Henry Raby's Blog

Monday, 14 June 2021

♪ Who fell, Grenfell ♫ - Music from the ashes

Part of a series of blogs, leading to a book, about the music of austerity 2010-2019.

Thursday, 8 April 2021

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

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!"

Wednesday, 24 February 2021

Dying side-by-side with the National Trust

Currently the Conservative government are wielding the state as a tool to crack down on the anti-racist, anti-homophiba and inclusive work being done by arts and heritage organisations, charities and museums. In 2016, I worked with the LBT on a show about working class, socialist conscientious objectors with Heritage Quay at the University of Huddersfield. What if some ministers, or their backers, decide this was “anti-British” and swoop in using their laws to slap artists and organisations on the wrist and gag them from telling the truth?

The National Trust simply wanted to unpack and educate people on the history of it's properties. It seems so simple and harmless to type that, but they recieved a barrage of abuse, calling them "woke" for simply pointing out British history. A group of MPs deeming themselves to be the Common Sense Group have decided common sense means "getting angry with truth" and are using their political power to weigh down on charities.

Facts don’t care about your feelings. No matter how much it upsets you, the truth is that the British Empire murdered, raped and plundered it’s way across the world. No matter how much you want to deny it, the slave trade was not a good thing. And it is entirely right that museums and theatres tell these truthful stories.

As a poet and playwright, I have always thought carefully about the stories we need to tell, and whose voices we platform. Whole generations grew up on the daring do of Zulu, Bridge On The River Kwai, The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape, or the stiff-upper-lip of Dad’s Army. These are fictional fodder, enjoyable for a Sunday afternoon viewing. But they are loose with the truth, constructed worlds of hyper-heroism and are not an accurate representation of our history.

The Conservative Party of the 1980s were a party of business. At the cost of millions of people’s livelihoods, they deregulated the market to introduce a wave of neoliberalism. The Party I saw come to power in 2010 boasted the Etonians-know-best rhetoric, arguing for ‘sensible’ economic policies which ultimately slashed the welfare state and plunged people into poverty. The current Conservative Party are neither business-minded, nor sensible. They pursued a Brexit-at-all-costs policy, fearing their voters would trickle away to Ukip or the Brexit Party. Now they have proudly adopted policies the BNP proposed in the 2000s. They are staunchly ‘anti-woke’, pandering to the nasty streak in British culture, and will legislate to keep their narrative dominant.

I have a small, tiny, unnourished feeling that maybe this will backfire on the Conservatives. As Brexit proves to have very few long-term positive impacts (or as Micheal Caine, a man with a net worth of £55 million said, we become “poor masters”) the public will be sick of a Party who hoard wealth at the top and whose ‘levelling up’ policies include a dribble of funding. And on the doorstep, when their campaigners rail against “wokeness” or “political correctness”, voters will be frustrated by their lack of answers to poverty.

Man standing to be MP: Have you seen the BBC want to hire more black actors? Bloody woke nonsense.

Voter: How can you make my life better?

Man standing to be MP: Have you seen you can’t use slurs to describe disabled people anymore? Bloody woke nonsense.

And yet, as the question “Should the UK leave the European Union” is so easily manipulated into a question of imagined sovereignty. Patriotism so easily, easily upsold into nationalism. I have seen calls to not play the Tories’ game, to not be angry at them calling us angry, not to become militant as they call us militant.

But they control a narrative, and we have to curate our own.

I never thought I’d die fighting side-by-side with the National Trust.

Wednesday, 13 January 2021

♫ Welfare warfare and hate the state ♪: Austerity and welfare in music

Besides raging against ‘woke culture’, from Black Lives Matter to whoever isn’t wearing a poppy, there’s very little else that can rile up a Conservative than the thought someone might be getting ‘something-for-nothing’. No, I’m not talking about the CEOs, the Royal Family and landlords, but people who access the welfare system. Benefits are disparagingly seen as ‘handouts’, ‘freebies’ and ‘dole’. The last few months, as people have relied on the state for support, the Conservatives have argued such policies (like free school meals) encourages the dreaded d word: dependency.

In 2008, The Telegraph was delighted by the prospect David Cameron would end the ‘something-for-nothing culture’. In a 2010 speech, David Cameron said the state was trapping people “in dependency.” Cameron attacked the ‘something-for-nothing’ culture at PMQs in 2012, a 2013 speech, a 2014 speech, a 2015 speech...it’s almost as if benefit claimants are an easy recurring folk devil target. But it’s not just Conservatives who frown upon the mechanisms of the welfare state. In 2015 Ed Miliband said during a televised election debate: “We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the Party to represent those who are out of work… we are the Labour Party, we are not the Party of people on benefits.”

The Tories' seeming solution was the 2013 Welfare Reform Act, and a combination of savage cuts and systematic overhauling. In 2018, the Social Metrics Commission published statistics that tax credits (£4.6bn), universal credit (£3.6bn), child benefit (£3.4bn), disability benefits (£2.8bn) and housing benefit (£2.3bn) had all been slashed in budgets. Disability Living Allowance was phased out, replaced with Personal Independence Payments which, alongside Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), were cut by £5bn, or by 10%. These cuts were seen as a way to ‘balance the budget’ after the Labour government, but Grace Petrie’s 2010 song ‘Farewell To Welfare’ sarcastically cries “someone's got to foot the bill / let's start with the disabled and the mentally ill.”

