously, “Yes, you hypocritical bastards, it is,” that they were bound to catch some stick, especially since they played the song at every opportunity, including the finale of the Live Aid concert.

If the Sharpeville massacre crystalized antiapartheid sentiment in the early 1960s, in the late ’70s the movement found focus in protesting the death of antiapartheid activist Stephen Biko. His brutal murder by the South African security services in 1977 caused international outrage, and Peter Gabriel’s elegy to the slain antiapartheid activist predicted, “You can blow out a candle / But you can’t blow out a fire.” Peter Hammill, bearing witness to the “bodies of Biko and the Soweto poor,” warned, “South Africa, your time is up.” But it was the prayer offered in Steel Pulse’s “Biko’s Kindred Lament” that proved most immediately prescient: “O Jah Jah / Take them where life sweeter / Send a Moses to set them free.” In 1984, Jerry Dammers and the Special AKA identified that Moses when they recorded “Nelson Mandela,” protesting the ANC leader’s twenty-one-year imprisonment on Robben Island. What made “Nelson Mandela” such an extraordinary protest song was its tone: even as it recorded the petty cruelties and indignities inflicted on Mandela in prison, it announced joy. “His mind is still free,” Stan Campbell sang, and the chorus, despite “begging” the authorities to “Free Nelson Mandela,” sounded less like a supplication than a victory celebration. It was a powerful rhetorical gesture, and it inspired similarly powerful gestures by others, including Eddy Grant and Hugh Masekela. Eddy Grant’s “Gimme Hope Jo’Anna,” with its jubilant chorus, hardly needs the hope it asks for: despite the South African regime’s “supporters in high places,” the song leaves absolutely no doubt that “the tide is turning.” Nor is there any doubt, in Hugh Masekela’s “Bring Him Back Home,” that the world will shortly see Mandela “walking down the street in South Africa.”

Less jubilant but in its own way just as confident was Labi Siffre’s “(Something Inside) So Strong.” Like “Biko’s Kindred Lament,” “So Strong” draws a parallel between black South Africans and the biblical Israelites, but in Siffre’s song (released almost a decade after the Steel Pulse track), it’s not the Israelites’ Egyptian bondage that is evoked but their victory over Jericho:

The more you refuse to hear my voice

The louder I will sing

You hide behind walls of Jericho

Your lies will come tumbling.

It’s a fair measure of how far the antiapartheid movement had travelled in ten years. Spitting Image, a satirical puppet show that ran on ITV from 1984 to 1996, expressed scepticism that anything would come of it in their song “I’ve Never Met a Nice South African.” It began with P.W. Botha (in puppet form) explaining “the facts as they really are”:

Bananas are marsupials

Cars run on gravy

Salmon live in trees and eat pencils

Reform in South Africa is on the way

But the sheer number of songs being written in support of the movement reflected the way people had begun to believe that the facts could be changed. Between the recording of “Nelson Mandela” and Mandela’s release from prison, the subject of South Africa was never far from the charts. In addition to the songs already mentioned, Red Guitars released “Marimba Jive” (a number-one indie hit) at the end of 1984, and 1985 saw the release of “In South Africa” by the Varukers, “Kick over the Statues” by the Redskins, “The Wind of Change” by Robert Wyatt and the SWAPO Singers, and a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” by the Faith Brothers. The following year, the Redskins added “K.O.! K.O.! (Kick over Apartheid),” Working Week released “South Africa,” the Housemartins offered “Johannesburg,” and Chumbawamba devoted the whole first side of Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records to the subject. In 1987, Pato Banton released “My Opinion,” expressing sympathy for those “depressed and persecuted by apartheid law” and quoting Burt Bacharach to the effect that what’s needed now is “love, sweet love / not for some but for everyone” (a sentiment he thoroughly undermined by also promising to fight “sodomites”). David Gedge of the Wedding Present, however, was of the opinion that the racist nation didn’t have much room for love, not for anyone. He had spent part of his childhood in South Africa and, in “All About Eve,” he recalled Afrikaners enjoying the “big game” of black children begging for change; “Did you try to imagine the hate / That a young boy could feel?” he asked. In 1988, Simple Minds released “Mandela Day” (they would add another cover of “Biko” in 1989), and Peter Hammill added “Sun City Nightlife” as a kind of coda to his earlier “A Motorbike in Africa”; Conflict released the dub reggae “These Things Take Time,” uncharacteristically advocating nonviolence in the face of apartheid oppression, and Steel Pulse released “State of Emergency,” which pointedly connected the antiapartheid protests happening in Cape Town, Uitenhage, and Durban to the 1985 riots in London, Handsworth, and elsewhere. These disturbances in England, they suggested, were also protests against a form of apartheid. And the UK Subs released “Fascist Regime,” its title a nod to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” which had worried, in 1977, that Britain was sliding into fascism. A decade later, the Subs argued, Thatcher’s Groove Thing was financing fascism abroad. Thatcher herself, appropriating the queen’s royal we, was pleased to point out, “We operate now on a global scale.”⁷⁷

Because the antiapartheid movement was also operating on a global scale, naturally antiapartheid music was being made all over the world: in Jamaica (Peter Tosh, “Anti-Apartheid”; Junior Murvin, “Apartheid”; Mystic Revealers, “Mash Down Apartheid”; Yami Bolo, “Free Mandela”), Senegal (Xalam, “Apartheid”), France (Alpha Blondy, “Apartheid Is Nazism”; Verdun, “Pretoria”), Italy (Irha, “A.N.C.”), the USA (Artists United Against Apartheid, “Sun City”), Nigeria (Sonny Okosun, “Fire in Soweto”; Fela and Egypt ’80, “Beasts of No Nation”), and most especially in South Africa itself, where the list of antiapartheid artists included Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Johnny Clegg, and Abdullah Ibrahim, as well as interracial bands like National Wake and Johnny Clegg’s Juluka, whose very existence constituted a challenge to apartheid.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison early in 1990, and, to give grudging credit where it’s due, Thatcher’s interventions may have helped bring about that release.⁷⁸ But Macka B was unimpressed, arguing in “Get Rid of Maggie”:

She glad when dem release Mandela out a prison

But she never glad fi di right reason.

The reason why she glad Mandela is free

Get nothing to di wi rights and equality

Ca’ all she a think about is invest money;

She wan boost up di English economy.

Certainly, Thatcher’s ambivalent contribution to the antiapartheid movement was negligible compared to popular music’s. Fundamentally, of course, pop only did what I’ve been describing it doing throughout these mixtapes. It bore witness; it argued; it articulated a shared sense of outrage and a shared purpose; more important, it expressed a shared hope; it got people jumping up and down for a cause. The difference, on this occasion, was that the hopeless cause it got behind was victorious. When we recall, as I’ve been doing here, music that got behind the miners, the antinuclear movement, or Red Wedge, it’s sometimes hard to see how it made a difference or how it mattered. I suppose we could imagine how much worse it would all have been at the time if nobody had sung about it. But in the case of the antiapartheid movement, we don’t have to resort to counterfactuals: Mandela was released from prison, and South Africa followed. So, when we look back on Jerry Dammers’ “Nelson Mandela,” we can see that it made a difference.

But, then, belatedly and just in time to give this story a happy ending of sorts, perhaps all those songs about the miners’ strike made a difference too. Richard Vinen argues that the defeat of the miners “left a nasty taste” in the public’s mouth and eventually played a significant (if difficult to quantify) role in Thatcher’s own defeat:

The truth, perhaps, was that the British people wanted the miners to be beaten, but then did not want to be associated with the means by which this victory was achieved. In a strange way, Thatcher’s very success in the miners’ strike laid the way for her eventual failure. Concern about the power of the trade unions had been one of the most important reasons for Thatcher’s electoral popularity. When the most terrifying of the British trade unions had been broken, the usefulness of her style of politics had ended.⁷⁹

If that’s true, then surely “Soul Deep,” “Which Side Are You On?,” and all the other songs that pricked the public’s conscience during the strike played a part in it. The benefit and tribute albums that came out after the strike played a part too, reminding the public that the miners had fought an honourable battle in defence of their communities—and in defence of a Britain that Mrs. Progress was sweeping away. And if that’s true, then these songs still matter, because they can still remind us what’s worth fighting for; they can still play a part in the interminable struggle against the Fascist Groove Thing.

images MIXTAPE 21: GOING WOBBLY

The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (1982)

The Style Council, “Shout to the Top” (1984)

Smiley Culture, “Westland Helicopter” (1986)

Oi Polloi, “Thrown on the Scrapheap” (1987)

Morrissey, “Margaret on the Guillotine” (1988)

Conflict, “The A Team” (1988)

Macka B, “Get Rid of Maggie” (1990)

The Exploited, “Don’t Pay the Poll Tax” (1990)

The Faithful, “We Can’t Let Maggie Go” (1990)

Robyn Hitchcock, “Kung Fu Fighting” (1990)

Pet Shop Boys, “How Can You Expect to be Taken Seriously?” (1990)

Manic Street Preachers, “New Art Riot” (1990)

Ruff Ruff & Ready, “The Money Snatcher” (1990)

The Robb Johnson Band, “Vic Williams” (1991)

Billy Bragg, “Rumours of War” (1991)

Oi Polloi, “Die for B.P.” (1991)

Thatcher on Acid, “No Fuckin’ War” (1992)

The Cleaners from Venus, “Gulf War Song” (1992)

World Party, “Kuwait City” (1993)

In No Such Thing as Society, Andy McSmith suggests that after Band Aid and Live Aid there seemed to be “less overtly political rock music, as if the industry had done its bit and could go back to singing about love, sex, despair and the other staples.”⁸⁰ At a glance, the mixtapes in this book would seem to bear out that assessment: of the more than three hundred songs included, only about seventy of them came out after 1985. And, certainly in the second half of the decade, there were economic reasons why mainstream pop started to sound less and less overtly political. Not the least of these was a predictable change in the music industry’s most profitable audience: the baby boomers were entering adulthood. The 1986 Yearbook of the British Phonographic Industry pointed to “the twin threat of youth unemployment and declining numbers of teenagers” and recommended redirecting the industry’s marketing strategies towards the relatively large and affluent demographic of twenty-five-to-forty-five-year-olds.⁸¹ The last thing this employed, and increasingly nostalgic generation wanted was difficult songs about a difficult present. What they wanted was the musical equivalent of a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans: something to make them feel young and a bit rebellious without being anything of the sort. At the same time, the cost of producing and marketing potential hit records had become so astronomical that major labels needed their acts to have worldwide appeal to make sense of the investment.⁸² Songs about miners’ strikes and voting Labour weren’t going to cut it. McSmith notes, “A lesson commonly drawn from the experience of Live Aid and Red Wedge is that rock and politics do not mix, and that if bands want to be effective they should confine themselves to uncontroversial issues such as famine relief.”⁸³ It might be more accurate, though, to say that if bands want to be effective internationally marketable commodities they should confine themselves to uncontroversial issues: disaster victims, war children, whales, rainforests, and so on.

One of the troubling consequences of this market in global causes has been the rise of the celebrity expert, eager, as the Pet Shop Boys put it, “to preach and teach the whole world about ecology” (or famine, or landmines). “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” the Pet Shop Boys asked, but in some cases pop star activists have been taken very seriously indeed. Bono and Bob Geldof, for example, somehow became experts on third world debt relief in the early 2000s, invited by everyone from the Sun to the Guardian to comment on the subject.⁸⁴ To be fair, though, this had less to do with pretensions on the part of the Bono and Geldof than with what Geldof himself laments as “the celebritization of politics.”⁸⁵ The media’s obsession with celebrities, he worries, means that humanitarian crises don’t get any attention “unless some c*** like me takes an interest.”⁸⁶ That Geldof didn’t see any of this coming when he started Band Aid isn’t really his fault.

This is not the whole story of political pop after Band Aid, of course. Red Wedge and the songs that came out of it all followed Live Aid, as did the reaction to Clause 28; most of the antiapartheid songs collected in Mixtape 20 came out between 1987 and 1989. So, whatever the music industry might have felt about having done its bit, there was still a commitment to politics in some quarters. This became clear in 1989 and ’90 when the introduction of the so-called poll tax prompted a spate of overtly political rock music. The government distributed some three million leaflets to British homes trying to explain the poll tax and “HOW IT WILL WORK FOR YOU,” but the explanation offered in the liner notes to the album A Pox upon the Poll Tax will do nicely:

In 1381, the rulers of England tried to introduce a poll tax (i.e. a tax on people). This led to the first working class uprising in history—“The Peasants’ Revolt”. Although unsuccessful as a complete social revolution, the Peasants’ Revolt did succeed as a protest against the taxation of poorer classes insofar as it prevented further levying of the poll tax.

In six centuries since this revolt, no government has attempted to re-introduce such a method of taxation … until now.

The government intends to introduce a poll tax (or community charge as the Tories like to call it) in Scotland in 1989 and a year later in England and Wales. The result of this measure is that everyone over the age of 18, with a few exceptions, will have to pay their own individual contributions to local Government. These contributions will not depend on how much your home is worth, or on your ability to pay. People living in the same local Government district will have to pay the same amount whether they are a millionaire living in a mansion, or a factory worker living in a council flat. This is blatantly unjust, and, as in 1381, it must be resisted.

Or, as Macka B put it in “Get Rid of Maggie,” “They mussa take poor people fi idiot.” A Pox upon the Poll Tax, with contributions from Chumbawamba, TV Smith’s Cheap, Robb Johnson, Shrug, the Shamen, and the Stretch Heads among others, was “dedicated to the memory of the rebels of 1381,” with proceeds going to “community resistance to the poll tax.” When that community resistance was met with police violence, most notably in Trafalgar Square on March 31, 1990, Chumbawamba and Robb Johnson contributed to a second benefit album, this time to help defend the people who were arrested. Throughout 1989 and ’90, local campaigns against the poll tax proliferated, so much so that the socialist organization Militant decided to set up the All Britain Anti–Poll Tax Federation to coordinate their various efforts. Not everyone appreciated the intervention, of course. The EP Smash the Poll Tax!, released, like A Pox upon the Poll Tax, as “a benefit for community resistance to the poll tax,” promised it was “A Militant SWP RCP-free record!” Put together by Oi Polloi with the assistance of Chumbawamba’s Danbert Nobacon and members of Active Minds, AOA, and several other punk bands, its three songs—“Axe the Tax,” “Can’t Pay Won’t Pay,” and “Fuck the Poll Tax”—captured the mood and the conceptual scope of the moment in their titles: anti–poll tax songs, as an oeuvre, didn’t stray far from those three points. Hardcore punk bands Genital Deformities and Sore Throat also recorded songs entitled “Fuck the Poll Tax”; trash rockers the Cannibals, reggae artists UK Apachi, Crucial Robbie and Glenroy Grant, and hardcore punks Sedition all released tracks entitled “Axe the Tax,” “Axe the Poll Tax,” or “No Poll Tax.” The Vibrators and Steve Marriott with one-off ensemble the Pollcats both released songs called “The Poll Tax Blues”; and the Exploited offered “Don’t Pay the Poll Tax,” helpfully advising people to take the poll tax form and stick it up Thatcher’s arse. Citizen Fish offered another approach. In “Home Economics,” a couple contemplate which family members to jettison in order to reduce their exposure to the poll tax: “Granny is starting to look pretty costly,” they reckon, and, with a baby on the way, it might be worth considering “abortion, adoption, or changing our name.” The Dubious Brothers suggested a less drastic solution, though, in a cha-cha entitled “The Dog Ate My Poll Tax Form.” The singer, up in front of the judge for failing to file his forms, pleads his case:

I’m sure you’re a kind and honest man, sir

And I’m sure Mr. Ridley is too,

But if you send the bailiffs ’round when this bill goes through,

My doggie is going to eat you.

As far as I can tell, it’s the only time Nicholas Ridley (who, as environment secretary, was responsible for the introduction of the poll tax) was ever mentioned in popular music.

As this flurry of activity suggests, popular music at the end of the decade hadn’t lost its willingness or ability to be overtly political. Nor had it lost its ability to have a bit of fun while doing it. For example, the compilation Alvin Lives (in Leeds) was released in support of the Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay Resource Unit, and explained dourly on its back cover,

THE POLL TAX SUCKS: DON’T PAY IT

IT TAKES FROM THE POOR AND GIVES TO THE RICH

IT’S AN ATTACK ON FREEDOM

IT’S A TAX ON THE VERY FACT THAT YOU WERE BORN

AND DON’T THINK THAT IT WON’T AFFECT YOU …

But the album itself was a collection of 1970s glam hits covered, with evident glee, by the Wedding Present, Close Lobsters, the Perfect Disaster, Lush, 14 Iced Bears, Cud (murdering Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), and, best of all, Robyn Hitchcock doing an a cappella version of “Kung Fu Fighting.” As Andy Metcalfe squawks and beatboxes in the background, Hitchcock sings about “funky Chinatown” in aid of the British taxpayer. So, although McSmith is right that, on the face of it, pop looked less political in the second half of the 1980s, this wasn’t because it had “done its bit” and fallen asleep again. Certainly, there was a kind of exhaustion setting in—asked about “Kung Fu Fighting” some years later, all Hitchcock could remember was that “it was a benefit for something.”⁸⁷ And Morrissey, while fantasizing about sending Thatcher to the guillotine, explained to her in a tone more resigned than revolutionary, “People like you make me so tired.” Even rock criticism was starting to experience a form of exhaustion. Simon Reynolds, for one, decided that British rock culture had spent too long suffering from “an overbearing neurosis for meaning and relevance,” and that the only healthy thing to do was to stop responding to rock “as a series of ‘statements’” and, instead, “be swept up in its incoherence.”⁸⁸

There were several other factors at work too, however. First, after 1985, there were simply fewer interesting, concrete political things to write about. There were no more Falklands, no more miners’ strikes, no more riots (at least not until the Poll Tax provoked them in 1990), and you could only go on pointing out that there were millions of people on the dole for so long—even during the boom years in the second half of the decade real income for the bottom 10 percent continued to decline and the number of people living in poverty continued to rise;⁸⁹ by the end of the decade a quarter of the nation’s children were living in “households officially defined as ‘poor.”⁹⁰ At some point, the unemployment rate became as unremarkable as the rain. Thatcher’s third term in office lacked the epic, black-and-white political dramas that had characterized her first two terms. Instead, there was a squabble between Thatcher and her defence secretary Michael Heseltine about the fate of Westland Helicopters,⁹¹ followed by a noisy but rather abstract scandal over confidentiality. Ten years later, even Thatcher would admit, “I can’t even remember what the actual Westland thing was about.”⁹² With the possible exception of Smiley Culture’s “Westland Helicopter,” which appears to have been inspired by the company’s prominence in the news early in 1986, popular music ignored the whole thing. Even Smiley’s song isn’t really interested in the politics: it imagines Margaret Thatcher trying to buy a house from Smiley and Smiley demanding a helicopter as payment. “From a youth I’ve wanted a helicopter,” he explains, “so when I’m ready I could just take off and hover.”

There was also a conflict between Thatcher and both her foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe and her chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont about the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which had serious (but again rather abstract) economic consequences. Both disagreements led to resignations, and both would eventually contribute to Thatcher’s downfall.⁹³ So they were politically significant but not exactly the sort of thing you could sing about. That said, South London indie rockers Ruff Ruff & Ready did their level best in “The Money Snatcher”:

Blink of an evil eye,

Mister Minister goodbye

Cabinet puppets shuffled

around ’til the cap fits

Haven’t you had enough of it?

Generally speaking though, aside from Clause 28 and the Poll Tax, Thatcher’s late-1980s agenda was dominated by things pop music found it difficult to care about: legislation concerning child support, the legal profession, NHS reforms, firearms, and the prosecution of war criminals, for example, or cuts to higher education, arts funding, and seniors’ benefits.⁹⁴ A couple of exceptions to the general indifference were the Manic Street Preachers, who argued that “hospital closures kill more than car bombs ever will,” and Oi Polloi, who protested the “pittance of a pension” given to the generation who fought in World War II. The eardrum-shredding squall of Oi Polloi’s “Thrown on the Scrapheap” would have scared the heroic hell out of the average pensioner, of course, but I’m sure they appreciated the sentiment.

Ironically, pop’s indifference to these things meant it took its eyes off the Fascist Groove Thing exactly when it was making some of its most genuinely totalitarian moves. For example, pop didn’t really register Thatcher’s campaign against local democracy. Arguing (spuriously) that town and city councils were financially irresponsible, Thatcher stripped them of their ability to set local priorities, and transferred authority over housing, education, and public health to Whitehall. She abolished the Greater London Council outright. It was an extraordinary centralization of power, especially for someone ostensibly committed to rolling back the state.⁹⁵ From below, however, the implications of all this were often unclear, and, besides, pop music was never going to be enthusiastic about defending the establishment, even against Thatcher. The Style Council had made a token effort to draw attention to the situation in 1984, listing “No! To the abolition of the GLC & the local councils” as one of the things worth shouting about on the sleeve of their “Shout to the Top” EP. But, by Paul Weller’s standards, the song itself was oddly supine (literally so: the chorus begins, “When you’re knocked on your back and your life’s a flop … there’s nothing else but to shout to the top”). And pop music couldn’t find a way to engage with Thatcher’s consolidation of power at the top until it resulted in something that clearly affected those at the bottom: the poll tax.

The government’s role in sales of arms to Iraq in the second half of the decade might perhaps have provoked more shouting if it hadn’t been so successfully covered up at the time. But, then again, perhaps not. When Thatcher seized on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as an opportunity for another war, she hoped it would give her the sort of boost the Falklands had, and that Saddam Hussein would turn out to be yet another pantomime villain for her to defeat.⁹⁶ She was so eager for the fight, in fact, that she phoned President George H.W. Bush to make sure he was up for it, telling him, “This is no time to go wobbly.”⁹⁷ Even in her final speech as prime minister, already ousted, she was still trying to link Kuwait to the Falklands: “Twice in my time as prime minister we have had to send our forces across the world to defend a small country against ruthless aggression: first to our own people in the Falklands and now to the border of Kuwait.”⁹⁸ She added, her last words in the House of Commons as leader of the Conservative Party, trying to connect, as she had done in 1982, the decisive defeat of her “enemies without” to decisive action against her “enemies within”: “When evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms. It is because we on this side have never flinched from difficult decisions that this House and this country can have confidence in this Government today.”

Not everyone was persuaded that the real evil was in Iraq, however. Robb Johnson wrote a ballad to celebrate Lance Corporal Vic Williams, a gunner who had served five years in the Royal Artillery when, faced with deployment in a war that would make Britain, in his words, “no better than Saddam Hussein,”⁹⁹ he went absent without leave. Williams spent the rest of the war addressing antiwar rallies before turning himself in to stand trial.

They charged me with desertion but I never ran away

The officers gave me orders that me conscience couldn’t obey

So I stood up and I spoke out, and when the war was done

I went back to Woolwich Barracks ’cos I wouldn’t live on the run

Me name is Vic Williams, I was a soldier to the Queen

But I didn’t know the half of it when I was in my teens

The enemy ain’t the other side wherever they draw the

line The enemy is the ruling class who draw the bloody line.

The antiwar rallies he addressed were relatively small, at least compared to the protests provoked by the second Gulf War a decade later, but they pointed to the fact that Britons were not buying Thatcher’s alignment of Kuwait with the Falklands.¹⁰⁰ Hussein was certainly hated (one measure of this was that he topped the NME Readers’ Poll as Bastard of the Year in 1990, a title Thatcher had taken for nine of the previous ten years, losing only once, to Adam Ant).¹⁰¹ But the docks were not thronged with people cheering “our boys” on their way; front room windows were not plastered with Union flags. And, with no one climbing on board Thatcher’s bandwagon, pop had very little impetus to interfere. As a result, there weren’t nearly as many songs about the Gulf War as there were about the Falklands. In 1988, Conflict had nodded towards the USA’s involvement in the Gulf as one symptom of a global malaise, but the impending poll tax had figured much more prominently in their analysis of the world’s woes. In the months leading up to Operation Desert Storm, Billy Bragg sang about “Rumours of War” and reflected dejectedly that “life goes on as it did before / As the country drifts slowly to war,” but the song was more a reflection on the transient fragility of peace than an observation about the immediate political situation. When the Gulf War broke out, Oi Polloi recognized that Thatcher was hoping it would provide a “video distraction from recession and poll tax,” and they refused to “Die for B.P.” (British Petroleum). Red London half-heartedly released a flexi-disc entitled “CND (Gulf War 1991 Mix),” and the Passion Killers released a cover of Country Joe & the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.” Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine released “Bloodsport for All”; an oblique commentary on racism in the British army, it was not about the Gulf War, but the BBC banned it anyway, just in case. A couple more songs came out in the aftermath of the conflict. In 1992, Thatcher on Acid released a cover of American punk band 7 Year Bitch’s “No Fuckin’ War”; Thatcher on Acid’s version added a sample of George Bush absurdly calling for “a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations,” even as American and British bombers let loose over Kuwait. The same year, the Cleaners from Venus recorded a “Gulf War Song,” a sentimental ballad in which an English soldier on a tour of duty in the desert discovers to his surprise that he misses both the “cold English rain” and his wife. So the song is really less about the Gulf War than about the gulf between a woman and her neglectful husband. And in 1993, World Party released a Beach Boys pastiche about American contractors enjoying the high life and “surfing in Kuwait City.” That’s about it. By and large, pop couldn’t be bothered.

Many of the things that pop couldn’t be bothered with in the late 1980s were things that, by contrast, the middle-aged middle class and their preferred media got very worked up about. They and their newspapers started to complain that “trains, museums, operas, hospitals, universities cannot exist without public funding and those of us who pay high rates of tax have a right to expect something better than the present government offers.”¹⁰² The Sunday Telegraph’s Peregrine Worsthorne, one of Thatcher’s staunchest supporters, warned her about the dangers of “bourgeois triumphalism,” but the real danger was in the bourgeois grumbling of the taxpayers she called “our people.”¹⁰³ Towards the end of 1988 the Conservatives started to fall behind Labour in opinion polls and it got worse over the next two years: in the months leading up to Thatcher’s resignation, the Conservatives trailed by as much as 24 percent.¹⁰⁴ And Thatcher’s polling was even worse than her party’s.¹⁰⁵ Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that pop lost interest in Thatcher: there’s not a lot of rock ’n’ roll credibility to be had from complaining about the same things as Mr. and Mrs. British Average and their newspapers. When the ambulance drivers went on strike for six months in 1989–90, polls showed 80–95 percent public support for the strike throughout.¹⁰⁶ There were no songs about the ambulance drivers’ strike (although, again, Ruff Ruff & Ready tried to fill the gap, reproducing a “Support the Ambulance Crews” poster on the inner sleeve of their Tribal Mutation EP).

When Thatcher finally went, popular music hardly seemed to notice. The only song that marked the occasion was Jonathan King’s cover version of Honeybus’s minor 1968 hit “I Can’t Let Maggie Go” (retitled “We Can’t Let Maggie Go”). King was best known for satirical novelty songs, often released under parodic pseudonyms: a gibberish soft-rock pastiche called “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” (under his own name), a testosterone-depleted folk-rock version of “Satisfaction” (as Bubblerock), an acid rock version of “Sugar Sugar” (as Sakkarin), and a children’s song parody, “Lick a Smurp for Christmas” (as Father Abraphart and the Smurps). For “We Can’t Let Maggie Go” he recorded as the Faithful, doing his best Wurzels impersonation and accompanying himself on a Casio keyboard. The single’s cover claimed that royalties would go to the “Bring Her Back Campaign,” which may or may not have existed; the B-side was a “karaoke version” of the song, which is to say just the dreadful Casio keyboard instrumental. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the single didn’t chart, although whether this was because people thought it was a terrible song or because they thought it was a terrible idea is not clear.

Curiously, despite the song’s obviously satirical tone, commentators have recently taken to assuming that King was sincere in his homage to Thatcher.¹⁰⁷ This seems to be mainly because, latterly, he has been exposed as a monster who preyed on young people, and the assumption is that, being a monster, he would naturally have been in favour of Thatcher. Quite aside from being, even by my standards, unfair to Thatcher, this assumption is wrong: by 1990 even the monsters had turned against the prime minister. On November 21, facing defeat in a leadership challenge, she resigned.

•

March 1991. It would be thematically convenient if it were the sunniest March on record, but the meteorological office insists that rainfall totals are “above normal nearly everywhere.” In fact, rainfall has been above normal every month since Thatcher left Downing Street in November. Despite some bright patches (John Major has announced the abolition of the poll tax), there are many other depressingly familiar phenomena to report: the economy is in recession; unemployment is rising (808 State will score a hit with a reworking of UB40’s “One in Ten” in 1992); the Provisional IRA has just blown all the windows out of No. 10 Downing Street with a homemade mortar; and Britons’ sadomasochistic willingness to torture one another with unlistenable novelty songs is undiminished. “Do the Bartman” has just spent an excruciating three weeks at number one.

Elsewhere in the charts there is an ambivalent glimmer of sunshine. The Clash have belatedly got their first top-ten hit with an opportunistic reissue of “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” The March 6 issue of Smash Hits even includes a poster of the band and the lyrics to the song. Given the timing of the release, it’s tempting to argue that it somehow resonates with the public as a breakup song. After eleven years of “If I go there will be trouble,” Britain has finally said, “Go.” The fact is, though, as Smash Hits points out, the song has become a hit simply because it was recently featured in a Levi’s 501 jeans advert. This puts the Clash in the company of Ben E. King (“Stand by Me”), Percy Sledge (“When a Man Loves a Woman”), Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”), Sam Cooke (“Wonderful World”), and the Steve Miller Band (“The Joker”), all of whom have benefitted from the same marketing campaign over the last five years. The Clash have become nostalgia, transitioning from punk rock to dad rock in one easy step.

The advert that “Should I Stay or Should I Go” soundtracks is set in an American pool hall, where a prettily handsome kid (Smash Hits says his name is Mario Sorrenti) wagers his Levi’s in a money game against a sweaty, leering old pool shark. Our boy bends to the task, blue denim hugging the firm contours of his buttocks as a female bartender bites her lower lip in anticipation. In this moment our boy and his jeans (a single, inseparable commodity) are the object of everyone’s desire. Disappointingly, he and his jeans calmly run the table and, blank-faced, he demands payment; it’s the pool shark who’s going to have to drop his trousers. It feels like some sort of comment on nostalgia and commodity culture: you pay for a glimpse of your youth; you get a sweaty old man with his trousers around his ankles. The Fascist Groove Thing is laughing at us.

* Angelic Upstarts, “Guns for the Afghan Rebels”; the Stranglers, “Shah Shah a Go Go”; the Zounds, “Biafra”; Political Asylum, “Down Amongst the Olive Groves”; Robert Wyatt, “East Timor”; the Members, “Offshore Banking Business”; the Clash, “Washington Bullets”; Oi Polloi, “Hands off Nicaragua”; Chumbawamba, “An Interlude: Beginning to Take It Back”; Billy Bragg, “Marching Song of the Covert Battalions”; Ruff & Ready, “El Salvador”; U2, “Mothers of the Disappeared” and “Bullet the Blue Sky”; Sting, “They Dance Alone”; Working Week, “Venceremos.”

CODAFascist Groove Thing, Notes, March 2021

I met Tom Robinson recently. I was sharing a stage with him at a remembrance concert for the great agit-folk singer Roy Bailey, and Tom asked if he could borrow my guitar so he could sing “Glad to Be Gay” in honour of Roy. Of course you can borrow my guitar, but only if I can tell you a story you’ve probably heard a thousand times from a thousand different people over the last forty-odd years: Go on then, he said.

I was a teenager in a small northern English town who discovered punk through seeing Sex Pistols on TV, chopped off my hair, went to the local art college, and bought a cheap electric guitar. As Patrik Fitzgerald put it in “Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart,” it was that “beat-beat-beat-beatbeating,” the outrageous shock and energy of the music that flicked a switch that changed my life.

But still, there I was in my painted shirt and drainpipe trousers, still casually and ignorantly racist and homophobic, somehow able to square what I knew of punk with my blinkered small-town attitudes. Then this girl called Linda came into class one day with a copy of the Tom Robinson Band’s “Glad to Be Gay,” with its story of police attacks on gay pubs, and I quietly sneered in contempt, awkward and embarrassed. Why was I embarrassed? Why did I feel threatened by this in-your-face declaration of anger, this song telling its truth to power, this singalong that was immediately banned by BBC Radio? And I realized, with some sense of shame, that my sneer put me in with the cops and the gutter press and the right wing politicians and all the backward, petty, self-serving moralists that punk was railing against. And from that point, from that song, I changed, I grew up, I purposely shed the casual racism and bigotry I’d grown up with.

I told this story to Tom, and he said yes, he had heard that story before, from many different people; but that he never tired of hearing it. Because there’s a lazy consensus among far too many musicians that, as Bob Geldof said, “music can’t change the world.” But from that “Glad to Be Gay” moment on, I realized that if it could change my world then it could change other people’s—bit by bit, song by song. It could be the angry polemic of Crass or the quiet satire of Randy Newman, the in-your-face feminism of the Slits or the all-out attack of Public Enemy: it was all there, an education in verses and choruses.

Growing up in the Thatcher years was, as this book shows, an incredible time to learn about the power of music. Thatcherism wasn’t a simple political ideology; it was a broad, sweeping attack on the culture and legacy of progressive ideas. It was in many ways similar to what we are witnessing right now under a post-Brexit Conservative government, a rolling-back of the gains we’d made as a society—a triumphal rollercoaster of petty, racist, blinkered selfishness, an open declaration of unfairness and inequality.

It was a time when musicians with any sense could see how important it was to say something, to sing something. It wasn’t a time for standing around thinking that somehow art was above politics—it was a time to jump in and declare your allegiances. This book, in its exhaustive roll call of songs and artists, is a solid reminder of how so many musicians and bands were prepared to make their feelings known, not just in benefit gigs and interviews but where it really mattered, in songs, on records, in catchy radio-friendly choruses, and in angry barked rants on do-it-yourself cassettes.

What’s interesting, and what you first notice in this book, is the sheer number of political songs that typified Thatcher’s time in power—from Wham! to Conflict and somehow via Rod Stewart, hundreds and hundreds of songs that, to differing extents, had something to say, had meaning and purpose. Suddenly songs provoked conversation, were argued over, got banned by the BBC (always a badge of honour). Hugh Hodges is right when he argues against music sociologist John Street’s claims that a song’s success or failure as a political statement is dependent on it being “good.” That was the point of this era of music, that the audience who loved Bronski Beat didn’t have to concur with fans of Abrasive Wheels—what was important was the sense of broad agreement across those musical divides.

The inclusion of folk artists like Leon Rosselson and Dick Gaughan is crucial here; they existed before the twin crucibles of punk and post-punk politicized a generation of bands and musicians, and they drew a line that connected these Thatcher-era songs back to Woody Guthrie and beyond, a proud lineage of protest songs. In their company, the words of Gary Numan quoted here—“I really like Maggie Thatcher—she’s everything that we needed and made me feel proud to be British”—sound not just ridiculously out-of-touch but thankfully rare.

And what do we do after reading this book? Initially we probably look around and think how little, by comparison, popular music is currently speaking about the state we’re in, as a country and as a world. But then there’s always Sleaford Mods and Idles and Nadine Shah and Stormzy and Kae Tempest and the rest, there are young bands, rappers, and musicians growing up being confronted by new draconian police laws, attacks on demonstrators, an epidemic of homelessness, poverty, foodbanks, and incompetent government. And while school strikes and Extinction Rebellion can fuel the poetic fire, hopefully there’ll be a generation of musicians who can look to books like this as inspiration—a bit like “What did you do in the war, dad?” Well, you see son, I met Tom Robinson at a concert and he asked if he could borrow my guitar, and …

Boff Whalley, 2021

For Further Reading

… This is not enough. So here are some suggestions for further reading, arranged alphabetically by subject: Anarcho-Punk, Black Britain, Ethnomusicology, Fanzines, Independent Record Labels, the Miners’ Strike, New Wave, Oi!, Post-punk, Punk, Rave, Reggae and Soul, Thatcher, and the Troubles. Some of the books suggested here I have relied on myself in preparing The Fascist Groove Thing, but most of them explore topics I have been barely able to touch upon in this book.

Anarcho-Punk

In a letter to Sounds magazine, in May 1982, Steve Arrogant of Special Duties dismissed the punk scene that revolved around Dial House and the free festival circuit as “the ridiculous hippy underground.”¹ He meant it as a withering term of abuse, of course, but he was actually identifying much of what was good about anarcho-punk. The best place to start reading about the anarcho-punk scene is Ian Glasper’s The Day the Country Died. He begins with the warning that “anarcho-punk” is a convenient label, but not a way of “stuffing it [the music] into a neat pigeonhole, where, once classified, it can be more easily controlled.”² He then demonstrates this by interviewing more than seventy “anarcho-punk” bands, most of whom have cogent reservations about being called “anarcho-punk.” The resulting band biographies are arranged regionally, which means you have to know where bands came from to find them, but this organization creates a narrative from one entry to the next and makes The Day the Country Died an account worth reading cover to cover. Crass figures largely in Glasper’s book, of course, but for a full account of anarcho-punk’s most seminal band, see George Berger’s The Story of Crass. As far as scholarly accounts of anarcho-punk go, The Aesthetics of Our Anger, a collection of essays edited by Mike Dines and Matt Worley, is “punk studies” done properly. Many of the contributors to the collection are members of the Punk Scholars Network, which is responsible for an important and rapidly growing list of publications on punk as a global phenomenon.

Berger, George. The Story of Crass. Oakland: PM Press, 2009.

Dines, Mike, and Matthew Worley, ed. The Aesthetics of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Colchester, UK: Minor Compositions, 2016.

Glasper, Ian. The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984. Oakland: PM Press, 2014.

Black Britain

Journalists Mike and Trevor Phillips offer an overview of the modern history of Black Britain, from the 1940s through to the end of the twentieth century, in Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain. The longer history of Black Britain, going back to the sixteenth century, can be found in Peter Fryer’s seminal study Staying Power. Unfortunately, because it was first published in 1982, Staying Power ends with the Brixton riots, and some misplaced hopes about what that uprising might accomplish. For an account of Black Britain in the 1980s, see Paul Gilroy’s “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.” It is, in the first instance, an academic study of “racial meanings … not as an autonomous branch of ideology, but as a salient feature in a general process whereby culture mediates the world of agents and the structures which are created by their social praxis.”³ Along the way, it provides a history of racism and black resistance in the 1970s and ’80s.

Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984.

Gilroy, Paul. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Phillips, Mike, and Trevor Phillips. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain. London: HarperCollins, 1998.

Ethnomusicology

In preparing The Fascist Groove Thing, I have focused on the politics articulated in pop lyrics and set aside the numerous other ways in which popular music makes meaning. But there is an extensive discourse on this subject, and it is well worth exploring.

Dave Laing’s One Chord Wonders and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture both explore how meaning was created in the context of first-wave punk, not just by the music itself but by fashion, style, fanzines, news media, and so on. Hebdige’s book particularly has been hugely influential on academic discussions about how popular music makes meaning. Simon Frith’s Performing Rites probably still offers the best introduction to this evolving discourse, arguing persuasively for a very broad approach to understanding meaning in music (as sound, as rhythm, as embodied experience, as performance, as text). Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, in Faking It, add an exploration of how meaning in music often hinges on questions of authenticity.

John Street’s Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music focuses usefully on how musical meaning becomes political. Street is particularly interested in what we might call the politics of sound, the politics bIG fLAME were articulating when they said, “the sound we produce is political … because it is so radical and anti-complacency when compared to the crap we are being fed now from all angles.”⁴ Big Flame were making the same point Theodor Adorno made in his critique of the crap he was being fed from all angles in the 1940s: music, he said, is under an obligation “to reach out beyond the current consciousness of the masses” and overcome their “blindness, spite and conventionalism.”⁵ That is, like Big Flame, Adorno was interested in the “disruptive power of sound itself.”⁶

Street’s more recent book Music and Politics gives an excellent introduction to the politics of music as music (rather than as linguistic communication, for example) and the subversive power of what the philosopher Roland Barthes called jouissance.⁷ That is, in moments of bliss or sublimity (the personal revolutions that positive punk, for example, sought) “structures of meaning as well as systems of ideology” may be undermined.⁸ A space may be cleared, in which it’s possible to think, or perhaps more accurately feel in new ways, not just about ourselves but about our relation to others. Music has the ability to leave us “struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday.”⁹ This embodied experience of the extraordinary become political when it is shared: “Through singing, through the rhythms of repetition,” John Street explains, “we are connected to others and enchanted by our world.”¹⁰ In this way “music mobilizes politics.”¹¹ I’ve set this phenomenon aside in The Fascist Groove Thing, but it is as important as anything I’ve written here.

There is also, predictably, a substantial discourse on the impossibility of music mobilizing politics. Simon Frith points out that this demoralizing assessment of popular music has been circulating since the 1930s,¹² and probably the most influential statement on the subject is still Adorno’s 1941 essay “On Popular Music,” which argues that because pop music is “standardized” and “pre-digested,” it “divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes.”¹³ Consequently, Adorno argues, no matter how novel or subversive pop music might at first appear, it always leads back to the same, familiar experiences. Of course, he never heard Big Flame.

Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” In On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 301–14. London: Routledge, 1990.

Barker, Hugh, and Yuval Taylor. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.

Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. New York: Routledge, 1988.

_____. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Oakland: PM Press, 2015.

Street, John. Music and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

_____. Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Fanzines

The zine culture that emerged with punk in 1976 and continued through the 1980s is given an appropriately polyvocal treatment in Ripped, Torn and Cut. A collection of essays put together by Matthew Worley’s Subcultures Network, it includes both reflections on the role of zines in popular culture and recollections by zine makers themselves. Punkzines, edited by Eddie Piller and Steve Rowland is a less academic approach to the subject, but is also well-researched and includes first-hand insights from many of the key figures in the development of the punk zine. Less analytical but nevertheless valuable, Oh So Pretty, curated Roby Mott and Rick Poynor offers five hundred pages of punk zines, flyers, posters, programmes and leaflets, placing zines in the broader context of punk in print. Meanwhile, the complete runs of iconic punk zines Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped and Torn have been reprinted, and selections from Jamming! have been collected as The Best of Jamming! Collectively, they offer a unique glimpse into the world they were creating and documenting.

Drayton, Tony. Ripped and Torn 1976–1979: The Loudest Punk Fanzine in the UK. London: Ecstatic Peace Library, 2018.

Fletcher, Tony. The Best of Jamming! Selections and Stories from the Fanzine That Grew Up, 1977–86. London: Omnibus, 2021.

Mott, Toby, and Rick Poynor. Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976–1980. London: Phaidon Press, 2016.

Perry, Mark. Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory. Edited by Terry Rawlings. London: Sanctuary, 2000.

Piller, Eddie, and Steve Rowand, ed. Punkzines: British Fanzine Culture from the Punk Scene 1976–1983. London: Omnibus Press, 2021.

Subcultures Network, ed. Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Independent Record Labels

Because The Fascist Groove Thing focusses on what pop songs said, rather than on how they said it, I set aside discussion of the network of independent record labels, music weeklies, fanzines, and radio shows that distributed and broadcast those songs. That certainly doesn’t mean they are unimportant to an understanding of popular music in the 1980s, nor does it mean that what they did wasn’t political. Geoff Travis, founder of archetypal independent label Rough Trade, which was run as a radical democracy, notes, “We were being profoundly political by not owning our groups.”¹⁴

Many of the independent labels that flourished in the 1970s and ’80s have books dedicated to them, for example Richard Balls’s history of Stiff Records, Neil Taylor’s of Rough Trade, Michael DeKoningh and Marc Griffiths’s of Trojan Records, and Alan McGee’s of Creation. The last of these, written by the founder of Creation himself, highlights some of the ambiguities of being a businessman with countercultural instincts (beginning with the fact that Creation was started with support from the Thatcher government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme). The most thorough assessment of the independent scene, however, is Alex Ogg’s Independence Days. It is, as Ogg says, both “a ‘celebration’ of independent record label culture,” and a story of “villainy, deceit, and gluttony.”¹⁵

Balls, Richard. Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story. London: Soundcheck Books, 2014.

