Thatcher and Music Part 2: Thatcher’s Children

Thatcher and Music Part 2: Thatcher’s Children

Over 2020 and into 2021, I’ve been working on a book about protest music of the 2010s against austerity, and you can read extracts here. Part of this has made me look to the past and the protest music of the 1980s. As this week seems the anniversary of Thatcher’s death, here’s an edited extract:

Labour had been polling ahead of the Conservative Party in most opinion polls since mid-1989, and the Conservatives were bitterly divided on issues such as the European Union, a sore internal topic that would come to haunt the Party two decades later. Finally ousted in a leadership challenge by John Major, nevertheless Thatcher cast a shadow across British culture long after her premiership. Artists writing about Thatcher and her legacy after she stepped down as a MP in 1993 include Benjamin Zephaniah (‘Belly Of De Beast’), Frank Turner (‘Thatcher Fucked The Kids’), Hefner (‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’), The Corries (‘Who’ll Take The Ball from Maggie Thatcher’), Primal Scream (‘Thatcher's children’) and Nightmares On Wax (‘70 80s’).

The legacy of the great miner’s strike looms across music too, from Manic Street Preachers’ ‘1985’ to Ferocious Dog’s ‘The Enemy Within.’ Miner’s life and community is immortalised in concept albums like Joe Solo’s passionate and personal Never Be Defeated and Public Service Broadcasting’s sweeping and stirring Every Valley. Pulp’s epic ‘The Last Day of the Miner’s Strike’ spans generations and cements the struggle as an unshakable touchstone of British history akin to the Magna Carta. Lead singer Jarvis Cocker takes us ambitiously, but not romantically, back to a time where “The future's ours for the taking now, if we just stick together.” Hauntingly optimistic even in the face of defeat, the song layers religious iconography over a soaring guitar-soaked track. Although the lyrics admit that socialism has given way to socialising and the party-driven feel-good Britpop era, Cocker cultivates goosebumps when he declares “so put your hands up in the air once more, the north is rising!”

An inspiration to the Tory teenagers of the 1980s who now sat on the frontbench, Osborne shed a graceful tear at her funeral in 2013. Meanwhile parts of the country celebrated. Street parties and processions sparked up from Brixton to Glasgow to Goldthorpe, where a Thatcher effigy was burned in a carnival celebration. In 2017, a Parliamentary petition submitted on 10th January demanded that day become Thatcher Day to honour the former Prime Minister, Inequality Street responded with the song ‘Thatcher Day’: “so go on have your Thatcher day, ‘cos here’s what we envisage / a burning Thatcher effigy in every mining village.”

Thatcher served as a symbolic bastion of the Right, with the tax-payer contributing £3.6 million to her state funeral. Pundits discussed her influence on modern politics, and those opposed to her Party galvanised against the celebrity tone of her achievements and legacy. Thatcher, as symbolic as when she was Prime Minister, was once more used to remind people of the harm her government did in the 1980s, and the harm her Party were doing in the 2010s.

The week of her death, ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ from the Wizard of Oz soundtrack peaked at number 2 in the charts. The Notsensibles’ tongue-in-cheek 1979 punk song ‘I’m In Love With Margaret Thatcher’ hit number 35. Chumbawamba, who started their career under Thatcher’s regime in the 1980s, recorded the In Memorium EP in 2005. Fans bought the EP via mail-order, and when inevitably Thatcher would die in the future, it would be shipped out the following day. Officially released on 8 April 2013, the 10 minute-ish selection of songs mutate into one another with samples of Thatcher and a clip of comedian Frankie Boyle. ‘So Long, Farewell’ and ‘Waiting for Margaret To Go’ chime with a creepily upbeat attitude reminiscent of World War Two pop. Comedy duo Johnny & The Baptists penned ‘Let’s Bury Thatcher’ to argue that Thatcher could be buried once a week to “keep everyone happy”:

“If you're a fan of her legacy you could help lay her in the ground And If you're a miner you could get work digging her out Makes for a great Blitz spirit - whichever side you're on So let's lay Maggie under the soil every Wednesday from now on.”

Atilla The Stockbroker began his career as a punk poet and musician under Thatcher’s premiership. His song with Barnstormer ‘Maggots 1 Maggie 0’ is a jeering folk-punk song, with a rousing up tempo chorus with added “hallelujah!” The song predates Thatcher’s death, but Attilla re-released it on his 2013 Best Of.

