Possibly the last thing this benighted and disunited kingdom needs is yet another article about the funeral frenzy that has gripped the nation during April 2013 following the death of Margaret Thatcher*1, but given the fuss over the re-release of a couple of pop records – one from 34 years ago, the other from 74 years back, I feel that those amongst our little JFAB community*2 (and possibly beyond) might be interested in a brief overview of the remarkable number of protest songs provoked by our late leader during and even after her protracted reign as PM.
In 1982, the UK’s fourth TV service, Channel 4 began broadcasting with a remit to encourage new and sometimes quite left-wing talent including the new comedians coming through from The Comedy Store club on to shows like Saturday Live, in which Ben Elton would regularly target ‘Mrs. Thatch’. Brookside – before it turned into a parody of itself - was a new, more realistic soap-opera that also began on C4, focusing on social issues beyond the realm of traditional soaps and, notably portraying trades-unionists in a sympathetic light at a time when the government was hell-bent on all but destroying them.
BBC 1 meanwhile, seemed to be embracing the accelerating ‘greed is good’ zeitgeist with its new comedy-drama hit, Minder which started in 1979 and the even more successful Only Fools & Horses sitcom which began in 1981. Both of these shows glorified the rampant spiv culture of the times in an entertaining and heart-warming style. Thatcher’s own favourite TV show, Yes, Minister first aired in 1980. Long before the rampant effing and blinding of The Thick Of It, the much more demure Yes Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister, nevertheless tellingly nailed the self-serving hypocrisy of politicians of all shades. The epithet ‘career politician’ has increasingly become the norm in both national and local politics ever since. Interesting that The Un-Iron-ic Lady actually seemed to have had some semblance of a sense of humour then…She was, of course, the undoubted star of a puppet-show that began in 1984, the corruscatingly satirical Spitting Image, in which she was represented as a tyrannical she-monster in a man’s suit, terrorising her cabinet of fawning fools. By 1987, The New Statesman, featuring comedian Rik Mayall as Tory MP, Alan B'Stard, the stereotype of Thatcherites as crass, greedy bloodsuckers had almost become routine.
More darkly comic and politically critical of the Thatcher government, was the drama-series, Boys From The Black Stuff, which in 1982 memorably portrayed the havoc being wrought by the Tories in working-class Liverpool during the first half of Thatcher’s reign in the name of ‘managed decline’. The polemical feature film, My Beautiful Launderette (1985) painted a picture of Anglo-Asian relationships in a London
Clearly, Britain ’s first female PM and her governmental henchmen (all but one of her ministers were men) had an exercising effect on the arts and I can certainly think of no other politician – either national or international – who has so galvanised UK
* * * * *
Regarding the title of this piece, I’m afraid there have been far more misses than hits
generated by the Thatcher effect. Let’s then, first look at the, er, Thatcher Chartbusters.
By far the biggest hit was ‘Ghost Town’ by 2 Tone glumsters, The Specials, which, although not specifically about Thatcher, was a UK # 1 during 1981 when summer riots, not dissimilar to those thirty years later in 2011, challenged the complacency of Tory administrations of the day. ‘Ghost Town’, with its brilliantly claustrophobic video of the band crammed into a car driving through shadowy scenes of urban decay, is a great latter-day Ska record which points the finger at a ‘government leaving youth on the shelf’.
Next up is the one that has caused all kerfuffle of late, ‘Ding Dong – The Wicked Witch Is Dead’, a track from the 1939 Hollywood musical film, The Wizard Of Oz. Performed by Judy Garland & The Munchkins and, long before Thatcher’s demise, rumoured to be the subject of an online campaign to engineer it into the UK # 1 spot, this little ditty had the BBC squirming on a pin as to whether to play it or not. Cravenly, they decided to allow only five seconds of the dastardly disc to be aired – though it was only fifty-one seconds long in er, toto! Alas, the record only reached # 2 (or was it another case, like that in the Jubilee year of 1977, when the scurrilous ‘God Save The Queen’ by The Sex Pistols was finagled out of the top position despite allegedly outselling the Rod Stewart song that made it to # 1, by hook or by crook, ironically titled, as it happened, ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’?*4).
‘Sowing The Seeds Of Love’, a Beatlesque slice of psychedelia that was a transatlantic top 5 smash for Tears For Fears in 1989 called upon the power of love to heal a sick capitalist world and asked ‘Politician Granny with your high ideals / Have you no idea how the majority feels?’
Now we come to ‘I’m In Love With Mrs. Thatcher’ by the drily named Not Sensibles which lost out in The Great 2013 Chart Battle with ‘Ding Dong’, only reaching a gallant # 6. Interestingly, The Not Sensibles were however, the first act to make a record about Thatcher. The 1979 single – really not much more than a likeably oikish Punk chant which sounds like Jilted John on the verse and Arthur Mullard on the chorus – sank into obscurity at the time. It’s resurrection by Thatcher’s mourners only goes to show their fatheaded failure to appreciate even the most blatant irony.