Leon Rosselson’s song ‘Sixty Quid A Week’ has the ‘talking blues’-style singer meet a man who worked his whole life, until he’s on the “scrapheap so I must be punished” after an injury at work. The character talks about his poverty trying to live off his meager benefits, and would love to see the “Tory prat, that arrogant slimeball, live off that.” The man says “they’ve bled me dry / they must have hearts of stone / their cuts have cut me to the bone.”

The reforms also allowed Jobcentres to sanction claimenets. Payments can be stopped for anywhere 4 or 13 weeks. Between 2014-2015 around 482,000 Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants had their benefits cut or reduced. A 2018 report by the University of York was compiled after 5 years of research. Professor Peter Dwyer wrote: “...our findings so far show only limited evidence that the stick approach being adopted by the Government is actually working. It brings into question the ability of welfare sanctions to bring about positive changes in people’s behaviour.” Sanctions mean that people, and their families, can go without any funds for days, or weeks. This has a knock-on effect of hardship and poverty and forcing people to crime, drugs or alcohol abuse. Claimants are not even allowed to be present to explain their case.

The patronising and dehumanising treatment of people accessing benefit and welfare is encapsulated on Autonomads’ swaggering ska-punk song ‘See You At The J.C.B.’, where “looking for a job, my son, is a full-time occupation”. The song envisages an uprising to burn down the filing system. The hostility in the system is slung right back through gritty frustration of Autonomads’ thick dub-punk song ‘Breadline Britain’ draws from the legacy of crust/Anarcho-punk, with the guttural guitar and vocal snarling:

“Out of work and unemployed

Or working hard, souls destroyed

Say we’re all in this together

Fucking right, at the end of our tether”

Furious that people would be given the bare minimum (or less) to live off, the Conservatives introduced the Workfare programme, which forced people living through the benefit system to work for free for multinational corporations and museums. As opposed to, you know, paying people a fair wage. Grace Petrie’s ‘You Pay Peanuts You Get Monkeys (You Pay Nothing You Get Nowt)’ and powerviolence band The Shower Boys ‘Workfare Bastard’ are responses to the exploitative programme. The band I was in, Pewter City Punks, used to cover Billy Bragg’s classic ‘To Have And To Have Not’ about unemployed life. I added a new verse “If you don’t take the job / They’ll cut your benefits / Zero hours or a Workfare slave / Why not try being a spanner in the system / Instead of a cog in their machine.”

Manchester band Wadeye’s Spooneye With A Vengeance is a skacore state-of-the-nation album. The band’s sizzling energy and gristly lyrics are encapsulated on ‘Welfare Warfare’ with thudding drums and slicing ska-punk. After painting a picture of a deprived nation, the central chorus declares an Anarchic hatred for the state which penalises, demonises and destroys.

“Surgeries are closing

As the dying turn to dead

A massive burning track

That the government have tread

Did you believe in what

That pig fucker said?

A ten year dark hole

And now we're in debt

Welfare warfare, welfare warfare

Welfare warfare ain't going our way

Welfare warfare I’m going insane

Welfare warfare where's our pay

Welfare warfare and hate the state.”

The Tories attempt to transform the so-called ‘nanny state’ effectively created a zealous assault on the poorest in society. As we’re told to ‘live within our means’ by millionaires, exploiting us for cheap, or even free labour. There is no ‘deserving’ poor, worthy of crumbs, nor scounging underclass. Only power, wielded by the state. Should we get rid of ‘something-for-nothing’ culture? Yes, let’s start with the bosses. As Automads’ album says: One Day This Will All Be Gone... EVERYTHING NOW!

Next I’ll look at the songs of disabled resistance against Atos and Ian Duncan Smith.

Thursday, 31 December 2020

Henry's top albums of 2020 blog

This year I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. Back in July, I decided to listen to a new album every day. I tried to ensure a mixture of genres and eras, and make sure I was listening to voices outside the straight, white male mainstream. As of typing, I’ve managed to check out about 191 albums. It's also been part of my project to write a book about the protest music of the 2010s.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has stopped bands writing, rehearsing and recording. And there’s no shame for artists unable to be artists in these difficult times. There has been a good wodge of new music though, and some years I post my top albums list.

This year I’ve needed anger and hope more than ever. I’ve been feeling thin. For every surge forward the Black Lives Matter and anti-racism movements make, it feels the Hard Right radicalise more people against an ‘anti-woke’ agenda. The military gets another wad of money while poor children starve. Brexit has made Far Right policies mainstream, and the climate chaos is just around the corner. Still, there’s been some solid musical bangers this year.