De Koningh, Michael, and Marc Griffiths. Tighten Up: The History of Reggae in the UK. London: Sanctuary, 2003.

McGee, Alan. Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label. London: Pan Books, 2014.

Middles, Mick. Factory: The Story of the Record Label. London: Virgin Books, 2009.

Ogg, Alex. Independence Days: The Story of UK Independent Record Labels. London: Cherry Red, 2009.

Taylor, Neil. Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade. London: Orion Books, 2010.

The Miners’ Strike

Graham Stewart’s Bang!, which offers a broad and very readable scan of the 1980s, gives a fairly detailed overview of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. For a more complete account, however, see Beckett and Hencke’s Marching to the Fault Line, which Stewart relies on quite heavily.¹⁶ It’s not perfect, particularly in its rather dismissive portrayal of Arthur Scargill, but it is a reasonably clear account of the strike, its causes, and its aftermath. For an account of the war that Thatcher, MI5, and the Maxwell media empire continued to wage against the miners after their defeat, see Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within. And for an account of the strike from the government’s perspective, see volume two of Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher. It’s a bit disorienting (like reading an account of the Battle of Britain in which German High Command are the scrappy heroes), but it is also illuminating.

Beckett, Francis, and David Hencke. Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners’ Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain. London: Constable, 2009.

Milne, Seumas. The Enemy Within: The Secret War against the Miners. Updated ed. London: Verso, 2014.

Stewart, Graham. Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s. London: Atlantic Books, 2013.

New Wave

There is no academic discourse on new pop, new wave, and new romantics even remotely equivalent to the discourse on punk. Nor, for that matter, has there been much written for a general readership. Music journalist Dave Rimmer’s entertaining account of Culture Club’s rise and fall, Like Punk Never Happened, was, for a very long time, about as good as it got. In 2020, however, i-D editor and Bowie biographer Dylan Jones published Sweet Dreams, an exhaustive oral history of new romanticism “from club culture to style culture.” Clocking in at over six hundred pages and featuring fragments of interviews with dozens of the scene’s luminaries, it emphasizes the continuities from the Bowie/Roxy end of glam rock, through the first, arty phase of punk, to the Blitz club scene that birthed the new romantics. Academically, too, I suspect that new romanticism and new wave, on both sides of the Atlantic, are due for reevaluation. Ellen Goldfarb’s 2018 documentary New Wave: Dare to Be Different recalls how Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, Flock of Seagulls, the Fixx, and Howard Jones sounded like a liberating army of dayglo guerrillas when they were parachuted onto American radio by WLIR in New Jersey, in the early 1980s. “Dare to Be Different,” WLIR told their listeners, and to kids held hostage by the Eagles and the Allman Brothers it felt plausible that “Girls on Film” might indeed be the road to freedom. So Jones’s Sweet Dreams is probably the tip of an emerging iceberg.

Goldfarb, Ellen, dir. New Wave: Dare to Be Different. 95 min. Jomyra Productions/Roger Senders Productions. DVD. Oaks, PA: MVD Visual, 2018.

Jones, Dylan. Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics. London: Faber & Faber, 2020.

Rimmer, Dave. Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop. London: Faber & Faber, 1985.

Oi!

Aside from Matthew Worley’s No Future, perhaps the best available account of Oi! and street punk is Ian Glasper’s encyclopaedic Burning Britain. Like The Day the Country Died, Glasper’s account of anarcho-punk, it is more than the sum of its parts. Dozens of band biographies—all of them based on interviews with band members—combine to create a comprehensive oral history of the scene.

Although not specifically about Oi! and street punk, Tomorrow Belongs to Us, a collection of essays edited by Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, provides invaluable insight into the ambivalences that defined the genre.

Glasper, Ian. Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984. Oakland: PM Press, 2014.

Worley, Matthew, and Nigel Copsey, ed. “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967. London: Routledge, 2018.

Post-punk

Like punk, post-punk has received a lot of academic attention in recent years. But the most useful book on the subject remains Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again. Reynolds blends music journalism with cultural criticism better than just about anyone, which is a particularly valuable skill when dealing with bands (such as the Pop Group, Gang of Four, the Mekons, and the Fall) who were themselves engaged in cultural criticism. A second volume, Totally Wired, transcribes about thirty of the interviews Reynolds undertook while preparing Rip It Up. It’s an excellent companion to the earlier book, even if Reynolds does come to the disappointing conclusion that Rip It Up was “the story of a bunch of different bands who tried to make politics and pop work together but failed.”¹⁷

Contemporaneous with these post-punks, the two-tone bands (including the Specials, Madness, and the Beat) were also blending music and cultural commentary—and politics. Daniel Rachel’s Walls Come Tumbling Down is an invaluable oral history of the political movements that brought these artists together, notably Rock Against Racism and Red Wedge.

Tracey Thorn, one of Rachel’s many interviewees in Walls Come Tumbling Down, gives her own account of the post-punk period in Bedsit Disco Queen. The autobiography of someone who “grew up and tried to be a popstar” in Thatcher’s Britain, it offers valuable insights into why pop and politics overlapped so much in the 1980s.

John Robb’s Death to Trad Rock is an account of forty or so postpost-punk bands you’ve probably never heard of, even if you lived in the UK in the 1980s. More than any other book I read while preparing The Fascist Groove Thing, Robb’s account of this noisenik scene upended my recollections of what the 1980s sounded like.

Rachel, Daniel. Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge. London: Picador, 2016.

Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984. London: Penguin, 2006.

_____.Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

Robb, John. Death to Trad Rock: Faster! Louder! Bass Aggro, High Treble Xerox Culture, Pop Noise and Anti Trad Rock Feeling … Adventures in the 80s Post Punk Underground. London: Cherry Red, 2009.

Thorn, Tracey. Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Popstar. London: Virago, 2013.

Punk

In addition to Hebdige’s Subculture and Laing’s One Chord Wonders listed here under “ethnomusicology,” there are dozens of books, both general and academic on punk rock, punk fashion, punk culture, and punk aesthetics. The definitive book on punk’s genesis remains Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, first published in 1992. Matthew Worley’s much more recent No Future, which focusses on the politics of first wave punk, anarcho-punk, and street punk, is an invaluable complement to Savage’s book (appropriately, its title comes from the same Sex Pistols song as England’s Dreaming), and it’s probably the best book on punk written in the last twenty-five years. Helen Reddington’s The Lost Women of Rock Music is also a useful complement to England’s Dreaming. Where Savage concentrates on punk in London and Manchester, Reddington writes about punk outside those metropolitan centres, and outside the media frenzy, with a focus on the role of women musicians in the punk movement.

For an encyclopaedic A-to-Z of first-wave punk bands, metropolitan and otherwise, “from the Anal Fleas to Zyklon B,” see Alex Ogg’s comprehensive No More Heroes.

Ogg, Alex. No More Heroes: A Complete History of UK Punk from 1976 to 1980. London: Cherry Red Books, 2006.

Reddington, Helen. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2012.

Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber & Faber, 1992.

Worley, Matthew. No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Rave

The dance-driven scenes that defined pop at the end of the decade don’t figure largely in The Fascist Groove Thing because, between the dancing and the Ecstasy, they didn’t leave a lot of room for political commentary. Or, to put it the other way around, as Simon Reynold does in Energy Flash, “Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant English Lit and social realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focus on songs and storytelling.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, rave and its handmaiden E had political implications. “It’s no coincidence,” Reynolds argues, “that Ecstasy escalated into a pop cultural phenomenon at the end of the go-for-it, go-it-alone eighties (the real Me Decade). For Ecstasy is the remedy for the alienation caused by an atomized society.”¹⁹ He also insists, “Rave has actually politicized me, made me think harder about questions of class, race, gender, technology,”²⁰ although this may have more to do with who Reynolds is than what rave is. In any case, Energy Flash (titled Generation Ecstasy in the US version), first published in 1998 and updated in 2008 and 2012, is a compendious and compelling study of dance culture.

Reynold’s account naturally places the Madchester scene and the rave-rock crossover of the late 1980s in the context of this international dance culture. For a counterpoint, see John Robb’s The North Will Rise Again, which places it in the context of the evolving Manchester music scene.

Reynolds, Simon. Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador, 1998.

Robb, John. The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City (1977–1996). London: Aurum, 2010.

Reggae and Soul

British reggae frequently makes an appearance in broader accounts of the genre: in Dick Hebdige’s Cut n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music, for example, or in Lloyd Bradley’s Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. But neither British reggae nor British soul have, as genres, been the subject of book-length accounts. To date, the most informative book on black music in Britain is Bradley’s Sounds Like London; a history of black popular music in the nation’s capital, it is a useful complement and counterpoint to Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.

Bradley, Lloyd. Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital. London: Serpent’s Tale, 2013.

Hebdige, Dick. Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London: Comedia, 1987.

Thatcher

John Campbell’s two-volume Margaret Thatcher was, for many years, the most comprehensive biography available, and it remains an excellent source: critical, analytical, and neutral (if occasionally exasperated by its subject). It has, perhaps, been superseded by Charles Moore’s even more comprehensive, three-volume Margaret Thatcher. The latter’s granular detail, made possible by the access granted to Moore as an authorized biographer, gives it an air of credible authority, but be aware that there’s a reason why this biography was authorized: although Moore is occasionally critical of Thatcher herself, his political sympathies are clearly and prejudicially Thatcherite. The same cannot be said of Simon Jenkins, whose Thatcher and Sons is, as the Daily Telegraph says, “A withering indictment of arrogance in high office.”²¹ In Rejoice! Rejoice!, Alwyn Turner comments on the haplessness of the Fascist Groove Thing: “[Thatcher] released forces into society over which she had little or no control. She called for a return to thrift and good housekeeping, and presided over a massive increase in credit card debt and mortgage indebtedness; she sought to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, and saw the City overrun by … a generation of spivs and speculators; she wished to reverse the effects of 1960s permissiveness and found herself in a country where drug-taking had become almost the norm amongst young people … and where home video recorders and satellite television made pornography ever more available.”²² In Thatcher and Sons, Jenkins explains why this was inevitable, why the Fascist Groove Thing’s “atomized, centralized democracy is not a democracy,” and why it “cannot deliver.”²³

Thatcher’s own ghostwritten autobiography is interesting as a study in delusional vanity, but it is less than entirely reliable on what actually happened.

Campbell, John. Margaret Thatcher. Vol. 2, The Iron Lady. London: Pimlico, 2003.

Jenkins, Simon. Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts. London: Penguin, 2007.

Moore, Charles. Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. 3 vols. London: Penguin, 2014–19.

Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

The Troubles

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998, the tendency among historians of the Troubles has been to write in the spirit of truth and reconciliation. McKittrick and McVea’s Making Sense of the Troubles is in this vein, and it does an admirable job of trying to be even-handed without obscuring or diminishing the horrors committed by all sides in the conflict. It also gives a clear account of the difficult peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement.

Tim Pat Coogan, meanwhile, is entirely transparent about his nationalist sympathies, and, having been editor of the Irish Times through most of the Troubles, he is exceptionally well-informed (if occasionally by sources who remain unnamed for their legal or physical protection). Coogan’s accounts also rectify a shortcoming of Making Sense of the Troubles: McKittrick and McVea give very little historical background to the conflict that erupted in the late 1960s, beginning their narrative in the mid-twentieth century. Coogan’s The IRA and The Troubles fill in some of the long background, the latter going all the way back to the twelfth century to observe, “[Ireland’s] buttocks, the south-eastern coast of Wexford and Waterford, are … no more than eighty miles from the coast of Wales. It was in this area that the first serious Norman penetrations occurred.… The Norman coming is generally regarded as the starting point for ‘eight hundred years of British oppression.”²⁴ Make of that what you will.

Coogan, Tim Pat. The IRA: A History. Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1994.

_____. The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace. London: Arrow Books, 1996.

McKittrick, David, and David McVea. Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict. London: Viking, 2012.

Discography

This discography includes all the recordings mentioned, however briefly, in this book. In each case, the discographic information provided is for the first release of the song; when a song was released as a single and as an album track more or less simultaneously, I have listed the latter.

Abacush. A female-led reggae band formed in 1981, Abacush built their mellow sound on a mixture of lovers rock and dub. Never prolific, they nevertheless released four EPs during the 1980s, all of them now sought after.

“Batta Dem.” Various Artists. In Progress. People Unite, 1984, LP.

“Sufferah Style (Brixton Riot 1981).” The Train Is Coming. Abacush, 1984, 12″.

ABC. Led by singer Martin Fry and produced by Trevor Horn, ABC played what Horn described as “Dylan, except it’s disco music instead of an acoustic guitar.”¹ Their first album, The Lexicon of Love, went platinum and helped to define New Pop, with the singles “Poison Arrow,” “All of My Heart,” and “The Look of Love” all becoming top-ten hits.

“Date Stamp.” The Lexicon of Love. Neutron Records, 1982, LP.

“United Kingdom.” Beauty Stab. Neutron Records, 1983, LP.

The Abnormal. From Bridgend, South Wales, the Abnormal described themselves as “a Herbert band into football.”² Their only recording was a split album with Scottish punk band Barbed Wire.

“Football Song.” Skins ’n’ Punks, vol. 4. Oi! Records, 1987, LP.

“Local Copper.” Skins ’n’ Punks, vol. 4. Oi! Records, 1987, LP.

Abrasive Wheels. Probably the biggest punk band to come out of Leeds, Abrasive Wheels had a knack for “massive rowdy choruses that could put a grin on the face of a dead man,”³ an effect often at odds with their fiercely angry lyrics. Their first album, When the Punks Go Marching In, made it to number three on the indie charts.

“Army Song.” ABW EP. Cherry Red Music, 1982, 7″.

“Burn ’Em Down.” When the Punks Go Marching In. Riot City Records, 1982, LP.

“Vicious Circle.” Vicious Circle EP. Riot City Records, 1981, 7″.

“Voice of Youth.” Vicious Circle EP. Riot City Records, 1981, 7″.

Adam and the Ants. Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni were veterans of the London punk scene when they teamed up in 1980 to write off-kilter pop songs and try on a series of exciting costumes. A dozen top-twenty hits, including the number ones “Stand and Deliver,” “Prince Charming,” and “Goody Two Shoes,” put them squarely at the centre of what the music industry called “new wave.”

“Kings of the Wild Frontier.” Kings of the Wild Frontier. CBS, 1980, LP.

“Goody Two Shoes.” Friend or Foe. CBS, 1982, LP.

The Adverts. TV Smith and Gaye Advert formed the Adverts in London in 1976, becoming part of the first wave of punk. Their single “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,” about the post-execution transplant donation of an American murderer’s corneas, was a top-twenty hit in 1977.

“Bored Teenagers.” Gary Gilmore’s Eyes. Anchor, 1977, 7″.

Age of Chance. One of the few mid-1980s noisenik bands to break through into the national charts (number fifty, with their splintering cover of Prince’s “Kiss”), Leeds’s Age of Chance explained, “We started basically because we hated everything else.”⁴

“Kiss.” Kiss. Virgin, 1986, 12″.

A-Heads. Closely associated with Subhumans, Warminster anarcho-punks A-Heads were fronted by Mel Bell, who joined Faction when the band split in 1984. Bassist Nigel Johnson joined Dick Lucas in Culture Shock.

“Forgotten Hero.” Forgotten Hero. Bluurg Records, 1983, 7″.

“Isolated.” Forgotten Hero. Bluurg Records, 1983, 7″.

The AK47s. Tottenham ska-punk outfit the AK47s were only active for a couple of years in the early 1990s, but they released a now much sought-after album, Don’t Call Me Vanilla, on the label run by Ben Corrigan (Thatcher on Acid) and Sean Forbes (Wat Tyler).

“The Tottenham Three.” Don’t Call Me Vanilla. Rugger Bugger Discs, 1991, LP.

The Alarm. From Rhyl, Wales, the Alarm had big hair and a line in anthemic alternative rock that made them a natural opener for U2, with whom they toured the United States in 1983. Lead singer Mike Peters had formerly been in one of Wales’s earliest punk bands, the Toilets.

“Bells of Rhymney.” The Chant Has Just Begun. IRS Records, 1984, 7″.

“The Deceiver.” Declaration. IRS Records, 1984, LP.

“Declaration.” Declaration. IRS Records, 1984, LP.

“Deeside.” Strength. IRS Records, 1985, LP.

“Hallowed Ground.” Eye of the Hurricane. IRS Records, 1987, LP.

“Marching On.” Declaration. IRS Records, 1984, LP.

“A New South Wales.” Change. IRS Records, 1989, LP.

“We Are the Light.” Declaration. IRS Records, 1984, LP.

“Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke.” Declaration. IRS Records, 1984, LP.

Altered Images. Formed in Glasgow in 1979 and fronted by vocalist Clare Grogan, Altered Images transitioned from snarky post-punks to smiley new pop stars under the tutelage of producer Martin Rushent. Half a dozen top-forty hits followed before the band folded in 1983.

“Dead Pop Stars.” Dead Pop Stars. Epic, 1981, 7″.

Alternative. Dunfermline’s Alternative were pacifist anarcho-punks, heavily influenced by Crass. Vocalist Eric Beveridge explains, “We were concerned about politics, religion, war, greed, and the destruction of the planet, and realizing that these issues were interlinked.”⁵

“Sick Man’s Slaughter.” The Animals Packet. Sky & Trees, 1983, cassette.

“Where Are Your Hiroshimas?” If They Treat You Like Shit—Act Like Manure. Corpus Christi, 1984, LP.

Amazulu. A pop reggae band formed in London, Amazulu had half a dozen hits, including a cover of “Montego Bay” that made the top ten (in Canada). They were once the musical guests on the anarchic sitcom The Young Ones, whose producers had figured out that if they had a musical guest each week it made them a “variety” show, which got them a bigger budget from the BBC.

“Greenham Time.” Various Artists. Let the Children Play. Panic Records, 1983, LP.

Amebix. One of the first bands to fuse punk with heavy metal, Amebix were a formative influence on what became known as “crust punk.” The only song of theirs that appears in this book, the early recording “University Challenged,” is lyrically uncharacteristic inasmuch as it isn’t fixated on violent death.

“University Challenged.” Various Artists. Bullshit Detector. Crass Records, 1980, LP.

Anathema. An anarcho-punk band from Surrey, Anathema released three cassette-only albums between 1984 and 1987 on their own LOL Tapes label, which became a recognizable name in the cassette underground. Their only vinyl release was a 7″ split with kindred spirits The Apostles.

“6 Seconds.” Anathema/The Apostles. The Split EP. Fight Back Records, 1986, 7″.

“Anti-Apartheid Rap.” The Feeding of the 5 Knuckle Shuffle. LOL Tapes, 1987, cassette.

“Useless Slaughter.” Make the Fighting Cease. LOL Tapes, 1985, cassette.

“Your Ulster.” The Feeding of the 5 Knuckle Shuffle. LOL Tapes, 1987, cassette.

Angelic Upstarts. The Upstarts, from South Shields, cracked the top fifty on the national charts twice in the late 1970s. Hugely influential, they were one of the first “street punk” bands, although lead singer Mensi is mostly (and justifiably) proud of being “the first pro-active anti-fascist band.”⁶

“Brighton Bomb.” Brighton Bomb. Gas Records, 1985, 12″.

“Flames of Brixton.” Still from the Heart. Zonophone, 1982, LP.

“Guns for the Afghan Rebels.” 2,000,000 Voices. EMI, 1981, LP.

“Last Night Another Soldier.” Last Night Another Soldier. EMI, 1980, 7″.

“The Murder of Liddle Towers.” The Murder of Liddle Towers. Small Wonder Records 1978, 7″.

“Soldier.” Still from the Heart. Zonophone, 1982, LP.

“Woman in Disguise.” Woman in Disguise. Anagram Records, 1982, 7″.

Another Warcry. A punk band from Blackburn, Another Warcry recorded a total of three songs, all of them for animal rights benefit compilations. Two of the band members would later join another Blackburn punk band, Potential Threat, equally dedicated to animal rights.

“Don’t Kill the Fox.” Various Artists. A Song for the Animals. LOL Tapes, 1984, cassette.

Martin Ansell. A singer-songwriter and session musician, Ansell released one album, 1986’s The Englishman Abroad, with Howard Jones providing keyboards.

“Hardy’s England.” The Englishman Abroad. Island, 1986, LP.

Anthrax. Anthrax were a punk band from Gravesend, Kent, who released two 7”s, both of which made it onto the indie charts. Vocalist Gary Budd was also responsible for the fanzine Enigma, which circulated widely in the anar-cho-punk scene.

“All the Wars.” Anthrax Demo Tape. Not on label, 1982, cassette.

“Capitalism Is Cannibalism.” Capitalism Is Cannibalism. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

“Violence Is Violence.” Capitalism Is Cannibalism. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

Anti-Nowhere League. Perhaps because they came from Tunbridge Wells, where, lead singer Nick “Animal” Culver explains, “You’d get all sorts of yobbos—skin-heads, bikers, punks—all drinking in the same pubs,”⁷ the League looked and sounded like all three simultaneously. Their first single cracked the top fifty on the national charts, despite the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publication Squad having seized a number of copies. Their first album, We Are … the League, made it to number twenty-four.

“Not My England.” The Perfect Crime. GWR Records, 1987, LP.

“So What?” Streets of London. WXYZ Records, 1981, 7″.

Antisect. Between 1981 and 1987, Daventry punks Antisect tried to balance a commitment to anarcho-punk direct action (“We became experts at the old ‘sitting down in front of the missile transporter’ routine,” guitarist Pete Lyons recalls)⁸ with a commitment to heavy drug use. It didn’t always work.

“Tortured and Abused.” In Darkness, There Is No Choice. Spiderleg Records, 1984, LP.

Antisocial. A Blackpool Oi! band, Antisocial were Daz, Spigg, Woz, and Sid, replaced by Phil on their third release, the Steve Jones–produced Official Hooligan.

“Official Hooligan.” Official Hooligan. Beat the System!!/Lightbeat Records, 1983, 7″.

Anti-System. Ferocious Bradford anarcho-punks Anti-System released two singles, an EP, and an album before they split, in 1985, because of what lead singer Nogsy describes as “differences over everything really.”⁹

“Animal Welfare.” No Laughing Matter. Reconciliation Records, 1985, LP.

“Bomb Threat.” Defence of the Realm EP. Pax Records, 1982, 7″.

“Government Lies.” Defence of the Realm EP. Pax Records, 1982, 7″.

“No Longer to Choose.” Defence of the Realm EP. Pax Records, 1982, 7″.

“Wot! No Meat?” No Laughing Matter. Reconciliation Records, 1985, LP.

AOA. From Loanhead, Scotland, All Out Attack lived up to their name. Guitarist Scott Paton explains, “We decided to vent our anger through music, and take a more direct approach with our protest.”¹⁰ They released two albums, one of them a split with Oi Polloi, before folding in 1990.

“Who Are They Trying to Con?” Who Are They Trying to Con? Children of the Revolution Records, 1985, 7″.

A.P.F. Brigade. Formed in Peterborough and active between 1977 and 1984, A.P.F. Brigade were genuinely DIY anarcho-punks, recording all their material live to cassette and self-releasing it on whatever blank tapes came to hand. The only exception was “Anarchist Attack,” which Crass included on the first Bullshit Detector LP.

“Eat Wheat, Not Meat.” The Animals Packet. Sky & Trees, 1983, cassette.

The Apostles. Led by vocalist Andy Martin, the Apostles helped to set up four anarchist centres, including the Wapping Autonomy Centre and the Centro Iberico. They also had a band that played what could reasonably be called punk, but Martin was firm that this did not make them anarcho-punks.

“Fucking Queer.” The Acts of the Apostles in the Theatre of Fear. Acid Stings, 1988, LP.

“The Hunt (The Liberator’s March).” Punk Obituary. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“The Hunt (The Saboteur’s Revenge).” Punk Obituary. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“The Hunt (The Victims Lament).” Punk Obituary. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“Kill or Cure.” The Giving of Love Costs Nothing. Scum Records, 1984, 7″.

“Pigs for Slaughter.” Blow It Up Burn It Down Kick It Till It Breaks. Not on label, 1982, 7″.

“Workers’ Autonomy.” Punk Obituary. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

The Art Attacks. Vocalist Edwin Pouncey is probably better remembered by his nom de plume, Savage Pencil, under which name he illustrated for Sounds. The Art Attacks formed at the Royal College of Art in 1977 and released two singles before calling it a day in 1979.

“Neutron Bomb.” I Am a Dalek. Albatross Records, 1978, 7″.

The Astronauts. One of the many bands who might have remained a strictly local phenomenon (in this case, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire) without the intervention of John Peel. He took to their lo-fi debut EP, The Astronauts, which subsequently sold out in a day.

“It’s All Done by Mirrors.” It’s All Done by Mirrors. All the Madmen Records, 1983, LP.

“Typically English Day.” It’s All Done by Mirrors. All the Madmen Records, 1983, LP.

Aswad. One of Britain’s first and most enduring reggae bands, Aswad’s founding members all came from Holland Park, London. Their biggest hit (to date) is the pop-reggae single “Don’t Turn Around,” which went to number one in 1988.

“Judgement Day.” Hulet. Island, 1979, LP.

“Set Them Free.” Distant Thunder. Mango, 1988, LP.

“Tuff We Tuff.” New Chapter. CBS, 1981, LP.

Attila the Stockbroker. John Baine was one of the so-called “ranting” poets who enlivened the punk scene in the early 1980s (along with Steven “Seething” Wells, Joolz Denby, and Phill “Porky the Poet” Jupitus). Attila’s first album was appropriately entitled Ranting at the Nation. It was dedicated to “Ken ‘our Ken’ Livingstone and his pet salamander, Edwin.” (The leader of the GLC was an avid herpetologist.)

“Flappin’ in the Wind.” Ranting at the Nation. Cherry Red, 1983, LP.

Attrition. Martin Bowes and Julie Niblock formed Attrition in Coventry in 1980, producing several cassette-only albums before their first vinyl release, 1984’s Attrition of Reason. That album established them as part of the nebulous “dark wave” subgenre of electronic music.

“Monkey in a Bin.” Attrition & Schamanen Circel. Ocвoбoждeниe. Recording Union, 1984, 12″.

Au Pairs. The Au Pairs, from Birmingham, operated in the same post-punk milieu as Leeds bands Gang of Four and Delta Five. Their album Playing with a Different Sex was a number-one indie hit and spent seven weeks on the national charts.

“Armagh.” Playing with a Different Sex. Human Records, 1981, LP.

Aztec Camera. Roddy Frame started Aztec Camera in East Kilbride, Scotland, in 1980. The band’s 1983 album High Land Hard Rain spent sixty-four weeks on the indie charts, but their biggest success was Love, which spent most of 1988 on the nationals.

“Good Morning Britain.” Stray. WEA, 1990, LP.

Bananarama. In 1988, the Guinness Book of Records identified Bananarama as the most successful female group in pop history. They had formed in London in 1981 and would have more than twenty top-forty hits before the decade was over.

“Give Us Back Our Cheap Fares.” Really Saying Something. Deram, 1982, 12″.

Band Aid. Bono, Phil Collins, Chris Cross, Sara Dallin, Siobhan Fahey, Bob Geldof, Boy George, Glenn Gregory, Gary Kemp, Simon Le Bon, George Michael, Rick Parfitt, Sting, Andy Taylor, Midge Ure, Paul Weller, Paul Young, etc.

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Do They Know It’s Christmas? Phonogram, 1984, 12″.

Pato Banton. Birmingham reggae artist Pato Banton achieved most of his commercial success in the 1990s, most notably with “Baby Come Back,” a number-one hit in 1994, but by then he’d already been recording for more than a decade. “Handsworth Riot.” Never Give In. Greensleeves Records, 1987, LP.

“Pato’s Opinion.” Never Give In. Greensleeves Records, 1987, LP.

Barbed Wire. From West Lothian, and active between 1984 and ’86, Barbed Wire released two albums on Oi! Records, the second of them a split with the Abnormal.

“Fuck the Polis.” The Age That Didn’t Care. Oi! Records, 1986, LP.

Basement 5. The members of Basement 5 are mostly famous for other things. Richard Dudanski played with the Raincoats and PiL; Leo Williams played with Big Audio Dynamite; Dennis Morris is responsible for iconic photographs of other musicians, notably Bob Marley. As a band, they released a couple of singles and one album of distinctive post-punk dub-reggae.

“Riot.” 1965–1980. Island, 1980, LP.

Mike Batt. A respected and very successful songwriter, musician, producer, conductor, and composer, with an impressive row of Ivor Novello Awards on his bookshelf, Mike Batt will for many of us only ever be the man who told us, “Remember, remember, remember, remember / Remember you’re a Womble.”

“Remember You’re a Womble.” Remember You’re a Womble. CBS, 1974, 7″.

“The Wombling Song.” The Wombling Song. CBS, 1973, 7″.

The Beat. One of the first ska revival groups (with a fair infusion of soul and pop), the Beat released their first single on Jerry Dammers’s Two-Tone Records before starting their own label, Go-Feet. The band had their biggest hit in 1983 with “Can’t Get Used to Losing You” and then split into three parts: General Public, International Beat, and Fine Young Cannibals.

“Dream Home in NZ.” Wha’ppen? Go-Feet Records, 1981, LP.

“Get-a-Job.” Wha’ppen? Go-Feet Records, 1981, LP.

“Two Swords.” I Just Can’t Stop It. Go-Feet Records, 1980, LP.

“Whine & Grine/Stand Down Margaret.” I Just Can’t Stop It. Go-Feet Records, 1980, LP.

Chuck Berry. The father of rock ’n’ roll, in a career that spanned seven decades, had only one number-one single, the 1972 novelty song “My Ding-a-Ling.” Jesus wept.

“School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell).” School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)/ Deep Feeling. Chess, 1957, 7″.

Big Audio Dynamite. After he was fired by the Clash, Mick Jones teamed up with DJ Don Letts to create the genre-hopping BAD. They released four albums between 1985 and 1989 but split in 1990, replaced by Big Audio Dynamite II, and then Big Audio, and then Big Audio Dynamite again.

“Funny Names.” Tighten Up Vol. ’88. CBS, 1988, LP.

Big Country. After leaving the Skids, Stuart Adamson started Big Country with Canadian-born guitarist Bruce Watson. Their single “In a Big Country” made them one-hit wonders in North America, but in the UK they had five top-ten albums between 1983 and 1990.

“Steeltown.” Steeltown. Mercury, 1984, LP.

Black Lace. They finished seventh in the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest and made everyone pay for it for a decade.

“Agadoo.” Agadoo. Flair Records, 1984, 7″.

Blah Blah Blah. According to the back cover of their only single, Blah Blah Blah were from Essex. They played minimalist electronica with titles like “My Mother Was a Radiator” and “Weasel Hunting.”

“In the Army.” In the Army. Absurd Records, 1979, 7″.

The Blow Monkeys. Playing jazz- and soul-tinged pop rock, the Blow Monkeys had hits with “Digging Your Scene” and “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.” The single “(Celebrate) the Day After You,” recorded with Curtis Mayfield, might have been a hit too if the BBC hadn’t banned it.

“Atomic Lullaby.” Limping for a Generation. RCA, 1984, LP.

“(Celebrate) The Day After You.” (Celebrate) The Day After You. RCA, 1987, 12″.

The Bluebells. Specializing in jangly guitar pop, Scottish band the Bluebells made the top ten twice, both times with the single “Young at Heart.”

“The Patriot Game.” Sisters. London Records, 1984, LP.

“South Atlantic Way.” Sisters. London Records, 1984, LP.

The Boomtown Rats. From Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, the Boomtown Rats have the distinction of being the first Irish rock band ever to log a number-one hit in the UK, with 1978’s “Rat Trap.” They had ten other top-forty hits before suddenly falling out of fashion in the mid-1980s. Lead singer Bob Geldof was the driving force behind Band Aid and the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts.

“Banana Republic.” Mondo Bongo. Mercury, 1981, LP.

David Bowie. On average, he had one top-forty hit every year for fifty years.

“Fashion.” Scary Monsters. RCA, 1980, LP.

Bow Wow Wow. In 1980 Malcom McLaren (formerly manager of the Sex Pistols) stole Adam Ant’s band, gave them a new lead singer, and had another go at antagonizing the music industry. Bow Wow Wow’s first single, “C-30 C-60 C-90 Go!,” was a celebration of cassette tapes at a time when the industry was convinced that kids taping things off the radio was going to “kill music.”

“W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No! No! My Daddy Don’t).” W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No! No! My Daddy Don’t). EMI, 1981, 7″.

Boy George. A central figure in the new romantic movement that emerged from the Blitz nightclub in London, Boy George had a string of international hits in the early 1980s with his band Culture Club. When they split in 1986, he began a solo career, which included the number-one single “Everything I Own” in 1987.

“No Clause 28 (Hi-Energy Mix).” Boyfriend. Virgin, 1989, LP.

Bradford. With their plangent guitars and thoughtful lyrics, Blackburn indie band Bradford arrived at exactly the wrong moment, just as Madchester swept the North. Nevertheless, they managed two top-twenty indie singles in 1989, “In Liverpool” and “Adrift Again.”

“Greed and Peasant Land.” Shouting Quietly. The Foundation Label, 1990, LP.

Billy Bragg. The bard of Barking. Billy Bragg made two albums mostly consisting of smart, gentle social commentary before Thatcher made the mistake of attacking the miners. The most immediate result was Bragg’s highest charting single, “Between the Wars.” The longer-term results were the Jobs for Youth tour, Red Wedge, and Bragg’s formidable career as an activist and public intellectual.

“Between the Wars.” Between the Wars. Go! Discs, 1985, LP.

“The Busy Girl Buys Beauty.” Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy. Utility, Go! Discs, 1983, LP.

“The Few.” Don’t Try This at Home. Go! Discs, 1991, LP.

“God’s Footballer.” Don’t Try This at Home. Go! Discs, 1991, LP.

“The Home Front.” Talking with the Tax Man about Poetry. Go! Discs, 1986, LP.

“It Says Here.” Brewing Up with Billy Bragg. Go! Discs, 1984, LP.

“Rumours of War.” Don’t Try This at Home. Go! Discs, 1991, LP.

“There Is Power in a Union.” Talking with the Tax Man about Poetry. Go! Discs, 1986, LP.

“To Have and to Have Not.” Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy. Utility, Go! Discs, 1983, LP.

“Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” Workers Playtime. Go! Discs, 1988, LP.

“Which Side Are You On?” Between the Wars. Go! Discs, 1985, LP.

Francie Brolly. With his wife, Anne, Francie Brolly released several albums of republican folk songs in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The duo subsequently went into politics.

“H. Block Song.” Various Artists. H-Block. Music For H-Block, 1978, LP.

Bronski Beat. They were a synth-pop trio formed in London in 1983, although two-thirds of the original lineup were Glaswegian. They had three top-ten hits before Somerville left to start the Communards in 1985. The new, less Glaswegian lineup subsequently produced the top-ten single “Hit That Perfect Beat.”

“Hit That Perfect Beat.” Hit That Perfect Beat. London Records, 1985, 12″.

“No More War.” The Age of Consent. Forbidden Fruit, 1984, LP.

“Smalltown Boy.” The Age of Consent. Forbidden Fruit, 1984, LP.

“Why?” The Age of Consent. Forbidden Fruit, 1984, LP.

Brown Sauce. For the benefit of non-British readers, “brown sauce” is the generic name for what Americans call “steak sauce.” It’s nice on a bacon sandwich.

“I Just Wanna Be a Winner.” I Wanna Be a Winner. BBC Records, 1981, 7″.

Kate Bush. She arrived in 1978 with a number-one debut single, “Wuthering Heights,” which made her the first woman ever to top the UK charts with her own composition. She followed up with an unbroken string of top-ten albums (twelve of them and counting).

“Breathing.” Never for Ever. EMI, 1980, LP.

The Business. One of the most influential and long running of the Oi! bands, the Business formed in Lewisham, London, in 1979. Bassist Mark Brennan and the band’s manager, Laurie Pryor, also started Link Records, which specialized in reissuing hard-to-find punk recordings.

“Hand Ball.” Welcome to the Real World. Link Records, 1988, LP.

“Hardcore Hooligan.” The Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. Burning Heart Records, 1997, LP.

“Saturdays Heroes.” Saturdays Heroes. Harry May Record Company, 1985, LP.

Buzzcocks. Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto formed Buzzcocks in Manchester after seeing the Sex Pistols. By self-releasing their first EP, Spiral Scratch, on their own New Hormones label, they arguably had more influence on the trajectory of punk than the band who had inspired them.

“Boredom.” Spiral Scratch. New Hormones, 1977, 7″.

“Ever Fallen in Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?).” Love Bites. United Artists, 1978, LP.

John Cale. Cale’s career began with New York’s avant-garde milieu and the Velvet Underground in the mid-1960s. Since then he has recorded two dozen solo albums and has produced more than twice that many for the Stooges, Patti Smith, Brian Eno, Ian Hunter, Happy Mondays, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Manic Street Preachers, among many others.

“Dr. Mudd.” Sabotage/Live. Spy Records Ltd., 1979, LP.

“The Falklands Suite.” A Prayer for the Dying. Land Records, 1989, LP.

The Cannibals. A garage-rock band formed by American vocalist Mike Spenser (formerly of London pub-rock band the Count Bishops), the Cannibals released half a dozen albums between 1982 and 1991.

“Axe the Tax.” Axe the Tax. Hit Records, 1990, 7″.

Captain Sensible. Raymond Ian Burns acquired his nom de guerre as the guitarist for the Damned, which he left after scoring a UK number one with his cover of the showtune “Happy Talk,” from the musical South Pacific. Other slightly less improbable singles followed.

“Glad It’s All Over.” The Power of Love. A&M Records, 1983, LP.

“Hey Jo.” Various Artists. Wargasm. Pax Records, 1982, LP.

“The Russians Are Coming.” This Is Your Captain Speaking. Crass Records, 1981, 7″.

“The Snooker Song.” Captain Sensible/Stephane Grappelli and Mike Batt. The Snooker Song. Trax Music, 1988, 7″.

“Wot! No Meat?” Captain Sensible & The Missus. Wot! No Meat? Animus Records, 1985, 7″.

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. A duo (Jim Bob and Fruitbat), Carter USM deployed an array of samples, looped tapes, and drum machines to fill out their crunching dance-pop sound. They released a dozen top-forty singles between 1991 and 1994.

“Bloodsport for All.” 30 Something. Rough Trade, 1991, LP.

Mike Carver. A songwriter and activist, Carver released three singles, one in support of the Blair Peach Memorial Fund, one in support of the campaign to stop the closure of the Corby steelworks, and one in support of H-Block prisoners in Armagh.

“Murder of Blair Peach.” Murder of Blair Peach. Venom, 1979, 7″.

Chaotic Dischord. Started as a joke by members of Bristol punk band Vice Squad, Chaotic Dischord were, as Ian Glasper puts it, “unashamedly awful, yet somehow strangely relevant.”¹¹

“Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You!” Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You! Riot City Records, 1983, LP.

Charged GBH. One of the first street punk bands, GBH came together in Birmingham in 1978. Their unique combination of punk social commentary and heavy metal horror stories scored them four top-ten indie albums and even propelled three singles into the lower end of the UK charts.

“Heavy Discipline.” City Baby Attacked by Rats. Clay Records, 1982, LP.

Chas and Dave. Londoners Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock played a kind of musichall sing-along version of rock ’n’ roll they dubbed “rockney.” Their biggest successes were the novelty songs “Rabbit” and “Snooker Loopy” and the rock ’n’ roll throwback “Ain’t No Pleasing You.”

“Don’t Anyone Speak English Anymore?” Mustn’t Grumble. Rockney, 1981, LP.

“Snooker Loopy.” As the Matchroom Mob with Chas and Dave. Snooker Loopy. Rockney, 1986, 7″.

Chelsea. Emerging at the same time as the Clash and the Damned, Gene October’s Chelsea never achieved the success of its contemporaries, partly because of constant lineup changes. The entire first lineup, for example, left in the middle of a gig to form Generation X.

“Right to Work.” Right to Work. Step-Forward Records, 1977, 7″.

The Chesterfields. An indie-pop group from Somerset, they were frequent visitors to the indie charts in the late 1980s, most notably with the jangly “Ask Johnny Dee.”

“Lunchtime for the Wild Youth.” Crocodile Tears. Household, 1988, LP.

Chris and Cosey. When performance art provocateurs Throbbing Gristle called it quits in 1981, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti continued to collaborate, producing several albums of arty synth-pop.

“Silent Cry.” Various Artists. Animal Liberation. Wax Trax! Records, 1987, LP.

Chumbawamba. Emerging from an anarchist collective in Leeds in 1982, Chumbawamba delivered their politically uncompromising message in a bewildering variety of musical idioms, including punk, folk-rock, pop-rock, electronic, synth-pop, a cappella, and medieval choral music.

“Animals’ Song.” The Animals Packet. Sky & Trees, 1983, cassette.

“Fitzwilliam.” Various Artists. Dog This: A Tribute to the Great Strike. Forward Sound International, 1985, LP.

“An Interlude: Beginning to Take It Back.” Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records: Starvation, Charity and Rock & Roll Lies & Traditions. Agit Prop, 1986, LP.

“Let It Be.” As Scab Aid. “Let it Be/ The Scum.” Not on label, 1987, 7″.

“The Police Have Been Wonderful.” Common Ground. Not on label, 1985, cassette.

“Rock ’n’ Roles.” Feed the World Starve the Rich. Not on label, 1986, cassette.

“Slag Aid.” Feed the World Starve the Rich. Not on label, 1986, cassette.

“Smash Clause 28!” Smash Clause 28!/Fight the Alton Bill. Agit Prop, 1988, 7″.

“Work.” Chumbawamba and Passion Killers. Be Happy! Despite It All.… Sky & Trees, 1983, cassette.

Citizen Fish. A ska-punk band formed in 1990 by Dick Lucas and members of Lucas’s two previous bands, Subhumans and Culture Shock, Citizen Fish is still active and is based in Bath, Somerset.

“Home Economics.” Free Souls in a Trapped Environment. Bluurg Records, 1990, LP.

“How to Write Ultimate Protest Songs.” Free Souls in a Trapped Environment. Bluurg Records, 1990, LP.

Claire and Friends. Claire Usher was a schoolgirl in Stockport, Manchester, when the novelty song featuring her reached number thirteen on the national charts. She went on to have a reasonably normal life.

“It’s ’Orrible Being in Love (When You’re 8½).” It’s ’Orrible Being in Love (When You’re 8½). BBC Records, 1986, 7″.

Anne Clark with David Harrow. Poet Anne Clark collaborated with a variety of musicians in the 1980s to produce a unique kind of spoken-word synth-pop.

“Poem for a Nuclear Romance.” Changing Places. Red Flame, 1983, LP.

John Cooper Clarke. The original punk poet, Salford’s John Cooper Clarke released four albums of rapid-fire social commentary between 1978 and 1982, frequently backed by the Invisible Girls. They had a top-forty hit in 1979 with “Gimmix! (Play Loud).”

“You Never See a Nipple in the Daily Express.” Où Est la Maison de Fromage? Rabid Records, 1978, LP.

The Clash. One of the most influential of the first-wave punk bands, the Clash evolved rapidly from their punk roots, absorbing influences from reggae, funk, hip-hop, dub, and elsewhere. By the time they imploded in 1986, they had become a global phenomenon in more ways than one.

“Bankrobber.” Bankrobber. CBS, 1980, 7″.

“The Call Up.” Sandinista! CBS, 1980, LP.

“Capitol Radio.” Capitol Radio EP. CBS, 1977, 7″.

“Career Opportunities.” The Clash. CBS, 1977, LP.

