I’m writing a book! About music, austerity and the 2010s. In my last blogpost (which you can read here) I talked about Cameron’s music tastes and who ‘owns’ protest music. The following is a chopped-up extract.
Like Thatcher in the 1980s, David Cameron became a lyrical device which summarised all the evils of the Coalition, the Conservative Party and austerity policies. His spearheading confidence and assurance in austerity, Big Society and that “we’re all in this together” became a target for song-writers to parody, lampoon and criticise as a way to rail against the wider Conservative ideology. Cameron had the ability to play a friendly and affable ‘Dave’ with the media, as well as turn on the firm voice of the government against protest. By being such a visible personality, as well as boasting the arch millionaire/Etonian/Bullingdon Club background, Cameron becomes the ever-recurring character and voice in protest music, a sort of inverted folk-devil.
In the punk camp, Cameron is sampled on Magnificent Seven’s ‘Welfare Is A State’, Ravioli Me Away’s ‘Imagination’ and The Relitics’ ‘Whitewash’. Over in the hip-hop camp, Cameron is sampled in Novelist’s ‘Street Politician’ and Dave’s ‘Question Time’. The Smiley & The Underclass song ‘It’s All England’ opens with Smiley declaring “Now this one’s straight to the head of David Cameron and the Houses of Parliament, dedicated to the ones who struggle and suffer and can’t pay their rent.” On Old Radio’s ‘Our Contributions’, the skacore band sing “leaving scraps on the floor / fuck David Cameron / take the fight to the Number Ten door.”
The Skints’ ‘The Island’, written about fallout of the EU Referendum, asks: “Whose idea was this? / Cos I feel the joke is over / But he's only done a runner / And sold you down the river”. At this stage in the music video, a cartoon Cameron makes a Beano-escape dash offscreen. Cameron’s resignation after the referendum is the core of Half Bam Half Whisky’s song ‘A Pig Boy Did It And Ran Away.’ Cameron’s resignation is the crux of Throwing Stuff’s ferocious and undaunted ‘We Wrote This Song Before David Cameron Resigned’. In the song at the final lines screech at quicktime:
“Dodging questions like you know where I’ve been
That dirty smirk couldn’t hide a wedding ring
Tell me how it’s not black and white
Sounds like you gave up the fight
Time’s run out, growing indignation
Raising a toast to your resignation.”
I also think Throwing Stuff’s equally intense punk song ‘How Do You Sleep At Night?’ is about Cameron. I can’t help but think of the 2011 moment presenter Matt Baker asked the Prime Minister the question just as they were wrapping up an interview on The One Show. His co-host, Alex Jones, exclaims a gasp followed by an awkward laugh at the unscripted question. Cameron, to his credit, has a slight flustered moment before ploughing ahead and politely saying “I’ve always been able to sleep OK actually.”
Throwing Stuff’s snappy song opens with the lines “I’d rather be dead than a blue / You march the beat of a familiar tune / A scramble to the top, society’s divider / The bottom continues growing wider.” and concludes lyrically with a throat-wrenching verse: “I’m sick of your trickle down politics / Sick of your flawed free market logic”
To say that Theresa May was the prime minister for almost exactly three years, her role as Cameron’s successor, continuation of austerity policies and key part in the Hostile Environment made her a focal figure for songs in this brief window. Grace Petrie’s ‘Farewell To Welfare’ was written during May’s tenure as Home Secretary. May takes the brunt of this song as Grace foregrounds her queer identity railing against Section 28, searching for her own Harvey Milk and asking if May thinks “that honest people really should be turned away / From IVF and B&Bs just because they're gay.” Grace would perform, and rewrite, this song across the decade, and it gained even more pertinence when May became PM.
May is sampled at the start of Wadeye’s ‘Welfare Warfare’, with a clip taken from her Brexit speech from March 2018. May’s speech is juxtaposed with the ‘Soviet March’ from real-time strategy video game Red Alert 3. In the same punk spirit, the Menstrual Cramps released their high-energy song ‘Tory Scum’ which highlights May’s terrible record for migrant rights, selling arms to Saudi Arabia and “kissing Donald’s ass” with the savage chorus: “we’re getting fucked by Tory scum / we’re getting fucked by Theresa May.” Cabinet of Millionaires released three singles and remixes of Theresa songs in January, May and June of 2019, referencing Grenfell, the Windrush scandal, the refugee crisis, the arms trade and calling on the PM to “give your austerity a rest / save our NHS.”
Thumping electro-pop track ‘Theresa May (Bullshit)’ by duo Cherryade has a goading, childlike quality with the “na-na-na” refrain under a sugary-pop beat and and swaggering lyrics advising the listener to “hide your shit like Theresa May.” East London’s Farai released an affecting track in ‘This Is England.’ In beat poetry-style, she delivers an angry plea to Theresa May asking “Do you know how it feels to count hours and days until payday?” The static energy of producer TONE’s hive-like droning electronic music bristles beneath Farai’s savage howl. ‘This Is England’ is the perfect product of 2010s frustration where clearly nothing is getting better and our politicians not only are the cause, they don’t even care.
Stormzy’s 2019 song ‘Vossi Bop’ became the rapper’s first number one single. The line “I could never die / I’m Chuck Norris / Fuck the Government / Fuck Boris” was adopted by the internet with the hashtag #FuckBoris. Captain SKA collaborated with Rubi Dan and used this term for their 2019 collaboration ‘Fuck Boris’: “Lying and dishonest / This racist idiotic / Things are getting toxic / That's why we hashtag - fuck Boris!” Commie Faggots go through a list of Johnson’s racist language on ‘Boris Johnson Is A Racist,’ a list also featured in samples on dance-rock band Cabinet of Millionaires’ ‘Stop The Coup,’ a song released in protest to Johnson’s illegal proroguing of Parliament.