On the other end of the spectrum Carol Hodge’s 2018 ‘The Witch Is Dead’ is introprosetive, encouraging the listener to “go home / And hold the one you love / That little bit tighter tonight / And sleep smug, safe and sound because you know / There’s one less touch of evil / One less grain of rotten alive”. By contrast, ‘Party Gone Wrong’ by Smiley and The Underclass sees that evil still hovering in the world. The song fizzes with an infectious dub punk energy whilst telling the story of a peaceful party under attack from the police whilst “the ghost of Maggie Thatcher is laughing tonight.”

Thatcher appears on the artwork to Fit and the Conniptions’s 2017 album Old Blue Witch. The title song grizzly, but resists a celebratory tone. Like ‘Party Gone Wrong’, Thatcher’s presence is still very much felt in British politics. The song states there’s a party in Brixton, but the singer will stay at home instead because “the Iron Lady’s bastard child is still in Number 10 / The hospital's closing and the library’s gone.” The song focuses on the ways to win the fight through activism, else otherwise “that old blue witch ain’t dead.”

The Conservatives used ‘Maggie’ as a spiritual figure, with Cameron leading tributes to the Iron Lady on the steps of Number 10 and in Parliament. She becomes no longer a breathing politician, but a symbolic invocation of State power and economic hardship against the poorest. Whether discussing internal politics or Brexit, the ‘Ghost’ of Thatcher would be referenced in articles and speeches across the 2010s. Seven years after her death, Spitting Image ran a sketch where she possesses the aimless Johnson.

With so many parallels to the Coalition government and the 2010s Conservative frontbench, it’s not surprising that bands also invoked the figure of Thatcher in their lyrics to tell stories of the modern world. If Thatcher can be transformed in a symbol, then this symbol can still be twisted through music just as she was in the 1980s.

Thatcher and Music Part 1: Get Rid Of Maggie

Thatcher and Music Part 1: Get Rid Of Maggie

Over 2020 and into 2021, I’ve been working on a book about protest music of the 2010s against austerity, and you can read extracts here. Part of this has made me look to the past and the protest music of the 1980s. As this week seems the anniversary of Thatcher’s death, here’s an edited extract:

On April 8th 2013, Baroness Thatcher passed away. Few other 20th century British figures have spearheaded such societal changes as Thatcher, and caused so much harm through destructive policies. Thatcherism's upheaval of the welfare state, demonisation and breaking of working class communities, de-regulation of the markets created a polarised and unrepentant response from musicians. You can find a Spotify plealist here.

Thatcher is overtly the subject of songs by The Beat (‘Stand Down Margaret’), Macka B (‘Get Rid Of Maggie’), Ewan McColl (‘The Grocer’), Morrissey (‘Margaret on the Guillotine’), UB40 (‘Madame Medusa’) and The Exploited (‘Maggie’) to name but a few. Her figure looms across the music of the era, Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ opens with the line “Margaret Thatcher on TV”, whilst Pink Floyd refer to “Maggie” multiple times throughout their 1983 album The Final Cut.

In 1985, The Men They Couldn’t Hang released ‘Ironmasters’, which reached number 11 in the UK singles charts. Their record label insisted the release remove the line "and oh, that iron bastard, she still gets her way," a knowing reference to Thatcher as the Iron Lady. The Blow Monkeys’ 1987 album was dedicated to Thatcher, titled She Was Only a Grocer's Daughter and featured jibing songs like ‘The Grantham Grizzler’. Though intended as a protest against her, Thatcher was always proud of her middle class origins. During the election, the Blow Monkeys released a blue-eyed soul duet with Curtis Mayfield called ‘(Celebrate) The Day After You’, which was too political for the BBC to play during a general election and was banned. Crass’ 1982 anti-war single ‘How Does It Feel’ asked Thatcher “How does it feel to be the mother of a thousand dead?” Tory MP Timothy Eggar blustered on LBC Radio that the song went “beyond the acceptable bounds of freedom of speech, being the most vicious, scurrilous and obscene record that has ever been produced.” I guess by modern standards, he wanted to ‘cancel’ Crass.