“Clampdown.” London Calling. CBS, 1979, LP.

“The Guns of Brixton.” London Calling. CBS, 1979, LP.

“I’m So Bored with the USA.” The Clash. CBS, 1977, LP.

“Ivan Meets G.I. Joe.” Sandinista! CBS, 1980, LP.

“Janie Jones.” The Clash. CBS, 1977, LP.

“Know Your Rights.” Combat Rock. CBS, 1982, LP.

“Lost in the Supermarket.” London Calling. CBS, 1979, LP.

“London Calling.” London Calling. CBS, 1979, LP.

“Radio Clash.” Radio Clash. CBS, 1981, 12″.

“Rudie Can’t Fail.” London Calling. CBS, 1979, LP.

“Should I Stay or Should I Go.” Combat Rock. CBS, 1982, LP.

“Something about England.” Sandinista! CBS, 1980, LP.

“Stop the World.” The Call Up. CBS, 1980, 7″.

“This Is England.” Cut the Crap. CBS, 1985, LP.

“(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais.” (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais. CBS, 1978, 7″.

“Washington Bullets.” Sandinista! CBS, 1980, LP.

“White Riot.” The Clash. CBS, 1977, LP.

The Cleaners from Venus. Without a record deal, without a studio, and frequently without proper equipment, the Cleaners from Venus released eight cassette-only albums of plangent, psychedelia-tinged lo-fi rock that made them DIY heroes. The only consistent member of the band was Martin Newell.

“Living with Victoria Grey.” Living with Victoria Grey. Ammunition Communications, 1987, 12″.

“Gulf War Song.” My Back Wages (1991–1992). Captured Tracks Records, 2014, 12″.

Close Lobsters. One of the bands who appeared on the influential NME compilation C86, Glasgow’s Close Lobsters released two albums and four singles of lyrically oblique indie-rock, all of them top-ten indie hits.

“From This Day On.” What Is There to Smile About. Fire Records, 1988, 12″.

“In Spite of These Times.” Foxheads Stalk This Land. Fire Records, 1987, LP.

The Cockney Rejects. Formed in the East End of London, the Cockney Rejects were the inspiration of the Oi! movement: their song “Oi, Oi, Oi” was the first track on the genre-defining 1980 compilation Oi! The Album. Three top-thirty albums followed, but subsequent attempts to fuse Oi! with heavy metal proved fatal.

“The Power and the Glory.” The Power and the Glory. EMI, 1981, LP.

“War on the Terraces.” We Are the Firm. Zonophone, 1980, 7″.

“We Are the Firm.” We Are the Firm. Zonophone, 1980, 7″.

Cock Sparrer. Propelled into the Oi! scene when their song “Sunday Stripper” was included in the compilation Oi! The Album, Cock Sparrer had actually been around since the early 1970s, and their thumpingly melodic style was as much glam as punk.

“England Belongs to Me.” England Belongs to Me. Carrere, 1982, 7″.

“They Mean Murder.” Running Riot in ’84. Syndicate Records, 1984, LP.

“Riot Squad.” Shock Troops. Razor Records, 1982, LP.

“The Sun Says.” Running Riot in ’84. Syndicate Records, 1984, LP.

“Trouble on the Terraces.” Rarities. Streetlink, 1992, compact disc.

Phil Collins. Both as the lead singer for Genesis and as a solo artist, Phil Collins was an all-destroying behemoth of pop throughout the 1980s.

“Another Day in Paradise.” … But Seriously. Virgin, 1989, LP.

The Colour Field. Although less successful than either of Terry Hall’s previous two bands (the Specials and Fun Boy Three), the Colour Field did manage a top-twenty in 1984 with the sophisti-pop single “Thinking of You.”

“Cruel Circus.” Virgins and Philistines. Chrysalis, 1985, LP.

Commoners Choir. Boff Whalley’s post-Chumbawamba project is a choral group whose manifesto begins, “This will be a choir unlike any other,” and concludes, “We’ll be peculiar, memorable, feisty, celebratory, witty, angry and inclusive.”¹²

“Boris Johnson.” Commoners Choir. No Masters Co-operative Limited, 2017, compact disc.

The Communards. After leaving Bronski Beat, Jimmy Somerville formed the Communards with multi-instrumentalist Richard Coles. “Don’t Leave Me this Way,” a duet with Sarah Jane Morris, was the top single of 1986.

“There’s More to Love Than Boy Meets Girl.” Red. London, 1987, LP.

Conflict. Next to their mentors Crass, Conflict were probably the most influential of the anarcho-punk bands. They had half a dozen top-ten singles on the indie charts between 1982 and 1987 and almost that many top-ten albums. Most of them were released on Conflict’s own label, Mortarhate, which also released material for dozens of other anarcho-punk bands.

“The A Team.” The Final Conflict. Mortarhate Records, 1988, LP.

“Blind Attack.” The House That Man Built. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

“Conflict.” The House That Man Built. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

“The Day Before.” The Ungovernable Force. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“Force or Service.” The Ungovernable Force. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“I’ve Had Enough.” The House That Man Built. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

“Let the Battle Commence.” The Final Conflict. Mortarhate Records, 1988, LP.

“Meat Means Murder.” It’s Time to See Who’s Who. Corpus Christi, 1983, LP.

“Neither Is This.” This Is Not Enough Stand Up and Fucking Fight. Mortarhate Records, 1985, 7″.

“Stop the City.” Increase the Pressure. Mortarhate Records, 1984, LP.

“These Things Take Time.” The Final Conflict. Mortarhate Records, 1988, LP.

“This Is Not Enough” This Is Not Enough Stand Up and Fucking Fight. Mortarhate Records, 1985, 7″.

“This Is the A.L.F.” The Ungovernable Force. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“The Ungovernable Force.” The Ungovernable Force. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“They Said That.” The Ungovernable Force. Mortarhate Records, 1986, LP.

“Wargames.” The House That Man Built. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

Cook Da Books. A Liverpool new wave band formed in 1980, they had the unique and inexplicable career highlight of providing the theme song “The Look Out Is Out” for the animated film Asterix Chez Les Bretons (Asterix in Britain).

“Piggy in the Middle Eight.” Piggie in the Middle Eight. Probe Plus, 1981, 7″.

Julian Cope. Side by side with Echo and the Bunnymen, Cope’s psychedelic postpunk outfit the Teardrop Explodes emerged from Liverpool in 1978. Initially more successful than their compatriots, they had a top-ten single, “Reward,” in 1981. When the band folded in 1982, Cope continued in the same musical vein.

“5 O’Clock World.” My Nation Underground. Island, 1988, LP.

The Cortinas. Bristol’s first punk band, the Cortinas released two high-velocity, Ramones-influenced singles, “Fascist Dictator” and “Defiant Pose,” in 1977 before losing the plot the following year.

“Independence.” Defiant Pose/Independence. Step-Forward Records, 1977, 7″.

Elvis Costello, Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Born Declan McManus, he renamed himself Elvis Costello for his first releases on Stiff Records. He has also, at various times, been Howard Coward, the Imposter, and Napoleon Dynamite. After recording My Aim Is True with session musicians in 1977, he worked with the Attractions (Bruce Thomas, Pete Thomas, and Steve Nieve) to produce eight consecutive top-ten albums.

“Watching the Detectives.” Watching the Detectives. Stiff Records, 1977, 7″.

“Oliver’s Army.” Armed Forces. Radar Records, 1979, LP.

“Pills and Soap.” Punch the Clock. F-Beat, 1983, LP.

“Radio Radio.” Radio Radio. Radar Records, 1978, 7″.

“Secondary Modern.” Get Happy. F-Beat, 1980, LP.

“Sunday’s Best.” Armed Forces. Radar Records, 1979, LP.

“This Year’s Girl.” This Year’s Model. Radar Records, 1978, LP.

“Tramp the Dirt Down.” Spike. Warner Brothers, 1989, LP.

The Council Collective. A one-off created by Paul Weller to release the benefit single “Soul Deep.” The rest of the collective were Mick Talbot and Dee C. Lee (i.e., the Style Council) and soul singers Jimmy Ruffin and Junior Giscombe.

“Soul Deep.” Soul Deep. Polydor, 1984, 12″.

The Country Pickets. A one-off group assembled for the miners’ benefit album Which Side Are You On?

“Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?” Various Artists. Which Side Are You On? Music for the Miners from the North East. Which Side Records, 1985, LP.

Crass. They might have sounded, as Martin Newell put it, like “two lathes buggering each other on an elevator in an aircraft hangar,”¹³ but from their base of operations at Dial House, in Essex, Crass instigated and sustained the anarcho-punk scene while their label, Crass Records, with its visually distinctive releases, established its aesthetic.

“Bata Motel.” Penis Envy. Crass Records, 1981, LP.

“Do They Owe Us a Living?” Stations of the Crass. Crass Records, 1979, LP.

“Gotcha.” Sheep Farming in the Falklands. Crass Records, 1983, 7″.

“How Does It Feel (to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)?” How Does It Feel. Crass Records, 1983, 7″.

“Nagasaki Nightmare.” Nagasaki Nightmare/Big A Little A. Crass Records, 1980, 7″.

“Nineteen Eighty Bore.” Christ—The Album. Crass Records, 1982, LP.

“White Punks on Hope.” Stations of the Crass. Crass Records, 1979, LP.

“Sheep Farming in the Falklands.” Sheep Farming in the Falklands. Crass Records, 1983, 7″.

“Sheep Farming in the Falklands.” Best Before … 1984. Crass Records, 1986, LP.

“You’re Already Dead.” You’re Already Dead. Crass Records, 1984, 7″.

The Cravats. Although their emergence from Redditch coincided with the first wave of punk, and although Crass released an album and single for them, they were never exactly punks. “We wandered off in our own direction,” vocalist Robin Dallaway explains.¹⁴

“Gordon.” Gordon/Situations Vacant. Small Wonder Records, 1978, 7″.

Crisis. Crisis came from Guildford, Surrey. They were proudly affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was distinct, they were quick to point out, from the International Marxist Group (IMG) and the Communist Party-Stalinist (CP-S). “No way would we be members of the CP-Stalinists!” their guitarist scoffed.¹⁵

“PC One Nine Eight Four.” No Town Hall (Southwark). Action Group Records, 1978, 7″.

“UK ’79.” UK ’79 b/w White Youth. Ardkor Records, 1979, 7″.

Crucial Robbie. Sound system DJ Crucial Robbie (Robbie Lyle) had a number-one hit on the reggae charts with 1989’s “Proud to Be Black.” These days he’s better known as the creator of ArsenalFanTV.

“Axe the Poll Tax.” Crucial View. Ariwa, 1990, LP.

“Fraid to Get Kickup.” Crucial View. Ariwa, 1990, LP.

Culture Club. With the possible exception of Duran Duran, Culture Club were the most successful of the “new pop” groups. Their commercial peak was 1983’s “Karma Chameleon,” which went to number one virtually everywhere in the world.

“The War Song.” Waking Up with the House on Fire. Virgin, 1984, LP.

Culture Shock. When Subhumans temporarily called it a day in 1985, Dick Lucas segued into Culture Shock without missing a beat. More ska-inflected than Subhumans, Culture Shock shared the previous band’s political sensibilities.

“Colour TV.” Onwards & Upwards. Bluurg Records, 1988, LP.

“Northern Ireland.” All the Time. Bluurg Records, 1989, LP.

“Stonehenge.” Various Artists. Stonehenge. Bluurg Records, 1987, 7″.

“Twenty Questions.” All the Time. Bluurg Records, 1989, LP.

The Defects. The Defects released only one album, Defective Breakdown, but it spent ten weeks on the indie charts, peaking at number ten. Perhaps predictably, their song “Brutality” made them a favoured target for police brutality in their native Belfast.

“Brutality.” Dance (Until You Drop). Casualty Records, 1981, 7″.

Def Leppard. A heavy rock band from Sheffield, Def Leppard are best known for their 1987 album Hysteria, which went double platinum in the UK and twelve times platinum in the United States.

“When the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down.” On through the Night. Vertigo, 1980, LP.

Deman Rockers. David Destouche, from Hackney, London, would team up with his brother Trevor as the Ragga Twins in 1990 to release Reggae Owes Me Money. The album, which reached number twenty-six on the national charts, pioneered jungle.

“Iron Lady.” J. Osborne/Demon Rockers. Put It by Number One/Iron Lady. Unity Sounds, 1985, 12″.

Denim. When indie-pop band Felt folded after ten albums, lead singer Lawrence Hayward created Denim. The band fused techno with Seventies glam; as Hayward explained in “I’m Against the Eighties,” “I’ve made a new sound … concerns the future and the past / But not the eighties.”

“Osmonds.” Back in Denim. Boy’s Own Recordings, 1992, LP.

Depeche Mode. Formed in Basildon, Essex, Depeche Mode evolved from synthpop lightweights into electronic music heavyweights over the course of the Eighties, racking up two dozen top-thirty hits in the process. The hits kept coming in the Nineties.

“Everything Counts.” Everything Counts. Mute, 1983, 7″.

“New Dress.” Black Celebration. Mute, 1986, LP.

“Two Minutes Warning.” Construction Time Again. Mute, 1983, LP.

“Work Hard.” Everything Counts. Mute, 1983, 7″.

Desperate Bicycles. Pioneers of DIY punk, East London’s Desperate Bicycles were one of the first punk bands to record and release a record on their own label.

“It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it,” they explained.

“Don’t Back the Front.” The Medium Was Tedium/Don’t Back the Front. Refill Records, 1977, 7″.

Dexys Midnight Runners. Kevin Rowland was prone to vainglorious posturing, but over the course of three albums (and at least three distinct lineups) Dexys produced almost enough top-ten hits to justify it.

“One of Those Things.” Don’t Stand Me Down. Mercury, 1985, LP.

“This Is What She’s Like.” Don’t Stand Me Down. Mercury, 1985, LP.

The Diagram Brothers. Manchester post-punks the Diagram Brothers played what they called, appropriately, “discordo.” Andy Diagram would later add his distinctive trumpet sound to the fabulously out-of-step, Burt Bacharach–loving Pale Fountains and then to the most successful lineup of Manchester rock band James.

“Isn’t It Interesting How Neutron Bombs Work.” Some Marvels of Modern Science. New Hormones, 1981, LP.

“My Dinner.” Discordo 45. New Hormones, 1982, 7″.

“Put It in a Bigger Box.” Some Marvels of Modern Science. New Hormones, 1981, LP.

“Seals/Fur Coats.” Some Marvels of Modern Science. New Hormones, 1981, LP.

Dire Straits. Mark and David Knopfler formed Dire Straits in Newcastle in 1977. Starting with “Sultans of Swing” in 1979, they were pretty consistently on the charts until they split (for the first time) in 1987. Their album Brothers in Arms spent fourteen weeks at number one; it was the first album to sell more copies on CD than on vinyl.

“Iron Hand.” On Every Street. Vertigo, 1991, LP.

“Money for Nothing.” Brothers in Arms. Vertigo, 1985, LP.

Dirge. Based in Leicester, hardcore band Dirge recorded a five-song demo tape in 1984 that wasn’t released until twenty years later. “Blood Sports” and “Bootiful,” both from that demo tape, found their way onto several animal rights benefit cassettes in the mid-1980s, however.

“Blood Sports.” Various Artists. A Song for the Animals. LOL Tapes, 1984, cassette.

Discharge. They were so influential that they literally have a genre named after them: D-beat. Between 1980 and 1985 they had ten top-ten indie singles. Their album Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing even reached number forty on the national charts, making May 1982 one of the loudest months on record.

“A Look at Tomorrow.” Why. Clay Records, 1981, 12″.

“Realities of War.” Realities of War. Clay Records, 1980, 7″.

Dougie. According to the demo he sent to Crass in 1982, you could get info about Doug Anderson by writing to 75 Hill Street, Hamilton, Lanarkshire. It’s possible he’s moved since then.

“War without Winners.” Various Artists. Bullshit Detector Two. Crass Records, 1982, LP.

John Dowie. Born in Birmingham in 1950, Dowie started his career in comedy in the late 1960s. That varied career saw him work as a dramatist, poet, actor, musician, director, and stand-up comedian. He had a comedy-rock band called the Big Girl’s Blouse in the 1970s, which he disbanded after seeing the Sex Pistols and deciding he couldn’t compete.¹⁶

“British Tourist (I Hate the Dutch).” Another Close Shave. Virgin, 1977, 7″.

The Dream Academy. As their name suggests, the Dream Academy played pop for sleepwalkers. Their first single, “Life in a Northern Town,” drifted into the charts, but they never found their way back into the top fifty after that.

“Life in a Northern Town.” The Dream Academy. Blanco Y Negro, 1985, LP.

Dubious Brothers. Lead singer Monty described the Dubious Brothers as “anar-cho music hall.”¹⁷ Monty was subsequently responsible for the London Punkharmonic Orchestra, which recorded straight-faced classical arrangements of, among other things, “White Riot” and “Pretty Vacant.”

“The Dog Ate My Poll Tax Form.” The Dog Ate My Poll Tax Form. Glutton for Punishment, 1989, 7″.

Ian Dury. Originally from West London, Dury migrated, over the course of his life, all the way to East London. He specialized in half-sung, half-spoken commentaries on British society, releasing two top-ten albums, New Boots and Panties and Do It Yourself, with his band the Blockheads.

“Billericay Dickie.” New Boots and Panties. Stiff Records, 1977, LP.

“Ban the Bomb.” As Ian Dury and the Music Students. Very Personal. Polydor, 1984, 7″.

Easterhouse. They shared a name with a notoriously grim Glasgow housing estate, but Easterhouse actually came from Stetford, home of Manchester United. They wedded melodic guitar rock to overtly political lyrics, producing several indie hits, most notably “Whistling in the Dark,” which peaked at number two.

“Ain’t That Always the Way.” Whistling in the Dark. Rough Trade, 1985, 12″.

“Confrontation.” Whistling in the Dark. Rough Trade, 1985, 12″.

“Inspiration.” Inspiration. Rough Trade, 1986, 12″.

“Nineteen Sixty-Nine.” Contenders. Rough Trade, 1986, LP.

“Stay with Me (Death on the Dole).” Waiting for the Redbird. Rough Trade, 1989, LP.

“This Country.” Waiting for the Redbird. Rough Trade, 1989, LP.

“Whistling in the Dark.” Whistling in the Dark. Rough Trade, 1985, 12″.

Echo and the Bunnymen. Like U2, Liverpool’s Echo and the Bunnymen played Big Music, although their lead singer, Ian McCulloch, explained they were “an oceans and mountains band,” whereas U2 were “music for plumbers and bricklayers.”¹⁸

“All That Jazz.” Crocodiles. Korova, 1980, LP.

Electro Hippies. DIY hardcore punks from Merseyside and Manchester, the Electro Hippies were animal rights advocates with a deep and abiding hatred of Ronald McDonald.

“Sheep.” If Killing Babies Is Tight … Killing Babies for Profit Is Even Tighter. Not on label, 1987, cassette.

“Run Ronald.” The Only Good Punk … Is a Dead One. Peaceville, 1988, LP. “Scum.” The Only Good Punk … Is a Dead One. Peaceville, 1988, LP.

“Turkeys.” The Only Good Punk … Is a Dead One. Peaceville, 1988, LP.

Endangered Species. Without question the most obscure band in this discography. Their only known recording was “Slaughter of the Innocent (Curiosity Kills),” which appeared on Crass’s Bullshit Detector Two. “This tape was sent without an address,” the liner notes say. “Could the band please contact us?”

“Slaughter of the Innocent (Curiosity Kills).” Various Artists. Bullshit Detector Two. Crass Records, 1982, LP.

The Enemy. Formed in Derby in 1980, the Enemy released half a dozen singles and two albums of melodic punk, firmly in the vein of the Clash’s early recordings, before splitting up in 1984.

“Fallen Hero.” Fallen Hero. Fallout Records, 1982, 7″.

The Enemy Within. A one-off recorded for the benefit of the Miners’ Solidarity Fund, “Strike” reached number two on the independent charts.

“Strike.” Support the Miners. Rough Trade, 1984, 7″.

Energy Orchard. A folk-rock band from Belfast, Energy Orchard were signed by MCA in 1989 but never quite achieved mainstream success.

“Belfast.” Energy Orchard. MCA Records, 1990, LP.

Harry Enfield. Saturday Live, which ran for three series between 1985 and ’88, was a veritable who’s who of alternative comedy; it made stars of regulars Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton, and Harry Enfield, whose most memorable contribution to the series was certainly the character Loadsamoney.

“Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up the House).” Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up the House). Mercury, 1988, 7″.

Kenny Everett. Radio DJ and comedian Kenny Everett was a fixture on British airwaves from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. In the 1980s he supported Thatcher; she thanked him by enacting Clause 28, which censured his homosexual lifestyle.

“Snot Rap.” Snot Rap. RCA, 1983, 7″.

Everything but the Girl. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt formed Everything but the Girl while at the University of Hull. Their early, jazz-influenced recordings pioneered what came to be called sophisti-pop, but their commercial peak would come in the mid-1990s when “Missing” fused their acoustic sound with electronica.

“Anytown.” Love Not Money. Blanco Y Negro, 1985, LP.

“Ballad of the Times.” Love Not Money. Blanco Y Negro, 1985, LP.

“The Night I Heard Caruso Sing.” Idlewild. Blanco Y Negro, 1988, LP.

Exit-Stance. Closely associated with Conflict, with whom they frequently played, Milton Keynes’s Exit-Stance could honestly say, “We never made a penny out of all this, we never thought we would; we didn’t do it for fame, we just did it because we cared—it felt right—and because we could.”¹⁹

“Ballykelly Disco.” Crime Against Humanity. Fight Back Records, 1984, 7″.

“They Kill Dogs.” While Backs Are Turned. Mortarhate, 1985, LP.

The Exploited. Their first album, Punks Not Dead, reached number twenty on the national charts, making the point very nicely. The following year, Troops of Tomorrow did even better and cemented the Exploited’s position as the biggest of the second-wave punk bands.

“Army Life.” Army Life. The Exploited Record Company, 1980, 7″.

“Alternatives.” Attack, Alternative. Secret Records, 1982, 7″.

“Boys in Blue.” The Massacre. Rough Justice, 1990, LP.

“Daily News.” Troops of Tomorrow. Secret Records, 1982, LP.

“Disorder.” Troops of Tomorrow. Secret Records, 1982, LP.

“Dole Q.” Punks Not Dead. Secret Records, 1981, LP.

“Don’t Pay the Poll Tax.” The Massacre. Rough Justice, 1990, LP.

“False Hopes.” Let’s Start a War Said Maggie One Day. Pax Records, 1983, LP.

“I Believe in Anarchy.” Punks Not Dead. Secret Records, 1981, LP.

“Let’s Start a War … (Said Maggie One Day).” Let’s Start a War Said Maggie One Day. Pax Records, 1983, LP.

“Maggie.” Horror Epics. Konexion, 1985, LP.

“Rival Leaders.” Rival Leaders. Pax Records, 1983, 7″.

“Safe Below.” Let’s Start a War Said Maggie One Day. Pax Records, 1983, LP.

“SPG.” Punks Not Dead. Secret Records, 1981, LP.

Faction. Faction’s only single was released on Subhumans’ label, Bluurg. Dick Lucas explains, “Mel [Bell] was Subhumans guitarist Bruce’s g/friend, and Rob [Challice] their bassist used to be his best mate … if we played London we’d stay at their shared house—96 Brougham Road in Hackney, from where Rob on bass ran his DIY cassette label 96 Tapes.”²⁰

“Obligatory War Song.” Through the Window. 96 Tapes, 1982, cassette.

The Faith Brothers. Despite releasing half a dozen singles and opening for some major acts, including R.E.M. and U2, the Faith Brothers couldn’t turn their soul-influenced rock into chart success. They disbanded in 1987.

“Easter Parade.” Eventide. Siren, 1985, LP.

The Faithful. A one-off by producer Jonathan King.

“We Can’t Let Maggie Go.” We Can’t Let Maggie Go. Chrysalis, 1990, 7″.

Marianne Faithfull. Her career began in the early 1960s but went badly off the rails in the early ’70s. The punk-influenced Broken English returned her to public attention in 1979; by then, laryngitis and hard living had permanently altered her voice.

“Ireland.” A Childs Adventure. Island, 1983, LP.

The Fall. The archetypal post-punk band, the Fall released thirty-one studio albums and another hundred or so live albums and compilations, on two dozen different indie labels between 1978 and Mark E. Smith’s untimely death in 2018. Their early 1980s albums on Rough Trade and Kamera were hugely influential on the trajectory of independent music.

“2nd Dark Age.” Fiery Jack. Step-Forward Records, 1980, 7″.

“Bingo-Master.” Bingo-Master’s Break-Out! Step-Forward Records, 1978, 7″.

“Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow.” Live at the Witch Trials. Step-Forward Records, 1979, LP.

“Marquis Cha Cha.” Room to Live. Kamera Records, 1982, LP.

“The N.W.R.A.” Grotesque (After the Gramme). Rough Trade, 1980, LP.

Fallout. A DIY punk band from Surrey, two of its members had formerly been part of the equally DIY Six Minute War.

“AIDS Charade.” Various Artists. We Won’t Be Your Fucking Poor. Mortarhate, 1985, LP.

“Tell Me About It.” Butchery. No label, 1985, 10”.

“Pound of Flesh.” Home Killed Meat. No label, 1983, LP.

“Salt Mines.” Home Killed Meat. No label, 1983, LP.

The Farm. They started out as an indie guitar-pop band and had a top-ten indie hit with “Hearts and Minds” in 1984. By 1990, after a lineup change, they had transitioned to a kind of house-influenced synth-pop that gave them two national top-tens: “Groovy Train” and “All Together Now.”

“All Together Now.” All Together Now. Produce Records, 1990, 12″.

Fine Young Cannibals. When the Beat disintegrated, bassist David Steel and guitarist Andy Cox hooked up with a new vocalist and started making soulful synth-pop. It made them the most successful of the Beat offshoots: their second album, The Raw and the Cooked, went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic in 1989.

“Blue.” Fine Young Cannibals. London Records, 1985, LP.

“Move to Work.” Fine Young Cannibals. London Records, 1985, LP.

The Fire Engines. One of those bands whose influence on other bands was infinitely greater than their influence on the listening habits of the British public, the Fire Engines only recorded a dozen or so studio tracks, all wiry guitars and barely contained aggression, before folding in 1981. There are many covers of “Fascist Groove Thang,” but theirs is pretty much definitive.

“We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thang.” Fond. Rev-Ola, 1992, LP.

The Firm. Bored session musicians. Novelty songs happened.

“Arthur Daley (E’s Alright).” Arthur Daley E’s Alright. Stiff Records, 1982, 7″.

“Star Trekkin.” Star Trekkin. Bark, 1987, 7″.

The Four Bucketeers. Children’s show presenters. Novelty songs happened.

“The Bucket of Water Song.” The Bucket of Water Song. CBS, 1980, 7″.

4 Skins. One of the genre-defining Oi! bands, the 4-Skins were from Hoxton, East London. Tom “Hoxton” McCourt describes their sound: “The music was punk but it was faster … A lot heavier and more basic, like Sabbath meets The Ramones, with terrace chants.”²¹ Their first album, The Good, the Bad & the 4 Skins, was an indie number one.

“I Don’t Wanna Die.” The Good, the Bad & the 4 Skins. Secret Records, 1982, LP.

“One Law for Them.” One Law for Them. Clockwork Fun, 1981, 7″.

Flux of Pink Indians. Both thematically and stylistically searching, Hertfordshire’s Flux of Pink Indians (later just Flux) were a distinctive presence on the anarcho-punk scene. Their first album, Strive to Survive, released on their own Spiderleg label, topped the indie charts. Bassist Derek Birkett subsequently founded One Little Indian Records (now One Little Independent Records).

“Blinded by Science.” Strive to Survive Causing the Least Suffering Possible. Spiderleg Records, 1982, LP.

“Myxamatosis.” Strive to Survive Causing the Least Suffering Possible. Spiderleg Records, 1982, LP.

“Tapioca Sunrise.” Strive to Survive Causing the Least Suffering Possible. Spiderleg Records, 1982, LP.

“They Lie, We Die.” Strive to Survive Causing the Least Suffering Possible. Spiderleg Records, 1982, LP.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Largely the creation of producer Trevor Horn (although the band didn’t see it that way), Frankie had three number-one hits in 1984, including the two best-selling singles of the decade. The first, “Relax,” was already a hit when the BBC suddenly realized that the chorus was “Relax, don’t do it, when you want to come” and panicked.

“Relax.” Welcome to the Pleasuredome. ZTT, 1984, LP.

“Two Tribes.” Welcome to the Pleasuredome. ZTT, 1984, LP.

The Freshies. Before Chris Sievey became the fibreglass-headed comedian Frank Sidebottom (one of those things impossible to explain to non-British audiences), he had a power-pop band called the Freshies. Their single “I’m in Love with the Girl on the Virgin Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk,” released on their own Razz Records, was a minor indie hit in 1981.

“Wrap Up the Rockets.” Wrap Up the Rockets. MCA Records, 1980, 7″.

Funboy Five. They came from Hemel Hempstead, and there were only four of them. They released one single, in 1980, and then, having got it right the first time, stopped.

“Compulsive Eater.” Life after Death. Cool-Cat-Daddy-O Records, 1980, 7″.

Fun Boy Three. Three former members of the Specials, their first single was 1981’s ironically gloomy “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum.” Top-ten success came a year later when they teamed up with Bananarama to record

“It Ain’t What You Do” and “Really Saying Something.”

“The More I See (The Less I Believe).” Waiting. Chrysalis, 1983, LP.

Peter Gabriel. The one-time lead singer for Genesis had a respectable chart career in Britain in the 1980s, but he was probably bigger in the United States, where “Sledgehammer” went to number one in 1986 (partly on the strength of the video by Aardman Animations, of Wallace and Gromit fame).

“Biko.” Peter Gabriel. Charisma, 1980, LP.

Gang of Four. The fine art department at Leeds University, which treated political and cultural theory as “inseparably intertwined with artistic practice,”²² produced three post-punk bands: the Mekons, Delta 5, and Gang of Four. Gang of Four were particularly influential in defining a strain of politically engaged post-punk.

“At Home (He’s a Tourist).” Entertainment. EMI, 1979, LP.

“Call Me Up.” Songs of the Free. EMI, 1982, LP.

“Capital (It Fails Us Now).” To Hell with Poverty. EMI, 1981, 7″.

“Ether.” Entertainment. EMI, 1979, LP.

“Guns before Butter.” Entertainment. EMI, 1979, LP.

“I Will Be a Good Boy.” Songs of the Free. EMI, 1982, LP.

Dick Gaughan. Scottish singer-songwriter Dick Gaughan began his recording career in 1972, singing mainly traditional folk songs. His most successful release, however, was 1981’s Handful of Earth, which mixed traditional songs with his own politically charged composition.

“Both Sides the Tweed.” Handful of Earth. Topic Records, 1981, LP.

“Song for Ireland.” Handful of Earth. Topic Records, 1981, LP.

“Which Side Are You On?” Live in Edinburgh. Celtic Music, 1985, LP.

Generation X. The two key members of Generation X were Tony James, who would go on to create Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and Billy Idol, who would spend most of the 1980s in the US rock charts as a solo act.

“Youth Youth Youth.” Generation X. Chrysalis, 1978, LP.

Genesis. Originally an aimlessly long-haired public-school prog rock band, Genesis evolved into a ruthlessly efficient pop-rock machine in the 1980s, producing half a dozen number-one albums.

“Match of the Day.” Spot the Pigeon. Charisma, 1977, 7″.

Genital Deformities. Thrash/grindcore band from the West Midlands. GD’s demo cassette, Profession of Violence, made it onto vinyl twice, once as a split with Polish death metal band Nuclear Death, once as a split with Portuguese hardcore band Subcaos.

“Fuck the Poll Tax.” Profession of Violence. Not on label, 1990(?), cassette.

“You’ll Never Know Why.” Profession of Violence. Not on label, 1990(?), cassette.

Gillan. When Deep Purple split up in 1976, lead singer Ian Gillan formed Gillan and released the album Gillan. Five more albums followed, all UK top-twenty hits, before Deep Purple reformed in 1984.

“Mutually Assured Destruction.” Double Trouble. Virgin, 1981, LP.

Girls at Our Best. They were actually one girl and three boys, from Leeds. Their uniquely jittery take on post-punk gave them four successful indie singles and an album that found its way into the lower reaches of the national charts, all in 1980–81.

“Getting Nowhere Fast.” Getting Nowhere Fast/Warm Girls. Record Records, 1980, 7″.

The Godfathers. Formed in London in 1985. Their early releases on their own label, Corporate Image, did well on the independent charts, but the band never quite broke through after being signed by Epic. Their R&B-based hard rock went down better in the United States, where their singles “She Gives Me Love” and “Unreal World” were played heavily on modern rock stations.

“Birth School Work Death.” Birth School Work Death. Epic, 1987, LP.

God’s Little Monkeys. A folk-rock group from York formed in 1985, they released a couple of EPs and an album as Malcolm’s Interview before changing their name to God’s Little Monkeys. Two more albums followed before they disbanded in 1991.

“Reynard.” Various Artists. The Sporting Life? Agit Prop, 1988, LP.

Dave Goodman and Friends. Dave Goodman was best known as a producer for various first-wave punk bands, including the Sex Pistols. The Friends were ex-Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones and Vibrators bassist Ben Brieley.

“Justifiable Homicide.” Justifiable Homicide. The Label, 1978, 7″.

Eddy Grant. Born in British Guiana, Grant moved to North London with his parents in 1960. There he formed R&B band the Equals, who had a number-one hit with “Baby, Come Back” in 1968. As a solo artist, fusing calypso, reggae, and pop, Grant produced several hits in the 1980s, including the number-one single “I Don’t Wanna Dance.”

“Electric Avenue.” Killer on the Rampage. ICE, 1982, LP.

“Gimme Hope Jo’Anna.” File Under Rock. Parlophone, 1988, LP.

Glenroy Grant. Best guess, Glenroy Grant was from somewhere in or around Acton. He self-released three 12” singles and an LP, There Goes My Everything.

“No Poll Tax.” No Poll Tax. Not on label, 1990, 12″.

The Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band & G.C.H.Q. Trade Unions with 7:84 Theatre Co. England. A one-off collaboration in aid of the TUC Miners Hardship Fund, but not a unique one: the collaboration between artists, musicians, miners, trade unionists, and independent labels (in this case Rough Trade) in defence of shared ideals was one of the characteristic features of the 1984–85 miners’ strike.

“Raise Your Banners High.” Robert Wyatt/The Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band & G.C.H.Q. Trade Unions with 7:84 Theatre Co. England. The Age of Self/Raise Your Banners High. TUC, 1985, 7″.

Half Man Half Biscuit. From Birkenhead, Merseyside, HMHB were Tranmere Rovers FC fans. They were also one of John Peel’s favourite bands (they recorded twelve Peel Sessions), and their debut album, Back in the D.H.S.S., spent almost a year on the indie charts, peaking at number one in 1986.

“All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit.” Back Again in the D.H.S.S. Probe Plus, 1987, LP.

“Fuckin’ ’Ell, It’s Fred Titmus.” Back in the D.H.S.S. Probe Plus, 1985, LP. “Hedley Verityesque.” McIntyre, Treadmore and Davitt. Probe Plus, 1991, LP. “Let’s Not.” McIntyre, Treadmore and Davitt. Probe Plus, 1991, LP.

Peter Hammill. When Hammill’s prog rock outfit Van der Graaf Generator folded, for the second time, in 1978, Hammill focused on his prolific and idiosyncratic solo career. His version of art-rock didn’t often produce hit records, but his early 1980s albums Enter K and Patience both appeared on the indie charts.

“A Motor-Bike in Afrika.” The Future Now. Charisma, 1978, LP.

“Sun City Nightlife.” In a Foreign Town. Enigma, 1988, LP.

Happy Mondays. Formed in Salford in 1982, the Mondays peaked with their third album, 1990’s Pills ’n’ Thrills ’n’ Bellyaches, which yielded the top-ten hit “Step On.” A year later, a homophobic tirade by Shaun Ryder and Mark Berry in NME marked the beginning of their hasty decline.

“Lazyitis.” Bummed. Factory, 1988, LP.

Paul Hardcastle. Several minor synth-pop hits in 1984 were followed by the massive international success of “19”. Subsequently, under a series of pseudonyms (Deff Boyz, Kiss the Sky, and the Jazzmasters), he focused increasingly on smooth jazz.

“19.” Paul Hardcastle. Chrysalis, 1984, 7″.

Roy Harper. Born in Manchester in 1941, singer-songwriter Roy Harper built a durable career not on hit records but on a loyal folk-rock following. His most critically successful albums were probably his eighth, HQ, and his twenty-second, Man and Myth.

“Back to the Stones.” Born in Captivity II. Hard Up, 1992, cassette.

“Government Surplus.” … Descendants of Smith. EMI, 1988, LP.

Keith Harris and Orville. Acts like ventriloquist Keith Harris were endemic to British entertainment in the 1960s and ’70s. They performed at holiday camps, populated television variety shows, and starred in Christmas pantomimes.

Sometimes they made unfortunate records.

“Orville’s Song.” Orville’s Song. BBC Records, 1982, 7″.

Hawkwind. Over its fifty-year existence, and through innumerable lineup changes, Hawkwind has been not so much a band as the countercultural nexus of all things spacey. The band formed in London in 1969 and quickly became part of the emerging free festival movement, pioneering what came to be called space-rock; there were flirtations with chart success in the 1970s, but Hawkwind has always been a live experience.

“Urban Guerrilla.” Urban Guerrilla. United Artists, 1973, 7″.

Heaven 17. They were, as Simon Reynolds puts it, “sons of socialist Sheffield” who aspired to “throw off the shackles of Northern working-class inverted snobbery” while trying not to look like Thatcherite spivs.²³

“Contenders.” Pleasure One. Virgin, 1986, LP.

“Key to the World.” The Luxury Gap. Virgin, 1983, LP.

“Let’s All Make a Bomb.” Penthouse and Pavement. Virgin, 1981, LP.

“(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang.” Penthouse and Pavement. Virgin, 1981, LP.

The Higsons. A post-punk funk band from Norwich, the Higsons had several indie hits, starting with “I Don’t Want to Live with Monkeys” in 1981 and ending with “Music to Watch Girls By” in 1984. Charlie Higson would subsequently become a novelist, TV writer, and actor (most notably in The Fast Show). Guitarist and trumpeter Terry Edwards was also a member of Serious Drinking.

“Conspiracy.” Conspiracy. Waap, 1982, 7″.

Hippy Slags. An all-women band, they were based in Bath, where, Dick Lucas recalls, they were “part of the local counter culture along with bands Smart Pils, Zygote, bits of Hawkwind, Culture Shock, [and] Rhythmites.”²⁴ Singer Bridget Wishart would later join Hawkwind.

“Sunlight on the Truncheons.” Various Artists. Stonehenge. Bluurg Records, 1987, 7″.

Robyn Hitchcock. A prolific writer of witty, often-surreal pop music, Hitchcock is responsible for more than three dozen albums, many of them recorded with the Soft Boys, the Egyptians, or the Venus 3.

“Bells of Rhymney.” Bells of Rhymney. Midnight Music, 1984, 12″.

“Do Policemen Sing?” Black Snake Diamond Röle. Armageddon Records, 1981, LP.

“Kung Fu Fighting.” Various Artists. Alvin Lives (in Leeds). Midnight Music, 1990, LP.

“Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus.” I Often Dream of Trains. Midnight Music, 1984, LP.

Hit Parade. Belfast anarchist David Hyndman recorded two singles and one album, all released on Crass Records. The second single, “Plastic Culture,” was a minor indie hit in 1985.

“Media Song.” Bad News. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

Honey Bane. Most widely known for her Jimmy Pursey-produced single “Turn Me On Turn Me Off,” Honey Bane started out, at age fourteen, as lead singer for London punk band Fatal Microbes. On her first solo release, “Girl on the Run,” she was backed by Crass. After that, things got a bit new-wavey.

“Girl on the Run.” You Can Be You. Crass Records, 1979, 7″.

The Housemartins. Formed at the University of Hull in the early 1980s, the Housemartins wrote insouciant indie-pop that tried to conceal the political weight of its lyrics. When the band split in 1988, after several hit singles and two top-ten albums, Heaton formed the Beautiful South. Bassist Norman Cook would eventually become Fatboy Slim.

“Think for a Minute.” London 0 Hull 4. Go! Discs, 1986, LP.

“We Are Not Going Back.” The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. Go! Discs, 1987, LP.

“The World’s on Fire.” The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. Go! Discs, 1987, LP.

Alan Hull. Born in Newcastle, Hull was a founding member of the folk-rock group Lindisfarne. He also released half a dozen solo albums in the folk-rock vein.

“Heroes.” Various Artists. Heroes. Rock ’n’ Dole, 1985, LP.

Hue & Cry. Brothers Pat and Greg Kane, from Glasgow, had a top-ten hit with the soul-pop single “Labour of Love” in 1987. No other major hits followed, but the duo built a long career on their mixture of soul, jazz, funk, and pop.

“Strength to Strength.” Seduced and Abandoned. Circa, 1987, LP.

The Human League. The Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh version was a moderately successful industrial synth outfit; the Phil Oakey version was a chart-crushing synth-pop leviathan.

“Circus of Death.” Being Boiled/Circus of Death. Fast Product, 1978, 7″.

“Don’t You Want Me.” Dare. Virgin, 1981, LP.

“I Am the Law.” Dare. Virgin, 1981, LP.

Icons of Filth. Anarcho-punks from Cardiff, Wales, Icons of Filth released three singles and two albums on Conflict’s Mortarhate label and Crass’s Corpus Christi. All three singles were top twenty on the indie charts; their album Onward Christian Soldiers was top-ten.

“One Second to Midnight.” Onward Christian Soldiers. Mortarhate Records, 1984, LP.

“Success on a Plate (for Who?)” Brain Death. Mortarhate Records, 1985, 7″.

“Your Military.” Not on Her Majesty’s Service. Mortarhate Records, 1983, cassette.

“Virus.” Used, Abused, Unamused. Corpus Christi, 1983, 7″.

“Show Us You Care.” Onward Christian Soldiers. Mortarhate Records, 1984, LP.

I, Ludicrous. They owed something to the Fall, and just as much to Half Man Half Biscuit, but London’s I, Ludicrous charted their own eccentric spoken-word path through late Eighties indie rock. Their first album, the misleadingly titled It’s Like Everything Else, was a top-ten indie hit.

“Moynihan Brings Out the Hooligan in Me.” A Warning to the Curious. Rodney, Rodney!, 1989, LP.

The Insane. A punk band from Wigan, the Insane went through more than a dozen lineup changes between 1979 and 1985. There were even two competing versions of the band at one point. Their most successful release was the El Salvador EP, which went to number six on the independent charts.

“El Salvador.” El Salvador. No Future Records, 1982, 7″.

Instant Automatons. Lo-fi and entirely DIY, Lincolnshire’s Instant Automatons were devoted proponents of free music because, vocalist Mark Lancaster explained, “I would have felt as uncomfortable asking people to pay for my words and music as I would have done asking them to pay for the carbon dioxide I exhaled or the nitrogenous waste that came out the other end.”²⁵

“Nothing Ever Happens to Me.” Tape Transport. Deleted Records, 1981, cassette.

Instigators. Paul Halmshaw and Simon Mooney, from Dewsbury, Yorkshire, started Instigators in 1980, inspired and encouraged by Crass. Their recording career started when Dick Lucas’s Bluurg Tapes recorded and released an opening set they played for Subhumans in Bradford. Their first album proper for Bluurg, Nobody Listens Anymore, reached number eighteen on the independent charts.

“All Creatures.” The Blood Is on Your Hands. Bluurg, 1984, 7″.