Other MPs were immortalised in music. Grace Petrie’s MP Song neatly takes it in turns to poke fun at members of the cabinet like they are a sitcom cast. For George Osborne, Petrie sings: “austerity’s working wonders so onwards we will forge / before we sink this ship, take a tip from double dip / No the smart money’s not on George.” This is a reference to GDP shrinking again in 2012 by 0.2%, the first double dip downturn since the 1970s. Ian Duncan Smith and Jeremy Hunt all have verses alongside Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Captain SKA reworked 2010’s ‘Liar Liar’ for the 2015 general election, this time targeting Farage and Osborne and sampling their speeches. In 2017, the focus was on Theresa May as ‘Liar Liar GE2017’. The BBC refused to play the song, a representative stating: "we do not ban songs or artists, however our editorial guidelines require us to remain impartial and the UK is currently in an election period so we will not be playing the song." The song was again retooled for Boris Johnson in 2019 as ‘Liar Liar GE2019’. An updated ‘Liar Liar’ track to coincide with a general election became something of a tradition across the 2010s!
Composer Kim Halliday loops piano and samples for ‘2010 George Osborne’, making the intertwining of “decades of debt” and increasingly spiralling figures seem all meaningless and abstract. Half Bam Half Whisky’s ‘The George Osborne Stance’ is a comic take about the bizarre way Osborne posed at the 2015 Conservative Party conference, apparently trying to ape an impressive power stance. Danimal Crackers’ ‘The George Osborne Song’ on accordion is reminiscent of rude, raucous knees-up London musical hall numbers. It pulls no punches finding inventive rhymes to call the Chancellor a cunt.
On the similarly-titled ‘The Jacob Rees Mogg Song’ Barnaby Griffins encourages listeners to “check out his voting record on theyworkforyou.com / To see the true cloth that he's cut from.” Even Michael Gove gets a rare mention on Griffins’ disturbing track ‘Torypede’. Gove, alongside Osborne and May, are described as part of a hideous Human Centipede. Not a track to listen to whilst eating.
‘He’s A Tory’ by Fight Rosa Fight starts as a jangly poppy indie-punk account of a friend who changed and aligned himself to the Right. Then the song bursts into a Riot Grrrl call response “Fuck you” for various Right-wingers, including Cameron, Johnson and Osborne. It might be the only song to reference Conservative MPs David Willetts and Eric Pickles, who stood down in the 2015 and 2017 elections respectively. As we’ll see, Ian Duncan Smith has numerous songs written about him for his part in the cruel reforms to welfare, and Andrew Lansly and Jeremy Hunt both represent the Conservative’s underfunding and dismantling of the NHS.
Whilst musicians of the 1980s targeted Thatcher, protest music of the early 2010s ran further with a varied armoury of songs naming, parodying, referencing, highlighting, lampooning and attacking individual Conservative MPs. This plethora of name-checking helped challenge the austerity narrative in two ways. Firstly, the Conservative Government tactically passed the blame to others. As The Skapones neatly summarise at the end of their track ‘Benefit Street’:
“Blame the immigrants and blame the weak
Blame the job that’s getting 64 quid a week
You can blame single mothers and the mentally ill
EU workers till you’ve had your fill”
Punk band Ariel Salad are also conscious of this scapegoating from Cameron, who is name-checked on their scathing track ‘Conservative Thinking’. Even though the song was released in 2017, a year after Cameron’s resignation, it’s still important for the band to highlight his role in this blame culture:
“Cameron’s fingers getting too long now it seems
A raise of hands for everybody’s broken dreams
I don’t see the working class like I use to see it
So you blame the doctors and the teachers,
Blame the poor, blame the homeless, blame the preachers,
As the working cash paychecks don't pay the rent.”
American singer-songwriter, story-teller and activist Utah Phillips once said: “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” The reason for Britain’s issues was specific politicians in specific roles doing specific, ideologically-driven, jobs. The celebrity nature of the cabinet suggested each MP had their strategic task, and therefore became the figurehead, and target, for songs which refused to accept the legitimacy of austerity.
The Conservative’s hit the decade with a solid mission. Reflecting behind a paywall in The Times in 2019, former PM Cameron would ruminate on austerity:
“I have always thought that the most important job for a prime minister is to do their duty - to tackle the most urgent task in front of them, whatever that might be. In 2010 there was absolutely no doubt what that was: to rescue our economy.”
This Churchillian sense of ‘duty’ implies that the Coalition were not the architects of poverty, but merely enacting what was necessary, like an undaunted surgeon cutting off a wounded limb. The suggestion is, one cannot take the blame for the negative aspects of ones actions if you were merely a vessel for the duty.
Cameron would go on to add: “For me there wasn’t any doubt about how that could be achieved.” A tough, unavoidable medicine to prioritise ‘saving’ the economy, and therefore (by Cameron’s estimation) the country. Musicians constantly challenged this narrative in both unyielding anger and teasing lyrics. As Grace Petrie sings in the MP Song:
“But I’m primarily concerned with Mr Cameron
He seems to have the story wrong
Well Labour didn’t take Britain’s money after all!
It was in the spare rooms of council houses all along
And if we can just squeeze you all a little tighter
Every penny we must save
Oh but old boys, do relax
We wouldn’t think of a mansion tax!
Yes we’re all in this together, us and Dave.”