‘Maggie Maggie Maggie / Out Out Out' was a familiar chant throughout the decade, and immortalised in song by The Larks, which was played by John Peel on his roadshows. On the sleeve notes to their 1986 debut album, The Communards dedicated their song ‘Reprise’ to Thatcher. ‘She’ll Have To Go’ by pop chart-toppers Simply Red declares “breaking our backs with slurs / And taking our tax for murdering / The only thing I know / She’ll have to go.” Elvis Costello goes further: on his cutting ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’, he hopes he’ll live on so that “when they finally put you in the ground / I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.”

Various bands, artists and comedians were part of Red Wedge, a collective hosting gigs and events from 1985-1990, primarily to oust the Tories in the 1987 election (pictured above). Author and radio presenter Stuart Maconie says that Thatcher‘s personality was encapsulated in the ideology Thatcherism, like Reagan’s Reaganomics. No one ever called it Nixonomics or Callahanism. So Thatcher “became more than just a person, she became sort of a shorthand for the ruthlessness, callousness, the disregard for working people.” Speaking to website NPR the week of her death, Maconie goes on to to say:

"It wasn't just a political response; it was a kind of gut emotional response. In the north of England, the effects of Thatcherism were quite visible: Factories closed down, mills closed down, mines closed down, and people were put out of work. And of course, you've got to argue, she was an easy person to become a figurehead. She even looked like she should be on the prow of a ship."

Since the rumbling of alternative pop music since the late 1950s, a tribal and scene-based culture had been brewing across the generations. Just look at The Young Ones, where a metalhead, a punk and a hippie squabble. Retrospect films and TV like This Is England show the power of subcultures defining themselves, and being defined by their music. Tracey Thorn of Marine Girls and Everything But The Girl wrote in her memoir: “politicisation seemed to be the norm, and would continue to do so well into the 1980s. Even as musical styles changed, and many of the old punk battles were left behind, for those of my age the ideals of the late 1970s remained a driving force.”

By the 1980s, a cultivation of colourful and vibrant network of punk, synth-pop, dub, post-punk, new wave, Oi!, power pop, goth, metal, psychobilly, ska genres danced alongside fashion styles and cultures like New Romantics, Mod and Ted revivalists, skinheads, casuals, rude boys and the adjacent LGBTQ+ scenes and the Rastafarian religious and cultural movement. With such a packed repertoire of scenes and styles challenging mainstream perceptions, this period of time was rife for an explosion of political music.

Thatcher was eventually defeated when the Poll Tax legislation was met with riots and resistance. Over 40 people collaborated on Punk Aide’s 1989 compilations Axe The Tax, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay and Fuck The Poll Tax. Oi Polloi and Chumbawamba released and toured an EP called Smash the Poll Tax. Crossover thrash punks The Exploited released ‘Don’t Pay the Poll Tax’ in 1990, featuring clips from news reports on the Poll Tax Riots that same year.

Thatcher and her government became the focal intersection for these movements. Whilst bands and their fans come through different routes, they find themselves arriving at the same destination. For example, Madness and The Specials criticise the Tories on ‘Blue Skinned Beast’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’ respectively, inspired by the upstart rude boy style of Jamacian ska. Meanwhile Scottish band The Corries are part of a legacy of rebellious celtic working class folk music. But whatever the roots of the struggle, these genres, styles and cultural communities all found a common enemy in Thatcher.

Ed Vaizey, Conservative MP between 2005 to 2019, said: “It’s become a cliché, but Thatcher was one of those Marmite figures – you either loved her or you hated her. Even those who hated her had to acknowledge that she was an iconic figure, and as such she became a lightning rod for dissent.”

This unity against Thatcher was a reflection of her own, sweeping antagonism towards British culture. Her biographer John Campbell wrote: “to fuel the aggression that drove her career she had to find new antagonists all the time to be successively demonised, confronted and defeated… She viewed the world through Manichaean spectacles as a battleground of opposed forces - good and evil, freedom and tyranny, us against them.”

And this is exactly the energy that is being invoked right back at Thatcher. These are songs which hold no punches. They are often bitter and brash, cutting straight to the point and using personal insults as a way to attack the broader policies and structures of Thatcherism. Speaking to author and journalist Dorian Lynsky, Crass’ Penny Rimbaud said: "I think Thatcher was an absolute fairy godmother. Christ, you're an anarchist band trying to complain about the workings of capitalist society and you get someone like Thatcher. What a joy!"