“The Fix.” Nobody Listens Anymore. Bluurg, 1985, LP.

“Genocide.” All Creatures Great and Small. Bluurg Tapes, 1984, cassette.

“Wrong Word.” Nobody Listens Anymore. Bluurg, 1985, LP.

Tippa Irie. Brixton dancehall MC Tippa Irie specialized in comic narratives and sharp social commentary; his biggest hit was the sing-along “Hello Darling,” in 1986.

“Complain Neighbour.” Complain Neighbour. UK Bubblers, 1985, 12″.

“Football Hooligan.” Is It Really Happening to Me. UK Bubblers, 1986, LP.

Joe Jackson. He arrived in 1978, from Burton-on-Trent, playing snotty power-pop, and then swing, and then pop-rock, and then Latin jazz, and then modern classical. His biggest album, on both sides of the Atlantic, was 1982’s Night and Day.

“Sunday Papers.” Look Sharp! A&M Records, 1978, LP.

“Tango Atlantico.” Big World. A&M Records, 1986, LP.

The Jam. In 1982, the Jam had racked up eighteen top-twenty hits over five years, including three number ones, and had just released their first number-one album, The Gift, so Paul Weller broke up the band. Some people still haven’t quite forgiven him.

“Going Underground.” Going Underground. Polydor, 1980, 7″.

“The Great Depression.” Just Who Is the 5 O’clock Hero. Polydor, 1982, 12″.

“That’s Entertainment.” Sound Affects. Polydor, 1980, LP.

“Time for Truth.” In the City. Polydor, 1977, LP.

James. Originally formed in 1982 as a quartet, Manchester band James hit their artistic and commercial stride when they expanded into a septet in 1988. Six top-ten albums followed over the next decade.

“Charlie Dance.” Strip Mine. Blanco Y Negro, 1988.

“Sit Down.” Sit Down. Rough Trade, 1989, 12″.

The Jazz Butcher. Oxford University literature students Pat Fish and Max Eider started the Jazz Butcher in 1982. The jazz was more in the verbal play of the lyrics than in the music itself, which poured out in a magpie variety of oeuvres.

“Holiday.” Sex and Travel. Glass Records, 1985, LP.

“The Jazz Butcher v. the Prime Minister.” Real Men. Glass Records, 1985, 7″.

Jethro Tull. Ian Anderson’s flute-driven blues-folk-prog-jazz fusion outfit, formed in Blackpool in 1967 and still going.

“Protect and Survive.” A. Chrysalis, 1980, LP.

Linton Kwesi Johnson. One of the pioneers of dub poetry, LKJ was also a member of the activist collective that published Race Today magazine through most of the 1970s and ’80s. That organization’s Marxist and antiracist principles gave his poetry a sharp intellectual edge.

“Di Eagle an’ Di Bear.” Making History. Island, 1984, LP.

“Di Great Insohreckshan.” Making History. Island, 1984, LP.

“Inglan Is a Bitch.” Bass Culture. Island, 1980, LP.

“Liesense Fi Kill.” More Time. LKJ Records Ltd., 1998, LP.

“Reality Poem.” Forces of Victory. Island, 1979, LP.

“Reggae Fi Peach.” Bass Culture. Island, 1980, LP.

“Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem).” Forces of Victory. Island, 1979, LP.

Garry Johnson. The punk poet of choice on Oi! compilations in the early 1980s, Hackney’s Garry Johnson was also, briefly, the manager of the Stone Roses.

“Dead End Yobs.” Various Artists. Strength thru Oi! Deram, 1981, LP.

Robb Johnson. About as definitively punk-folk as you can get, for a period in the 1980s Johnson fronted “a deliberately confrontational agit-prop acoustic trio” called the Ministry of Humour,²⁶ but he is best known for his prolific solo career, recording on his own label, Irregular Records.

“The Animals Song.” Robb Johnson, Carla Lane, Martin Simpson. The Animals Song. Artists for Animals, 1986, 7″.

“The Herald of Free Enterprise.” The Herald of Free Enterprise. Irregular Records, 1988, 7″.

“Vic Williams.” The Robb Johnson Band. Living in the Rubbish. Irregular Records, 1991, 12″.

Howard Jones. Nine top-ten singles and four top-ten albums between 1983 and 1986 made Welsh singer-songwriter Howard Jones a major figure in synth-pop.

“Assault and Battery.” Dream into Action. WEA, 1985, LP.

“Don’t Always Look at the Rain.” Human’s Lib. WEA, 1984, LP.

“New Song.” Human’s Lib. WEA, 1984, LP.

Junior Murvin. Jamaican reggae artist Junior Murvin had only one international hit, “Police & Thieves,” but the Clash heard it and forever after wanted to be a reggae band.

“Police & Thieves.” Police & Thieves. Island, 1977, 12″.

Judas Priest. Versions of Judas Priest have been around since 1969, but the classic lineup came together in 1973–74, with the arrival of Rob Halford and Glenn Tipton. Dressed in studded leather and very little else, they released fourteen albums before vocalist Rob Halford temporarily bowed out in 1993.

“Breaking the Law.” British Steel. CBS, 1980, LP.

“Eat Me Alive.” Defenders of the Faith. CBS, 1984, LP.

“Fever.” Screaming for Vengeance. CBS, 1982, LP.

“Freewheel Burning.” Defenders of the Faith. CBS, 1984, LP.

“Hot Rockin.” Point of Entry. CBS, 1981, LP.

“I’m a Rocker.” Ram It Down. CBS, 1988, LP.

“Love Zone.” Ram It Down. CBS, 1988, LP.

“On the Run.” Point of Entry. CBS, 1981, LP.

“Pain and Pleasure.” Screaming for Vengeance. CBS, 1982, LP.

“Rock Hard Ride Free.” Defenders of the Faith. CBS, 1984, LP.

“Ram It Down.” Ram It Down. CBS, 1988, LP.

“Turbo Lover.” Turbo. CBS, 1986, LP.

The Kinks. From Muswell Hill, London, the Kinks had almost two dozen hits in the 1960s and then recorded a commercially suicidal series of concept albums in the ’70s before the mod revival gave them a path back into the charts, particularly in the United States. Their biggest hit in the 1980s was the nostalgic “Come Dancing.”

“Young Conservatives.” State of Confusion. Arista, 1983, LP.

Kissing the Pink. A synth-pop band formed in London in 1980, Kissing the Pink (then KTP, then Kissing the Pink again) had a top-twenty hit with “The Last Film” in 1983.

“Greenham.” What Noise? Magnet, 1984, LP.

“Victory Parade.” What Noise? Magnet, 1984, LP.

Kitchens of Distinction. A trio formed in Tooting, London, in 1986. Occasionally billing themselves as Toilets of Destruction, they played swooping, sometimes ethereal indie rock.

“Breathing Fear.” The Death of Cool. One Little Indian, 1992, LP.

“Margaret’s Injection.” Elephantine EP. One Little Indian, 1989, 12″.

Kronstadt Uprising. Starting out as the Bleeding Pyles, Kronstad Uprising renamed themselves for the doomed 1921 revolt against Russia’s Bolshevik government and recorded two EPs, one of them The Unknown Revolution for Flux of Pink Indians’ label Spiderleg. It comprised, as Ian Glasper puts it, “four exceptionally pissed off songs.”²⁷

“Receiver Deceiver.” The First Recording Tape. Menshintsvo Tapes, 1981, cassette.

The Kunts. Lead vocalist Kunt has been writing and recording songs, mostly about masturbation, since the early 2000s.

“Boris Johnson Is a Fucking Cunt.” Kunts Punk in Your Face. Disco Minge Records, 2020, CD-R.

The Lambrettas. One of the more successful mod revival bands, Brighton’s well-dressed Lambrettas had a top-ten hit with their cover of the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy” in 1980. The first pressing was on the nonce “Two-Stroke Records,” a play on “Two-Tone Records,” with a cover that emphasized the shared aesthetics of the mod and ska revivals.

“Cortina MK II.” Beat Boys in the Jet Age. The Rocket Record Company, 1980, LP.

The Larks. Formed at Christchurch College, Canterbury, in 1981, the Larks experimented with the bright ska-punk sound that American ska-core bands would perfect in the Nineties.

“Maggie Maggie Maggie.” Billy Graham. R4 Records, 1986, 12″.

The Last Resort. Oi! punks from Herne Bay, Kent, the title of their debut album, A Way of Life—Skinhead Anthems, pretty much says it all. The album reached number six on the indie charts in 1982.

“Resort Bootboys.” A Way of Life—Skinhead Anthems. The Last Resort, 1982, LP.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band with Elephants Memory and Invisible Strings. With and without various Ono-related outfits, and under an array of aliases (including Dr. Winston O’Boogie, Dwarf McDougal, Mel Torment, and Rev. Thumbs Ghurkin), John Lennon had a prolific post-Beatles career.

“Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Some Time in New York City. Apple Records, 1972, LP.

Level 42. Formed in London in 1979, although most of the band came from the Isle of Wight, Level 42 initially followed the Brit funk groove established by Hi-Tension and Light of the World. By the mid-1980s, though, they had veered into more mainstream pop, producing several top-ten hits.

“The Chinese Way.” The Pursuit of Accidents. Polydor, 1982, LP.

The Levellers. Taking their name from a populist political movement that sprang up during the English Civil War to advocate for tolerance and equality, Brighton’s Levellers developed a distinctive version of indie rock informed, more or less equally, by punk and folk. In the 1990s they were unstoppable, racking up six consecutive top-twenty albums, including the number one Zeitgeist.

“Battle of the Beanfield.” Levelling the Land. China Records, 1991, LP.

“England My Home.” A Weapon Called the World. Musidisc, 1990, LP.

Jona Lewie. In 1972, Lewie’s band Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs had a top-ten hit with the accordion novelty song “Seaside Shuffle.” Subsequently, as a solo artist, Lewie had several more hits, although they tended to be in unexpected places, like Austria and Sweden.

“Stop the Cavalry.” Stop the Cavalry. Stiff Records, 1980, 7″.

Light of the World. A jazz-funk group from London, Light of the World shared a rotating cast with two other jazz-funk groups, Beggar & Co and Incognito. Between them, the three bands produced a number of minor hits, but nothing on the scale of the bands who copied them, most notably Haircut 100 and Wham!

“The Boys in Blue.” The Boys in Blue/This Is It. Ensign, 1980, 7″.

“Liv Togevver (The Greater London Funkathon).” Light of the World. Ensign, 1979, LP.

The Living Legends. The musical arms of Ian Bone’s Class War, the Living Legends only wrote songs for special occasions, such as the papal visit (“The Pope Is a Dope”), the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan (“Dum Dum Bullets for a Dum Dum Dummy”), or the death of a conservative MP (“Tory Funerals”).

“Island Wars.” Various Artists. Anti-Capitalism: Anarcho-Punk Compilation Vol. 4. Overground Records, 2007, compact disc.

Lost Cherrees. From Sutton, Surrey, the Lost Cherrees developed an unusually melodic approach to anarcho-punk, aided by having two (briefly three) female vocalists: Sian Jeffries, Bev Cook-Abbott, and Debbie McKenna. Their most successful release was the EP A Man’s Duty … A Woman’s Place, which reached the top ten on the independent charts in 1984.

“Please Don’t Hurt the Animals.” The Animals Packet. Sky & Trees, 1983, cassette.

M. Musician and producer Robin Scott moved in the same circles as Malcolm McLaren, releasing Adam and the Ants’ first album on his Do It Records. He subsequently recorded three synth-pop albums as M, before taking a detour into world music. The satirical single “Pop Muzik” was a top-ten hit in 1979.

“Pop Musik.” New York, London, Paris, Munich. MCA, 1979, LP.

“Your Country Needs You.” The Official Secrets Act. MCA Records, 1980, LP.

The Macc Lads. Formed in 1981 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, the Macc Lads offered either a satirical parody of sexist, racist, homophobic laddism or actual sexist, racist, homophobic laddism lamely excusing itself as satire. At some point, the difference becomes insignificant.

“Buenos Aires.” Eh Up! Hectic House, 1983, cassette.

Macka B. The biblical Maccabees were rebels against colonial oppression; Rastafarians note that most Protestant bibles, including those used by the British in Jamaica, omit the books concerning them. When Birmingham toaster Christopher MacFarlane chose a nom de guerre, he went with Macka B.

“Apartheid.” We’ve Had Enough. Ariwa, 1988, LP.

“Get Rid of Maggie.” Natural Suntan. Ariwa, 1990, LP.

“We’ve Had Enough.” We’ve Had Enough. Ariwa, 1988, LP.

Mad Jocks and Englishmen. A Warwickshire folk trio, Mad Jocks and Englishmen seem to have survived for over forty years by not taking themselves seriously.

“Just Like Kenny.” Just Like Kenny. Zuma, 1984, 7″.

Madness. A one-hit wonder in the US, an institution in the UK. Formed in Camden Town in 1976 and initially associated with the two-tone ska revival, Madness racked up fifteen top-ten singles and six top-ten albums before they disbanded, momentarily, in 1986.

“Baggy Trousers.” Absolutely. Stiff Records, 1980, LP.

“Blue Skinned Beast.” The Rise and Fall. Stiff Records, 1982, LP.

“Grey Day.” 7. Stiff Records, 1981, LP.

“House of Fun.” House of Fun. Stiff Records, 1982, 7″.

“Land of Hope and Glory.” One Step Beyond. Stiff Records, 1979, LP.

“Michael Caine.” Keep Moving. Stiff Records, 1984, LP.

The Man from Delmonte. An indie-rock band formed in Manchester in the late 1980s, their music was in the jangly-guitar vein that their Madchester contemporaries were in the process of displacing. Nevertheless, they had three top-twenty indie singles in 1989 before closing up shop.

“My Love Is Like a Gift You Can’t Return.” My Love Is Like a Gift You Can’t Return. Bop Cassettes, 1989, 12″.

Manic Street Preachers. Formed in Blackwood, Wales, in 1986, the Manics started out playing something between punk and hard rock, with a political edge. By the time they reached their commercial peak, at the end of the 1990s, neither their music nor their political edge had softened much. They had the first new number-one single of the new millennium with “The Masses against the Classes,” displacing Westlife’s cover of ABBA’s “I Have a Dream.”

“New Art Riot.” New Art Riot EP. Damaged Goods, 1990, 12″.

Man’s Hate. A solo project by Andi Xport, formerly of APF Brigade, the focus of Man’s Hate was firmly on animal rights.

“Meat Means Money.” Suffer in Silence. A Man’s Hate Production, 1984, cassette. Bob Marley and the Wailers. Even the myopically US/UK-focused Rolling Stone ranks him eleventh on the list of “Greatest Artists of All Time.” In terms of political and spiritual significance, he leaves Rolling Stone’s top ten in the Babylonian dust.

“Get Up, Stand Up.” Burnin’. Island, 1973, LP.

“Punky Reggae Party.” Jamming/Punky Reggae Party. Island, 1977, 7″. “Redemption Song.” Uprising. Island, 1980, LP.

Hugh Masekela. Born in Witbank, South Africa, Hugh Masekela was a jazz pioneer, founding the Jazz Epistles with Abdullah Ibrahim in Johannesburg in the late 1950s. After the Sharpville massacre in 1960, both he and Ibrahim spent much of their careers effectively in exile.

“Bring Him Back Home.” Tomorrow. WEA, 1987, LP.

Mayhem. A hardcore punk band from Southport, Merseyside, they managed a couple of indie top-thirty EPs between 1979 and 1986. Most of the band also played with Blitzkrieg, also from Southport, who also managed a couple of top-thirty EPs.

“Patriots.” Gentle Murder EP. Riot City Records, 1982, 7″.

McCarthy. One of the C86 indie bands, McCarthy could be distinguished from the rest by Malcolm Eden’s sweet, deadpan delivery of brutally satirical lyrics. They never broke through to the mainstream like their biggest fans, the Manic Street Preachers, but they had several indie hits, including two top-ten albums.

“And Tomorrow the Stock Exchange Will Be the Human Race.” Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. Midnight Music, 1990, LP.

“The Drinking Song of the Merchant Bankers.” Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. Midnight Music, 1990, LP.

“God Made the Virus.” I Am a Wallet. September, 1987, LP.

“The Home Secretary Briefs the Forces of Law and Order.” The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth. Midnight Music, 1989, LP.

“I’m Not a Patriot But.” The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth. Midnight Music, 1989, LP.

“I’m on the Side of Mankind as Much as the Next Man.” Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. Midnight Music, 1990, LP.

“The Lion Will Lay Down with the Lamb.” The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth. Midnight Music, 1989, LP.

“Now is the Time for an Iron Hand.” Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. Midnight Music, 1990, LP.

“The Procession of Popular Capitalism.” I Am a Wallet. September, 1987, LP.

“What Our Boys are Fighting For.” The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth. Midnight Music, 1989, LP.

The Mekons. Formed at the University of Leeds in the late 1970s as an art collective rather than specifically as a band, the Mekons played ragged post-punk until they split up in 1982. When they reformed three years later, they had become a folk-rock group.

“32 Weeks.” Never Been in a Riot/32 Weeks/Heart and Soul. Fast Product, 1978, 7″.

“Abernant 1984/5.” Fear and Whiskey. Sin Record Company, 1985, LP.

“Country.” Fear and Whiskey. Sin Record Company, 1985, LP.

“Hard to Be Human Again.” Fear and Whiskey. Sin Record Company, 1985, LP.

“Lost Highway.” Fear and Whiskey. Sin Record Company, 1985, LP.

“Last Dance.” Fear and Whiskey. Sin Record Company, 1985, LP.

“Never Been in a Riot.” Never Been in a Riot/32 Weeks/Heart and Soul. Fast Product, 1978, 7″.

The Members. From Camberley, Surrey, Nicky Tesco and company played melodic ska-punk that also owed something to the mod revival. Their biggest hit was “The Sound of the Suburbs,” in 1979. Their most unlikely hit was “Offshore Banking Business,” a scandalized exposé of corporate tax havens in the Caribbean.

“Brian Was.” 1980—The Choice Is Yours. Virgin, 1980, LP.

“Offshore Banking Business.” Offshore Banking Business. Virgin Records, 1979, 7″.

“Police Car.” 1980—The Choice Is Yours. Virgin, 1980, LP.

“Solitary Confinement.” At the Chelsea Nightclub. Virgin, 1979, LP.

“Working Girl.” Uprhythm/Downbeat. Arista, 1982, LP.

The Membranes. Bassist John Robb explains, “We thought that this wild noise that we were making was commercial. We thought everyone would understand our music, born as it was from the frustration of living out on a limb in the ‘Tatty Seaside Town’ of Blackpool.”²⁸ They were wrong, although their single “Death to Trad Rock” did make it into the indie top ten in 1985.

“Everything’s Brilliant.” Everything’s Brilliant. In Tape, 1986, 12″.

Metro Youth. Exeter punks Metro Youth only ever released one cassette (as Sanction) on their own steam, but they contributed memorable tracks to Crass’s second Bullshit Detector compilation and the CND benefit cassette Nuclear Terra.

“Brutalised.” Various Artists. Bullshit Detector Two. Crass Records, 1982, LP.

“Meltdown.” Various Artists. Nuclear Terra. Anti Nuclear Benefit, 1983, cassette.

Miles over Matter. Part of the neo-psychedelic scene that blossomed briefly in London at the beginning of the 1980s, Miles over Matter never released anything on their own, but two of their songs were included on the influential 1981 neo-psychedelic compilation A Splash of Colour.

“Something’s Happening Here.” Various Artists. A Splash of Colour. WEA, 1981, LP.

Military Surplus. Chris Bowsher, from Hungerford, Essex, founded Military Surplus (later renamed Radical Dance Faction) in 1986. The combination of dub reggae and Bowsher’s spoken-word lyrics owed something to Linton Kwesi Johnson and something to John Cooper Clarke.

“Time of the Dispossessed.” Various Artists. Stonehenge. Bluurg Records, 1987, 7″.

Sugar Minott. Singer and selector Lincoln Barrington Minott relocated from Jamaica to the UK in 1980, where his contributions to the lovers rock genre included the top-ten UK hit “Good Thing Going.”

“Riot Inna Brixton.” Various Artists. What a Feeling/Riot Inna Brixton/Candy Man. CSA Records, 1986, 7″.

Misty in Roots. Coming together in the early 1970s in Southall, London, Misty in Roots were important contributors to Rock Against Racism later in the decade. Their contemplative roots-reggae album Wise and Foolish reached number two on the indie charts in 1981.

“Poor and Needy.” Earth. People Unite, 1983, LP.

“Sodome and Gomorra.” Live at the Counter Eurovision 79. People Unite, 1979, LP.

The Mob. Somerset anarcho-punks the Mob had a couple of solid indie hits, including a number-three album, Let the Tribe Increase. They released most of their material on their own All the Madmen Records, which also released the Astronauts, Thatcher on Acid, and Blyth Power, the folk-rock band started by Joseph Porter after the Mob folded in 1983.

“No Doves Fly Here.” No Doves Fly Here. Crass Records, 1982, 7″.

“Raised in a Prison.” Let the Tribe Increase. All the Madmen Records, 1983, LP.

Modern English. They started out in Colchester, Essex, as a punk band called the Lepers. Their first album as Modern English was 1981’s gloomy post-punk Mesh and Lace; their second was 1982’s slightly less gloomy After the Snow.

“I Melt with You.” After the Snow. 4AD, 1982, LP.

Momus. Nicholas Currie’s first recordings were with the Happy Family, an arty post-punk band he formed in Edinburgh with three-quarters of Josef K. His late 1980s solo experiments in synth-pop yielded the indie hit “The Hairstyle of the Devil” and gave Pulp the blueprint for all their best records.

“I Was a Maoist Intellectual.” Tender Pervert. Creation Records, 1988, LP.

Mood Six. Originally part of the neo-psychedelic scene in London, Mood Six released two albums of 1960s-influenced pop in the mid-1980s, both of which had more impact in Europe than in the UK.

“Just Like a Dream.” Various Artists. A Splash of Colour. WEA Records, 1981, LP.

Christy Moore. Born in County Kildare, Moore is a songwriter and activist and a founding member of the bands Planxty and Moving Hearts. A supporter of Irish republicanism, he recorded two songs written by Bobby Sands, who had recently died while on hunger strike, for his 1981 album The Spirit of Freedom.

“Section 31.” The Time Has Come. WEA Ireland, 1983, LP.

“The Peoples Own M.P.” The Spirit of Freedom. WEA Ireland, 1985, LP.

Morrissey. Before he became a right-wing knob, Steven Morrissey was the lead singer for the Smiths. He was a knob then too, but he was our knob. His first solo album, Viva Hate, which included “Bengali in Platforms,” was the first sign that something was horribly wrong.

“Margaret on the Guillotine.” Viva Hate. His Master’s Voice, 1988, LP.

Elton Motello. Under the moniker Elton Motello, Alan Ward released two albums at the end of the 1970s, both notable for including songs that documented the gay experience. The backing track for his 1977 single “Jet Boy Jet Girl” would be remixed as the backing track for Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça Plane Pour Moi” later the same year.

“When All the Boys Are English.” Pop Art. Edge, 1980, LP.

Moving Hearts. Christy Moore and Dónal Lunny of the folk group Planxty formed Celtic-rock band Moving Hearts in 1981. They released three albums in the early 1980s.

“Hiroshima Nagasaki Russian Roulette.” Moving Hearts. WEA, 1981, LP.

“Irish Ways and Irish Laws.” Moving Hearts. WEA, 1981, LP.

Neil. Comedian Nigel Planer recorded several songs in character as Neil, the depressive hippie he created for The Young Ones. He also recorded three albums with the parodic heavy metal band Bad News. The rest of the band were Rick Mayall, Ade Edmondson, and Peter Richardson.

“Hole in My Shoe.” Hole in My Shoe. WEA, 1984, 7″.

New Hearts. Formed in 1977, London mod-punk outfit New Hearts recorded a couple of singles before they split. Vocalist Ian Page and guitarist David Cairns subsequently formed the mod band Secret Affair.

“Just Another Teenage Anthem.” Just Another Teenage Anthem. CBS, 1977, 7″.

“Revolution (What Revolution?).” A Secret Affair—The CBS Sessions 1977–1978. Cherry Red, 2009, compact disc.

New Model Army. From Bradford, Yorkshire, New Model Army played punk-in-flected, anti-Thatcher folk-rock. Their first album, Vengeance, was an indie number one. On the strength of it, they signed with EMI, hoping the major label would help them reach a wider audience. Conflict reckoned, “Only stupid bastards help EMI.”

“51st State.” The Ghost of Cain. EMI, 1986, LP.

“Spirit of the Falklands.” Vengeance. Abstract Records, 1984, LP.

“Young, Gifted and Skint.” No Rest for the Wicked. EMI, 1985, LP.

The Newtown Neurotics / The Neurotics. Harlow was one of the axiomatically alienating “new towns” built after World War II. The Neurotics got together there, on the heels of first-wave punk, in 1977. When their first single was rejected by punk label Small Wonder, they started their own label, No Wonder, and released it themselves.

“Afrika.” Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks? Jungle Records, 1988, LP. “Bored Policeman.” Pissed as a Newt. No Wonder Records, 1982, LP.

“Fighting Times.” Repercussions. Jungle Records, 1985, LP.

“Keep the Faith.” Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks? Jungle Records, 1988, LP.

“Kick Out the Tories!” Kick Out the Tories!/Mindless Violence! CNT Productions, 1980, 7″.

“Living with Unemployment.” Beggars Can Be Choosers. Razor Records, 1983, LP.

“You Must Be Mad.” Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks? Jungle Records, 1988, LP.

999. One of the first-wave London punk bands, 999 never achieved the success of the Clash, but they were far more durable. Their 1978 debut album almost cracked the UK top fifty, and their single “Homicide” reached number forty. Several indie top-tens followed in the early 1980s.

“English Wipeout.” The Biggest Prize in Sports. Polydor, 1979, LP.

“I’m Alive.” I’m Alive. Labritain Records, 1977, 7″.

Nine Steps to Ugly. A twee pop band from Berkshire, their only release was a 7″ flexi-disc (“80p inc p&p from 30 Blenheim Road, Slough”).

“Bobby Charlton’s Haircut.” Eddie Lopez Lives in Slough/Bobby Charlton’s Haircut. Not on label, 1987, 7″ flexi.

Danbert Nobacon. One of the founding members of Chumbawamba, Nigel Hunter describes himself as a “freak music legend,” which works either way you read it.²⁹ A highly theatrical dissenter, he once poured a bucket of ice over the deputy prime minister at the Brit Awards.

“Birmingham.” Why Are We Still in Ireland? Rugger Bugger Discs, 1989, 7″.

“Declaring Peace.” The Unfairy Tale. Sky & Trees, 1984, cassette.

“McDonald’s.” Various Artists. Ronald McDonald’s Golden Grates: A McLibel Benefit Tape. Vegan Policeman Tapes, 1991, cassette.

“Why Are We Still in Ireland?” Why Are We Still in Ireland? Rugger Bugger Discs, 1989, 7″.

The Notsensibles. Lancashire punks with an absurdist streak, the Notsensibles were sometimes identified as “punk pathetique,” a term coined by Sounds magazine journalist Garry Bushell, who liked to put things in boxes.

“Don’t Wanna Work Anymore.” Instant Classic. Snotty Snail Records, 1980, LP.

“I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher.” I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher. Redball Records, 1979, 7″.

Gary Numan. Getting nowhere fast as a punk, Gary Numan picked up a Minimoog synthesizer and tried his hand at sounding like Ultravox. It worked. He had three number-one albums between the middle of 1979 and the end of 1980.

“Down in the Park.” Tubeway Army. Replicas. Beggars Banquet, 1979, LP.

Hazel O’Connor. A singer and songwriter from Coventry, O’Connor is probably best known for the 1980 film Breaking Glass, which she both starred in and wrote the music for. The soundtrack album produced two top-ten singles, “Eighth Day” and the frequently anthologized torch song “Will You.”

“Who Needs It.” Breaking Glass. A&M Records, 1980, LP.

Sinead O’Connor. O’Connor was born just south of Dublin and started her music career there in the early 1980s. Her commercial peak came at the end of the decade with I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, a number-one album, which featured the number-one single “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

“Black Boys on Mopeds.” I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Ensign, Chrysalis, 1990, LP.

Oi Polloi. As their name suggests, Edinburgh’s Oi Polloi sounded like an Oi! band, but their antifascist politics also aligned them with the anarcho-punk scene. On their first release they mooted the term “anarchoi,” but it didn’t take. Early releases included splits with Aberdeen anarcho-punks Toxic Ephex and Folkestone Oi! punks Betrayed, signalling their commitment to unity between punks and skins.

“Apartheid Stinx.” AOA/Oi Polloi. Unlimited Genocide. Children of the Revolution Records, 1986, LP.

“Commies and Nazis.” Unite and Win. Oi! Records, 1987, LP.

“Die for B.P.” Omnicide.… Words of Warning, 1991, 7″.

“Hands Off Nicaragua” Resist the Atomic Menace. Endangered Musik, 1986, 7″.

“Kill the Bill.” Unite and Win. Oi! Records, 1987, LP.

“No Filthy Nuclear Power.” Oi Polloi/Toxic Ephex. Mad as Fuck LP. Green Vomit Records, 1987, LP.

“Nuclear Waste.” Unite and Win. Oi! Records, 1987, LP.

“Pigs for Slaughter.” Oi Polloi/Betrayed. Skins ’n’ Punks Volume Two. Oi! Records, 1986, LP.

“Resist the Atomic Menace.” Resist the Atomic Menace. Endangered Music, 1986, 7″.

“Stop Vivisection Now.” Various Artists. A Song for the Animals. LOL Tapes, 1984, cassette.

“Thrown on the Scrapheap.” Unite and Win. Oi! Records, 1987, LP.

“When Two Men Kiss.” In Defence of Our Earth. Words of Warning, 1990, LP.

‘O’ Level. Ed Ball, John Bennett, and Gerard Bennett formed ‘O’ Level in London in 1976 but became Television Personalities with the addition of Dan Treacy in 1977, Treacy and Ball simultaneously becoming Teenage Filmstars, until Ball became the Times, the Bennetts quit, and Treacy went on being Television Personalities. Got it?

“‘O’ Levels.” East Sheen. Psycho, 1978, 7″.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys started OMD in Wirral, Merseyside, in 1978. Their lyrics and artwork revealed a fixation on technology and the posthuman, often referencing early twentieth-century futurism and vorticism. Regardless, they became one of the most successful of the early 1980s synth bands, producing four top-ten albums between 1980 and 1984.

“Enola Gay.” Organisation. Dindisc, 1980, LP.

Osibisa. Founded in London in 1969, Osibisa developed a distinctive jazz-funk sound, a blend of Nigerian, Ghanaian, and African American influences. It garnered them a large following in the 1970s and two top-twenty albums.

“Too Much Going On.” Live at the Marquee. Premier, 1984, LP.

The Partisans. Inspired by the Clash and the Sex Pistols, the Partisans got together in 1978 in Bridgend, Wales, when they were all about fifteen. Their first single, “Police Story,” spent twenty-two weeks on the independent charts, and Garry Bushell adopted them as an Oi! band, although they were never entirely comfortable with the tag.

“Arms Race.” The Partisans. No Future Records, 1983, LP.

“No U Turns.” The Partisans. No Future Records, 1983, LP.

“Police Story.” Police Story/Killing Machine. No Future Records, 1981, 7″.

The Passage. Dick Witts was a founding member of the Manchester Musicians Collective, which fostered several bands, including the Fall and Joy Division. The first version of the Passage included Tony Friel, moonlighting from the Fall, but by the time the Passage recorded its first album of avant-garde post-punk, Pindrop, it was essentially Dick Witts’s project. Pindrop and the two albums that followed were all top-ten indie hits.

“Locust.” Pindrop. Object Music, 1980, LP.

“Troops Out.” Troops Out. Night & Day, 1981, 7″.

Passion Killers. Barnsley’s Passion Killers featured Darren Hamer and Mavis Dillon, pre-Chumbawamba, in straight-up garage-punk mode, with the addition of Chumbawamba’s Boff Whalley on bass after the two bands met. (They sought each other out after both appeared on the second Bullshit Detector compilation.)

“‘Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die’ Rag.” Whoopee!! We’re All Going to Die. Rugger Bugger Discs, 1991, 7″.

“Judging by Headlines.” Motion … Yet Motionless. Peaceville Tapes, 1984, cassette.

“Start Again.” Various Artists. Bullshit Detector Two. Crass Records, 1982.

“Why.” Chumbawamba and Passion Killers. Be Happy! Despite it All.… Sky & Trees, 1983, cassette.

“Zoo.” It’s Up to You. Sky & Trees, 1984, cassette.

Jon Pertwee. He had a long and successful career in film and television, but for many of us Jon Pertwee was the third Doctor Who, and the only proper Doctor Who, with the possible exception of Tom Baker.

“Worzel’s Song.” Worzel’s Song. Decca, 1980, 7″.

Pet Shop Boys. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s first album as the Pet Shop Boys went to the top of the charts on the strength of the single “West End Girls,” and they haven’t noticeably slowed down since. Their sophisticated lyrics and knowing sense of irony mean that you’re allowed to like them even if you generally think of yourself as being above dance music.

“Can You Forgive Her?” Very. Parlophone, 1993, LP.

“How Can You Expect to be Taken Seriously?” Behaviour. Parlophone, 1990, LP.

“Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money).” Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money). Parlophone, 1985, 7″.

“Shopping.” Actually. Parlophone, 1987, LP.

Pink Floyd. A five-piece, then a four-piece, three-piece, and, finally, two-piece psych-prog band. Every version of Floyd, with the exception of the original lineup, had at least one number-one album in the UK.

“Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” The Wall. Harvest, 1979, LP.

The Pogues. When Shane McGowan’s London punk band the Nipple Erectors split up in 1980, he teamed up with Jem Finer and Peter Stacy to form Celtic folk-punk band the Pogues. Legendary alcohol abuse did not prevent them producing four top-twenty albums between 1985 and 1990.

“Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six.” If I Should Fall from Grace with God. Pogue Mahone Records, 1988, LP.

“White City.” Peace and Love. Island, 1989, LP.

Poison Girls. Vi Subversa, Lance D’Boyle, Richard Famous, and Bernhardt Rebours started Poison Girls in Brighton in 1976 before moving to Essex to work more closely with Crass. They shared much with Crass, including their help-others-to-do-it ethos, mentoring numerous young bands in the anarcho-punk scene. Their own powerfully feminist brand of punk found its widest audience with the albums Chappaquiddick Bridge and Total Exposure.

“Dirty Work.” All Systems Go. Crass Records, 1980, 7″.

“Feeling the Pinch.” Songs of Praise. Xtrinx, 1985, LP.

“Persons Unknown.” Crass/Poison Girls. Bloody Revolutions/Persons Unknown. Crass Records, 1980, 7″.

“The Price of Grain and the Price of Blood.” The Price of Grain and the Price of Blood. Upright Records, 1985, 12″.

“Take the Toys from the Boys.” I’m Not a Real Woman. Xtrinx, 1984, 12″.

The Police. A globally successful pop-rock band formed in London in 1977, they had five consecutive number-one albums in the UK between 1979 and 1986.

“Invisible Sun.” Ghost in the Machine. A&M, 1981, LP.

Political Asylum. They’re generally remembered as being part of the anarcho-punk scene, although lead singer Kanaan notes that Political Asylum evolved largely in isolation. “The music we played wasn’t really punk,” he says. “I’m actually not quite sure why we were embraced by the underground punk scene.”³⁰ Kanaan returned the embrace by founding first AK Press (in his mum’s house in Stirling) and then PM Press (in California).

“Disarm or Die.” Fresh Hate. Not on label, 1983, cassette.

“Down Amongst the Olive Groves.” Someday. We Bite Records, 1987, LP.

“Symptom.” Valium for the Masses. Not on label, 1984, cassette.

“System of War.” Valium for the Masses. Not on label, 1984, cassette.

The Pollcats. A one-off band comprising Steve Marriott (Small Faces), Jim Leverton (Caravan), and Rick Richards (Georgia Satellites).

“The Poll Tax Blues.” The Poll Tax Blues. Community Charge, 1990, 7″.

The Pop Group. As Simon Reynolds says, “They couldn’t settle on just reggae, or just funk, or just jazz, so they went full-throttle for all three simultaneously.”³¹ The Bristol band produced two albums of fractured, politically outraged postpunk: Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, which went to number one on the independent charts in 1980.

“Amnesty International Report.” We Are All Prostitutes. Rough Trade, 1979, 7″.

“Justice.” How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder. Rough Trade, 1980, LP.

“We Are All Prostitutes.” We Are All Prostitutes. Rough Trade, 1979, 7″.

Pop Will Eat Itself. A stylistically restless band from Stourbridge, West Midlands, PWEI started out playing punk-pop and then experimented with sampling, hip-hop, acid house, electronic, dub, and industrial music. They had a string of indie hits in the 1980s and a national top-ten with “Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies!” in 1993.

“Def.Con.One.” This Is the Day … This Is the Hour … This Is It! RCA, 1989, LP.

Post Mortem. Not the American death metal band or the German death metal band; a punk band formed in Skegness, Lincolnshire, active between 1980 and 1984.

“Pain.” A Song for the Animals. LOL Tapes, 1984, cassette.

Potential Threat. Formed in Blackburn in 1981, hardcore punk band Potential Threat were unusual in having a female vocalist, Pauline. The band went through several lineups before settling down with two former members of Another Warcry in 1985.

“Cheap Labour.” What’s So Great Britain! Out of Town Records, 1982, 7″.

“A Cry for Help.” Brainwashed. Children of the Revolution Records, 1984, 7″. “Nuclear Threat.” What’s So Great Britain! Out of Town Records, 1982, 7″.

The Proclaimers. Edinburgh twins the Reid brothers recorded their first album, 1987’s acoustic folk-rock This Is the Story, as a duo; for their subsequent albums they added a band, but their distinctive, interlocking vocals remained the defining characteristic of their sound.

“Letter from America.” Letter from America. Chrysalis, 1987, 12″.

“Cap in Hand.” Sunshine on Leith. Chrysalis, 1988, LP.

Public Disgrace. A short-lived punk band featuring Andy Farrier of Chaos UK and Sam Davis, who would later join Manchester folk-rock outfit Gone to Earth.

“Toxteth.” Toxteth. Probe Plus, 1982, 7″.

Purple Hearts. From Romford, Essex, Purple Hearts were one of the mod revival bands that emerged, in the wake of the Jam, at the end of the 1970s. Very popular on the mod scene, they had a couple of minor hits with “Millions Like Us” and “Jimmy.”

“Millions Like Us.” Millions Like Us. Fiction Records, 1979, 7″.

Queen. Queen’s Greatest Hits, released in 1981, spent 895 weeks on the UK charts, which means it had only just dropped off when the compiled Greatest Hits 1,2 & 3 was released in 2000. That stayed in the charts for an additional 297 weeks.

“Is This the World We Created …?” The Works. EMI, 1984, LP.

“Radio Gaga.” The Works. EMI, 1984, LP.

The Radio Actors. A one-off by various members of Gong and Hawkwind, with Sting on vocals, asking “Do you find it attractive to be radioactive?” “Nuclear Waste” made the independent top forty in 1980.

“Nuclear Waste.” Nuclear Waste. Charly Records, 1980, 7″.

Radiohead. Formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in the mid-1980s, Radiohead didn’t record anything for their first six years together. After that they evolved rapidly, from moderately interesting grunge also-rans into unassailable art-rock geniuses. Six number-one albums followed.

“Pop Is Dead.” Pop Is Dead. Parlophone, 1993, 12″.

The Raincoats. Formed by Hornsey College of Art students Ana da Silva and Gina Birch, who remained the core of the group through several lineup changes, the Raincoats were the archetypal Rough Trade band: thoughtful, unpretentiously experimental, and utterly indifferent to music industry success. Despite the last of these qualities, they released three top-five indie albums.

“Off-Duty Trip.” The Raincoats. Rough Trade, 1979, LP.

Ranking Ann. Wolverhampton’s Ann Swinton was the first female MC. As Dick Hebdige notes, neither the establishment nor some reggae fans “like[d] the idea of a girl stepping out of the stereotyped passive female role and ‘chanting down Babylon,”³² but Ranking Ann released two albums and made it into the national charts contributing vocals to the B-side of Scritti Politti’s “Word Girl.”

“Kill the Police Bill.” Kill the Police Bill. Rough Justice, 1984, 12″.

Reality. A punk band from Norfolk, Reality released a couple of singles, in 1982 and 1984, but succumbed to disillusionment while recording their debut album in 1985. Apparently, they lived next door to Lene Lovich in the village of Crimplesham.³³

“Acceptable Death Loss.” Blind to the Truth. Subversive Records, 1982, 7″.

“N.A.T.O.” Blind to the Truth. Subversive Records, 1982, 7″.

Red Alert. A punk band from Sunderland formed in 1979, their first recording was a bit misleadingly called the Third and Final EP. (The title track was about the “third and final” war.) Several more releases followed, including the indie top ten “In Britain” and the album We’ve Got the Power, before the band folded in 1984.

“The Art of Brutality.” We’ve Got the Power. No Future Records, 1983, LP.

“S.P.G.” We’ve Got the Power. No Future Records, 1983, LP.

“We’ve Got the Power.” We’ve Got the Power. No Future Records, 1983, LP.

Red Guitars. They formed in Hull alongside the Housemartins and, like them, had a line in sophisticated, left-leaning lyrics (the “Red” in their name indicated a very definite political position). They released a string of top-ten indie singles on their own Self Drive Records before signing to Virgin in 1986.

“Fact!” Fact! Self Drive Records, 1983, 7″.

“Good Technology.” Good Technology. Self Drive Records, 1983, 7″.

“Marimba Jive.” Slow to Fade. Self Drive Records, 1984, LP.

“Steeltown.” Steeltown. Self Drive Records, 1984, 7″.

Red London. Unlike the Red Guitars (see above), Red London didn’t originally intend their name to identify a political leaning. However, their hometown, Sunderland, was a mining community, and during the miners’ strike, as many of their friends stood on the picket lines, Red London became a fixture at benefits. Their most successful release was the Sten Guns in Sunderland EP, released in 1983.

“C.N.D.” This Is England. Razor Records, 1984, LP.

Redskins. Formed in 1981 (as No Swastikas), the Redskins had a distinctive soulpunk sound and an equally distinctive line in SWP-inspired lyrics. They signed with Decca in an effort to use international capital’s structures against it by communicating their message to a mass audience; their incendiary single “Bring It Down (This Insane Thing)” did crack the top forty in 1985; music journalist Andrew Collins notes, “compared with the SWP’s mainstream political impact, [this] was akin to storming Whitehall.”³⁴

“Bring It Down (This Insane Thing).” Bring It Down (This Insane Thing). Decca, 1985, 7″.

“Turnin’ Loose (These Furious Flames).” Neither Washington nor Moscow. Decca, 1986, LP.

“Unionise!” Lean on Me! CNT Productions, 1983, 7″.

Reggae Regular. Also known as the Regulars, they formed in Ilford and released three albums of roots reggae drawing heavily on Rastafarian themes between 1979 and 1984.

“Violence in the Streets.” Ghetto Rock. Greensleeves Records, 1984, LP.

The Rezillos. Scotland’s first punk band, they formed at Edinburgh Art School in 1976, played demented 1950s rock ’n’ roll, and sang gleefully about trash pop culture. This went on until 1979, when the band collapsed.

“Top of the Pops.” Can’t Stand the Rezillos. Sire, 1978, LP.

Riot/Clone. From Ashford, Surrey, Riot/Clone’s first gig, in 1979, was filling in spur-of-the-moment as the Ruts’ opening act at the Nashville. Rat Scabies of the Damned helped them out on guitar. They subsequently released three EPs on their own Riot/Clone label, reaching the independent charts twice. They folded in 1983, reemerging a decade later.