‘Don’t Give Up’, a duet by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush which charted at # 9 in 1986, was a sensitive ballad in which Gabriel’s jobless narrator had followed the advice of Thatcher’s lieutenant Norman Tebbitt and ‘got on his bike’, going from town to town searching in vain for work. Driven to the edge of suicide, he is touchingly reassured by Bush in the character of his wife. At a time when there were over three million unemployed, the song couldn’t help but strike a chord.
‘Stand Down Margaret’, a double-a-side with ‘Best Friend’ by The Beat reached # 22 in 1981. Another second-generation Ska record from the 2 Tone stable, it refers to Thatcher’s ‘cold grey hands’ and doubts that she would ‘ever give a damn’ about the mess she was making of society (ed. - society – what society?!)
The next – and last of the Anti-Thatcher sub-genre songs to chart – was ‘Shipbuilding’, by ex-Soft Machine Drummer and vaguely Cockernee avant-gardist, Robert Wyatt in 1983. A song with eloquent music by Clive Westlake*5 and a lyric by Elvis Costello, it imagines with tragic irony the reactivation of some UK shipyards due to the Falklands War and the short-lived prosperity of the areas in question and the young soldiers who died in the conflict. It has been recorded several times, including a version by Costello himself with Chet Baker on trumpet, and another minor hit by Tasmin Archer in 1994 which reached # 40 (Wyatt made # 35).
Well, that’s all for folks, as far as the hits are concerned, but what of the misses and some of the album-tracks that had the temerity to attack our great leader during her glory years?
Elvis Costello hadn’t finished with her yet and also recorded ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ from Spike (1989) which counterpointed a gentle folk melody with a terrific lyric and vocal seething with disgust about the time ‘When England was the whore of the world / [and] Margaret was its madam’. The title of ‘Margaret On The Guillotine’ from Viva Hate! (1988), the first solo album by Morissey, said it all in a low-key ballad which sounded like it would have been on the next Smiths album - had there been one.
Other big names that felt moved to vent some spleen were Pink Floyd whose ‘Fletcher Memorial Home’ (‘for incurable tyrants and kings’) was accompanied by a video in which Thatcher is portrayed doddering around a luxury rest-home in the company of Napoleon, Hitler and her old pal Reagan, along with General Haig and Ian Paisley (quite prescient really, when you consider the lavish surroundings of her actual last days in London’s Ritz Hotel). Meanwhile, ‘Black Boys On Mopeds’ by Sinead O’Connor, ‘Old England’ by The Waterboys and ‘Heartland’ by the defiantly definite articled The The, all painted vivid pictures of the general malaise.
Time to give a mention now to some of the dear old Punk outfits that rose up like midnight mushrooms only to rapidly wither away hitless, alas, but hey, at least they had their say, or to be more accurate, their yowl. Crass are probably the best known of these and their Anarcho-Punk noise-fests are fondly remembered, especially the shrill racket of ‘How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead?’ Then there were ‘Maggie’s Fortress’ by The Varukers, ‘Maggie’s Last Party’ by VIM, ‘No Government’ (‘and no Maggie Thatcher’) by Anti-Pasti, ‘’Guess Who’s Running The Show?’ by Thatcher On Acid (sweet suffering Jaysus - what a thought!) and Margaret’s Injection’ (lethal, naturally) by Kitchens Of Distinction – all of which are likely to appeal, in the main, only to the Thrash-inclined.
‘Kick Out The Tories’ by The Newtown Neurotics, however, is somewhat more musical, albeit very much in thrall to The Jam (whose own songs generally provided a grim take on Thatcher’s Britain without being specific about her); whilst the evergreen chant of ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – Out, Out, Out!’*6 was picked up from the anti-Thatcher demo’s by The Larks in 1985 and crossed with a lively rewrite of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock & Roll’ and contributed to one of several benefit albums for the striking miners. The Exploited also appropriated the chant in ‘Maggie’, although their revised chorus of ‘Maggie Maggie, Maggie – you f***ing c**t’ was decidedly unparliamentary…
Oooh, now, quite apart from the insult, the Baroness of Kesteven would have deplored such bad language. Infamously philistine, she had little time for the arts and once berated the stage director Peter Hall for his depiction of Mozart as foul mouthed in the Peter Shaffer play Amadeus (1984), persistently contradicting him when he protested that the great composer’s letters proved that he had been clearly less than a dainty speaker. The self-appointed Sacred Cow who must never be questioned and must always be obeyed, simply insisted that as Mozart wrote such pretty tunes he therefore must have been incapable of profanity*7.
In addition, Bob Dylan’s 1965 hit ‘Maggie’s Farm’ was co-opted into partial rewrites by both The Specials and The Blues Band (which featured two of Manfred’s Menn), but some of the better, specifically Anti-Thatcher, songs appeared only after her party had stabbed her in the back (by many of the self-same backstabbers, of course, who were loudly singing her praises after her death).
