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.
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