“Death to Humanity.” There’s No Government Like NO Government EP. Riot/ Clone, 1982, 7″.

“H-Block.” Destroy the Myth of Musical Destruction EP. Riot/Clone, 1982, 7″.

“Neu-vastation.” There’s No Government Like NO Government EP. Riot/Clone, 1982, 7″.

Tom Robinson, The Tom Robinson Band. Tom Robinson put TRB together in London in 1976. A gay rights activist and dedicated supporter of RAR, Robinson explains, “The basic tenet of the Tom Robinson Band was you either live in a free and fair society or you don’t. You can’t ask for freedom and fairness for just homosexuals on the one hand but not people of a different skin colour or for women or for workers versus bosses. You didn’t just fight in isolation.”³⁵

“Blue Murder.” TRB 2. EMI, 1979, LP.

“Glad to Be Gay.” Rising Free. EMI, 1978, 7″.

“Grey Cortina.” Power in the Darkness. EMI, 1978, LP.

“Merrily up on High.” North by Northwest. Panic Records, 1982, LP.

Rockpile. Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Billy Bremner, and Terry Williams recorded several rock ’n’ roll albums together between 1978 and ’81, mostly released as Edmunds or Lowe solo albums.

“Teacher Teacher.” Seconds of Pleasure. F-Beat, 1980, LP.

Roland Rat Superstar. Voiced by puppeteer David Claridge, Roland Rat’s first album included the hit singles “Rat Rapping” and “Love Me Tender,” in addition to “Leeks Are Wonderful, Leeks Are Nice” and “Pink Bucket Reggae.” The difficult second album included “Guinea Pig in Love,” “Hair Loss,” and “Trousers.”

“Rat Rapping.” Rat Rapping. Magnet, 1983, 7″.

Leon Rosselson. Rosselson started his long music career in the early 1960s playing traditional folk songs with the Galliards and his own satirical compositions on the television series That Was the Week That Was. A frequent collaborator with other artists, he had an accidental hit with Billy Bragg and the Oyster Band in 1987: they recorded “Ballad of a Spycatcher,” based on the banned MI5 tell-all book Spycatcher, to provoke the government into prosecuting them. It went to number eleven on the indie charts, but no prosecution ensued. “This wasn’t what was intended,” Rosselson notes. “So much for subversive intentions.”³⁶ “Jackboot Democrats.” Bringing the News from Nowhere. Fure Records, 1986, LP. “Whoever Invented the Fish Finger.” Roy Bailey/Leon Rosselson. If I Knew Who the Enemy Was.… Acorn, 1979, LP.

Rudi. A Belfast punk band, Rudi were enormously popular on their home turf, but they never made the leap to success outside Northern Ireland. Their song “Cops,” about heavy-handed policing at an aborted Clash concert, became a local punk anthem but was never committed to vinyl.

“Cops (Live).” Big Time: The Best of Rudi. Anagram Records, 1996, compact disc.

Ruefrex. Formed in Belfast in 1977, Ruefrex remained uncompromisingly political throughout their ten-year career. The band’s lyricist (and drummer), Paul Burgess, explains, “Unlike others, we didn’t write songs about girls and chocolates. We grew up in the heart of the Troubles and saw with our own eyes what was going on. So that’s what we wrote about, even when it was unfashionable.”³⁷

“Paid in Kind.” Paid in Kind. One by One, 1984, 7″.

“Playing Cards with Dead Men.” Political Wings. Flicknife Records, 1987, 12″.

“The Wild Colonial Boy.” Flowers for All Occasions. Kasper Records, 1985, LP.

Ruff Ruff & Ready. Emerging from the late 1980s Peckham art-squat scene, Ruff Ruff & Ready blended reggae and funk metal with an anarcho-punk sensibility.

“El Salvador.” Word of Mouth. Sense, 1990, LP.

“Money Snatcher.” Unreleased, recorded 1990.

The Ruts. A favourite of John Peel, London band the Ruts had a top-ten single with “Babylon’s Burning” in 1979. As the title suggests, the Ruts’ music was both political and heavily inflected with reggae. The release of the accompanying album, The Crack, coincided with the emergence of two-tone and announced the second wave of punk. Sadly, lead singer Malcolm Owen died of a heroin overdose a year later.

“Jah War.” The Crack. Virgin, 1979, LP.

“Staring at the Rude Boys.” Staring at the Rude Boys. Virgin, 1980, 7″.

“SUS.” The Crack. Virgin, 1979, LP.

Alexei Sayle. The son of Liverpool communists, Alexei Sayle has applied his surreal, political wit as a stand-up comedian and actor and as a writer. In the early 1980s, he was part of a group of comedians who, as the Comic Strip, initiated the antiracist, antisexist “alternative comedy” movement. The two volumes of his autobiography are entitled Stalin Ate My Homework and Thatcher Stole My Trousers.

“Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?” Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? Island, 1982, 7″.

“Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? Part II.” Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? Island, 1982, 7″.

Scars. An Edinburgh post-punk band, their first single, 1979’s “Adult/ery,” was released by Fast Product (famous for early releases by Mekons, Gang of Four, and the Human League). A couple of major label singles and an album followed. A gold flexi-disc of “Your Attention Please” was given away with the third issue of style magazine i-D.

“Your Attention Please.” Author! Author! PRE Records, 1981, LP.

Scissor Fits. They released two EPs, both in 1979. The first, Taut? Tense? Angular? And Other British Rail Sandwiches was “recorded in one, or two takes, maximum.”³⁸ It came with a lyrics sheet that confirmed that the lyrics to “D.H. Lawrence Wasn’t a Mexican” really were “There’s no egg in my parachute / And crabs can’t fly. / But there’s no onion in my bank account.”

“I Don’t Want to Work for British Airways.” Taut? Tense? Angular? And Other British Rail Sandwiches. Dubious Records, 1979, 7″.

The Screaming Blue Messiahs. A pop-culture-obsessed rockabilly-blues trio, they were best known for what was, effectively, a novelty single (“I Wanna Be a Flintstone”), but they put out three very credible albums of driving power-pop between 1986 and ’89. And they came with the David Bowie seal of approval.³⁹

“I Can Speak American.” Bikini Red. WEA, 1987, LP.

“I Wanna Be a Flintstone.” Bikini Red. WEA, 1987, LP.

Secret Affair. Formed in 1978, from the ashes of punk band New Hearts, Secret Affair became a cornerstone of the mod revival scene by fusing, as they put it, “a Tamla dance beat with contemporary lyrics and guitar sound.”⁴⁰ They had two top-twenty hits with “Time for Action” and “My World” in 1979 and ’80 and released three albums before changing musical fashions forced them out of business in 1982.

“Time for Action.” Glory Boys. I-Spy Records, 1979, LP.

Sedition. These Scottish hardcore punks released three EPs and two LPs between 1989 and 1994, including splits with Belfast’s Pink Turds in Space, Glasgow’s Disaffect, and Newcastle’s One by One.

“No Poll Tax.” Sedition/Pink Turds in Space. Reel to Real Records, 1990, LP.

Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. American singer-songwriter Peggy Seeger and English singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl were key figures in the British folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, doing much to align it with left-wing politics. They were frequent collaborators, recording more than three dozen albums together; they married in 1977.

“Carry Greenham Home.” Familiar Faces. Blackthorne Records, 1988, LP.

“The Media.” Items of News. Blackthorne Records, 1986, LP.

The Selecter. Led by Pauline Black and Neol Davis, ska band the Selecter emerged from Coventry in lockstep with the Specials: both bands’ first record was a split 7”, the debut release for Jerry Dammers’s Two-Tone Records. The Selecter’s next single, “On My Radio,” and their first album, Too Much Pressure, both top-ten hits, also appeared on Two-Tone.

“On My Radio.” On My Radio. Two-Tone Records, 1979, 7″.

Serious Drinking. Between 1981 and the dissolution of the original lineup in 1984, Serious Drinking released two albums and three singles, all of which were certifiable indie hits. They also recorded four sessions for John Peel, who, living in nearby Suffolk, was a keen supporter of the Norwich music scene they emerged from.

“Love on the Terraces.” Love on the Terraces. Upright Records, 1982, 7″.

“The Revolution Starts at Closing Time.” The Revolution Starts at Closing Time. Upright Records, 1983, LP.

Sex Pistols. Alex Ogg’s and Ian Glasper’s various histories of UK punk include more than five hundred bands. Virtually none of them would have existed without the Sex Pistols. The Pistols’ own brief career was as much about “the filth and the fury” as it was about music, but it was crowned with “God Save the Queen,” a song that arrived during the queen’s Silver Jubilee, as Jon Savage puts it, “with all the force of a hand-grenade tossed into an arrangement of gladioli.”⁴¹

“Anarchy in the UK.” Anarchy in the UK. EMI, 1976, 7″.

“God Save the Queen.” God Save the Queen. Virgin, 1977, 7″.

“Problems.” Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols. Virgin, 1977, LP.

“Seventeen.” Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols. Virgin, 1977, LP.

Sham 69. Adding football and a laddish sense of humour to the punk formula, Sham 69 were a big influence on the development of Oi! Like so many of the Oi! bands who came after them, they attracted a right-wing skinhead following they didn’t want; despite this they had several top-twenty singles in the late 1970s and a top-ten album with The Adventures of the Hersham Boys.

“I Don’t Wanna.” I Don’t Wanna. Step-Forward Records, 1977, 7″.

“They Don’t Understand.” Tell Us the Truth. Polydor, 1978, LP.

“Ulster.” I Don’t Wanna. Step-Forward Records, 1977, 7″.

Pete Shelley. Born in Lancashire, Shelley was the guitarist, principal songwriter, and, after Howard Devoto’s departure, lead singer for Buzzcocks. He made his first solo recording, the experimental oscillator noise of Sky Yen, before Buzzcocks formed. His post-Buzzcocks albums continued this interest in electronic music, albeit in a more digestible style.

“Homosapien.” Homosapien. Genetic Records, 1981, LP.

Shelleyan Orphan. Indie duo Shelleyan Orphan, formed in Bournemouth in 1982, often used a chamber orchestra to fill out their ethereal sound, producing two top-twenty indie albums for Rough Trade.

“Suffer Dog.” Various Artists. The Liberator—Artists for Animals. Deltic Records, 1989, LP.

Shop Assistants. They were one of six Scottish indie guitar-pop bands featured on the C86 compilation (the others were Primal Scream, the Soup Dragons, Close Lobsters, the Pastels, and the Mackenzies). They subsequently had two top-ten indie singles, and one that made the top one hundred on the national charts, “I Don’t Wanna Be Friends with You.” The band folded in 1987.

“Before I Wake.” Shop Assistants. Blue Guitar, 1986, LP.

Shriekback. A London synth-pop band started by former members of XTC and Gang of Four, Shriekback produced two successful indie albums before signing with Arista.

“Hanging Fire.” Various Artists. Animal Liberation. Wax Trax! Records, 1987, LP.

Labi Siffre. He started his career as a jazz and soul guitarist with various bands in the 1960s; his solo career as a singer-songwriter also drew on funk, R&B, and folk influences. Siffre had several top-thirty singles in the 1970s (one of them, “It Must Be Love,” would also be a hit for Madness in 1981), but his most successful release was “(Something Inside) So Strong,” which was a number four in 1987.

“(Something Inside) So Strong.” (Something Inside) So Strong. Chrysalis, 1987, 12″.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik. After Generation X’s acrimonious collapse, bass player Tony James formed new wave novelty act Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Their first single, “Love Missile F1-11,” was a hit in 1986, but it was downhill from there until the band folded in 1989. Tony James then joined Sisters of Mercy for the recording of their third album, Vision Thing.

“Love Missile F1-11.” Flaunt It. Parlophone, 1986, LP.

“M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction).” Dress for Excess. Parlophone, 1988, LP.

“Success.” Dress for Excess. Parlophone, 1988, LP.

The Silhouettes. A doo-wop group from Philadelphia, they recorded a dozen singles between 1957 and 1967, but the one they’re remembered for is “Get a Job.”

“Get a Job.” Get a Job/I Am Lonely. Ember Records, 1957, 7″.

Simple Minds. Formed in 1977 around the nucleus of songwriters Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, Glasgow’s Simple Minds were a highly successful rock band. Their early albums were in the new wave synth-pop vein, but by the mid-1980s they had joined U2 in making Big Music. Between 1982 and 1995 they had eight consecutive top-three albums.

“Belfast Child.” Street Fighting Years. Virgin, 1989, LP.

Simply Red. Singer Mick Hucknall’s first band was the Frantic Elevators, a trebly post-punk outfit that emerged from the same milieu as the Fall and the Passage. Simply Red, which Hucknall formed in 1984, played pop-rock with a nod to soul and funk. Their biggest hit was 1986’s “Holding Back the Years,” a song Hucknall had originally recorded with the Elevators.

“Money’s Too Tight (to Mention).” Picture Book. Elektra, 1985, LP.

Siouxsie and the Banshees. Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin were part of the so-called “Bromley Contingent,” who adopted the Sex Pistols and did much to establish the aesthetics of first-wave punk before it was even called punk. The Banshees, which they formed in 1976, were an influential post-punk band, and then an even more influential goth band, and then an interesting but somewhat less influential art-rock band. They disbanded in 1996.

“Fireworks.” Fireworks. Polydor, 1982, 7″.

“Mittageisen.” Mittageisen/Love in a Void. Polydor, 1979, 7″.

Six Minute War. DIY punks, they self-released three lo-fi EPs in 1980–81, including More Short Songs, which cost 50p, and Slightly Longer Songs, which appropriately enough cost slightly more: 75p.

“Protest and Survive.” More Short Songs. Not on label, 1980, 7″.

Skids. Formed as a punk band in Dumferline, Scotland, in 1977, the Skids experimented with various kinds of post-punk and power-pop approaches to rock, most successfully on the album The Absolute Game. After that album, a top-ten hit in 1980, guitarist and songwriter Stuart Adamson quit to form Big Country.

“Charles.” Charles. No Bad Records, 1978, 7″.

Skrewdriver. In its first incarnation, between 1976 and 1979, Skrewdriver was a virtually featureless punk band. In its second incarnation, from 1982 to 1993, it was the malevolent house band for the British National Front and other aspiring Nazis. Please ignore:

“Before the Night Falls.” Hail the New Dawn. Rock-O-Rama Records, 1984, LP. “Europe Awake.” Hail the New Dawn. Rock-O-Rama Records, 1984, LP.

“Our Pride Is Our Loyalty.” Hail the New Dawn. Rock-O-Rama Records, 1984, LP.

“Shove the Dove.” White Power. White Noise Records, 1983, 7″.

“Smash the I.R.A.” White Power. White Noise Records, 1983, 7″.

“Soldier of Freedom.” Hail the New Dawn. Rock-O-Rama Records, 1984, LP.

“Voice of Britain.” Voice of Britain. White Noise Records, 1984, 7″.

“White Power.” White Power. White Noise Records, 1983, 7″.

The Slits. Formed by Ari Up, Viv Albertine, Tessa Pollitt, and Palmolive in 1976, the Slits, Alex Ogg correctly estimates, “did more than anyone to build something substantive out of punk’s confusing and contradictory rhetoric.”⁴² Palmolive left to join the Raincoats before they recorded their first album, Cut.

“Love und Romance.” Cut. Island, 1979, LP.

“Shoplifting.” Cut. Island, 1979, LP.

“Spend, Spend, Spend.” Cut. Island, 1979, LP.

Smiley Culture. The Saxon sound system in South London was the training ground for a generation of British reggae DJs, including Tippa Irie, Papa Levi, and Smiley Culture. All three specialized in the “fast chat” DJ style that gave Smiley Culture a top-twenty hit with “Police Officer.”

“Cockney Translation.” Cockney Translation. Fashion Records, 1984, 7″.

“Police Officer.” Smiley Culture/The Reprobates. Police Officer/Participation Two. Fashion Records, 1984, 7″.

“Westland Helicopter.” Tongue in Cheek. Polydor, 1986, LP.

The Smiths. Formed in 1982 in Manchester by the songwriting team of Steven Morrissey and Johnny Marr, the Smiths signed to independent label Rough Trade rather than one of the majors. They dominated the indie charts from 1984 to 1987, with fourteen consecutive number ones, and their distinctive sound, defined by Marr’s guitar work, was hugely influential on other indie bands.

“Ask.” Ask. Rough Trade, 1986, 12″.

“Frankly, Mr. Shankly.” The Queen Is Dead. Rough Trade, 1986, LP.

“The Headmaster Ritual.” Meat Is Murder. Rough Trade, 1985, LP.

“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. Rough Trade, 1984, 7″.

“Panic.” Panic. Rough Trade, 1986, 7″.

“The Queen Is Dead.” The Queen Is Dead. Rough Trade, 1986, LP.

“You’ve Got Everything Now.” The Smiths. Rough Trade, 1984, LP.

Sneex. Part of the lively punk scene that also included XS Discharge and Defiant Pose, Sneex only managed one recording, “Radiomania,” but it still turns up regularly on anthologies of Scottish punk rarities.

“Radiomania.” Various Artists. Spectacular Commodity. Groucho Marxist, 1979, 7″.

Soft Cell. Marc Almond and David Ball formed the synthesizer duo Soft Cell after they met at Leeds Polytechnic in 1977. Their first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, produced three top-ten singles, including the international number one “Tainted Love.” Their distinctive line in queasy demimonde sleaze gave them three more successful albums and half a dozen more singles. They folded after 1984’s This Last Night in Sodom.

“Forever the Same.” The Art of Falling Apart. Some Bizarre, 1983, LP.

“Frustration.” Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. Some Bizarre, 1981, LP.

“Torch.” Torch. Some Bizzare, 1982, 12″.

Jimmy Somerville. After Bronski Beat and the Communards, Somerville embarked on a solo career that kept him in the charts until well into the late 1990s. His most successful solo release was “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” in 1990.

“Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough).” Read My Lips. London Records, 1989, LP.

Sore Throat. Purveyors of superaccelerated noise, Huddersfield’s Sore Throat released four albums in quick succession in 1988–89, featuring such thirty-second classics as “Let’s Go Gas Board Punch Official,” “Let’s Go Buckingham Kill Queen,” and “Let’s Go Stock Market Disembowel Yuppie.”

“Fuck the Poll Tax.” Unhindered by Talent. Meantime Records, 1988, LP.

The Sound. Formed in South London in 1979, the Sound were a critically acclaimed post-punk band in the bleak Joy Division mould who never quite broke through to the mainstream despite major label support. They persevered until 1988.

“Missiles.” Jeopardy. Korova, 1980, LP.

South Wales Striking Miners Choir and Test Dept. The former were exactly what their name suggests. Actually, so were the latter.

“Comrades.” Shoulder to Shoulder. Ministry of Power, 1985, LP.

The Special AKA. When the Fun Boy Three split from the Specials in 1981, Jerry Dammers enlisted several new members, notably vocalists Rhoda Dakar and Stan Campbell, and carried on as the Special AKA.

“Bright Lights.” Racist Friend/Bright Lights. Two-Tone Records, 1983, 7″.

“Racist Friend.” Racist Friend/Bright Lights. Two-Tone Records, 1983, 7″.

“Free Nelson Mandela.” Nelson Mandela b/w Break Down the Door! Two-Tone Records, 1984, 7″.

Special Duties. From Colchester, Essex, Special Duties made a brief career out of testing the punk scene’s tolerance. “Bullshit Crass” was a top-ten indie hit, although lead singer Steve Arrogant reckons “that may have been because it looked a bit like a Crass record, and their fans were so stupid they thought it was one.”⁴³ The single got them effectively blacklisted.

“Bullshit Crass.” Bullshit Crass. Rondelet Music and Records, 1982, 7″.

“CND (Campaign for Nuclear Destruction).” ’77 in ’82. Rondelet Music and Records, 1982, 7″.

“Police State.” Police State 4 Track EP. Rondolet Music & Records, 1982, 7″.

“There’ll Be No Tomorrow.” ’77 in ’82. Rondolet Music & Records, 1982, 7″.

The Specials. They figured out how to infuse ska and rocksteady with a punk sensibility (or vice versa) and then started their own label to record it. The label, Two-Tone, became synonymous with the ska revival they instigated, also releasing records by the Bodysnatchers, the Beat, and the Selecter. The original Specials lineup had seven top-ten singles, culminating in 1981’s “Ghost Town.”

“Concrete Jungle.” Specials. Two-Tone Records, 1979, LP.

“Doesn’t Make It Alright.” Specials. Two-Tone Records, 1979, LP.

“Ghost Town.” Ghost Town. Two-Tone Records, 1981, 7″.

“It’s Up to You.” Specials. Two-Tone Records, 1979, LP.

Spitting Image. At its peak in the 1980s, Spitting Image’s viciously satirical portrayals of everyone from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to the Queen Mother and the Pope made it one of Britain’s most popular TV programmes. Their “Chicken Song,” a parody of “Agadoo,” was almost as successful and almost as annoying as the original.

“I’ve Never Met a Nice South African.” The Chicken Song. Virgin, 1986, 7″.

Spizzenergi. Kenneth Spiers adopted the commercially suicidal policy of changing his band’s name every time he left the house. Spizzoil became Spizzenergi, then Athletico Spizz 80, the Spizzles, Spizzenergi2, and Spizz Orbit. As Spizzenergi, he had the very first number one on the independent charts: “Where’s Captain Kirk,” January 19, 1980.

“Soldier Soldier.” Soldier Soldier. Rough Trade, 1979, 7″.

Stalag 17. They took their name from an American comedy-drama about a German prisoner-of-war camp, but they got their anarcho-punk ethos from Crass. In addition to recording a cassette, as well as a couple of splits with fellow Belfast punks Asylum and Toxic Waste, they were instrumental in establishing the long-running punk social centre Giro’s.

“Doomsday Machine.” From Belfast with Love. Warzone Tapes, 1985, cassette.

Alvin Stardust. Bernard Jewry’s first musical incarnation was as Shane Fenton of the Fentones, a rock act managed by legendary impresario Larry Parness in the early 1960s. A decade later he took over the role of Alvin Stardust from producer Peter Shelley, who had been recording under that pseudonym but didn’t want to perform live. Glam rock stardom followed.

“I Feel Like Buddy Holly.” I Feel Like … Alvin Stardust. Chrysalis, 1984, LP.

Steeleye Span. Formed in 1969, folk-rockers Steeleye Span had half a dozen successful albums in the 1970s, the biggest of them being All around My Hat, which they recorded with Womble-master Mike Batt.

“Blackleg Miner.” Hark! The Village Wait. RCA Victor, 1970, LP.

Steel Pulse. Birmingham roots-reggae band Steel Pulse were closely associated with Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s, sharing stages with the Clash, Generation X, XTC, and numerous other punk bands. This helped propel their 1978 album Handsworth Revolution into the top ten. Babylon the Bandit, released in 1985, is still the only non-Jamaican record to win the Grammy for Best Reggae Album.

“Biko’s Kindred Lament.” Tribute to the Martyrs. Island, 1979, LP.

“Blues Dance Raid.” True Democracy. Elektra, 1982, LP.

“Handsworth Revolution.” Handsworth Revolution. Island, 1978, LP.

“Jah Pickney—RAR.” Tribute to the Martyrs. Island, 1979, LP.

“Ku Klux Klan.” Handsworth Revolution. Island, 1978, LP.

“State of Emergency.” State of Emergency. MCA Records, 1988, LP.

Stiff Little Fingers. Belfast cover band Highway Star heard the Clash in 1977 and found religion. Brian Young of fellow Belfast punk band Rudi reckoned “they were about as punk as the Wombles,”⁴⁴ but it’s hard to argue with the success of the six albums they released between 1979 and 1983 (all of them top-thirty in the UK).

“Alternative Ulster.” Alternative Ulster. Rough Trade, 1978, 7″.

“Hits and Misses.” Go for It. Chrysalis, 1981, LP.

“Law and Order.” Inflammable Material. Rough Trade, 1979, LP.

“No More of That.” Inflammable Material. Rough Trade, 1979, LP.

“State of Emergency.” Inflammable Material. Rough Trade, 1979, LP.

“Suspect Device.” Suspect Device. Rigid Digits, 1978, 7″.

Sting. The lead singer, bass player, and principal songwriter for the Police, Sting also had a successful solo career, including almost a dozen top-ten albums. He has often lent that celebrity to human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the Rainforest Fund.

“We Work the Black Seam.” The Dream of the Blue Turtles. A&M Records, 1985, LP.

“They Dance Alone (Gueco Sola).” … Nothing Like the Sun. A&M Records, 1987, LP.

Stitched-Back Foot Airman. If you’ve got an experimental side project that you don’t expect to go anywhere, there’s a temptation to call it something stupid. Simon Vincent, Robin Vincent, and Mike Farmer, from Southampton, succumbed to this temptation in the mid-1980s.

“Costa Del Sol.” Costa Del Sol. In Tape, 1988, 12″.

The Stone Roses. An indie-rock band from Manchester, the Stone Roses became one of the key Madchester bands, fusing psychedelic pop-rock with acid house to create the “baggy” sound that took them into the charts at the end of the 1980s.

“(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister.” The Stone Roses. Silvertone Records, 1989, LP.

The Stranglers. Formed in 1974 in Guildford, Surrey, the Stranglers were momentarily mistaken for punks after they opened for the Ramones in 1976. They had a distinctive line in adolescent sexism (“Peaches”), casual racism (“I Feel Like a Wog”), and global conspiracy theories (“Meninblack”).

“Shah Shah a Go Go.” Bear Cage/Shah Shah A Go Go. United Artists, 1980, 7″.

The Straps. Formed in Battersea in 1977, the Straps toured with the Damned, Sham 69, and Stiff Little Fingers, going through several lineups in the process. They dissolved in 1983.

“Brixton.” Brixton. Donut Records, 1982, 7″.

The Strawbs. They started out in 1964 as a bluegrass group called the Strawberry Hill Boys, but they passed through a variety of musical styles before folding in 1980. Their biggest hit was 1973’s “Part of the Union,” a novelty song written by band members Richard Hudson and John Ford. Hudson and Ford had another novelty hit in 1979 as the Monks, with “Nice Legs Shame About the Face.” The accompanying album went double platinum in Canada.

“Part of the Union.” Part of the Union. A&M Records, 1973, 7″.

Stump. Fretless bass player Kev Hopper explains the original vision was to create “splintered structures and dissonant harmonics with an added post-punk twist thrown in by an off-the-wall singer.”⁴⁵ Not many bands get to realize their vision so perfectly. Signed by major label Ensign, they didn’t make hit records.

“Buffalo.” Various Artists. C86. New Musical Express, 1986, cassette.

The Style Council. After the Jam, Paul Weller decided to play absolutely anything but rock music. The results earned him and Mick Talbot three gold albums and half a dozen top-ten singles between 1983 and 1989.

“All Gone Away.” Our Favourite Shop. Polydor, 1985, LP.

“Money-Go-Round.” Money-Go-Round. Polydor, 1983, LP.

“Our Favourite Shop.” Our Favourite Shop. Polydor, 1985, 12″.

“Shout to the Top.” Shout to the Top. Polydor, 1984, 12″.

“The Stand Up Comic’s Instructions.” Our Favourite Shop. Polydor, 1985, LP.

“A Stones Throw Away.” Our Favourite Shop. Polydor, 1985, LP

“Walls Come Tumbling Down.” Our Favourite Shop. Polydor, 1985, LP.

“With Everything to Lose.” Our Favourite Shop. Polydor, 1985, LP.

Poly Styrene. After X-Ray Spex split up in 1979, Poly Styrene recorded only sporadically: an album in 1980, an EP in 1986, and then contemplative silence until 2004. The rest of the band found a new singer and became Classix Nouveaux, a moderately successful New Romantic band.

“Big Boy Big Toy.” Gods and Goddesses. Awesome Records, 1986, 12″.

Subhumans. When his first band, the Mental, folded in 1980, Dick Lucas joined another Wiltshire punk band, Stupid Human, which then became Subhumans. They were never entirely comfortable with the implied orthodoxy of the “anarcho-punk” tag, but they made common cause with the bands at the heart of that scene. Driven by Lucas’s outraged wit and the band’s sense of fun, they released a string of highly successful recordings (first on Flux of Pink Indians’ label, Spiderleg, and then on their own Bluurg Records) before taking a hiatus in 1986.

“Apathy.” Worlds Apart. Bluurg Records, 1985, LP.

“British Disease.” Worlds Apart. Bluurg Records, 1985, LP.

“Evolution.” Evolution. Bluurg Records, 1983, 7″.

“From the Cradle to the Grave.” From the Cradle to the Grave. Bluurg Records, 1983, LP.

“Heads of State.” Worlds Apart. Bluurg Records, 1985, LP.

“Rats.” Rats. Bluurg Records, 1983, 7″.

“Reality Is Waiting for a Bus.” From the Cradle to the Grave. Bluurg Records, 1983, LP.

“Reason for Existence.” Reason for Existence. Bluurg Records, 1982, 7″.

“Someone Is Lying.” Worlds Apart. Bluurg Records, 1985, LP.

Suburban Studs. Playing very, very fast R&B, the Suburban Studs emerged from Birmingham in 1976 as part of the first wave of punk. They never quite caught on, however, and decided to call it a day in 1978.

“I Hate School.” Slam. Pogo Records Ltd., 1978, LP.

Tears for Fears. From Bath, Somerset, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith formed synth-pop duo Tears for Fears in 1981. They had numerous top-ten hits but never a number one in the UK, although their song “Mad World,” as covered by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, was an unlikely Christmas number one in 2003.

“Shout.” Songs from the Big Chair. Mercury, 1985, LP.

“Sowing the Seeds of Love.” The Seeds of Love. Fontana, 1989, LP.

Television Personalities. Originally formed in 1977 by five Chelsea school friends, the Television Personalities somehow managed to become influential, maybe even iconic, while remaining hopelessly marginal. They also, against all odds, turned out to be remarkably durable.

“She Was Only the Grocer’s Daughter.” How I Learned to Love the Bomb. Dreamworld, 1986, 7″.

“How I Learned to Love the Bomb.” How I Learned to Love the Bomb. Dreamworld, 1986, 7″.

“You’ll Have to Scream Louder.” The Painted World. Illuminated Records, 1984, LP.

Terminus. Arriving in 1983, sporting hard rock moustaches and occasional mullets, Scunthorpe’s Terminus didn’t look much like a punk band, but as the Maximumrocknroll review of 1990’s Going Nowhere Fast said, “If ever there was a manifesto of the ‘underclass’ who got blamed for the Poll Tax Riots … this is it.”⁴⁶

“Hunt the Hunt.” Fear, Despair & Hate. Terminal Plague Productions Limited, 1989, 7″.

“Propaganda War.” Body Count. Terminal Plague Productions Limited, 1986, cassette.

“Terraces to the Trenches.” Going Nowhere Fast. Word of Warning Records, 1990, LP.

Test Dept. They formed in 1981, in New Cross, London, and set to work making music with things that weren’t strictly speaking musical instruments, like heavy machinery and scrap metal. With the support of adventurous indie label Some Bizzare, they became an influential industrial music act or, as they put it, “sonic material handlers.”

“Long Live British Democracy … ” A Good Night Out. Ministry of Power, 1987, LP.

Thatcher on Acid. By their own reckoning, Somerset’s Thatcher on Acid “took a lot of musical risks, most of which didn’t work at all.”⁴⁷ There was acid involved.

“No Fuckin’ War.” Thatcher on Acid/7 Year Bitch. No Fuckin’ War/Can We Laugh Now. Clawfist, 1992, 7″.

“Riff Raff/Orthodox.” Curdled. All the Madmen Records, 1987, LP.

“Thatcher on Acid.” Curdled. All the Madmen Records, 1987, LP.

That Petrol Emotion. After the Undertones, John and Damian O’Neill formed indie-rock band TPE. They never quite reclaimed the success of their previous band, but their late 1980s albums anticipated the mixture of indie-rock and dance music that would be so successful for the Madchester bands.

“Big Decision.” Babble. Polydor, 1987, LP.

The The. Matt Johnson, supported by a rotating cast of collaborators and studio musicians, developed a distinctive and melodramatically grumpy version of synth-pop. It struck a chord, giving Johnson three top-ten albums between 1986 and 1993.

“Heartland.” Infected. Epic, 1986, LP.

The Thrashing Doves. A pop-rock band from London, the Doves have the unenviable distinction of having a curse named after them. Their single “Beautiful Imbalance” stalled in the charts after Thatcher expressed a liking for it, and their career never quite recovered; “The Curse of the Thrashing Doves” has become shorthand for the blight experienced by any band publicly endorsed by politicians.

“Biba’s Basement.” Bedrock Vice. A&M Records, 1987, LP.

“Northern Civil War Party.” Bedrock Vice. A&M Records, 1987, LP.

The Three Johns. Emerging from the same Leeds art-school ferment as the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Soft Cell, the Three Johns were actually two Johns, one Jon, and a drum machine called Hugo. Between 1981 and 1988, they set about “putting the world to rights with a big drunken grin on their faces.”⁴⁸ Despite the grins, and the joyful furore of their music, however, their songs were often sharply political.

“Atom Drum Bop.” The World by Storm. Abstract Records, 1986, LP.

“Coals to Newcastle.” The World by Storm. Abstract Records, 1986, LP.

“Death of the European.” Death of the European. Abstract Records, 1985, 12″.

“Sold down the River.” The World by Storm. Abstract Records, 1986, LP.

The Timelords. Working under several names (the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, JAMs, KLF, the Timelords), acid house pioneers Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty had six top-five singles between 1988 and 1992. They also published The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), which, in the Situationist spirit of punk, demystified their own cynical process for manufacturing hits.

“Doctorin’ the Tardis.” Doctorin’ the Tardis. KLF Communications, 1988, 7″.

Tom Robinson Band. See Tom Robinson.

Toxic Ephex. A punk band formed in Aberdeen in 1979 as the Abductors, they didn’t actually release their first single, “Punk as Fuck,” until 1986. Dick Lucas remembers them as “a pleasantly loopy bunch.”⁴⁹

“Police Brutality.” Oi Polloi/Toxic Ephex. Mad as Fuck LP. Green Vomit Records, 1987, LP.

Toxic Waste. Formed in Newtownards, County Down, after its founding members saw Crass perform in Belfast in 1982, Toxic Waste moved to Belfast the following year. There they became part of the anarcho-punk scene centred on the anarchist bookstore Just Books. Vocalist Roy Wallace remembers “lentils, TVP … patchouli oil, stencils, cassette tapes, enthusiasm and political passion.”⁵⁰

“As More Die.” Asylum/Stalag 17/Toxic Waste. We Will Be Free. Warzone Records, 1986, LP.

“Burn Your Flags.” Toxic Waste/Stalag 17. From Belfast with Blood—The Truth Will Be Heard. Mortarhate Records, 1985, 12″.

“Listen Margaret.” Asylum/Stalag 17/Toxic Waste. We Will Be Free. Warzone Records, 1986, LP.

“Traditionally Yours.” Toxic Waste/Stalag 17. From Belfast with Blood—The Truth Will Be Heard. Mortarhate Records, 1985, 12″.

Toy Dolls. Sunderland punk band Toy Dolls, fronted by the wiry, cartoonish Michael “Olga” Algar, didn’t take themselves too seriously, but they had their share of indie hits—“Cheerio and Toodle-Pip,” “She Goes to Fino’s,” “James Bond (Lives down Our Street)”—and a surprise chart topper with their rendition of the children’s song “Nellie the Elephant,” a UK number four in 1984.

“PC Stoker.” Idle Gossip. Volume Records, 1986, LP.

Tubeway Army. See Gary Numan.

T.V. Smith’s Explorers. T.V. Smith is best known as the lead singer for first-wave punk band the Adverts, active from 1976 to 1979. His post-Adverts projects included T.V. Smith’s Explorers, T.V. Smith’s Cheap, and an extensive solo career.

“Tomahawk Cruise.” Tomahawk Cruise. Big Beat Records, 1980, 7″.

Twa Toots. Sarah Brown and Philippa Richmond, from Sheerness, sent John Peel a demo tape in 1983. He was impressed and had them record a session for him. Sarah’s dad helped out on trombone. Philippa went off to university. Sarah continued as Sarah Goes Shopping.

“Please Don’t Play a Rainy Night in Georgia” The Peel Sessions. Strange Fruit, 1986, 12″.

“A New Depression.” The Peel Sessions. Strange Fruit, 1986, 12″.

UB40. Undoubtedly the UK’s most successful reggae band (thirty-nine top-forty singles, including two number ones; twenty-seven top-forty albums, including two number ones), UB40 formed in Birmingham in 1978 and had the same lineup for almost thirty years.

“Don’t Do the Crime.” UB44. DEP International, 1982, LP.

“Don’t Let It Pass You By.” Present Arms. DEP International, 1981, LP.

“The Earth Dies Screaming.” The Earth Dies Screaming/Dream a Lie. Graduate Records, 1980, 7″.

“Madam Medusa.” Signing Off. Graduate Records, 1980, LP.

“One in Ten.” Present Arms. DEP International, 1981, LP.

“Present Arms.” Present Arms. DEP International, 1981, LP.

“So Here I Am.” UB44. DEP International, 1982, LP.

“You’re Not an Army.” Geffery Morgan … DEP International, 1984, LP.

UK Apachi. Abdul Wahab Lafta (UK Apachi) and Andre Williams (Shy FX) cracked the UK top forty with the ragga-jungle single “Original Nuttah” in 1994. “No Poll Tax.” No Poll Tax. Sweet Freedom Records, 1990, 12″.

UK Subs. Founded in London during the first wave of punk, Charlie Harper’s UK Subs proved extraordinarily durable. Apparently, after starting with Another Kind of Blues, Brand New Age, and Crash Course, Harper felt compelled to work his way through the alphabet, arriving, twenty-six albums later, at Ziezo.

“After the War.” Flood of Lies. Scarlet Records, 1983, LP.

“Bomb Factory.” Brand New Age. Gem, 1980, LP.

“Brand New Age.” Brand New Age. Gem, 1980, LP.

“Countdown.” Endangered Species. Nems, 1982, LP.

“Fascist Regime.” Motivator. Released Emotions Records, 1988, 12″.

“Organized Crime.” Brand New Age. Gem, 1980, LP.

“Police State (Part 1).” Shake Up the City. Abstract Records, 1982, 7″.

“Warhead.” Brand New Age. Gem, 1980, LP.

Tracey Ullman. A comedian, actress, singer, writer, producer, director, and businessperson, Tracey Ullman has split her relentlessly successful career between the UK and the United States.

“They Don’t Know.” You Broke My Heart in 17 Places. Stiff Records, 1983, LP.

Ultravox. Originally formed as Tiger Lily in 1973, the band’s most successful period began when Midge Ure took over vocals in 1979. Their synth-pop single “Vienna” was a UK number two in 1981.

“Dancing with Tears in My Eyes.” Lament. Chrysalis, 1984, LP.

The Undertones. John Peel liked their debut single, “Teenage Kicks,” so much he played it twice in one show when it was released in 1978. In 2000, he rated it his second favourite song of all time. The Undertones’ biggest single, however, was “My Perfect Cousin,” a UK number nine in 1980.

“It’s Going to Happen!” Positive Touch. Ardeck, 1981, LP.

“Teenage Kicks.” Teenage Kicks. Good Vibrations Records, 1978, 7″.

U2. According to Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, “Everything about U2—from their lyrics to Bono’s bellow to the Edge’s ionospheric guitar—was ‘uplifting’, veering towards the sun and away from seething male hormones and sticky female secretions.”⁵¹ Apparently this was a formula for global success.

“Bullet the Blue Sky.” The Joshua Tree. Island, 1987, LP.

“Mothers of the Disappeared.” The Joshua Tree. Island, 1987, LP.

“Seconds.” War. Island, 1983, LP.

“Sunday Bloody Sunday.” War. Island, 1983, LP.

The Valentine Brothers. They really were brothers, from Columbus, Ohio, and their last name really was Valentine. Their smooth soul sound gave them several R&B hits in the USA in the mid-1980s.

“Money’s Too Tight (to Mention).” Bridge Records, 1982, 7″.

The Vapors. From Guildford, Surrey, the Vapors had a top-ten hit with the definitively new wave single “Turning Japanese” in 1980. Despite their knack for melodic power-pop, they were unable to follow up that success and folded in 1982.

“Bunkers.” New Clear Days. United Artists, 1980, LP.

The Varukers. Leamington Spa is so axiomatically sleepy that Firestation Records and Bilberry Records have released nine compilations of twee pop by the likes of the Potting Sheds, the Pooh Sticks, and the Windmills, billed as The Sound of Leamington Spa. This does not explain the Varukers.

“Animals an Animal.” One Struggle One Fight. Liberate Records, 1985, LP.

“The Bomb Blast.” Massacred Millions. Rot Records, 1984, 12″.

“Deadly Games.” Another Religion Another War. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“Die for Your Government.” Die for Your Government. Riot City Records, 1983, 7″.

“The End Is Nigh.” Led to the Slaughter. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“The Last War.” Another Religion Another War. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“Led to the Slaughter.” Led to the Slaughter. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“Massacred Millions.” Massacred Millions. Rot Records, 1984, 12″.

“Never Again.” The Varukers EP. Tempest Records, 1981, 7″.

“No Escape.” Another Religion Another War. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“One Struggle One Fight.” One Struggle One Fight. Liberate Records, 1985, LP.

“Protest and Survive.” The Varukers EP. Tempest Records, 1981, 7″.

“Seek Shelter in Hell.” Another Religion Another War. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“Soldier Boy.” The Varukers EP. Tempest Records, 1981, 7″.

“Thatcher’s Fortress.” Massacred Millions. Rot Records, 1984, 12″.

“Who Pays.” Another Religion Another War. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

“Will They Ever Learn.” Massacred Millions. Rot Records, 1984, 12″.

“You’re Dead.” Led to the Slaughter. Riot City Records, 1984, 12″.

Vice Squad. A Bristol punk band who came with the John Peel seal of approval, Vice Squad were fronted by vocalist Rebecca Bond (Beki Bondage). They released most of their early material on their own label, Riot City Records, which also released records by Chaos U.K., Abrasive Wheels, the Ejected, and other second-wave punk bands.

“Last Rockers.” Last Rockers. Riot City Records, 1980, 7″.

“(So) What for the Eighties.” Out of Reach. EMI, 1982, 7″.

“You’ll Never Know.” Shot Away. Anagram Records, 1984, LP.

Violators. A punk band from Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, formed in 1979, the Violators were distinguished by having two distinctive vocalists, Helen Hill and Sean Stiles. Initially sporting Clockwork Orange–inspired bowler hats and codpieces, they released several successful singles on the influential punk label No Future, scoring three top-twenty indie hits, but they split up in 1983 before getting as far as an album.

“Summer of 81.” Summer of 81. No Future Records, 1982, 7″.

“Government Stinks.” Die with Dignity. No Future Records, 1983, 12″.

The Wailers. See Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Wat Tyler. Pitching their tent somewhere in the swamp ground between parody and surrealism, Tottenham’s Wat Tyler released several albums and numerous singles between 1989 and 1999.

“Bring Me the Head of Gus Caesar.” Bavarian Drinking Songs. Meantime Records, 1989, LP.

“It’s Football, Not Fuckin’ Soccer.” Thatcher on Acid/Wat Tyler. Yurp Thing. Allied Recordings, 1992, LP.

“No ID.” Contemporary Farming Issues. Rugger Bugger Discs, 1989, 7″.

“Terry Fenwick’s Leg Takes Crack.” Appetite for Axl. Rugger Bugger Discs, 1990, 10”.

The Wedding Present. Formed in Leeds in 1985, the Wedding Present’s disgruntled musings on the disappointments of love made them one of the foremost of the so-called C86 bands. Outliving that scene, however, they staked their greatest claim to fame in 1992, releasing a top-forty single every month of that year.

“All About Eve.” Anyone Can Make a Mistake. Reception, 1987, 7″.