Some of the best Anti-Thatcher songs appeared long after her fading away into the shadows of the political world (smug albeit, in the knowledge that having become an ‘ism’, her policies continued to be championed and implemented by New Labour’s Blair and Brown and, naturally by the Old Etonians, Cameron & Co.
The righteous foghorn of Billy Bragg, for instance, predicting the Tories’ eventual defeat under Major in ‘Thatcherites’ (1996), goaded them ‘Your leader, she has gone to The Lords / But she’s left us Little John / And he’s ‘angin’ on by his nails’. The same year, Hefner cheerfully declared that ‘We’ll dance and sing all night’ on ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’, a strong Pulpish tune featuring brass which also incorporates a kiddies chorus doing the ‘Ding Dong’ song (yes, that one).
In 2006, Frank Turner*8, a contemporary young folk singer, released the Kinksy ‘Thatcher F**ked The Kids’, an unflinching look at Modern Britain and what might be termed Thatcher’s Grandchildren: ‘We’re all wondering why we ended up so scared / We spent ten long years teaching our kids not to care / But there’s no such thing as society anyway’.
My personal favourite is actually the most recent of the Anti-Thatcher songs. It is – and not to be confused with Hefner above – ‘The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies’ by an old scouse pop star who had a few hits with his band The Mighty Wah! and as a solo artist back in the 1980s: Pete Wylie. It’s a great record about ‘the wicked witch of
‘You wanna give her a state funeral -
Well, that’s just great!
Ironic, cos she left us in a sorry state.
I protest it’s money wasted -
Build a school instead.
The only reason to go
Is to make sure that she’s dead’
You can find the song on YouTube if you search for ‘Anti-Thatcher Songs’. So – what do you think – shall we start a campaign for a new anti-anthem? Here comes the chorus:-
‘HEY! HO! HERE WE GO!
TELL EVERYBODY YOU KNOW
SHE’S GONE!’
N. B.
*1 – I’m often struck by the onomatopoeic range of Maggie’s Monicker: the quiet smoothness of the ‘a’ sounds in ‘Margaret’, so redolent of her phoney, reconstructed accent, followed by the slashing harshness of ‘Thatcher’, much more evocative of her Spitting Image persona.
*2 – For the unitiated, ‘JFAB’ stands for Jukebox For A Brain, a series of retrospective reviews of what I consider to be underrated albums along with other occasional articles about matters of musical interest – such as this one. JFAB should appear later this year online as a blog called Angles & Reflections by Ian Roberts and will also include other prose work, poetry and photography. In the meantime, if you would like to be added to my JFAB email list, feel free to contact me at lisa.roberts@live.co.uk
*3 – There was no shortage of bona-fide stars on the Red Wedge tours: apart from Billy Bragg at the helm, Elvis Costello, The Specials, The Beat, The Communards, The Smiths, Kirsty MacColl, and Tom Robinson were involved, for example; whilst comedians like Lenny Henry, Harry Enfield, Robbie Coltrane, Craig Charles, Phil Jupitus and Ben Elton were also aboard. All of which only goes to prove that it doesn’t matter how good your songs are or how funny your jokes, the government – to quote a well-known graffito - always gets in…
*4 – A double a-side for Stewart b/w ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’. The Pistols disc
did reach # 1 in the NME chart – so there! Mind you, when you look at the fiendish lefties writing for that publication at the time, you might say, yes, well, it would have, wouldn’t it…)
*5 – Westlake
*6 – Even during the post-Thatcher 1990s, the chant retained its currency and could, for instance, be witnessed breaking out during the crowded Saturday night bingo sessions at The Pool Road Working Men’s Club (confusingly situated in Leicester on Beatrice Road) where my wife and I would sometimes try our luck. In amongst the ‘Kelly’s Eyes’ and ‘Two Fat Ladies’, the caller would announce ‘Nurrrmber Ten – Maaaggie’s Den!’. There would inevitably follow conflicting cries of ‘Keep ‘er in!’ and ‘Gerrer out!’ which sometimes degenerated into a full-on ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out, Out, Out! / In, In In!’ cacophony.
*7 – Recounted by David Lister in The Independent 13/4/13.
*8 - Rising 'Folk-Punk' starlet, Frank Turner, it ironically turns out, is yet another of those Old Etonians popping up all over the place these days. Elsewhere on this blog, you can read Class Acts, my exploration into the extraordinary prevalence of privately educated people populating the UK's contemporary cultural landscape (see 'OTHER PROSE' topbox).
*8 - Rising 'Folk-Punk' starlet, Frank Turner, it ironically turns out, is yet another of those Old Etonians popping up all over the place these days. Elsewhere on this blog, you can read Class Acts, my exploration into the extraordinary prevalence of privately educated people populating the UK's contemporary cultural landscape (see 'OTHER PROSE' topbox).
C. 2013 IGR
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