We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It. Fuzzbox were a gaudy, shambolic, all-female rock band from Birmingham. Their first record, the Rules and Regulations EP, was an indie number one in 1986, and they subsequently had several UK top-forty hits before folding in 1990.

“Bohemian Rhapsody.” What’s the Point (The Bostinous One). WEA, 1987, 12″.

“Rules and Regulations.” Rules and Regulations. Vindaloo Records, 1986, 7″.

Wham! Between 1982 and 1986, it felt like Wham! were huge (with four UK number ones and thirty million records sold), but it turned out that was just George Michael warming up.

“Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do).” Wham Rap! Inner Vision, 1982, 7″.

Wings. The thing Paul McCartney did between 1971 and 1981, with help from Denny Laine and Linda McCartney. Many records were sold.

“Give Ireland Back to the Irish.” Give Ireland Back to the Irish. Apple Records, 1972, 7″.

The Wolfe Tones. A Dublin folk band specializing in Irish rebel music, the Wolfe Tones’ lineup remained unchanged from 1964 to 2001; in 2014 the remaining three members celebrated the band’s fiftieth anniversary.

“A Nation Once Again.” Let the People Sing. Dolphin Records, 1972, LP.

The Wombles. See Mike Batt.

Working Week. Formed in 1983, Working Week played Latin-inflected jazz-pop. Initially lacking a permanent vocalist, they called in Tracey Thorn and Robert Wyatt for their first single, the bossa “Venceremos,” which became their only chart hit.

“Venceremos (We Will Win).” Storm of Light/Venceremos. Virgin Records, 1984, 7″.

World Party. When Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger left the Waterboys in 1986, he started what was effectively a solo career as World Party. He released several critically acclaimed albums, the most commercially successful being 1993’s Bang!

“Kuwait City.” Bang! Ensign, 1993, LP.

The Wurzels. Formed in 1966 in Somerset, the Wurzels billed themselves as a “Scrumpy & Western” band, scrumpy being a ludicrously alcoholic cider made from whatever old apples come to hand. The Wurzels’ signature tune was “Drink Up Thy Zider.” Other favourites included “Drunk Again” and “I’m a Cider Drinker.”

“The Combine Harvester (Brand New Key).” The Combine Harvester. One-Up, 1976, LP.

Robert Wyatt. A founding member of pioneering psychedelic band Soft Machine, Wyatt subsequently founded the short-lived prog rock outfit Matching Mole and then embarked on a successful solo career.

“The Age of Self.” Robert Wyatt/The Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band & G.C.H.Q. Trade Unions with 7:84 Theatre Co. England. The Age of Self/Raise Your Banners High. TUC, 1985, 7″.

“East Timor.” Old Rottenhat. Rough Trade, 1985, LP.

“Shipbuilding.” Shipbuilding/Memories of You. Rough Trade, 1982, 7″.

“In the Dark Year.” Lindsay Cooper, Chris Cutler, Bill Gilonis, Tim Hodgkinson, and Robert Wyatt. The Last Nightingale. Re Records, 1984, 12″.

X-Ray Spex. Poly Styrene started first-wave punk band X-Ray Spex in London in 1976. When she quit in 1979, the rest of the band continued as Classix Nouveaux and become a moderately successful new romantic act.

“Germ Free Adolescents.” Germfree Adolescents. EMI, 1978, LP.

“I Am a Cliché.” Oh Bondage Up Yours. Virgin, 1977, 7″.

“O Bondage! Up Yours!” Oh Bondage! Up Yours! Virgin, 1977, 7″.

“Plastic Bag.” Germfree Adolescents. EMI, 1978, LP.

XS Discharge. Consisting of brothers Paddy and Chik Doherty plus various drummers, XS Discharge spent much of their brief career taunting the police. By all accounts, “Lifted” was recorded amidst fits of drunken giggles.⁵²

“Lifted.” Various Artists. Ha! Ha! Funny Polis. Groucho Marxist, 1980, 7″.

XTC. Swindon’s XTC started out in 1977 playing anxiously uptight post-punk, but after they stopped playing live in the early ’80s they relaxed into gentle pop, dub experimentalism, and, as the Dukes of Stratosphear, lovingly curated psychedelia.

“Everyday Story of Smalltown.” The Big Express. Virgin, 1984, LP.

“Making Plans for Nigel.” Drums and Wires. Virgin, 1979, LP.

Benjamin Zephaniah. Born in Handsworth, Zephaniah is a dub poet, novelist, playwright, and children’s book author. His first album, Rasta, made it into the indie charts in 1983.

“Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death (Lord Scarman Dub).” Rasta. Upright Records, 1983, LP.

“Free South Africa.” Rasta. Upright Records, 1983, LP.

Zounds. Formed in Berkshire and closely associated with the Mob, Zounds released their first EP, the indie number one Can’t Fight Karma, on Crass Records in 1981. Several EPs and one full album of smart, angular punk followed.

“Biafra.” La Vache Qui Rit. Not So Brave Records, 1983, 7″.

“Great White Hunter.” Demystification. Rough Trade, 1981, 7″.

“Loads of Noise.” The Curse of Zounds. Rough Trade, 1981, LP.

“Target/Mr. Disney/The War Goes On.” The Curse of Zounds. Rough Trade, 1981, LP.

Notes

PART ONE Everything’s Brilliant!

1Kwasi Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 50, 55.

2Officialcharts.com. This site is the source for references to national chart positions throughout.

3Simon Ford, Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and the Fall (London: Quartet Books, 2003), 22; Dave Simpson, The Fallen: Life in and out of Britain’s Most Insane Group (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008), 72.

4Andy McSmith, No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Constable and Robinson, 2011), 25; John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 303.

5Paul DuNoyer, “Worth Taking a Chance,” History of Rock, January 2017, 138; Dave Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear: 2-Tone, the Specials and a World in Flames (London: Soundcheck Books, 2011), 152.

6Campbell, Thatcher, 471.

7Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), 29; Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 242; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2014), 253–57, 303–4; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2015), 34–36.

8John Street, Music and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 46–47; Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 39–45.

9Quoted in Michael Holden, “Thatcher’s War on Acid House,” Vice, April 9, 2013, https://www.vice.com/en_CA/article/8gvp5x/margaret-thatcher-war-on-rave-acid-house-boys-own.

10Quoted in Holden, “Thatcher’s War”; see also John Harris, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair, and the Demise of English Rock (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 11–12; Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012), 66–69.

11Misquoted from Margaret Thatcher, “Interview for Woman’s Own (“No Such Thing as Society”), Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.

12Alexei Sayle, Thatcher Stole My Trousers (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2016), 218.

13Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 30–31, 46.

14Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2012), 502–3, 690–91; Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 8; Campbell, Thatcher, 6, 51; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 87; Moore, Thatcher, 1:337–38, 1:503.

15Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 501.

16Quoted in Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 670; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 275.

17Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 48.

18Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 223; Campbell, Thatcher, 624; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 29; Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 3, 29–30.

19Kari Kallioniemi, Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2016), 123–25; Moore, Thatcher, 1:408–11.

20Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 677.

21Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 677; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 94.

22Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 18.

23Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 22; Moore, Thatcher, 1:387.

24Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 43; Moore, Thatcher, 1:307–9.

25Quoted in Claire Berlinski, “There Is No Alternative”: Why Thatcher Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 76.

26Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 48.

27“The Great Storm of 1987,” UK Meteorological Office, accessed June 20, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20051024140200/https://www.meto.gov.uk/education/secondary/students/1987.html.

28Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 214–65.

29Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 23–36; Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 19–24; Laing, One Chord Wonders, 172–73; John Street, Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 174–76.

30Quoted in Christopher Gray, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998), 2.

31David Solomons, “A Blue Tomato and a Packet of Gauloises,” in The Aesthetics of Our Anger, ed. Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (Colchester, UK: Minor Compositions, 2016), 35.

32Robert Garnett, “Too Low to Be Low: Art Pop and the Sex Pistols,” 27; Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 63–65, 140–41.

33Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 4.

34Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 10, 54.

35Quoted in Stewart, Bang, 45.

36Stewart, Bang, 45; see also Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 69–73.

37Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 47; Moore, Thatcher, 1:283.

38Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 109.

39Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 109.

40Savage, England’s Dreaming, 230; John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015), 224.

41Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 8.

42Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons; Alwyn Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London: Aurum, 2013), 272; Campbell, Thatcher, 738, 751; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 272; Berlinski, No Alternative, 146.

43Quoted in Matthew Tempest, “Mandelson: We Are All Thatcherites Now,” Guardian, June 10, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/jun/10/labour.uk1.

44Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984 (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 111.

45Leon Rosselson, The World Turned Upside Down: Rosselsongs 1980–2010, PM Press, 2011, 4 compact discs and book, 38.

46Rosselson, World Turned Upside Down, 38.

47Joe Strummer, “Interview with Steve Walsh,” Sniffin’ Glue no. 4, in Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory, by Mark Perry, ed. Terry Rawlings (London: Sanctuary, 2000), n.p.

48Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic; Rock ’n’ Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Anchor, 2003), 259.

49Mark Perry, Sniffin’ Glue no. 8, in Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory, ed. Terry Rawlings (London: Sanctuary, 2000), n.p.

50Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, The Boy Looked at Johnny: The Obituary of Rock and Roll (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987), 186.

51Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 155, 265–68; see also Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 10–11; Street, Rebel Rock, 153; Mat Callahan, The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975 (Oakland: PM Press, 2017), 55–56, 110; Reynolds, Energy Flash, xxi.

52Quoted in Street, Music and Politics, 87.

53Callahan, Explosion, 42.

54Joan Holden, quoted in Callahan, Explosion, 178; see also Street, Rebel Rock, 169–71.

55Quoted in George Berger, The Story of Crass (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 66.

56Ian Bone, Bash the Rich: True-Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK (Bath, UK: Tangent Books, 2006), 127–28.

57Quoted in Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 48.

58Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 296; see also Billy Bragg, The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging (London: Bantam, 2006), 199.

59Quoted in Glasper, Day the Country Died, 176. Ellipses in the original.

60Richard Cabut, “Positive Punk,” in Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, ed. Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017), 255.

61Laing, One Chord Wonders, 157.

62Cabut, “Positive Punk,” 260.

63Cabut, “Positive Punk,” 260–61.

64Frith, Performing Rites, 164.

65Frith, Performing Rites, 164.

66Frith, Performing Rites, 169.

67Laing, One Chord Wonders, 141.

68Frith, Performing Rites, 169, 272.

69Street, Rebel Rock, 67.

70Street, Rebel Rock, 67.

71Turner, Classless Society, 132.

72Quoted in Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: From Club Culture to Style Culture, the Story of the New Romantics (London: Faber & Faber, 2020), 311.

73Jones, Sweet Dreams, 273.

74John Robb, Death to Trad Rock: Faster! Louder! Bass Aggro, High Treble Xerox Culture, Pop Noise and Anti Trad Rock Feeling … Adventures in the 80s Post Punk Underground (London: Cherry Red, 2009), 10.

75Jones, Sweet Dreams, 311.

76Paul Rambali, “You Wake Up with Style,” History of Rock, December 2016, 107.

77Gary Clarke, “Defending Ski-Jumpers,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 94.

78Michael Bracewell, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie (London: Flamingo, 1998), 206.

79Jones, Sweet Dreams, 11.

80Quoted in Glasper, Day the Country Died, 176.

81Street, Rebel Rock, 3.

82Tracey Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Popstar (London: Virago, 2013), 158.

83Robb, Trad Rock, 9.

84Robb, Trad Rock, 35.

85Robb, Trad Rock, 12.

86Quoted in Worley, No Future, 72.

87Worley, No Future, 39.

88Quoted in Harry Doherty, “We’ve Set Our Standards Higher,” History of Rock, November 2016, 17; see also Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge (New York: Canongate, 2007), 246–47.

89Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–84 (London: Penguin, 2006), 336.

90Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 414.

91Quoted in Jones, Sweet Dreams, 214–15; see also Michael Hann, “Five Songs about Thatcher,” Guardian, April 8, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/apr/08/five-songs-about-margaret-thatcher; Dave Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 180.

92John Taylor, In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death & Duran Duran (New York: Dutton, 2012), 71–72.

93Quoted in Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s (New York: Abrams Image, 2014), 63.

94Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, “White Youth: The Far Right, Punk and British Youth Culture 1977–87,” in “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (London: Routledge, 2018), 113–31.

95Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (New York: Routledge, 1988), 112–18.

96Quoted in Jones, Sweet Dreams, 166.

97Quoted in Jones, Sweet Dreams, 166.

98Ellen Goldfarb, dir., New Wave: Dare to Be Different (Jomyra Productions/Roger Senders Productions, MVD Visual, 2018).

99Ramsey Kanaan, personal communication with the author, September 19, 2019.

100Reynolds, Rip It Up, 195–96, 318–19; Savage, No Future, 401–2; Rick Pynor, ed., Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976–80 (London: Phaidon Press, 2016), 21–23.

101Burchill and Parsons, Boy Looked at Johnny, 94.

102Burchill and Parsons, Boy Looked at Johnny, 94.

103John Street, Music and Politics, 53.

104Most notably, Reynolds, Rip It Up, Worley, No Future, and Savage, England’s Dreaming.

105Tina Miles, “Merseyside Dad Hopes for Chart Success with Black Lace Hit Agadoo,” Liverpool Echo, March 26, 2009, https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/merseyside-dad-hopes-chart-success-3458034.

106Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen, 158–59.

107See Caryl, Strange Rebels; Sandbrook, Seasons; Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain; Berlinski, No Alternative.

108Caryl, Strange Rebels, 321–22.

109Caryl, Strange Rebels, 99.

110Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 125.

111Event flyer reproduced in Rich Cross, “‘Stop the City Showed Another Possibility,’” in The Aesthetics of Our Anger, ed. Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (Colchester, UK: Minor Compositions, 2016), 121.

112Cross, “Stop the City,” 132–35.

113Quoted in Cross, “Stop the City,” 133.

114Cross, “Stop the City,” 121.

115Cross, “Stop the City,” 134; Glasper, Day the Country Died, 427.

116I borrow the phrase “secret history” from Marcus, Lipstick Traces; on “secret histories,” see also Street, Music and Politics, 98–117.

PART TWO In the Days of the Ford Cortina

1Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 374, 387.

2John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt, “The Affluent Worker and the Thesis of Embourgeoisement: Some Preliminary Research Findings,” Sociology 1, no. 1 (January 1967): 13. Goldthorpe and his colleagues concluded, in 1967, that the term embourgeoisement was misleading, because “working-class affluence” did not seem to lead to the political conservatism characteristic of the middle classes (28).

3Quoted in Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 232.

4Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 7, 20; Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 35; Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), 31.

5Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 63.

6Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (London: Aurum, 2008), 13; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 39.

7Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 165.

8Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2012), 182.

9Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 181–82; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 21–22.

10Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 182.

11Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 183.

12Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 185.

13Quoted in Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3.

14Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 95.

15Quoted in Harry Doherty, “We’ve Set Our Standards Higher,” History of Rock, November 2016, 17.

16Quoted in Simon Ford, Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and the Fall (London: Quartet Books, 2003), 10.

17Henry Badowski, quoted in Alex Ogg, No More Heroes: A Complete History of UK Punk from 1976 to 1980 (London: Cherry Red Books, 2006), 128.

18Quoted in Eddie Piller and Steve Rowand, ed., Punkzines: British Fanzine Culture from the Punk Scene 1976–1983 (London: Omnibus Press, 2021), 68.

19Mark Perry, “Mark P’s Blurb,” in Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory, ed. Terry Rawlings (London: Sanctuary, 2000), 11.

20Mark Perry, Sniffin’ Glue no. 1, in Sniffin’ Glue, ed. Rawlings, n.p.

21Paolo Hewitt, “Not Just the Funny-Ha-Ha Bit,” History of Rock, December 2016, 127.

22John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 396–400.

23Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 599.

24Campbell, Thatcher, 400.

25Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 214.

26Quoted in Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 212.

27Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 65.

28Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 66.

29Robb Johnson, The People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State (Oakland: PM Press, 2020), 9–21.

30Johnson, People’s Republic of Neverland, 28.

31Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 66.

32Quoted in Stuart Maconie, The People’s Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records (London: Ebury Press, 2013), 219.

33Quoted in Maconie, People’s Songs, 219.

34Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2014), 214–15.

35Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 506.

36Johnson, People’s Republic of Neverland, 42.

37Moore, Thatcher, 1:218.

38John Robb, The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City (1977–1966) (London: Aurum Press, 2010), 256, 271.

39Tracey Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Popstar (London: Virago, 2013), 51–52.

40Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–84 (London: Penguin, 2006), 26–40.

41Dave Harker, One for the Money: Politics and Popular Song (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 55, 215–16.

42Ian Bone, Bash the Rich: True-Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK (Bath, UK: Tangent Books, 2006), 70.

43Bone, Bash the Rich, 69.

44Bone, Bash the Rich, 93.

45Quoted in Harker, One for the Money, 103.

46On smiling and killing, see Michael Epp, “Grinning Things: Object Lessons in Violent Labour,” in Material Cultures in Canada, ed. Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2015), 155–70.

47Quoted in Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984 (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 90. On this subject see also Bone, Bash the Rich, 165–66.

48Ennis B. Edmunds, “Dread ‘I’ In-a-Babylon: Ideological Resistance and Cultural Revitalization,” in Chanting Down Babylon, ed. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 23–35; Clinton Hutton and Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, “Rastas’ Psychology of Blackness, Resistance, and Somebodiness,” in Chanting Down Babylon, 36–54; J. Edward Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1993), 55–59.

49Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 99.

50Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 124–26.

51Quoted in Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 25; see also Alex Carter, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark? Assessing the Development of ‘Cumulative Extremism’ between Fascists and Anti-fascists in the 1970s,” in “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (London: Routledge, 2018), 90–112; Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 72–113; Errol Lawrence, “In the Abundance of Water the Fool Is Thirsty: Sociology and Black ‘Pathology,’” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), 93–140; Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 70.

52Fryer, Staying Power, 376–80, 395–99.

53Graeme Thomson, Complicated Shadows (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004), 88.

PART THREE The Procession of Popular Capitalism

1Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3–20, 95; Simon Frith, “What Is Bad Music?,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, ed. Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–19.

2John Street, Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 153; see also Nick Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–1980 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 32–33, 43–44, 53–54.

3Street, Rebel Rock, 161.

4Street, Rebel Rock, 161.

5Kwasi Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 52.

6Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 125.

7Quoted in John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 85.

8Andy McSmith, No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Constable and Robinson, 2011), 158; Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 107; Campbell, Thatcher, 99–100.

9Quoted in Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984 (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 392.

10Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Party Conference,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, October 9, 1987, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106941.

11Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial, 20.

12Peter Shore, quoted in Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial, 51; see also Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2014), 237.

13Campbell, Thatcher, 79.

14Margaret Thatcher, quoted in Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial, 11; see also Campbell, Thatcher, 532.

15Margaret Thatcher, “Interview for Catholic Herald,” Catholic Herald, December 5, 1978, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103793; see also Moore, Thatcher, 1:349–50.

16Moore, Thatcher, 1:349; see also Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2015), 9.

17Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, May 21, 1988, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107246; see also Campbell, Thatcher, 392.

18Quoted in Moore, Thatcher, 1:349.

19Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 95; Campbell, Thatcher, 85; Moore, Thatcher, 1:349.

20Thatcher, “Interview for Catholic Herald.”

21Campbell, Thatcher, 546.

22Quoted in Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 (London: Cherry Red, 2004), 360.

23Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–84 (London: Penguin, 2006), 48–49.

24Glasper, Day the Country Died, 23.

25Alastair Gordon, “Building Recording Studios whilst Bradford Burned,” in Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower, ed. Zack Furness (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2012), 112.

26Sleeve notes, Enemies of the State: Worst of the 1 in 12 Club, vol. 3, 1 in 12 Records, 1984, LP.

27Sleeve notes, Enemies of the State, vol. 3.

28Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2012), 487.

29Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 84; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 132, 213.

30Campbell, Thatcher, 86.

31Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), 75–78.

32“Biba and the Angry Brigade,” Reprobate, November 21, 2018, https://reprobatepress.com/2018/11/21/biba-and-the-angry-brigade.

33Bob Mayo, “A Tale of Domestic Terrorism, a BBC Ban, and the End of Hawkwind’s Pop Career,” Classic Rock, June 23, 2020, https://www.loudersound.com/features/a-tale-of-domestic-terrorism-a-bbc-ban-and-the-end-of-hawkwinds-pop-career?fbclid=IwAR0-gP7rZKJ3hV25uKPhL8Xf4mFis5ojoFqm70_R3WLS-WoL8FX8GbthzqI.

34Ed Vulliamy, “Hawkwind: ‘It Was Basically Freak-Out Music,’” Guardian, August 27, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/aug/27/hawkwind-dave-brock.

35Simon Ford, Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and the Fall (London: Quartet Books, 2003), 96–97.

36Moore, Thatcher, 1:378.

37Moore, Thatcher, 1:374.

38Reynolds, Rip It Up, 356.

39Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011), xiv.

40Reynolds, Retromania, 198.

41Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Party Conference,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, October 10, 1986, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106498.

42Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 103; Campbell, Thatcher, 236; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 195–98.

43Campbell, Thatcher, 232; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 103.

44Campbell, Thatcher, 168; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 240; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 202.

45Campbell, Thatcher, 248; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 200; Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), 91–92.

46Campbell, Thatcher, 235.

47Susan Faludi, quoted in Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 353.

48Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 334; see also Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), 16–21.

49Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 333.

50Campbell, Thatcher, 174–75, 233, 251.

51Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 234.

52Campbell, Thatcher, 182.

53Campbell, Thatcher, 248–50; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 234–35; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 205.

54Campbell, Thatcher, 243–45; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 182–86; Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 91.

55Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 237.

56Campbell, Thatcher, 246.

57Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 254–55.

58Quoted in Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 108.

59Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 74.

60Dave Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 141–51.

61Mary Harron, “McRock: Pop as a Commodity,” in A Pantheon Guide to Popular Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 208.

62Rimmer, Never Happened, 55; see also Reynolds, Rip It Up, 321–25.

63Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 312.

64Quoted in Pat Gilbert, “Sigue Sigue Sputnik Sign to EMI for £4 Million in 1985,” Mojo, June 2015, 27.

65Quoted in Gilbert, “Sigue Sigue Sputnik,” 27.

66“Sell Out! Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Album Will Feature Adverts,” History of Rock, June 2017, 46.

67Quoted in Gilbert, “Sigue Sigue Sputnik,” 27.

68Simon Frith, “Video Pop: Picking Up the Pieces,” in Facing the Music: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 88–130.

69Quoted in John Robb, Death to Trad Rock: Faster! Louder! Bass Aggro, High Treble Xerox Culture, Pop Noise and Anti Trad Rock Feeling … Adventures in the 80s Post Punk Underground (London: Cherry Red, 2009), 48.

70Robb, Trad Rock, 48.

71Chris Horrie, “Hillsborough: Telling the Truth about the Scum,” Justice Gap, November 7, 2014, https://www.thejusticegap.com/hillsborough-telling-truth-scum/.

72Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 152.

73For accounts of how Guy Debord’s critique of “the society of the spectacle” found its way into popular music via the Sex Pistols, see Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1992); Worley, No Future; Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 123–47; and Dave and Stuart Wise, “The End of Music,” in Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, ed. Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix, 163–70 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017).

PART FOUR Enemies of the State

1Henry Fairlie, “Look Again—There’s Really No War Over the Falklands,” Washington Post, May 9, 1982, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/05/09/look-again-theres-really-no-war-over-the-falklands/a95f64ba-8f74-4ffc-a8ce-4a64f5d19c9b/.

2Raymond Briggs, The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984).

3Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2014), 656, 672, 739.

4Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 102–3; John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 128; Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 136.

5Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 177.

6Thatcher, Downing Street, 236.

7Thatcher, Downing Street, 177.

8Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 137, 143; Moore, Thatcher, 1:668, 730.

9Campbell, Thatcher, 122, 126, 155; Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), 64–72; Moore, Thatcher, 1:650.

10Campbell, Thatcher, 3, 54, 66, 138; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 146.

11Thatcher, Downing Street, 193.

12Kwasi Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 8; Campbell, Thatcher, 351.

13Campbell, Thatcher, 351.

14Thatcher, Downing Street, 235.

15Thatcher, Downing Street, 235.

16Campbell, Thatcher, 138.

17John Robb, Punk Rock: An Oral History (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 469; Ana Raposo, “Rival Tribal Rebel Revel: The Anarcho Punk Movement and Subcultural Internecine Rivalries,” in The Aesthetics of Our Anger, ed. Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (Colchester, UK: Minor Compositions, 2016), 76–77.

18Quoted in Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 147.

19Quoted in Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 (London: Cherry Red, 2004), 100.

20Quoted in Glasper, Burning Britain, 100.

21Smash Hits, insert, June 9, 1983.

22“Get Smart,” Smash Hits, June 9, 1983, 13.

23“Get Smart,” Smash Hits, June 9, 1983, 13.

24“What Would You Do If You Were Prime Minister?” Smash Hits, June 9, 1983, 39.

25“What Would You Do,” 39.

26“What Would You Do,” 38–39.

27“What Would You Do,” 38.

28Quoted in “General Election Special,” Sounds, June 11, 1983, 12.

29Garry Bushell, “Warfare or Welfare?” Sounds, June 11, 1983, 12.

30Garry Bushell, “Last (Dis) Orders,” Sounds, June 4, 1983, 27.

31Quoted in Alan Travis, “Thatcher Was to Call Labour and Miners ‘Enemy Within’ in Abandoned Speech,” Guardian, October 3, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/03/thatcher-labour-miners-enemy-within-brighton-bomb; see also Campbell, Thatcher, 361; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 151.

32Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 362.

33Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2015), 40.

34Campbell, Thatcher, 177.

35Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 345; see also Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 155–59.

36Quoted in Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners’ Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain (London: Constable, 2009), 17.

37Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 47.

38Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 47, 56; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 164.

39Andy McSmith, No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Constable and Robinson, 2011), 157.

40Quoted in Moore, Thatcher, 1:539.

41McSmith, No Such Thing, 157; Campbell, Thatcher, 101–2, 355.

42Campbell, Thatcher, 90; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 120–21.

43Moore, Thatcher, 1:231–32.

44Campbell, Thatcher, 156.

45Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 56.

46Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 479–80.

47Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 110; see also Campbell, Thatcher, 357; Moore, Thatcher, 1:654.

48Quoted in Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 110; see also Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 160.

49Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 1–26.

50Quoted in Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 168; see also Stewart, Bang, 348–50; Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (London: Aurum, 2008), 13; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 39, 186; Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 67.

51Stewart, Bang, 35; Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 67.

52Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 365.

53McSmith, No Such Thing, 154.

54Chris Welch, “Obituary: Alan Hull,” Independent, November 20, 1995, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-alan-hull-1582853.html.

55McSmith, No Such Thing, 154; see also Campbell, Thatcher, 358.

56Moore, Thatcher, 2:182.

57John Street, Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 69.

58Quoted in Stewart, Bang, 353.

59McSmith, No Such Thing, 170.

60Dave Harker, One for the Money: Politics and Popular Song (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 171–73.

61David Amos, The Nottinghamshire Miners, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and the 1984–5 Miners Strike: Scabs or Scapegoats? Nottingham ePrints, University of Nottingham, 302, accessed July 30, 2019, http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14091/1/575419.pdf.

62Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 116.

63Beckett and Hencke, Marching, 67–71; Stewart, Bang, 356; Turner, Crisis, 186.

64Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 368.

65John Robb, Death to Trad Rock: Faster! Louder! Bass Aggro, High Treble Xerox Culture, Pop Noise and Anti Trad Rock Feeling … Adventures in the 80s Post Punk Underground (London: Cherry Red, 2009), 68, 310.

66Robb, Trad Rock, 310.

67Quoted in Robb, Trad Rock, 149.

68Quoted in Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984 (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 28.

69Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 215.

70Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 361.

71Mark Gregory, notes on “Unity (Raise Your Banner),” Union Songs, accessed August 23, 2020, https://unionsong.com/u292.html.

72Moore, Thatcher, 2:136–42.

73Campbell, Thatcher, 369.

74Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 173.

75Tim Cowen, “The Politics of Rock,” Melody Maker, June 6, 1981, 6.

76Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–84 (London: Penguin, 2006), 63.

77Quoted in Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: From Club Culture to Style Culture; The Story of the New Romantics (London: Faber & Faber, 2020), 338.

78Quoted in Jones, Sweet Dreams, 338.

79Simon Frith, “Why Do Songs Have Words?” Contemporary Music Review 5 (1989): 77–96.

80Barry Lazell, Indie Hits 1980 to 1989: The Complete UK Independent Charts (Singles & Albums) (London: Cherry Red Books, 1997). This volume is the source for references to independent chart positions throughout.

81Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 21.

82Campbell, Thatcher, 370, 566.

83Campbell, Thatcher, 432; Moore, Thatcher, 2:315.

84Thatcher, Downing Street, 382.

85Thatcher, Downing Street, 383.

86Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1996 and the Search for Peace (London: Arrow Books, 1996), 173, 263.

87Campbell, Thatcher, 423; David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict (London: Viking, 2012), 97.

88McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 161.

89Stewart, Bang, 35.

90McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 143; Campbell, Thatcher, 419; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 215.

91McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 171; Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA: A History (Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1994), 307; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 133.

92Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 157–58.

93Coogan, The IRA, 380–81; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 135.

94Thatcher, Downing Street, 390.

95Thatcher, Downing Street, 384.

96Thatcher, Downing Street, 390.

97Thatcher, Downing Street, 393; see also Moore, Thatcher, 1:616–17.

98Thatcher, “Speech at Stormont Castle Lunch,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, May 28, 1981, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104657.

99Campbell, Thatcher, 424, 426.

100Quoted in McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 172.

101McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 167, 183.

102Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: Ecco, 2011), 371; McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 166, 170–172.

103McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 171.

104Coogan, The Troubles, 232.

105Quoted in Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002), 265.

106Robert Martinez, “Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland: Rethinking the Politics of Popular Music,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association 48, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 206.

107Margaret Thatcher, “Press Conference Following Anglo-Irish Summit (‘Out … Out … Out’),” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, November 19, 1984, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105790.

108Quoted in Moore, Thatcher, 1:587.

109Martinez, “Punk Rock,” 205.

110McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 19.

111McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 1.

112Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone, Rock and Popular Music in Ireland: Before and After U2 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), 124.

113McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 178, 181; Coogan, The IRA, 251, 283.

114Coogan, The IRA, 348–49.

115Coogan, The IRA, 475.

116Moore, Thatcher, 2:299–300.

117Moore, Thatcher, 2:317–18.

118McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 164, 168.

119McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 42–59; Coogan, The Troubles, 70–96.

120Coogan, The IRA, 260–62; McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 71, 77–83.

121McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 89; Coogan, The Troubles, 159.

122Campbell, Thatcher, 420; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 215.

123Coogan, The IRA, xvi; see also McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 143–44.

124Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2012), 107.

125Campbell, Thatcher, 403.

126Campbell, Thatcher, 401–5, 439, 567, 573.

127Campbell, Thatcher, 569.

128Coogan, The IRA, 293.

129Coogan, The IRA, 445; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 133–34.

130McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 89.

131Quoted in Lynskey, 33 Revolutions, 370.

132Richard Lawrence Jordan, The Troubles, with Music: Ulster Punk and British Independents (Monee, IL: Fundamental Books, 2021), 8.

133McLaughlin and McLoone, Rock and Popular Music, 138. See also Jordan, The Troubles, 102.

134Damian O’Neill, Teenage Kicks: The Undertones, directed by Tom Collins, Perfect Cousins Productions Ltd., 2001, video, 9:33, accessed July 26, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0a9A-iHpdg.

135Michael Bradley, Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone (London: Omnibus, 2016), 188.

136Coogan, The IRA, 336, 396; McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 144–45, 179–80.

137Coogan, The IRA, 289–92.

138Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 53; Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 101; Michael Bracewell, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie (London: Flamingo, 1998), 94; Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 153–56; Robb, Punk Rock, 467.

139Quoted in Worley, No Future, 236.

140McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 220.

141McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense, 250–51; Coogan, The Troubles, xv.

PART FIVE New Clear Days

1Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 (London: Cherry Red, 2004), 189.

2Protect and Survive, History and Public Policy Program digital archive, prepared for the Home Office by the Central Office of Information (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1980), 8, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/110193.pdf?v=c77f06e782d33a2ec8bf00d7c597ea10.

3Protect and Survive, 10.

4Protect and Survive, 24.

5Protect and Survive, 22.

6Quoted in Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: Ecco, 2011), 349.

7Stuart Maconie, The People’s Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records (London: Ebury Press, 2013), 265.

8Lynskey, 33 Revolutions, 365.

9Terrance Dicks, writer, Doctor Who, Season 12, “Robot,” Episode 3, aired January 11, 1975, on BBC1, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00vd4yp.

10Dave Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear: 2-Tone, the Specials and a World in Flames (London: Soundcheck Books, 2011), 149.

11Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 237.

12Margaret Thatcher, “Speech at Kensington Town Hall (‘Britain Awake’) (The Iron Lady),” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, January 19, 1976, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102939.

13Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2014), 332–33; Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), 49.

14Steven Heller, “Knowing Our Priorities: Butter or Canon,” Print, June 10, 2013, https://www.printmag.com/political-design/guns-or-butter-war-posters/.

15“Erz hat stets ein Reich stark gemacht, Butter und Schmalz haben höchstens ein Volk fett gemacht.” Quoted in John Heartfield, Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!, 1935, photomontage, https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/famous-anti-fascist-art/heartfield-posters-aiz/butter-is-all.

16Thatcher, Downing Street, 238.

17John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 188.

18Angus MacKinnon, “Trident: Britain’s Brand New Passport to Armageddon,” New Musical Express, August 9, 1980, 6.

19Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 121; Campbell, Thatcher, 59.

20Thatcher, Downing Street, 65; Campbell, Thatcher, 58; Moore, Thatcher, 1:561–62.

21Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 120.

22Campbell, Thatcher, 188.

23Alwyn Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London: Aurum, 2013), 521; Tania Branigan, “400,000 Bring Rural Protest to London,” Guardian, September 23, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/23/hunting.ruralaffairs2.

24Ian Bone, Alan Pullen, and Tim Scargill, ed., Class War: A Decade of Disorder (London: Verso, 1991), 80.

25Bone, Pullen, and Scargill, Class War, 81.

26Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 123.

27Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 347.

28Theodor Adorno, “Theodor Adorno on Popular Music and Protest,” translated by Ric Brown, Internet Archive, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archive.org/details/RicBrownTheordorAdornoonPopularMusicandProtest.

29Quoted in Lynskey, 33 Revolutions, 383.

30Lynskey, 33 Revolutions, 383.

31Quoted in Allan Jones, “Guitar Solos Are Boring,” History of Rock 1980, 21. Originally published in Melody Maker, February 2, 1980.

32George Berger, The Story of Crass (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 75, 80.

33Alex Ogg, Independence Days: The Story of UK Independent Record Labels (London: Cherry Red, 2009), 429–32.

34The subject of punk authenticity has been explored elsewhere, notably: Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015); Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Ana Raposo, “Rival Tribal Rebel Revel: The Anarcho Punk Movement and Subcultural Internecine Rivalries,” in The Aesthetics of Our Anger, ed. Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (Colchester, UK: Minor Compositions, 2016), 67–90; Alistair Gordon, “They Can Stuff Their Punk Credentials Cause It’s Them That Take the Cash,” in Aesthetics of Our Anger, 227–50; Robert Martinez, “Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland: Rethinking the Politics of Popular Music,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association 48, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 193–219; and Allan Moore, “Authenticity as Authentication,” Popular Music 21, no. 2 (2002): 209–23. On punk heterotopias see Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and David Hesmondhalgh, “Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: The Success and Failure of Rough Trade,” Popular Music 16, no. 3 (October 1997): 255–74.

35Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 54.

36Negus, Popular Music in Theory, 55.

PART SIX The Police Have Been Wonderful

1Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 39.

2Helen Reddington, “The Political Pioneers of Punk (Just Don’t Mention the F-Word!),” in The Aesthetics of Our Anger, ed. Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (Colchester, UK: Minor Compositions, 2016), 112; see also Helen Reddington, The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2012); Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (London: Continuum, 2002), 132–78; Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 289–315; Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 194–214.

3Robb Johnson, email to author, April 20, 2021.

4Johnson, email to author, April 20, 2021.

5Mat Callahan, The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975 (Oakland: PM Press, 2017), 55, 192.

6Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 419.

7Quoted in Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (London: Omnibus, 1990), 95.

8Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–84 (London: Penguin, 2006), 330, 351.

9David Pilgrim and Richard Ormond, Elvis Costello and Thatcherism: A Psycho-Social Examination (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 82.

10Pilgrim and Ormond, Elvis Costello, 82.

11Robert Kilroy-Silk, 48 Parl. H.C. Deb. (November 7, 1983) cols. 25–110, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1983/nov/07/police-and-criminal-evidence-bill.

12Kilroy-Silk, 48 Parl. H.C. Deb. (November 7, 1983) cols. 25–110.

13Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 372–75; John Street, Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 18; Dick Hebdige, Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (London: Comedia, 1987), 105–6.

14Gerland Kaufman, 48 Parl. Deb. H.C. (November 7, 1983) cols. 25–110.

15Kaufman, 48 Parl. Deb. H.C. (November 7, 1983) cols. 25–110.

16Kaufman, 48 Parl. Deb. H.C. (November 7, 1983) cols. 25–110.

17Kaufman, 48 Parl. Deb. H.C. (November 7, 1983) cols. 25–110.

18John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 117.

19Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 347.

20Campbell, Thatcher, 360.

21Interviewed in Gareth Morris, Russell Morris, and Neil Goodwin, dirs., Operation Solstice (London: Channel 4 Critical Eye, 1991), video, 50:45, accessed August 7, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1owJQ2BEus.

22Dick Lucas, email to author, May 9, 2020; see also Alan Lodge, quoted in Tom Templeton, “The Observer: What Happened Next?” Guardian, February 22, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2004/feb/22/features.magazine27; Colin Clark, “‘New Age’ Travellers: Identity, Sedentarism and Social Security,” in Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, ed. Thomas Alan Acton (Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), 138.

23Mark Hodkinson, “That’s Me in the Picture: Rose Brash, 20, Is Led Away by Police at the Battle of the Beanfield, June 1985,” Guardian, January 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/15/battle-of-the-beanfield-stonehenge-1985-rose-brash-photograph; Ian Bone, Bash the Rich: True-Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK (Bath, UK: Tangent Books, 2006), 234–36.

24Nick Davies, interviewed in Morris, Morris, and Goodwin, Operation Solstice.

25Alan Lodge, quoted in Tom Templeton, “The Observer”; Morris, Morris, and Goodwin, Operation Solstice.

26Mo Lodge, “Travellers’ Aid,” in booklet for the album Travellers Aid Trust, Flicknife Records, 1988, 2 LPs, 5.

27Colin Clark, “‘New Age’ Travellers: Identity, Sedentarism and Social Security,” in Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, ed. Thomas Alan Action (Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), 135.

28Margaret Thatcher, “House of Commons PQs,” 98 Parl. Deb. H.C. (June 5, 1986) cols. 1081–86, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, accessed August 20, 2020, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106413v.

29Morris, Morris, and Goodwin, Operation Solstice.

30Dick Lucas, email to author, May 9, 2020.

31On the striking similarities between anti-Catholic violence in Northern Ireland and anti-Black violence in England, see David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict (London: Viking, 2012), 40–50, and Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 372–86, 391–92.

32Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain, (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 302–3.

33Margaret Thatcher, “TV Interview for Granada World in Action (‘Rather Swamped’),” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, January 27, 1978, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103485.

34Enoch Powell, “Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech,” Telegraph, November 6, 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html.

35Fryer, Staying Power, 372–86.

36Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 43, 45.

37Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 5; Billy Bragg, The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging (London: Bantam, 2006), 182–83.

38Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 6.

39Worley, No Future, 145–46.

40Bragg, Progressive Patriot, 191; see also Dave Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear: 2-Tone, the Specials and a World in Flames (London: Soundcheck Books, 2011), 11; Randal Doane, Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 38.

41Quoted in John Robb, The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City (1977–1966) (London: Aurum Press, 2010), 165–66.

42Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2013), 243.

43Bradley, Sounds Like London, 243.

44Quoted in Bradley, Sounds Like London, 243.

45Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 97.

46Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 114–15.

47Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, “White Youth: The Far Right, Punk and British Youth Culture 1977–87,” in “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (London: Routledge, 2018), 115; Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 81.

48Worley and Copsey, “White Youth,” 123; Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 49–54; Tony Drayton, “Learning to Fight,” in Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, ed. Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017), 206–10.

49Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 25.

50Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 99; see also Alex Carter, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark? Assessing the Development of ‘Cumulative Extremism’ between Fascists and Anti-fascists in the 1970s,” in “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (London: Routledge, 2018).

51Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 70.

52Carter, “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” 99.

53Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 81; Carter, “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” 96–101.

54Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2012), 595; Worley and Copsley, “White Youth,” 116; Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 135.

55Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (London: Penguin, 2014), 1:382.

56Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 84.

57Robin Bunce and Paul Field, “Mangrove 9: The Court Challenge against Racism in Notting Hill,” Guardian, November 9, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2010/nov/29/mangrove-nine-40th-anniversary; see also Fryer, Staying Power, 394–95; Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 92–93.

58Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London, 310.

59Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 97.

60Fryer, Staying Power, 395.

61Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 131.

62Campbell, Thatcher, 114–16; see also Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 72–113.

63Kwasi Kwarteng, Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 132–34.

64Moore, Thatcher, 1:635.

65Margaret Thatcher, “Script for Party Political Broadcast (‘P.P.B. Wednesday 8th July’),” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, July 8, 1981, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121344.

66Alwyn Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London: Aurum, 2013), 199; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 99.

67Robb, Punk Rock, 512–13.

68Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear, 177.

69Tom McCourt, quoted in Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 (London: Cherry Red, 2004), 329.

70Fryer, Staying Power, 393. On the use of the SUS law and the SPG to “control” black communities, see Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack; see also Keith Teare, Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today (London: Penguin, 1988), and Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 301–10.

71Richard Lawrence Jordan, The Troubles, with Music: Ulster Punk and British Independents (Monee, IL: Fundamental Books, 2021), 107.

72Ian Bone, Alan Pullen, and Tim Scargill, ed., Class War: A Decade of Disorder (London: Verso, 1991), 54.

73Carter, “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” 107.

74Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear, 56; Paul Lewis, “Blair Peach Killed by Police at 1979 Protest, Met Report Finds,” Guardian, April 27, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/apr/27/blair-peach-killed-police-met-report.

75Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear, 58.

76Michael Meacher, 976 Parl. Deb. H.C. (December 18, 1979) col. 355, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1979/dec/18/adjournment-christmas#column_355.

77Meacher, 976 Parl. Deb. H.C. (December 18, 1979) col. 355.

78Meacher, 976 Parl. Deb. H.C. (December 18, 1979) col. 355.

79Meacher, 976 Parl. Deb. H.C. (December 18, 1979) col. 355.

80Benjamin Zephaniah, “Who Killed Colin Roach?” (recorded live at Doncaster Co-op, November 19, 1983), accessed July 29, 2019, https://hackneyhistory.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/deaths-in-custody-songs-for-colin-roach/.

81Quoted in Teare, Under Siege, 22.

82Teare, Under Siege, 23.

83Campbell, Thatcher, 225.

84David Rose, “They Created Winston Silcott, the Beast of Broadwater Farm. And They Won’t Let This Creation Lie Down and Die,” Guardian, January 18, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/jan/18/ukcrime.race.

PART SEVEN Now Is the Time for an Iron Hand

1Quoted in Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 403–4.

2Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 383.

3Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 386.

4“How the ‘Stars’ Will Vote Next Thursday,” Smash Hits, June 3, 1987, 9.

5“How the ‘Stars’ Will Vote,” 9.

6“How the ‘Stars’ Will Vote,” 9.

7Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 495; Andy McSmith, No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Constable and Robinson, 2011), 186.

8John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London: Pimlico, 2003), 351.

9Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 41.

10Campbell, Thatcher, 385.

11Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 243.

12Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Party Conference,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, October 9, 1987, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106941.

13Campbell, Thatcher, 374, 507.

14Alwyn Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s (London: Aurum, 2010), 219.

15On this new space see Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: From Club Culture to Style Culture, the Story of the New Romantics (London: Faber & Faber, 2020), 175–240.

16Quoted in Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 145–46; see also Billy Bragg, The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging (London: Bantam, 2006), 195–97.

17Dave Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 179.

18Mary Harron, “McRock: Pop as a Commodity,” in A Pantheon Guide to Popular Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 209.

19Turner, Rejoice, 219.

20Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, “White Youth: The Far Right, Punk and British Youth Culture 1977–87,” in “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (London: Routledge, 2018), 119.

21Campbell, Thatcher, 530.

22Campbell, Thatcher, 529.

23Campbell, Thatcher, 530.

24Local Government Act 1988 (Reprint, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1995), 27, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/9/pdfs/ukpga_19880009_en.pdf.7/28/2019.

25Quoted in “A Witch Hunt,” History of Rock, August 2017, 10.

26Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 289.

27McSmith, No Such Thing, 259; Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 330.

28Worley and Copsey, “White Youth”; George J. Severs, “The ‘Obnoxious Mobilized Minority’: Homophobia and Homohysteria in the British National Party, 1982–1999,” in “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (London: Routledge, 2018), 150–68.

29Quoted in Gibby, “Interview with the Apostles,” Homocore, issue 4, June 1989, accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/apostles.html.

30Stewart, Bang, 324; see also Jon Savage, “The Enemy Within: Sex, Rock, and Identity,” in Facing the Music: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 172.

31Stewart, Bang, 324.

32On homohysteria see Severs, “Obnoxious Mobilized Minority,”154.

33Quoted in Stewart, Bang, 326.

34Matthew Todd, “Margaret Thatcher Was No Poster Girl for Gay Rights,” Guardian, April 10, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/10/margaret-thatcher-poster-girl-gay-rights.

35Turner, Rejoice, 219.

36Alison Park, Elizabeth Clery, John Curice, Miranda Phillips, and David Utting, ed., British Social Attitudes 28 (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2012), 180, https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38966/bsa28-full-report.pdf.

37David A. Keeps, “Pop View: The Uneasy Alliance Between AIDS and Pop,” New York Times, July 19, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/19/archives/pop-view-the-uneasy-alliance-between-aids-and-pop.html.

38Colin Clews, “How Not to Run an AIDS Information Programme, Part One: 1986,” Gay in the 80s: From Fighting for Our Rights to Fighting for Our Lives, July 22, 2103, https://www.gayinthe80s.com/2013/07/how-not-to-run-an-aids-information-programme-part-one-1986/.

39Colin Clews, “Feb 1989: ACT UP UK Stage First Protest,” Gay in the 80s: From Fighting for Our Rights to Fighting for Our Lives, February 4, 2019, https://www.gayinthe80s.com/2019/02/feb-1989-act-up-uk-stage-first-protest/.

40Campbell, Thatcher, 301–5; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 231–32.

41Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 65.

42Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 92.

43Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 68.

44Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2014), 486.

45Campbell, Thatcher, 322.

46Quoted in Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 94; see also Moore, Thatcher, 1:573.

47McSmith, No Such Thing, 308.

48Stewart, Bang, 322.

49On the long relationship between football and popular music, see Stuart Maconie, The People’s Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records (London: Ebury Press, 2013), 304–9.

50Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 154.

51McSmith, No Such Thing, 311; Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, 141; Stewart, Bang, 320.

52Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), 3, 61.

53Campbell, Thatcher, 574; Stewart, Bang, 322.

54Quoted in Stewart, Bang, 320.

55Quoted in McSmith, No Such Thing, 309.

56Campbell, Thatcher, 633.

57Stewart, Bang, 321–22.

58“British Hooligans Leave Trail of Violence: World Cup; 500 Seized, One Man Dies, as Drunken Fans Vent Anger in Italy, France and throughout England,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1990, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-05-sp-518-story.html.

59Paul Howarth, “The Inflatable Banana Craze,” Manchester Supporters Home Page, September 13, 1996, https://mcivta.com/bananas/.

60Quoted in Howarth, “Inflatable Banana Craze.”

61Quoted in John Robb, The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City (1977–1966) (London: Aurum Press, 2010), 241–42; see also Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012), 44–46.

62Campbell, Thatcher, 574.

63Martin Johnes and Matthew Taylor, “Football Ticket Prices: Some Lessons from History,” History & Policy, February 18, 2016, https://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/football-ticket-prices-some-lessons-from-history.

64Quoted in McSmith, No Such Thing, 174.

65Quoted in Andrew Collins, Still Suitable for Miners: Billy Bragg, rev. and updated ed. (London: Virgin Books, 2007), 160.

66Robert B. Wittingham, The Blame Machine: Why Human Error Causes Accidents (Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann), 119–24.

67Quoted in John Street, Music and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 118.

68McSmith, No Such Thing, 185–87.

69Campbell, Thatcher, 319; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 222.

70Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 329.

71Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: Ecco, 2011), 395; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2015), 560.

72Moore, Margaret Thatcher, 1:173.

73Campbell, Thatcher, 323–25; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 222; Moore, Thatcher, 2:546.

74Campbell, Thatcher, 324, 327.

75Campbell, Thatcher, 323.

76Lynskey, 33 Revolutions, 393–94.

77Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 759; see also Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 247–48.

78Campbell, Thatcher, 334.

79Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 175, 177.

80McSmith, No Such Thing, 185.

81Quoted in Savage, “The Enemy Within,” 167.

82Simon Frith, “Video Pop: Picking Up the Pieces,” in Facing the Music: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 104; René Boomkens, “Uncanny Identities: High and Low and Global and Local in the Music of Elvis Costello,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (February 2004): 69–72; John Street, Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 95.

83McSmith, No Such Thing, 185; see also Lynskey, 33 Revolutions, 380–83.

84Street, Music and Politics, 76–77.

85Quoted in Street, Music and Politics, 77.

86Quoted in Street, Music and Politics, 77.

87Quoted in Will Harris, “Hooks ’n’ You: Various Artists, Alvin Lives (in Leeds): Anti Poll Tax Trax,” Pop Dose, April 21, 2008, https://popdose.com/hooks-n-you-various-artists-alvin-lives-in-leeds-anti-poll-tax-trax/.

88Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (London: Omnibus, 1990), 12.

89Claire Berlinski, “There Is No Alternative”: Why Thatcher Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 148.

90Campbell, Thatcher, 546.

91Campbell, Thatcher, 496; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 265–66.

92Quoted in Moore, Thatcher, 2:449.

93Campbell, Thatcher, 590, 608, 681.

94Campbell, Thatcher, 83, 534, 554; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 259–62.

95Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 131, 153.

96Campbell, Thatcher, 353.

97Quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 666.

98Margaret Thatcher, 181 Parl. Deb. H.C. (November 22, 1990) col. 453, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1990/nov/22/confidence-in-her-majestys-government.

99Quoted in Angella Johnson, “Police Seek Absentee after Rally Speech,” Guardian, February 4, 1991, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1991/feb/04/iraq.world.

100Campbell, Thatcher, 607.

101“NME Albums of the Year and End of Year Critics Lists,” Rock List, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/poppoll.html#top.

102A.N. Wilson, quoted in Campbell, Thatcher, 594; see also 541, 560, 682.

103Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 269.

104Ami Sedghi and Simon Rogers, “Guardian/ICM polls: Every One since 1984,” Guardian, June 15, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/oct/21/icm-poll-data-labour-conservatives; Campbell, Thatcher, 683, 698.

105Campbell, Thatcher, 684.

106Dave Nellist, 164 Parl. Deb. H.C. (December 20, 1989) col. 509, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1989/dec/20/ambulance-dispute#column_509.

107Horton, “What Margaret Thatcher Did for Pop Music,” New Musical Express, April 8, 2013, https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/what-margaret-thatcher-did-for-pop-music-23796; Robert Chalmers, “Jonathan King: ‘The Only Apology I Have Is to Say That I Was Good at Seduction,’” Independent, April 22, 2012, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/jonathan-king-the-only-apology-i-have-is-to-say-that-i-was-good-at-seduction-7658249.html.

For Further Reading

1Steve Arrogant, “Hardcore Holocaust,” Sounds, May 8, 1982.

2Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984 (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 6.

3Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 17.

4Quoted in Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 72.

5Quoted in John Street, Music and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 148–49.

6Street, Music and Politics, 149.

7Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1988), 124–25.

8Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 179.

9Jane Bennet, quoted in Street, Music and Politics, 150.

10Street, Music and Politics, 150.

11Street, Music and Politics, 150; see also Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 277–78.

12Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (New York: Routledge, 1988), 108–12.

13Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 301–14.

14Quoted in John Harris, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair, and the Demise of English Rock (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 8.

15Alex Ogg, Independence Days: The Story of UK Independent Record Labels (London: Cherry Red, 2009), iii.

16Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), xi.

17Reynolds, Totally Wired, 431.

18Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012), xxv.

19Reynolds, Energy Flash, xxi.

20Reynolds, Energy Flash, xxxvii.

21Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London: Penguin, 2007), back cover.

22Alwyn Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s (London: Aurum, 2010), xi.

23Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 343–44.

24Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1996 and the Search for Peace (London: Arrow Books, 1996), 1–2.

Discography

1Quoted in Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–84 (London: Penguin, 2006), 328.

2Quoted in Jane Walsh, “The Abnormal,” Punky Gibbon: Punk Hardcore Oi! New Wave Post-Punk, accessed July 7, 2020, punkygibbon.co.uk/bands/a/abnormal. html.

3Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 (London: Cherry Red, 2004), 158.

4John Robb, Death to Trad Rock: Faster! Louder! Bass Aggro, High Treble Xerox Culture, Pop Noise and Anti Trad Rock Feeling … Adventures in the 80s Post Punk Underground (London: Cherry Red, 2009), 41.

5Quoted in Glasper, Day the Country Died, 451.

6Glasper, Burning Britain, 136

7Glasper, Burning Britain, 348.

8Glasper, Day the Country Died, 307.

9Glasper, Day the Country Died, 395.

10Glasper, Day the Country Died, 455.

11Glasper, Burning Britain, 21.

12“Manifesto,” Commoners Choir, accessed July 26, 2020, https://www.commonerschoir.com/.

13Quoted in Jane Walsh, “Crass,” Punky Gibbon: Punk Hardcore Oi! New Wave Post-Punk, accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.punkygibbon.co.uk/bands/c/crass.html.

14Glasper, Day the Country Died, 278.

15Alex Ogg, No More Heroes: A Complete History of UK Punk from 1976 to 1980 (London: Cherry Red Books, 2006), 167.

16John Dowie, “Biography,” JohnDowie.com, accessed July 27, 2020, https://www.johndowie.com/biography.html.

17“Welcome to the Delicious World of Monty and the Dubious Brothers,” on the Monty and the Dubious Brothers website’s home page, accessed July 27, 2020, https://www.monty.uk.net/.

18Reynolds, Rip It Up, 366.

19Mark Jeavons, quoted in Glasper, Day the Country Died, 320.

20Dick Lucas, email to Hugh Hodges, May 14, 2020.

21Glasper, Burning Britain, 328.

22Reynolds, Rip It Up, 55.

23Reynolds, Rip It Up, 324.

24Dick Lucas, email to Hugh Hodges, May 14, 2020.

25Mark Lancaster, “Free Music: The Downfall of Civilization,” Instant Automatons Archive, accessed August 18, 2020, https://www.instant-automatons.com/freemusic.asp.

26Robb Johnson, A Reasonable History of Impossible Demands: The Damage to Date 1986–2013, PM Press, 2016, 5 compact discs and book, 8.

27Glasper, Day the Country Died, 97.

28Robb, Trad Rock, 198.

29Danbert Nobacon home page, accessed July 13, 2022, Danbertnobacon.com/home.html.

30Glasper, Day the Country Died, 443.

31Reynolds, Rip It Up, 41.

32Dick Hebdige, Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (London: Comedia, 1987), 106.

33Glasper, Day the Country Died, 334.

34Andrew Collins, Still Suitable for Miners: Billy Bragg, rev. and updated ed. (London: Virgin Books, 2007), 112.

35Quoted in Daniel Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), 150.

36Leon Rosselson, The World Turned Upside Down: Rosselsongs 1960–2010, PM Press, 2011, 4 compact discs and book, 42.

37Quoted in Henry McDonald, “Return of the Angry Young Prods,” Guardian, October 2, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/oct/02/northernireland.popandrock.

38Sleeve notes, Scissor Fits, Taut? Tense? Angular? And Other British Rail Sandwiches, Dubious Records, 1979, 7”.

39Kurt Loder, “David Bowie: Stardust Memories,” Rolling Stone, April 23, 1987, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/david-bowie-stardust-memories-105451.

40“History and Discography,” The Official Secret Affair Website, accessed September 28, 2020, https://secretaffair.info/history.htm.

41Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 352.

42Ogg, No More Heroes, 552.

43Glasper, Burning Britain, 256.

44Quoted in Ogg, No More Heroes, 573.

45Robb, Trad Rock, 294.

46Quoted in “Terminus: Going Nowhere Fast—The First Album,” on Terminus’s website, accessed January 10, 2021, https://terminusest1983.weebly.com/going-nowhere-fast.html.

47Ben Corrigan, quoted in Glasper, Day the Country Died, 224.

48Robb, Trad Rock, 302.

49Dick Lucas, email to the author, July 28, 2020.

50Quoted in Glasper, Day the Country Died, 417.

51Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 82.

52Mike Clarke, “Paisley Punk & Groucho Marxist Records,” Shit-Fi, accessed May 10, 2021, https://shit-fi.com/articles/GM.

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Index

“Passim” (literally “scattered”) indicates intermittent discussion of a topic over a cluster of pages.

Abacush, 48, 179, 253

ABC, 15, 19, 77, 111, 160, 243; Lexicon of Love, 18, 243

Abnormal, 180, 204, 243

Abrasive Wheels, 36, 58, 88, 243; “Vicious Circle,” 56

A.C. Temple, 17, 104

ACT UP, 197

Adam and the Ants, 15, 243–44; Bow Wow Wow and, 250; M (Robin Scott) and, 272. See also Ant, Adam

Adebayo, Dotun, 50

Adorno, Theodor, 150, 234–35

advertising, 80; Levi’s jeans, 227–28

Adverts, 39n, 244

Age of Chance, 79–80

A-Heads, 195, 244

AIDS, 195–97 passim

AK47s, 159, 186, 244

Alarm, 43, 44, 54, 60, 102, 244; Declaration, 43; “New South Wales,” 108

Alarm (Swansea newspaper), 43–44

Allen, Deek, 58

All Out Attack. See AOA

Almond, Marc. See Soft Cell

Altered Images, 15, 16n, 244

Alternative, 136n, 156n, 244–45; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28

Alternative TV, 155

“Alternative Ulster” (Stiff Little Fingers), 127

Alvin Lives (in Leeds), 221

Amazulu, 144, 145, 245

Amebix, 173, 245

“Amnesty International Report” (Pop Group), 117

Anagram Records, 95

anarchist and punk social centres, 47, 60; Apostles and, 247; Stalag 17 and, 290

“Anarchy in the UK” (Sex Pistols), 8, 63, 129, 211

Anathema, 132, 156n, 157, 245

Angelic Upstarts, 27, 81n, 95, 115, 145–46, 182, 211, 245; Blood on the Terraces, 204; “Flames of Brixton,” 178; “Soldier,” 132; Top of the Pops, 109

Angry Brigade, 63

animal rights, 155–59

“Animals Song” (Johnson), 155–56, 158, 159

“Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” (Pink Floyd), 36–37, 38

Another Warcry, 156n, 245

Ansell, Martin, 145, 201–2, 245–46

Ant, Adam, 59, 111, 225

Anthrax (UK band), 76, 87, 147n, 246

Anti-Nowhere League, 246; “So What?,” 69

antinuclear movement, 85, 134–53. See also Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)

Antisect, 156–57, 158, 246

Antisocial, 180, 246

Anti-System, 57, 136, 136n, 147n, 156n, 246

antiwar movement and antiwar songs, 58, 84, 150, 151, 224, 225

AOA, 147n, 220, 246

apartheid, 212–16, 165

A.P.F. Brigade, 156n, 246

apocalyptic songs, 138–39, 147, 151–52

Apostles, 47, 156n, 195, 247

ARA General Belgrano, 87

Art Attack, 247; “Neutron Bomb,” 137–38

Astronauts (UK band), 143, 158, 177, 247

Aswad, 48, 212, 247; “Tuff We Tuff,” 55

Attila the Stockbroker, 207, 247

Attrition, 158, 247

Au Pairs, 145, 248; “Armagh,” 116, 117, 132

autonomous centres. See anarchist and punk social centres

Aztec Camera, 124, 248

Bailey, Phillip, 110, 113

Baine, John. See Attila the Stockbroker

Baker, Clarence, 183–84

Bananarama, 93, 160, 188, 248

Bananas!, 207

“Bankrobber” (Clash), 45

Band Aid, 209, 210–11, 219, 248

Banshees. See Siouxsie and the Banshees

Banton, Pato, 179, 215, 248

Barbed Wire, 180, 248

Basement 5, 177, 248

Batt, Mike, 23, 24, 248

Battle of Orgreave, 166, 167

Battle of the Beanfield, 167–68

BBC: censorship, 160, 225, 229, 230, 249

Beat, 46–47, 49, 93, 145, 147, 248–49; “Dream House in NZ,” 149; “Stand Down Margaret,” 3; “Two Swords,” 176; Wakeling, 175

Beatles, 4, 5, 210. See also Lennon, John; McCartney, Paul

“Belfast Child” (Simple Minds), 132

“Bells of Rhymney” (Seeger), 102–3

benefit concerts, 10, 63, 104–5, 209–13 passim

benefit records, 106, 145–46, 167, 209–11, 217; AIDS, 194–95; anti–poll tax, 220; McLibel, 159

Berry, Chuck, 36n, 249

“Between the Wars” (Bragg), 33, 110, 112–13

Beveridge, Eric: Alternative, 244–45

Beveridge, William, 33

“Biba’s Basement” (Thrashing Doves), 62–64

Big Audio Dynamite, 172, 249; Basement 5 and, 248

Big Country, 249; “Steeltown,” 66–67

Big Flame, 17, 104, 234

Biko, Stephen, 213

Birmingham Six, 125

Bone, Ian, 13, 43, 144; Living Legends, 272

Black, Pauline, 145; Selecter, 285

Black Lace, 25, 249

“Blackleg Miner,” 102

Blah Blah Blah, 84, 249

Blood and Roses, 16, 68

Bloody Sunday, January 1972, 122, 126, 127

Blow Monkeys, 4, 7, 141n, 188, 196

Bluebells, 87, 132, 249

Bone, Ian, 43

Bono, 151, 219

Boomtown Rats, 81n, 120, 249

“Both Sides the Tweed” (Gaughan), 64–65

Bovell, Dennis, 174, 178

Bowie, David, 17, 77, 189, 192, 249; “Ashes to Ashes,” 67

Bow Wow Wow, 59, 250; “W.O.R.K.,” 36n

Box, Mick, 18, 95

Boy George, 94, 192, 189, 192, 193, 195, 250

Bracewell, Malcolm, 16

Bradford (band), 73, 250

Bradley, Lloyd, 174

Bradley, Michael, 129

Bragg, Billy, 7, 13–14, 72, 74, 80, 81, 211, 250; on Band Aid and Live Aid, 209; benefit albums 145; “Between the Wars,” 33, 110, 112–13; Between the Wars, 103; on football fans, 206; Labour vote, 188; on “Police and Thieves,” 163, 173; Red Wedge, 188; “Rumours of War,” 225; on Spandau Ballet, 18; “To Have and to Have Not,” 57; “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards,” 189–90; “Which Side Are You On,” 99, 103

Bramble, Nicholas, 185

Bremner, Rory, 202

Briggs, Raymond: Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, 83

British Movement (BM), 174, 195

Brolly, Francie, 116, 250

Bronski Beat, 88, 188, 193, 194, 250–51. See also Somerville, Jimmy

Brown, Ian, 160, 207

Brown Sauce, 251

Buchan, Wattie, 58, 65, 184

Bucks Fizz, 93, 95, 192

Burchill, Julie, 12, 21

Burgess, Paul: Ruefrex, 128, 284

Burns, Jake, 131

Burns, Raymond Ian. See Captain Sensible

Bush, Kate, 141n, 210, 251

Business, 156n, 179, 204, 205, 208, 251

Bushell, Garry, 90, 95

Buzzcocks, 39n, 41, 192, 193, 251

Cabut, Richard, 14

Cale, John, 89, 141n, 251

“Caledonian Antisyzygy” (MacDiarmid), 64

Callahan, Mat, 13

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 10, 19, 93, 141–46 passim, 164; Protest and Survive, 135

Campbell, John, 58, 86, 89, 100, 123, 190–94 passim, 200

Campbell, Robin, 94

Cannibals, 220, 251

Captain Beefheart, 76

Captain Sensible, 136n, 141n, 145, 146, 147n, 157, 202, 251–52

Carnival Against the Nazis, 1978, 171

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, 225, 252

Carver, Mike, 54, 183, 252

Caryl, Christian, 26

censorship, 123, 160, 225, 229, 230; Blow Monkeys, 249

Chaos UK, 12, 28; Public Disgrace connection, 281

Chaotic Dischord, 11–12, 252

Charged GBH, 180, 252

Chas and Dave, 201, 202, 203, 252

Chelsea, 252; “Right to Work,” 35

Chesterfields, 196, 252

Chris and Cosey, 156n, 252

Chtcheglov, Ivan, 8

Chumbawamba, 11, 91, 105–6, 152, 202, 211, 252–53; animal rights, 156n; Passion Killers and, 279; Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, 209, 215; “Police Have Been Wonderful, ”165–66, 185; “Slag Aid” and “Scab Aid,” 210; “Smash Clause 28!,” 195; “Work,” 47. See also Nobacon, Danbert; Whalley, Boff

Churchill, Winston, 86, 87, 115

Citizen Fish, 156, 167, 220, 253

Claire and Friends, 25, 253

Clapton, Eric, 171

Clark, Alan, 91

Clark, Anne, 140, 156n, 253

Clark, John Cooper, 80, 81, 253

Clark, Petula: “I Know a Place,” 138–39

Clarke, Gary, 16

Clash, 12, 35, 38, 45–51 passim, 60, 81n, 147n, 211, 253–54; “Bankrobber,” 45, 49, 110; benefit albums, 145, 220; “Call Up,” 47; “Career Opportunities,” 36n; Carnival Against Nazis, 171; “Guns of Brixton,” 49–50; “I’m So Bored with the USA,” 201; “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe,” 149; “Janie Jones,” 31; “London Calling,” 146; Mick Jones, 124, 173, 249; “Rudie Can’t Fail,” 40; selling out, 152, 227; “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” 227; slogan use, 128; “Something about England,” 69, 71, 96; “This Is England,” 96; “White Riot,” 50. See also Strummer, Joe

Class War, 13, 144, 181; Living Legends and, 272

Clause 28, Local Authorities Act (1988), 194–95, 198, 219

Cleaners from Venus, 69, 104, 254; “Gulf War Song,” 225

Clegg, Johnny, 216

Clews, Colin, 197

Close Lobsters, 73, 221, 254; “In Spite of These Times,” 161

CND. See Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)

CNT Productions, 107

coal miners’ strike of 1984–85, 98–108 passim, 115, 165–66, 216–17; bibliography, 236–37

“Coals to Newcastle” (Three Johns), 65

Cockney Rejects, 203, 204, 254; “Power and the Glory,” 90

“Cockney Translation” (Smiley Culture), 171–72

Cock Sparrer, 80–81, 88, 163, 204, 254; Falklands War, 89–90

Cold War, 134–53 passim

Collins, Andrew: on Redskins, 282

Collins, Edwyn, 93, 95

Collins, Phil, 68, 109, 110, 255; “Another Day in Paradise,” 73–74; “Easy Lover,” 112–13

Colour Field, 157, 255

colour television, 81

Commoners Choir, 255

Communards, 188, 255

Conflict, 10–14 passim, 115, 131, 137n, 179, 225; animal rights, 156, 157; benefit albums, 145; “Day Before,” 151–52; Exit-Stance and, 132, 261; Increase the Pressure, 28, 60; on police, 168; “Police and Thieves,” 173; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28–29; “These Things Take Time,” 215; “They Said That,” 36n; “This Is Not Enough,” 155; view of police, 164, 179; view of soldiers, 163; “Wargames,” 112

consumerism, 8, 46, 63–64, 72–82 passim, 149, 159, 209

Coogan, Tim Pat, 121, 123, 125

Cook Da Books, 179, 255

Cope, Julian, 255–56; “5 O’Clock World,” 138–39

Cortina automobile. See Ford Cortina

Cortinas, 36n, 256

Costello, Elvis, 4, 39n, 80, 155, 256; miners’ benefit concerts, 104; “Oliver’s Army,” 33, 90; “Pills and Soap,” 160; “Secondary Modern,” 37; “Shipbuilding,” 89; “Watching the Detectives,” 50–51

Council Collective, 256; “Soul Deep,” 98, 101

council houses, 71–72, 100

Country Pickets, 102, 256

Crass, 4, 8, 58, 137n, 155, 256–57; benefit albums, 145; on CND marchers, 144; “Do They Owe Us a Living?,” 40; Falklands War, 84–85, 87, 91; “Gotcha,” 87; miners’ benefit concerts, 104, 105; “Nineteen Eighty Bore,” 81; on Northern Ireland, 123–24; Poison Girls and, 280; “selling out” accusations, 152; “Sheep Farming in the Falklands,” 84–85, 91; Steve Ignorant, 136; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28. See also Rimbaud, Penny

Cravats, 257 “Gordon,” 31

cricket, 202

Crisis, 257; “PC One Nine Eight Four,” 183; “UK 79,” 184

Crucial Robbie, 204, 220, 257

Cud, 221

Culture Club, 15, 68, 156n, 237, 257; Boy George, 192, 250; “War Song,” 151

Culture Shock, 80, 81, 124, 257

Culver, Nick: Anti-Nowhere League, 246

Currie, Nick (Momus), 11, 275

Dammers, Jerry, 188; Beat, 248; “Nelson Mandela,” 214, 216; Selecter and, 285; Special AKA, 214, 289

“Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” (Ultravox), 139–40, 147

David, Annajoy, 188

Declaration (Alarm), 43

Defects, 180, 257

Def Leppard, 257; “When the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down,” 151

Deman Rockers, 185, 257

Denim, 125, 258

Depeche Mode, 72–73, 81, 112, 141n, 258

Desperate Bicycles, 41, 175, 258

Dexys Midnight Runners, 75, 258

“D.H. Lawrence Wasn’t a Mexican” (Scissor Fits), 41, 285

Diagram Brothers, 80, 258; “Isn’t It Interesting How Neutron Bombs Work?,” 143; “My Dinner,” 38–39; “Seals/Fur Coats,” 157

Diddy Men, 65

Dig This: A Tribute to the Great Strike, 106

Diplock Courts, 130

Dire Straits, 167, 258; “Money for Nothing,” 193

Dirge, 156n, 258

Discharge, 134, 135, 151, 259

Disco Aid, 210

Disorder, 12, 58

Dodd, Ken, 65

“Don’t Always Look at the Rain” (Jones), 18

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (Band Aid), 209, 210, 211

Dougie (Doug Anderson), 147n, 259

Dowie, John, 199, 259

Dream Academy, 68, 259; “Life in a Northern Town,” 66

Dress for Excess (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), 79

Dubious Brothers, 220–21, 259

Duran Duran, 17, 19, 26, 27, 110, 111; “Rio,” 15; Taylor, 18

Dury, Ian, 30, 145, 259; “Ban the Bomb,” 136

Easterhouse, 55, 106, 259; “Inspiration,” 118; “Nineteen Sixty-Nine, ”122

Echo and the Bunnymen, 145, 260; “All That Jazz,” 67

Eden, Malcolm: McCarthy, 75, 192, 196, 273

Edmunds, Dave, 24

Eider, Max, 4

808 State, 227

Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU), 103–4

Electro Hippies, 156n, 159, 260; “Sheep,” 157

Elliot, Joe, 151

Endangered Species, 156n, 260

Enemies of the State: Worst of the 1 in 12 Club, vol. 3, 60

Enemy, 112, 260

Enemy Within, 260

Energy Orchard, 133, 260

Enfield, Harry, 75–76, 260

“Enola Gay” (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark), 139

Ethiopia benefit records, 209

Everett, Kenny, 24, 260

Everything but the Girl, 260–61; “Anytown,” 66; “Ballad of the Times,” 47; miners’ benefit concerts, 104; “Night I Heard Caruso Song, ”147–48

Ex, 104, 105, 106

Exit-Stance, 132, 156, 261

Exploited, 85, 88, 112, 147n, 178, 261; “Alternatives,” 112, 131; “Army Life,” 46, 84; “Don’t Pay the Poll Tax,” 220; “False Hopes,” 65, 66; “Let’s Start a War,” 88; on the press, 81n; “SPG,” 184; Wattie Buchan, 58, 65, 184

Faction, 147n, 261

Faith Brothers, 92, 215, 261

Faithful, 226, 261

Faithfull, Marianne, 132, 261–62

“The Falklands Suite” (Cale), 89

Falklands War, 20, 83–94 passim, 111, 114, 205, 223–24; “This Is England,” 96

Fall, 64, 74, 262; “Bingo-Master’s BreakOut,” 38; “Landslide Victory,” 3; “Marquis Cha Cha,” 19, 89; Passage and, 279; “2nd Dark Age, ”144. See also Smith, Mark E.

Fallout, 99, 115, 156n, 196, 262

fanzines. See zines

Farm, 206, 262

“Fascist Groove Thang” (Heaven 17). See “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” (Heaven 17)

Fawkes, Guy, 63, 68

Ferry Aid, 210

Fine Young Cannibals, 62, 262; Beat and, 249

Fire Engines, 80, 262

Firm, 262; “Arthur Daley (E’s Alright),” 24

Fish, Pat (Jazz Butcher), 4

Fitzgerald, Patrik, 156n, 229

“5 O’Clock World” (Reynolds), 138–39

Flaunt It (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), 78–79

Flock of Seagulls, 15, 93, 237

Flux of Pink Indians, 145, 147n, 156n, 157, 263; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28, 137n

football, 111, 202–8

Ford Cortina, 30–31, 51

foreigners, fear of. See immigrants and racial minorities; nationalism and xenophobia

Four Bucketeers, 23, 262

fox hunting, 144, 158

4-Skins, 137n, 179–80, 181, 262–63

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 17, 104, 137, 138, 192, 193, 263

Freshies, 137, 207, 263

Friend, Simon, 168

Frith, Simon, 13, 14

Fry, Martin, 18, 77

“Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You,” 11–12

Funboy Five, 161, 263

Fun Boy Three, 124, 263

Fuzzbox. See We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It

Gabriel, Peter, 145, 213, 263; “Biko,” 215

Gang of Four, 60, 76–77, 109, 111, 116, 117, 263–64; “Capital (It Fails Us Now),” 74–75; “Guns before Butter,” 142

Garnett, Mark, 100

Gaughan, Dick, 230–31, 264; “Both Sides the Tweed,” 64–65; “Song for Ireland,” 132, 133; “Which Side Are You On,” 103

gay-bashing. See homophobia

Gedge, David, 215

Geldof, Bob, 219, 230; Boomtown Rats, 120, 249

gender and sexuality, 155. See also homophobia; homosexuality; transgender identities

General Belgrano. See ARA General Belgrano

Generation X, 39n, 78, 264

Genesis, 203, 264; Collins, 255

Genital Deformities, 156n, 220, 264

Gill, Andy, 77

Gillan, 141n, 264

Gillan, Ian, 95, 264

Girls at Our Best, 264; “Getting Nowhere Fast,” 76

“Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (McCartney), 122

“Glad to Be Gay” (Robinson), 52–53, 192, 194, 229–30

Glasper, Ian, 134

Godfathers, 264; “Birth School Work Death,” 75

“God Save the Queen” (Sex Pistols), 8

God’s Little Monkeys, 158, 265

Golding, Lynval, 94, 124

Goodman, Dave, 183, 265

Government Communications Headquarters Union, 107

Grant, David, 93

Grant, Eddy, 178, 214, 265

Grant, Glenroy, 220, 265

Greater London Council (GLC), 96, 160, 164; Thatcher abolition of, 223

“Great White Hunter,” 157–58

Greenham Common protests, 143–44, 153, 190

Gregory, Glenn, 77, 137; Band Aid, 248

Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band, 107, 265

Guildford Four, 125

Gulf War, 223–25

“Guns before Butter” (Gang of Four), 142

Ha! Ha! Funny Polis, 180–81

Haircut 100, 15, 93; Light of the World influence on, 271

Half Man Half Biscuit, 202, 203, 207, 265

Halford, Rob: Judas Priest, 42, 45, 270

Hall, Terry: Colour Field, 157, 255. See also Fun Boy Three

Hammill, Peter, 213, 215, 265

Happy Ending, 104

Happy Mondays, 40, 265–66

Hardcastle, Paul, 266

The Harder They Come (film), 49

Harper, Roy, 57, 166, 167, 266

Harris, Keith, 23, 266

Harrow, David: Anne Clark and, 140, 253

Hawkwind, 266; “Urban Guerrilla,” 63

“Heads of State” (Lucas), 116

Healey, Denis, 6, 9, 34

Heaney, Seamus, 130

Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing (Discharge), 134, 259

Heath, Ted, 4, 100, 116, 123, 190

Heaton, Paul, 105, 188

Heaven 17, 40, 75–78 passim, 94, 137, 140, 147n, 266; elections, 94, 95; “Let’s All Make a Bomb,” 137; “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” 1–2, 67, 78, 195, 201

Hebdige, Dick, 211; on Ranking Ann, 282

Henderson, Dave, 35

Hennessy, Peter, 98

Henry Cow, 106, 165

Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, 210

Heyward, Nick, 93

Higsons, 112, 266

Hill, Vince, 18

Hippy Slags, 167, 266

Hitchcock, Robyn, 102, 141n, 221, 267; “Do Policemen Sing?,” 168, 183

Hit Parade, 81–82, 159, 267

homophobia, 191–92, 194–95, 196

“Homosapien” (Shelley), 193

homosexuality, 192–98 passim, decriminalization of, 92

Honey Bane, 155, 267

Honeybus: “I Can’t Let Maggie Go,” 226

hooliganism at football matches, 203–8 passim

Housemartins, 104, 105, 201, 215, 267

Howson, Neil, 80

“How I Learned to Love the Bomb” (Television Personalities), 143, 144

“How to Write Ultimate Protest Songs” (Lucas), 161

Hucknall, Mick, 189; Simply Red, 287

Hue & Cry, 160, 267

Hull, Alan, 101, 104, 106, 267

Human League, 15, 267; “Circus of Death,” 67; “I Am the Law,” 163

Humphreys, Paul, 20

hunger strikes, 116, 117–19, 129, 130

Hunter, Nigel. See Nobacon, Danbert

Hurd, Douglas, 169

Hussein, Saddam, 224

Ibrahim, Abdullah, 216; Masekela and, 273

Icons of Filth, 147n, 156n, 158, 267; “Virus,” 88; “Your Military,” 88

“I Fought the Law,” 45

Ignorant, Steve, 136

I, Ludicrous, 207, 208, 268

“I Melt with You” (Modern English), 140

immigrants and racial minorities, 96, 169–82, 191

Increase the Pressure (Conflict), 28, 60

Insane, 112, 268

Instant Automatons, 21, 81n, 268

Instigators, 82, 137n, 157, 268

Inter City Firm, 203, 205

International P.E.A.C.E. Benefit Compilation, 145–46

Iraq, 223–25

Ireland, 115–33 passim; bibliography, 242. See also Irish Republican Army (IRA)

“Ireland” (Faithfull), 132

Irie, Tippa, 203, 206, 268

Irish Republican Army (IRA), 19, 115–16, 160, 191

Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC), 101

Jackson, Joe, 80, 81, 268; Falklands War, 87, 91–92; “Tango Atlantico,” 87

Jam, 81n, 146, 268–69; Clash view of, 152; “Great Depression,” 76; on police, 183; “Saturday’s Kids,” 31; “Smithers-Jones,” 39; “That’s Entertainment,” 25

James (Manchester band), 55, 146, 269; Diagram Brothers and, 258

James, Tony, 78–79

Jazz Butcher, 269; “Holiday,” 199

Jethro Tull, 136, 147, 269

Jewry, Bernard. See Stardust, Alvin

jobs and labour, 35–47 passim, 54, 55, 72–73; loss of, 66; military, 131. See also unemployment

John, Leee, 18, 93

Johnson, Boris, 4n

Johnson, Garry, 36n, 269

Johnson, Linton Kwesi (LKJ), 149, 269; on Blair Peach murder, 184; “Di Great Insohreckshan,” 178, 186; “Inglan Is a Bitch,” 33; “Sonny’s Lettah,” 181; “Reality Poem,” 48

John, Matt, 201

Johnson, Robb, 220, 269; “Animals Song,” 155–56, 158, 159; “Boxing Day,” 158; “Herald of Free Enterprise,” 210; “Vic Williams,” 224

Jones, Dylan, 15, 16

Jones, Howard, 8, 18, 156n, 157, 269–70; Ansell and, 245

Jones, Mick, 124, 173; Big Audio Dynamite, 249

Joy Division, 68

Judas Priest, 42–43, 45, 270; “Breaking the Law,” 45

Junior Murvin, 207, 270; “Police and Thieves,” 163, 173

Kanaan, Ramsey: Political Asylum, 20, 280

Kane, Patrick, 160

Kaufman, Gerald, 165

Keeps, David, 196–97

Kemp, Gary, 18, 94

Kemp, Martin, 209

Kerr, Jim, 189

Kilbride, Noel, 17

Killing Joke: “Eighties,” 67

Kilroy-Silk, Robert, 164

King, Jonathan, 226

Kinks, 270; “Young Conservatives,” 36 Kissing the Pink, 144, 270

Kitchens of Distinction, 4, 145, 270, “Breathing Fear,” 196

KLF, 145; Timelords and, 294

Kraftwerk, 77–78

Kronstadt Uprising, 177, 270

Kunts, 271

Kwarteng, Kwasi, 57, 86

labour. See jobs and labour

labour unions. See unions

Laing, Dave, 14

Lambrettas, 30, 271

Larks, 4, 271

Last Resort, 179, 204, 271

Lawson, Nigel, 6, 7, 200

Leblanc, Keith, 102

Le Bon, Simon, 110

Lennon, John, 122, 150, 271; “Let It Be,” 210

lesbian-bashing. See homophobia

“Let the Battle Commence” (Conflict), 11

“Let It Be” (Lennon and McCartney): Ferry Aid cover, 210

Let the Children Play (CND benefit album), 145

Level 42, 59, 271

Levellers, 201, 271; “Battle of the Beanfield,” 167, 168

Levi’s ads, 227–28

Lewie, Joan, 271; “Stop the Cavalry,” 150, 151

The Lexicon of Love (ABC), 18, 243

“Life in a Northern Town” (Dream Academy), 66

Life in the European Theatre (benefit album), 145

Light of the World, 171, 180, 271–72

Lindisfarne: Alan Hull, 101, 267

“Listen Margaret” (Toxic Waste), 126–27

Live Aid, 209, 210–11, 213, 218, 219

“Live Togevver” (Light of the World), 171

Living Legends, 272

LKJ. See Johnson, Linton Kwesi (LKJ)

“Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up the House),” 75–76

Lodge, Mo, 166–67

Lost Cherrees, 156n, 272

“Love Missile F1-11” (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), 137, 138

Lucas, Dick, 15–16, 81; Bluurg Records and Tapes, 167, 268; Citizen Fish, 253; foreword, xiii–xv; “Heads of State,” 116; “How to Write Ultimate Protest Songs,” 161; “Stonehenge,” 166; on Stonehenge Free Festival, 166, 167

Lydon, John. See Rotten, Johnny (John Lydon)

Lynskey, Dorian, 137, 151

M (Robin Scott), 16n, 84, 272

Macc Lads, 19, 272

MacColl, Ewan, 102, 103, 104, 285

MacDiarmid, Hugh, 64

Macka B, 4, 272; “Apartheid,” 212–13; “Get Rid of Maggie,” 216, 220; “Liesense Fi Kill,” 186–87; “We’ve Had Enough,” 186

Macmillan, Harold, 33

Mad Jocks and Englishmen, 203, 272

Madness, 40, 92, 111, 145, 272; “Baggy Trousers,” 36, 37–38; “Grey Day,” 8; “Madness,” 160

“Making Plans for Nigel” (XTC), 32, 39

Mandela, Nelson, 212–16 passim

Mandelson, Peter, 10, 119, 133

Man from Delmonte, 77, 273

Mangrove 9, 176

Manic Street Preachers, 223, 273

Man’s Hate, 156n, 273

Marley, Bob, 48–49, 180, 273

“Marquis Cha Cha” (Fall), 19, 89

Marriott, Steve: Pollcats, 220, 280

Martin, Andy, 47–48

Masekela, Hugh, 214, 216, 273

mass media, 80–82, 88; censorship, 123, 160, 225, 229, 230, 249; coal miners’ strike, 99; labour issues, 103–4. See also radio; television

Mayhem, 91, 273

McCarthy, 75, 116–17, 169, 212, 273–74; “God Made the Virus,” 196; “Now Is the Time for an Iron Hand,” 191; “Procession of Popular Capitalism,” 72; “What Our Boys Are Fighting For,” 205

McCartney, Paul, 159; “Let It Be,” 210; Wings, 122, 298

McCluskey, Andy, 20

McCurbin, Clinton, 185–86

McDonald’s and McLibel Trial, 159

McGee, Mick, 91

McLaren, Malcolm, 59, 78, 93, 95; Bow Wow Wow, 250

McLaughlin, Noel, 129

McLoone, Martin, 129

McPherson, Graham “Suggs”: “Baggy Trousers,” 36, 37–38

McSmith, Andy, 101, 218, 221

Meacher, Michael, 184–85

Mekons, 21, 107, 108, 274; Fear and Whiskey, 108; miners’ benefit concerts and album, 104, 106; “32 Weeks,” 38

Members, 39, 180, 211, 274; “Solitary Confinement,” 39, 55; “Working Girl,” 40

Membranes, 16, 17, 104, 138, 274

Metro Youth, 123, 147n, 274

Michael, George, 189; Wham!, 59, 298

Miles over Matter, 44, 274–75

militarism and war, 46–47, 83–93 passim, 112, 162–63, 205–6. See also antiwar movement and antiwar songs; Falklands War; Gulf War; nuclear weapons and nuclear war

Military Surplus, 166, 167, 275

miners’ strike of 1984–85. See coal miners’ strike of 1984–85

Minott, Sugar, 179, 275

Misty in Roots, 48, 171, 183–84, 275

Mob, 39, 275; “No Doves Fly Here,” 151; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28

Modern English, 275; “I Melt with You,” 140

Momus. See Currie, Nick (Momus)

“Money’s Too Tight to Mention,” 55–56

Mood Six, 141n, 275

Moore, Charles, 176

Moore, Christy, 118, 123, 275

Morrison, Danny, 118

Morrissey, 4, 40, 139, 276; “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” 143; “Margaret on the Guillotine,” 221; “Meat Is Murder,” 156

Motello, Elton, 193, 195, 276

Moving Hearts, 118, 120, 147n, 276

Moynihan, Colin, 207

Murvin, Junior. See Junior Murvin

Musicians’ Union, 213

“My Dinner” (Diagram Brothers), 38–39

National Front (NF), 174–76 passim, 183, 195

nationalism and xenophobia, 199–202 passim, 205

National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), 98–108 passim, 115, 165–66

Negus, Keith, 113, 152–53

Neil (Nigel Planer character), 104, 276

Neurotics, 212

Newell, Martin: Cleaners from Venus, 69, 254; on Crass, 256

New Hearts, 276

New Model Army, 87–88, 201, 276

New Musical Express (NME), 91

“New South Wales” (Alarm), 108

Newtown Neurotics (Neurotics), 38, 55, 58, 81n, 88, 95, 107, 276–77; “Living with Unemployment,” 131; miners’ benefit concerts, 104

999, 39n, 61, 277

Nine Steps to Ugly, 203, 277

Nobacon, Danbert, 91, 159, 220, 277; “Why Are We Still in Ireland?,” 124

Nolan, Simon “Nogsy,” 57

Northern Ireland, 119–33 passim, 164, 169, 180

nostalgia, 27, 65, 66, 68, 69, 218, 227, 228

Notsensibles, 39n, 277; “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher,” 3

Notting Hill Carnival Riot, 176–77

novelty songs and comedy songs, 22–25, 34, 75–76, 150, 226; Chuck Berry, 249; rugby songs, 202; Strawbs, 291

nuclear power (nuclear energy), 146–47

nuclear weapons and nuclear war, 134–53 passim

Numan, Gary, 18, 67, 94, 189, 231, 277

Oakey, Phil, 2, 15, 94, 163

O’Connor, Hazel, 147n, 277

O’Connor, Sinead, 185, 277

Ogg, Alex, 236; on the Slits, 288

Oi! movement, 90, 179; bibliography, 238; Cockney Rejects, 90, 254; Cock Sparrer, 254; Sham 69, 286

Oi Polloi, 156n, 180, 195, 211, 223, 278; antinuclear songs, 146–47; “Apartheid Stinx,” 212; “Commies and Nazis,” 90; Deek Allen, 58; “Die for B.P.,” 225; Smash the Poll Tax!, 220

‘O’ Level, 39n, 278

O’Neill, Damian, 129, 130

O’Neill, John, 130

1 in 12 Club, Bradford, 60

“One Law for Them” (4-Skins), 179–80

Ono, Yoko, 122

Orange Juice, 93, 104

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), 20, 278; “Enola Gay,” 139

“Orville’s Song,” 23

Osbourne, Ozzy, 96

Osibisa, 7–8, 278

“Paid in Kind” (Ruefrex), 128–29

Parsons, Tony, 12, 21, 35

Partisans, 57, 137n, 184, 278–79 Passage, 76, 124, 131, 280; “16 Hours,” 55

Passion Killers, 91, 137n, 156n, 225, 279

Peach, Blair, 183–84

Peel, John, 16n, 20, 80, 92; Half Man Half Biscuit and, 265; Serious Drinking and, 285; Twa Toots and, 295; Undertones and 296

Penetration, 60

“The People’s Own M.P.,” 118

Perry, Andy, 7

Perry, Mark, 12, 35

“Persons Unknown” (Poison Girls), 59–60

Pertwee, John, 279; as Worzel Gummidge, 23

Pet Shop Boys, 195, 196, 218, 279; “Opportunities,” 35; “Shopping,” 72

Phillips, Mike and Trevor, 169

Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (Chumbawamba), 209, 215

“Pigs” (Wyatt), 158

Pink Floyd, 279; “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” 36–37

Planer, Nigel: as Neil, 104, 276

“Poem for a Nuclear Romance” (Clark and Harrow), 140

Pogues, 8, 125, 279

Poison Girls, 46, 49, 59–60, 280; benefit concerts and album, 104, 106, 145

police, 162–69, 176–87 passim; Northern Ireland, 131; murders by, 178, 182–87 passim

Police, 133, 280; Copeland, 18

Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 164, 165

“Police and Thieves,” 163, 173

Political Asylum, 20, 47, 156n, 137, 147n, 149, 159, 211, 280

Pollcats, 220, 280

poll tax, 219–23; abolition, 227

Poly Styrene. See Styrene, Poly

Pop Group, 59, 60, 76, 116, 117, 184, 280

Pop Will Eat Itself, 149, 280

“positive punk” (Cabut), 14

Post Mortem (UK band), 156n, 281

Potential Threat, 56–57, 137n, 156n, 281; Demand an Alternative, 209–10; Warcry and, 245

Pouncey, Edwin: Art Attacks, 247

Powell, Charles, 7

Powell, Enoch, 170–71, 174, 177

A Pox upon the Poll Tax, 219–20

Press, Joy, 74, 176

Proclaimers, 62, 64, 65, 281

Protect and Survive (UK government publication), 135–36

Protest and Survive (Thompson), 135, 136

Provisional IRA. See Irish Republican Army (IRA)

psychedelia, 5, 104; Miles over Matter, 44, 274–75; Mood Six, 275; Nigel Planer, 104

Public Disgrace, 179, 281

Purple Hearts, 45, 281

Queen, 147, 213, 281; “Bohemian Rhapsody,” 221

racial minorities. See immigrants and racial minorities

racism, 59, 170–71, 173; in British army, 225; in policing, 164, 165, 180

radio, 16n; censorship, 160, 225, 229, 230, 249; John Peel, 20, 80, 92, 296

Radio Actors, 147n, 281

Radiohead, 281

Raincoats, 155, 281

rain, 227; in song lyrics, 7–8, 18, 25

Rambali, Paul, 16

Ranking Ann, 164–65, 282

RAR. See Rock Against Racism (RAR)

Rastafarianism, 48

“Rats” (Lucas), 28, 29

rave, 5; bibliography, 240

Reality, 137n, 156n, 282

Red Alert, 137n, 163, 184, 282

Reddington, Helen, 155

Red Guitars, 54, 104, 147, 165, 215, 282; “Marimba Jive,” 54; miners’ benefit concerts, 104

Red Hot + Blue, 197–98

Red London, 104, 146, 225, 282

Redskins, 14–15, 100–101, 107, 215, 282; miners’ benefit concerts, 104

Red Wedge, 4, 18, 21, 188, 189, 191, 218

Reece, Florence: “Which Side Are You On?,” 99, 103

Reggae Regular, 177, 283

Rejects, 203–4

“retromania” (Reynolds), 68

The Revolution Starts at Closing Time (Serious Drinking), 13

Reynolds, Allen: “5 O’clock World,” 138–39

Reynolds, Simon, 68, 74, 176, 221; on the Pop Group, 280

Rezillos, 113, 283

Richards, Keith, 46

Rimbaud, Penny, 13, 82, 105, 174

Rimmer, Dave, 78, 237

Riot/Clone, 112, 116, 137n, 156n, 283

riots, 177–79 passim, 186, 222

Roach, Colin, 185

Robb, John, 15, 17, 18, 105

Robinson, Tom, 21, 30, 143, 192, 283; “Blue Murder,” 183; Carnival Against Nazis, 171; “it felt like end times,” 174; “Glad to Be Gay,” 52–53, 192, 194, 229–30; Let the Children Play, 145

Rock Against Racism (RAR), 11, 13, 21, 171–76 passim

Rockpile, 36n, 283

Roland Rat, 23, 283

Rolling Stones, 76; “Satisfaction,” 226. See also Richards, Keith

Rosetti, Christina: “Goblin Market,” 72

Rosselson, Leon, 10, 230–31, 283–84; “Jackboot Democrats,” 73; “Whoever Invented the Fish Finger,” 162

Rotten, Johnny (John Lydon), 8, 40, 60, 63, 129, 211

Rowland, Kevin. See Dexys Midnight Runners

Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 120, 121, 123

Rudi, 180, 284

Ruefrex, 119, 127, 128–29, 284

Ruffin, Jimmy: Council Collective, 101, 256

Ruff Ruff & Ready, 211, 226, 284; “Money Snatcher,” 222

rugby songs, 202

Ruts, 174, 184; “S.U.S.,” 181

Ryder, Shaun, 40, 266

St. Winifred’s School Choir: “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma,” 25, 150

SALT II agreement, 141, 143

Sandbrook, Dominic, 123

Sands, Bobby, 116, 118, 130

Saunders, Red, 171

Savage, Jon, 239; on Sex Pistols, 286

Sayle, Alexei, 284; benefit concerts and albums, 104, 145; “Ullo John! Got a New Motor?,” 24–25, 30

Scabies, Rat, 146; Riot/Clone and, 283

Scargill, Arthur, 98, 101–2, 190

Scars, 141n, 284

school and schooling, 36–40 passim

Scritti Politti, 60, 160

Secret Affair: “Time for Action,” 44

Scissor Fits, 285; “I Don’t Wanna Work for British Airways,” 40–41

Scott, Robin. See M (Robin Scott)

Scottish nationalism, 64–65

Screaming Blue Messiahs, 201, 285

Secret Affair, 44, 285

Sedition, 220, 285

Seeger, Pete: “Bells of Rhymney,” 102–3

Seeger, Peggy, 104, 144, 285

Selecter, 49, 285

Serious Drinking, 13, 204, 285

7 Year Bitch: “No Fuckin War,” 225

Severin, Steve, 93

Sex Pistols, 8, 21, 39n, 41, 56, 78, 183, 286; “Anarchy in the UK,” 8, 63, 129, 211; “God Save the Queen,” 215; influence on Boff Whalley, 229; “Seventeen,” 40; slogan use, 128; Top of the Pops, 109

sexuality. See gender and sexuality

Shakin’ Stevens, 23, 27

Shamen, 145, 220

Sham 69, 9, 286; “I Don’t Wanna,” 35; “If the Kids Are United,” 203; “Ulster,” 131

“Sheep Farming in the Falklands” (Crass), 84–85, 91

Shelley, Pete, 193, 195, 286; Alvin Stardust and, 290; Buzzcocks, 251

Shelleyan Orphan, 157, 286

Sherman, Alfred, 9

Sherwood, Adrian, 102

Shop Assistants, 286; “Before I Wake,” 147–48

Short, Bob, 14, 16

“Should I Stay or Should I Go” (Clash), 227

Shriekback, 157, 286

Sievey, Chris: Freshies, 207, 263

Siffre, Labi, 214, 286

Sigue Sigue Sputnik, 78–79, 138, 287; “Love Missile F1-11,” 137, 138; “M.A.D., ”138

Silhouettes, 39, 287

Simple Minds, 132, 189, 287

Simply Red, 68, 287; “Money’s Too Tight to Mention,” 55–56

Sinn Féin, 116, 118, 121, 121, 123

Siouxsie and the Banshees, 68, 93–94, 287; “Mittageisen,” 142

Sisters of Mercy, 68, 104, 107; Tony James (Sigue Sigue Sputnik) and, 287

Situationists, 8, 63, 78, 79

Six Minute War, 137n, 287; Fallout and, 262

Skeptix, 85

Skids, 46, 287; “Charles,” 38, 88

Skrewdriver, 19, 287–88

Slits, 50, 155, 288; “Spend Spend Spend,” 74

Smash the Poll Tax!, 220

Smiley Culture, 187, 288; “Cockney Translation,” 171–72; “Westland Helicopter,” 222

Smith, Curt, 20

Smith, Mark E., 19, 35, 93; Fall, 38, 64, 89, 144, 262; “Marquis Cha Cha,” 19, 89; “2nd Dark Age,” 144

Smith, Robert, 189

Smith, TV., 138, 220, 295

Smiths, 40, 288; “Ask,” 139; “Meat Is Murder,” 156

Sneex, 16n, 288

Sniffin’ Glue, 12, 35, 235

social centres, anarchist. See anarchist and punk social centres

Socialist Workers Party (SWP): Crisis and, 257; Redskins and, 14, 100, 282

Soft Cell, 288–89; “Frustration,” 39–40; “Torch, ”111

Sok, G.W., 105

Somerville, Jimmy, 188, 193, 289; “Read My Lips,” 197; “Smalltown Boy,” 194

“Song for Ireland” (Gaughan), 132, 133

Sore Throat, 220, 289

“Soul Deep” (Council Collective), 98, 101, 103

Sound, 149, 289

South Africa, 165, 212–16

South Wales Striking Miners Choir, 107, 289

Spain, Britons in, 200

Spandau Ballet, 15, 18, 192, 209

Special AKA, 185, 214, 289

Special Duties, 112, 137n, 144–45, 152, 289

Specials, 27, 49, 52, 124, 145, 174, 175, 289–90; Colour Fields and, 157; echoed by Thrashing Doves, 62

Spiers, Kenneth: Spizzenergi, 290

Spitting Image, 214, 290

Spizzenergi, 84, 290

sports, 202–8; Sport Aid, 210

Stalag 17, 137n, 290; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28

Stardust, Alvin, 24, 290

Starving Children Sell Records (Chumbawamba). See Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (Chumbawamba)

Status Quo, 210, 213

Steeleye Span, 102, 290

steel industry, 54, 66, 96; Mike Carver and, 252; unions, 100

Steel Pulse, 33, 49, 50, 171, 175, 177, 290; Biko’s Kindred Lament,” 213; “State of Emergency,” 215

“Steeltown” (Big Country), 66–67

Stevens, Shakin’. See Shakin’ Stevens

Stewart, Rod, 18, 213, 230; “Killing of Georgie,” 52–53

Stiff Little Fingers (SLF), 127–28, 155, 163, 168, 290–91; Burns, 131

Sting, 96, 98, 147n, 211, 291

Stitched-Back Foot Airman, 291; “Costa Del Sol,” 199–200

Stoke Newington Eight, 63

Stonehenge Free Festival, 166–68 passim

Stone Roses, 160, 207, 291

Stonewall, 198

Stop the City demonstration, London, 1983, 27–28, 72

Stranglers, 145, 211

Straps, 179, 291

Strawbs, 291; “Part of the Union,” 34, 76

Stray Cats, 24

Street, John, 14, 21, 52, 230, 234

strikes, 34, 54, 103–4; ambulance drivers, 226; coal miners, 98–108 passim, 115, 165–66, 216–17, 236–37

Strummer, Joe, 12, 18, 69; “This Is England,” 96

Stump, 291–92; “Buffalo,” 161

Style Council, 17, 52, 56, 62, 124, 165, 223, 292; “All Gone Away,” 66; Our Favourite Shop, 68–69; “Stone’s Throw Away,” 104

Styrene, Poly, 76, 138, 292

Subhumans, 15, 147n, 156n, 177, 292; “Apathy,” 31; “From the Cradle to the Grave,” 36n; “Heads of State,” 116; “Rats,” 28, 29; “Reason for Existence,” 112

Suburban Studs, 36–37, 292

Suggs. See McPherson, Graham “Suggs”

“Sun City,” 213

“Sunday Bloody Sunday” (Lennon and Ono), 122

“Sunday Bloody Sunday” (U2), 127

SUS law, 180, 181

Tackhead, 102

Tams, John, 107

Taylor, John, 18

Tears for Fears, 20, 71, 210, 292–93

Tebbit, Norman, 62, 76, 200

television, 81–82, 124; Spitting Image, 214, 290; Top of the Pops, 109–10, 113

Television Personalities, 147, 293; “How I Learned to Love the Bomb,” 143, 144; ‘O’ Level and, 278

Terminus, 11, 13, 152, 156n, 205–6, 293

Test Dept., 4, 107, 293

Thatcher, Margaret, 2–10, 33, 53–62 passim, 71–75 passim, 110–27 passim, 202, 221–27 passim; apartheid and, 212, 216; autobiography, 85; “Bastard of the Year” (NME poll), 224–25; bibliography, 241; Blow Monkeys on, 188; Boy George on, 189; Bushell on, 95; campaign song (1983), 18; coal miners’ strike, 98–107 passim, 165–66, 217; Cold War, 142–43, 146, 149, 153; Crass, 85; demise, 226–27; education policy, 36, 38; “Enemy Within,” 96; Exploited on, 65–66; Falklands War and, 83–94 passim; football hooligans and, 204, 207, 208; Greater London Council abolition, 223; homophobia, 191, 194–95, 198; on hunger strikers, 117–18; immigrants and, 170, 171, 176, 191; Ireland, 115–27 passim, 164, 169; Macka B album cover, 186; in Macka B song, 216, 220; in Morrissey song, 221; Numan, 94, 231; policing, 164, 165–66, 169, 185; Reddington on, 155; on riots, 178; Style Council, 68; Turner on, 241; Wakeling on, 175–76; Weller on, 109; “we operate on a global scale,” 215; white power groups and, 19

Thatcher on Acid, 4, 74, 80, 210, 212, 225, 293

That Petrol Emotion, 130–31, 293

“That’s Entertainment” (Dietz), 25

“That’s Entertainment” (Weller), 25

The The, 201, 293

“They Don’t Know” (MacColl), 24

They Shall Not Pass, 107

“This Is Not Enough” (Conflict), 10

Thomas, Dylan, 89

Thompson, E.P.: Protest and Survive, 135, 136

Thompson, Lee, 36

Thorn, Tracey, 13, 17, 26, 27, 41, 94, 148, 188. See also Everything but the Girl

Thrashing Doves, 293–94; “Biba’s Basement,” 62–64

Three Johns, 7, 107, 147, 149, 201, 294; “Coals to Newcastle,” 102; miners’ benefit concerts, 104, 105; “Sold down the River,” 65, 66

Throbbing Gristle, 77; Chris and Cosey and, 252

“Time for Action” (Secret Affair), 44

Timelords, 294

The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Iron Woman (Briggs), 83

Tippa Irie. See Irie, Tippa

Todd, Matthew, 196

Toilets, 43; Alarm and, 244

Top of the Pops, 109–10, 113

“Top of the Pops” (Rezillos), 113

Tottenham 3, 186

Towers, Liddle, 182–83

Toxic Ephex, 180, 183, 294

Toxic Waste, 126–27, 294; Stop the City demonstration (1983), 28

Toy Dolls, 168, 294–95

Trades Union Congress (TUC), 101, 106

transgender identities, 16

Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), 101

Travellers, 166–68

Travis, Geoff, 236

Treacy, Dan, 5, 143–44; ‘O’ Level, 278

Troubles. See Ireland

Tudor-Pole, Eddie, 93

TUC. See Trades Union Congress (TUC)

Turner, Alwyn, 241

T.V. Smith’s Explorers, 138, 295

Twa Toots, 20, 92, 295

UB40, 26–27, 49, 91, 116, 295; Ali Campbell, 189; Robin Campbell, 94; “Don’t Do the Crime,” 51; “Earth Dies Screaming,” 151; “Love Is Alright,” 112; “Marble Medusa,” 3; “One in Ten,” 27, 227; “Present Arms,” 46, 84; “So Here I Am,” 39

UK Apachi, 220, 295

UK Subs, 147n, 178–79, 295; “After the War,” 88–89; “Fascist Regime,” 215; “Police State (Part 1), 163–64; Top of the Pops, 109

Ullman, Tracey, 24

“Ullo John! Got a New Motor?” (Sayle), 24–25, 30

“Ulster” (Sham 69), 131

Ultravox: “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” 139–40, 147

Undertones, 129–30, 145

unemployment, 34–35, 54–59 passim, 62, 86, 222

“Unionise!” (Redskins), 100

unions, 34, 76, 98–108 passim

United Nations, 33, 35, 36, 212

“Unity (Raise Your Banner)” (Tams), 107

“Urban Guerrilla” (Hawkwind), 63

“Us Fish Must Swim Together” (Lucas), xiii–xiv

U2, 127, 141n, 211; Alarm and, 244. See also Bono

Valentine Brothers: “Money’s Too Tight (to Mention),” 55–56

Vapors: New Clear Days, 138

Varukers, 84, 134, 135, 215; animal rights, 155, 157

Vibrators, 220; Dave Goodman and, 265

Vice Squad, 8, 12, 137n, 297

“Vicious Circle” (Abrasive Wheels), 56

Vinen, Richard, 10, 216–17; Thatcher’s Britain, 27, 28

Violators, 95, 178, 179, 297

Vogues: “5 O’clock World,” 138–39

Wakeling, Dave, 145, 175

Wallace, Roy: Toxic Waste, 126, 294

war. See militarism and war

Ward, Alan. See Motello, Elvin

Wargasm (benefit album), 145–46

Warwick, Dionne, 197

Watson, Gavin, 5

Watson, Vic, 40

Watt, Ben, 94; Everything but the Girl, 148, 188, 260

Wat Tyler, 203, 207, 297

Weatherall, Andrew, 5

Wedding Present, 215, 221, 297

“(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” (Heaven 17), 1–2, 67, 78, 195; Fire Engines cover, 80, 262

Weller, Paul, 18, 25, 35, 66, 93, 104, 146, 223; Council Collective, 98, 101, 256; Our Favourite Shop cover, 69; “Soul Deep,” 98, 101, 103; Red Wedge, 188; on Thatcher, 109

We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It, 40, 161, 297

Whalley, Boff: Commoners Choir, 255; “Fascist Groove Thing, Notes,” 229–31

Wham!, 58–59, 104, 298

“Which Side Are You On?” (Reece), 99, 103

Which Side Are You On (compilation album), 102, 108

white power bands, 19, 287–88

Who, 76

Widgery, David, 13

Williams, Vic, 224

Wilson, Mari, 93, 145

Wilson, Mike, 173

Wings, 122, 298

Wolfe Tones, 121, 298

Wombles, 22–23, 24, 109

Women Against Pit Closures, 101, 102

Working Week, 104, 211, 215, 298

World Party, 225, 298

World War I, 206

World War II, 86, 122, 206, 223

Worsthorne, Peregrine, 226

Wurzels, 22, 226, 298

Wyatt, Robert, 71, 89, 106–7, 165, 211, 215, 298; “Pigs,” 158

X-Ray Spex, 60, 74, 76, 155, 298–99; Carnival Against Nazis, 171; “I Am a Cliché,” 35

XS Discharge, 180–81

XTC, 54, 145, 147, 299; “Everyday Story of Smalltown,” 201; “Making Plans for Nigel,” 32, 39

xenophobia. See nationalism and xenophobia

Yeats, W.B., 67–68

Young, Tracie, 93

Young Marble Giants: “Final Day,” 147–48

Zephaniah, Benjamin, 185, 187, 213, 299

zines, 20, 35, 41, 57; Alternative Ulster, 127; Anthrax and, 246; bibliography, 235–36; Boy’s Own, 5; Northern Ireland, 127; Sniffin’ Glue, 12, 35

Zodiac Mindwarp, 189

Zounds, 137n, 157–58, 211, 299

About the Authors

Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as “extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work.” Hodges currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remain hopelessly obscure.

Dick Lucas is a writer and visual artist, and the vocalist for three iconic punk bands: Subhumans, Citizen Fish, and Culture Shock. He is also the founder of independent punk label Bluurg Records.

Boff Whalley is a writer and musician, and a founding member of Chumbawamba. He is also an avid fell runner, the subject of his book Run Wild. His most recent musical project is Commoners Choir, a “strange yet open and inclusive choir that meets in Leeds.” The choir’s most recent release is Untied Kingdom.

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English Rebel Songs 1381-1984 (CD)

Chumbawamba

ISBN: 978-1-60486-000-9

UPC: 877746000423

$14.9942 min.

English Rebel Songs 1381-1984 is Chumbawamba’s homage to the men and women who never had obituaries in the broadsheets; those who never received titles or appeared in as an entry in “Who’s Who.” This is an album that conjures up the tragedies and triumphs of the people who shaped England: its citizens.

The Boy Bands Have Won (CD)

Chumbawamba

ISBN: 978-1-60486-027-6

UPC: 877746000621

$14.9949 min.

Chumbawamba began with a mission to be interesting and arresting, to be literate and understanding. This album is a collection of such ideas; some are just passing thoughts, others are fully-formed songs. The album is gentle and warm in tone, but caustic in intent … The album features guests the OysterBand, Roy Bailey, Robb Johnson, Barry Coope, and Jim Boyes … and a hundred others, give or take a few …

Get On With It: Live (CD)

Chumbawamba

ISBN: 978-1-60486-001-6

UPC: 877746000522

$14.9953 min.

Anyone who’s been to a Chumbawamba show recently will testify to the importance and relevance of releasing this live album. Get On With It: Live is pop, folk, a capella, politics, humor, four-part harmony and five-part anger. It’s sing-alongs and hymns, throwaways and big choruses, old favorites, covers and unreleased songs, including two tracks only available on this North American release.

The World Turned Upside Down: Rosselsongs 1960-2010

Leon Rosselson

ISBN: 978-1-60486-498-4

UPC:760137521624

$44.95294 min. / 80 pages

The life and times of England’s greatest living songwriter are captured in a deluxe box set, containing 72 songs on 4 CDs and an 80-page book.

“The songs on these CDs span 5 decades, from the sparky sixties to the curdled present, and encompass a wide variety of song subjects and song forms. They have been written out of hope, anger, love, scorn, laughter and despair. The tracks I have selected are, I believe, sturdily built and quite capable of standing up for themselves. And, because they have something to say about the times in which they were written, there are copious notes on the political and personal environments that formed them along with some pointed observations on the craft of songwriting.”—Leon Rosselson

Where Are the Elephants?

Leon Rosselson

ISBN: 978-1-62963-973-4

$16.95184 pages

Fierce and funny, this memoir in essay and song is full of wonderful tales of art and protest. Leon Rosselson’s Where Are the Elephants? is a rare behind the scenes look at the life and times of one of England’s foremost folksingers. This clear-eyed portrait of an activist who never gave up and whose talent, wit, and verve brought the world into finer focus provides a model for a whole new generation of radicals. Fans will love revisiting the lyrics from his hits—and behind the scenes glimpses of the stories and events that inspired his songs, but Rosselson’s story of growing from a red diaper baby into a modern troubadour up against the barricades is a tale for the ages.

“In many ways, Leon Rosselson is the embodiment of the original ideals of punk rock. His hair isn’t spiky, but his music is, using fearless wit and political integrity to highlight the hypocrisies of those in power. Alone among the great British songwriters of the past sixty years, Leon has sought to make art that stays true to Karl Marx’s demand that we should concern ourselves with the ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

—Billy Bragg

A Reasonable History of Impossible Demands: The Damage to Date 1986-2013

Robb Johnson

ISBN: 978-1-62963-220-9

UPC:877746007620

$44.95390 min. / 64 pages

The life and times (so far!) of the UK’s greatest living songwriter are captured in a deluxe box set. 92 songs, on 5 CDs with a 64-page booklet. A career retrospective traversing the acoustic and the electric, the agit-folk and the chanson, the greatest hits and a welter of unreleased material.

“So—yeah, this collection does have quite a lot of politics and protest, lots of songs doing what folk song is supposed to do—provide an alternative ordinary person’s perspective to the dominant culture’s hegemonic discourse, its spin and propagandising on behalf of the interests of the ruling class. But there are also interpersonal songs about relationships, about being a son, being a lover, being a dad (think I may not have had room for the ones about being a Brentford supporter), above all about being a human … what you have here is part journal, part diary part testament.”—Robb Johnson

The People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State

Robb Johnson

ISBN: 978-1-62963-795-2

$20.00288 pages

There once was a time when teachers and communities were able to exercise democratic control over their schools. Now that power has been taken away, both centralised and privatised, under the guise of “reform.” There is a forgotten history of the time before reform, and within it a bright horizon is visible, reachable only if educators and society at large can learn the lessons of the past.

Robb Johnson entered the classroom as a new teacher in the 1980s and has spent a lifetime alongside his pupils encouraging both creativity and a healthy distrust of authority. This book is both memoir and polemic, a celebration of children’s innate desire to learn, share, cooperate, and play, as well as a critique of bureaucratic interference.

Punk Rock: An Oral History

John Robbwith a Foreword by Henry Rollins

ISBN: 978-1-60486-005-4

$19.95584 pages

With its own fashion, culture, and chaotic energy, punk rock boasted a do-it-yourself ethos that allowed anyone to take part. Vibrant and volatile, the punk scene left an extraordinary legacy of music and cultural change. John Robb talks to many of those who cultivated the

movement, such as John Lydon, Lemmy, Siouxsie Sioux, Mick Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Malcolm McLaren, Henry Rollins, and Glen Matlock, weaving together their accounts to create a raw and unprecedented oral history of UK punk. All the main players are here: from The Clash to Crass, from The Sex Pistols to the Stranglers, from the UK Subs to Buzzcocks—over 150 interviews capture the excitement of the most thrilling wave of rock ’n’ roll pop culture ever. Ranging from its widely debated roots in the late 1960s to its enduring influence on the bands, fashion, and culture of today, this history brings to life the energy and the anarchy as no other book has done.

“Its unique brand of energy helps make it a riot all its own.”

—Harp magazine

“John Robb is a great writer … and he is supremely qualified in my opinion to talk about punk rock.”

—Mick Jones, The Clash

“John Robb is as punk rock as The Clash.”

—Alan McGee

The Story of Crass

George Berger

ISBN: 978-1-60486-037-5

$20.00304 pages

Crass was the anarcho-punk face of a revolutionary movement founded by radical thinkers and artists Penny Rimbaud, Gee Vaucher and Steve Ignorant. When punk ruled the waves, Crass waived the rules and took it further, putting out their own records, films and magazines and setting up a series of situationist pranks that were dutifully covered by the world’s press. Not just another iconoclastic band, Crass was a musical, social and political phenomenon.

Commune dwellers who were rarely photographed and remained contemptuous of conventional pop stardom, their members explored and finally exhausted the possibilities of punk-led anarchy. They have at last collaborated on telling the whole Crass story, giving access to many never-before seen photos and interviews.

The Last of the Hippies: An Hysterical Romance

Penny Rimbaud

ISBN: 978-1-62963-103-5

$12.00128 pages

First published in 1982 as part of the Crass record album Christ: The Album, Penny Rimbaud’s The Last of the Hippies is a fiery anarchist polemic centered on the story of his friend, Phil Russell (aka Wally Hope), who was murdered by the State while incarcerated in a mental institution.

In the space of seven short years, from 1977 to their breakup in 1984, Crass almost single-handedly breathed life back into the then moribund peace and anarchist movements. The Last of the Hippies fast became the seminal text of what was then known as anarcho-punk and which later blossomed into the anti-globalization movement.

This revised edition comes complete with a new introduction in which Rimbaud questions some of the premises that he laid down in the original.

One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock

Dave Laingwith a Foreword by TV Smith

ISBN: 978-1-62963-033-5

$17.95224 pages

Originally published in 1985, One Chord Wonders was the first full-length study of the glory years of British punk rock. The book argues that one of punk’s most significant political achievements was to expose the operations of power in the British entertainment industries as they were thrown into confusion by the sound and the fury of musicians and fans.

Through a detailed examination of the conditions under which punk emerged and then declined, Dave Laing develops a view of the music as both complex and contradictory. Special attention is paid to the relationship between punk and the music industry of the late 1970s, in particular the political economy of the independent record companies through which much of punk was distributed. The rise of punk is also linked to the febrile political atmosphere of Britain in the mid-1970s.

Using examples from a wide range of bands, individual chapters use the techniques of semiology to consider the radical approach to naming in punk (from Johnny Rotten to Poly Styrene), the instrumental and vocal sound of the music, and its visual images. Another section analyses the influence of British punk in Europe prior to the music’s division into “real punk” and “post-punk” genres.

The concluding chapter critically examines various theoretical explanations of the punk phenomenon, including the class origins of its protagonists and the influential view that punk represented the latest in a line of British youth “subcultures.” There is also a chronology of the punk era, plus discographies and a bibliography.

“A clear, unprejudiced account of a difficult subject.”

—Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming

Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

Ian Glasper

ISBN: 978-1-60486-748-0

$24.95416 pages

As the Seventies drew to a close and the media declared punk dead and buried, a whole new breed of band was emerging from the gutter. Harder and faster than their ’76–77 predecessors, not to mention more aggressive and political, the likes of Discharge, the Exploited, and G.B.H. were to prove not only more relevant but arguably just as influential.

Several years in the making and featuring hundreds of new interviews and photographs, Burning Britain is the true story of the UK punk scene from 1980 to 1984 told for the first time by the bands and record labels that created it. Covering the country region by region, author Ian Glasper profiles legendary bands like Vice Squad, Angelic Upstarts, Blitz, Anti-Nowhere League, Cockney Rejects, and the UK Subs as well as the more obscure groups like Xtract, The Skroteez, and Soldier Dolls.

The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984

Ian Glasper

ISBN: 978-1-60486-516-5

$24.95496 pages

The Day the Country Died features author, historian, and musician Ian Glasper (Burning Britain) exploring in minute detail the influential, esoteric, UK anarcho punk scene of the early Eighties. If the colorful ’80s punk bands captured in Burning Britain were loud, political, and uncompromising, those examined in The Day the Country Died were even more so, totally prepared to risk their liberty to communicate the ideals they believed in so passionately.

With Crass and Poison Girls opening the floodgates, the arrival of bands such as Zounds, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, Subhumans, Chumbawamba, Amebix, Rudimentary Peni, Antisect, Omega Tribe, and Icons of Filth heralded a brand new age of honesty and integrity in underground music. With a backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain, punk music became self-sufficient and considerably more aggressive, blending a DIY ethos with activism to create the perfectly bleak soundtrack to the zeitgeist of a discontented British youth.

That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority

Leon Rosselson

ISBN: 978-1-62963-378-7

$5.9532 pages

“For my parents and grandparents, Jewish identity, in religion, culture and language, was a given. Not so for me. I’m not religious, not a Zionist, so in what consists my Jewishness? Is a love of chopped liver and a belief that chicken soup cures all ills enough? And does it matter? This is the story of my search for answers. It is an argument with myself, with song lyrics to embellish the argument.”

Like so many of those others in Britain of Jewish lineage, songwriter and awardwinning folk singer Leon Rosselson is descended from antecedents who fled pogroms in eastern Europe. Pertinently, he questions what being a Jew means—is it adherence to Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a citizen of Israel, or someone who eats “chicken soup with knedlach”? He describes clearly and with historical insight how any concept of “Jewishness” can involve all of those things and more. In his own life, he has decided to pick and choose from this tradition and history and build on what he deems to be the progressive, humane, and universalist values of that Jewish background.

Rosselson is a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, seeing in the victimization of Palestinians by the state of Israel parallels with historical Jewish persecution. He concludes this short essay by stating: “I share with the growing number of Jews in the diaspora who place solidarity with the oppressed above demands of tribalism and with those in Israel who dare to stand against the powers that be.”

“His songs are fierce, funny, cynical, outraged, blasphemous, challenging and anarchic. And the tunes are good, too.”

—Guardian (UK)

“With dazzling lyrical technique, deftly woven inter-rhymes, a powerful understanding of image, irony and narrative verse, he paints vivid portraits of sadly displaced lives, fools in high places, the absurdities and the occasional graces of modern life.”

—Boston Globe

“Britain’s finest songwriter since Richard Thompson.”

—Venue

Citizen Fish: Underwater Overground/Gaffer Tape (DVD)

Director/Producers: Jasper Pattison and Pete Isaacs

UPC: 760137483991

$14.95159 min.

Two documentaries about punk-ska band Citizen Fish who live in South West England and spend large chunks of life playing their one-off brand of music to people who don’t. Bassist Jasper takes his video camera in and out of tour vans and people’s faces along the way—and this is what it looks and sounds like: clips of interviews, scenery, gigs, people, music and ‘things that happen’, meshed together to give a wide-angle picture of a band on (and off) tour.

Underwater Overground is the new film (2008) about the further adventures of the band as they tour in the UK, the USA and Europe. Jasper has been busy again with his video camera as the band toured England and Wales, the USA (four different tours), the Czech Republic and Poland, with other bands including Leftover Crack, Sainte Catherines, Witch Hunt, Intro5pect, Prague Ska Conspiracy, MDC and Subhumans. (63 min)

Gaffer Tape was the original film (2000). Using footage from throughout the band’s history, it includes Poland in 1994, Australia and New Zealand in 1997, America, from New York to San Francisco, in September 1999 and Winchester to France in 1999–2000. (48 min)

Extras Include:

10 live songs from 1990–2008 (32 min)

2007 Broadcast from BBC Radio 1 Punk Show with Mike Davies (8 min)

Gaffer Tape trailer (2 min)

Underwater Overground trailer (2 min)

Citizen Fish Oddities! (4 min)

No Gods No Masters: Live in Concert (DVD)

Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson

ISBN: 978-1-60486-441-0

$19.95 2 × DVDs / 250 min.

In this glorious 2 DVD set, Britain’s finest living songwriters are captured live (on tour in Berkeley, CA), presenting two nights of their original songs, words, and inimitable performance.

Turning Silence into Song (Disc One) showcases a pair of career-spanning “greatest hits, ” with a suitable sprinkling of new and previously unreleased material. All introduced and contextualized with a large helping of trademark wit and dry irony.

The Liberty Tree (Disc Two) tells the story of Tom Paine’s extraordinary life, interweaving Paine’s own words, from his letters and the pamphlets which made him one of the most influential and dangerous writers of his age, with extracts from newspaper reports, diaries, letters, and other documents of the times. The songs of Robb Johnson and Leon Rosselson add another dimension to the story, reflecting Paine’s radical ideas and evaluating them in the context of the 21st century. This unique blend of words and music challenges received opinion in the same way Paine’s writings did.

Together, herein you’ll find over four hours of the finest contemporary songs, stories, humor, and observation from the greatest practitioners of the craft.

“… some of the most literate and well-made topical songs now being written”

—The New York Times [on Leon Rosselson]

“Britain’s finest songwriter since Richard Thompson.”

—Venue [on Robb Johnson]

“A highly subversive pairing of two of the left’s most eloquent songwriters.”

—Daily Telegraph

Where Are the Barricades? (CD)

Leon Rosselson

ISBN: 978-1-62963-219-3

UPC:877746007521

$14.9553 min.

Best known for his song “The World Turned Upside Down” as performed and made into a top 10 hit by Billy Bragg, Leon Rosselson has blessed us with songs for nearly six full decades. The Guardian has called his compositions “fierce, funny, cynical, outraged, blasphemous, challenging, and anarchic, ” and Folk Roots called him “a superb integrator of words and music.” Now at 81 years old, Rosselson leaves us with his swan song and final recording, Where Are the Barricades? A collection of all-new songs, Where Are the Barricades? culminates a triumphant career, and firmly solidifies Rosselson’s reputation as one of England’s most prolific and respected songwriters.

The Liberty Tree: A Celebration of the Life and Writings of Thomas Paine

Leon Rosselson andRobb Johnson

ISBN: 978-1-60486-339-0

UPC: 877746001628

$20.00Double Audio CD / 20 pages

“When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example to the poor to plunder the rich of his property.”—Thomas Paine

The Liberty Tree tells the story of Tom Paine’s extraordinary life, interweaving Paine’s own words, from his letters and the pamphlets which made him one of the most influential and dangerous writers of his age, with extracts from newspaper reports, diaries, letters and other documents of the times. The songs of Robb Johnson and Leon Rosselson add another dimension to the story, reflecting Paine’s radical ideas and evaluating them in the context of the 21st century. This unique blend of words and music challenges received opinion in the same way Paine’s writings did.

Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth

Ian Brennanwith a Foreword by Tunde Adebimpe

ISBN: 978-1-62963-703-7

$20.00256 pages

Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people’s homes and haunting their psyches through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something the average citizen may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent corporate fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time.

Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media in the digital era. With his fifth book, producer, activist, and author Ian Brennan delves deep into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts globally. Brennan challenges music industry tycoons by skillfully demonstrating that there are millions of talented people around the world far more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.

We are invited to accompany the author on his travels, finding and recording music from some of the world’s most marginalized peoples. In the breathtaking range of this book, our preconceived notions of art are challenged by musicians from South Sudan to Kosovo, as Brennan lucidly details his experiences recording music by the Tanzania Albinism Collective, the Zomba Prison Project, a “witch camp” in Ghana, the Vietnamese war veterans of Hanoi Masters, the Malawi Mouse Boys, the Canary Island whistlers, genocide survivors in both Cambodia and Rwanda, and more.

Silenced by Sound is defined by muscular, terse, and poetic verse, and a nonlinear format rife with how-to tips and anecdotes. The narrative is driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles, his memoir-like reveries, and the striking photographs that accompany these projects.

After reading it, you’ll never hear quite the same again.

“An interesting and important project.

—Noam Chomsky

Muse-Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes

Ian Brennan with a Foreword byJohn Waters

ISBN: 978-1-62963-909-3

$14.95128 pages

Grammy-winning music producer Ian Brennan’s seventh book, Muse-Sick, is a primer on how mass production and commercialization have corrupted the arts. Broken down into a series of core points and action plans, it expands upon Brennan’s previous music missives, Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth and How Music Dies (or Lives).

Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something one may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur. By exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent commercialized and prepackaged fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time.

In fifty-nine clear and concise points, Brennan reveals how corporate media has constricted local cultures and individual creativity, leading to a lack of diversity within “diversity.” Muse-Sick’s narrative portions are driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles of places including Comoros, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Rwanda, with disparate groups such as the Sheltered Workshop Singers, brought to life by Marilena Umuhoza Delli’s striking photographs.

“Ian Brennan’s Muse-Sick is a passionate, thought-provoking chronicle of traveling beyond the mainstream to listen to unheard music created by the unsung.”

—Maureen Mahon, NYU, author of Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race and Black Diamond Queens

“We can never hear enough of the fresh, conscientious perspective of Ian Brennan. His words gives voice to people who have been silenced.”

—Booker T. Jones, frontman of Booker T. and the M.G.’s and winner of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

“By all means keep this book by your bedside.

—Songlines

If It Sounds Good, It Is Good: Seeking Subversion, Transcendence, and Solace in America’s Music

Richard Manning with a Foreword by Rick Bass

ISBN: 978-1-62963-792-1

$26.95320 pages

Music is fundamental to human existence, a cultural universal among all humans for all times. It is embedded in our evolution, encoded in our DNA, which is to say, essential to our survival. Academics in a variety of disciplines have considered this idea to devise explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, arcane, incomplete, ivory-towered, and just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a wholly different angle, using his own guitar and banjo as instruments of discovery. In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of music rough and rowdy.

American roots music is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, field hands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these people—poor, working people—built the foundations of jazz, gospel, blues, bluegrass, rock ’n’ roll, and country music, an unparalleled burst of invention. This is the counterfactual to the academics’ story. This is what tells us music is essential, but by pulling this thread, Manning takes us down a long, strange path, following music to deeper understandings of racism, slavery, inequality, meditation, addiction, the science of our brains, and ultimately to an enticing glimpse of pure religion.

Use this book to follow where his guitar leads. Ultimately it sings the American body, electric.

“Richard Manning is the most significant social critic in the northern Rockies. We’re fortunate to have Dick Manning as he continues his demands for fairness while casting light on our future.”

—William Kittredge, author of The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology and The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays

“Richard Manning’s work has always been something special, distinguished by its intense passion and its penetrating insights.”

—George Black, author of Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone

The Primal Screamer

Nick Blinko

ISBN: 978-1-60486-331-4

$14.95128 pages

A Gothic Horror novel about severe mental distress and punk rock. The novel is written in the form of a diary kept by a psychiatrist, Dr. Rodney H. Dweller, concerning his patient, Nathaniel Snoxell, brought to him in 1979 because of several attempted suicides. Snoxell gets involved in the nascent UK anarcho-punk scene, recording EPs and playing gigs in squatted Anarchy Centers. In 1985, the good doctor himself “goes insane” and disappears.

This semi-autobiographical novel from Rudimentary Peni singer, guitarist, lyricist, and illustrator Nick Blinko, plunges into the worlds of madness, suicide, and anarchist punk. Lovecraft meets Crass in the squats and psychiatric institutions of early ’80s England. This new edition collects Blinko’s long sought after artwork from the three previous incarnations.

“Dense, haunted, shot through with black humour.”

—Raw Vision

“Nick Blinko is a madman. That’s not intended as pejorative opinion but rather a statement of plain fact.”

—Maximum RocknRoll

“The insights it offers into the punk scene and into the unsettling landscapes of its author’s mind are fascinating. The whole book has a distinct sense of coming from a mind unlike most we are used to.”

—The Big Issue

“An intensely written and authentically Gothic look at the life of a man suffering extreme mental distress.”

—Detour

“Fascinating and compelling.”

—Kerrang