If you want anger, from across the pond my top rage-inducing punk album is War On Women’s Wonderful Hell. The album is loaded with righteous anger through acerbic lyrics. The slicing post-hardcore guitar underpin a sharp intersectionality through ‘This Stolen Land’ and ‘Milk and Blood’. A lot of punk can feel timeless, but I think the power of Wonderful Hell is it feels so rooted in 2020, a determined energy from years under Trump’s administration and still riding the explosion of #MeToo and #TimesUp. And born from DIY and grassroots acrtivism. At a time when the alt-right’s voice is amplified, Wonderful Hell’s noise feels like it fills every corner of a room.

Other notable fist-shaking albums include the scathing Growth (Screaming Toenail), the unapologetic Royal Disruptor (Nekra), the all-out assault of We Are Knife Club (Knife Club) and the filthy ska-punk of Harijin’s self-titled debut. I discovered the immediacy of Seamless by Pardon Us, the restlessness of Svalbard’s When I Die, Will I Get Better and the call-to-armness of Svetlanas’ Disco Sucks. Bad Luck by Answering Machine is a indie-pop-punk booty shuffling-inducer. I love Jeff Rosenstock’s No Dream, which sounds like someone having a panic attack during a jam session. I Am Moron is The Lovely Eggs’ latest trippy North West jangle. I enjoyed Billy Nomates’ low-fi, bedroomcore self-titled debut, and although IDLES’ Ultra Mono is their weakest release, it’s still biting and fun. We Fight by Fistymuffs is a rough and raw stomp of an EP. Revolution Spring by Suicide Machines is a good listen if you want a bolt of anger, whilst Peaceful as Hell by Black Dresses is as distrubring as it is rewarding. Untenable (Bad Moves) is a delightful indie-punk-pop bop with the absolute anthem ‘Party With The Kids Who Wanna Part With You’. Telling Truths, Breaking Ties by Millie Manders and The Shutup delivers upbeatness in spades. As we bid farewell to Toots Hibbet of Toots and The Maytals, I’m thankful he left us Got To Be Tough.

As I type this, people across the UK are buying and streaming ‘Comin Over Here’ by Asian Dub Foundation sampling Stewart Lee’s anti-racism parody set. ADF’s album Access Denied is a pertinent collection of stories and songs about migration, race and culture. With all their usual inventive and innovative music fusions, the politics of ADF is the soundtrack to a Brexit Britain. ADF are able to look at a wider compelx picture of colonialism and borders, and tear it apart.

There’s been some emotional releases from this very hard year. I went for a long walk and listened to Climbing Frame by Gecko. It really sat neatly in my skull in York’s outskirts, surrounded in trees and fields hearing these gentle and honest accounts of growing up. Especially when I felt like I did a lot of growing up this year. Perkie’s I Let Myself Die To Live Again hits me square in my punky heart. South Somewhere Else (Nana Grizol) is a portrait of strength and gentleness in harsh realms. Young (Erica Freas) is soft and makes me feel fragile but secure. Even In Exile (James Dean Bradfield) is a layered tribute to Victor Jara. Non Canon II (Non Canon) is an insightful antidote. Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters was delightful in it’s melancholy. In the hip-hop camp, Princess Nokia’s two mirror releases, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Sucks are full of dynamite and evolution. Sharecropper Daughter (Sa-Roc) is also a vital release of confidence and defiance. Arrested Development, Run The Jewels and Public Enemy added to their genre-defining canon. Odd Cure by Oddisee was familial and perfectly framed against the pandemic.

My top albums are a tie. Dream Nails’ self-titled debut album is a lovely, bratty mixture of fun, bouncy pop-punk which masterfully combines the cheekiness of Millennial life on ‘Jillian’ and ‘Text Me Back (Chirpse Degree Burns)’ but also the damning need for intersectional radical feminism on ‘Kiss My Fist’ and ‘Payback’. There’s so much going on here, bouncing between themes and ideas whilst keeping the driving, poppy energy. But a key reason this album has meant a lot to me this year is it reminds me of seeing Dream Nails in October at The Crescent in York. My heart soars when ‘DIY’ comes on, it makes me want to bounce and dance in a sweaty, DIY venue (obviously from the back). It’s been the closest I’ve got in 2020, and I think Dream Nails have really captured that vibe.

Untied Kingdom is the second album from Commoners Choir and is my other top album for the same reason. Not that it makes me want to bounce around (no matter how punky a choir can be). But it reminds me of people. The album came out in February and their launch at the Wardrobe in Leeds and to say it was emotional is an understatement. The lyrics to Untied Kingdom are pure poetry, and make me strive for ways to articulate with language. The lyrics are not just about working class history, but our multicultural present. It’s an album for the national, an album for communities, multiculturalism and our identity here in the 21st century. Nothing sounds to modern but so classic. Time and time again it holds my heart tight and sings truth to power. “It’s where we go from here that will define us.” Fuck me, that lyric on the eve of 2021 with Hard Right Brexiteers running the show hits me hard. But there are a million voices of solidarity behind me.

Also, Plastic Hearts by Miley Cyrus was a banger.

Wednesday, 30 December 2020

2020: They see me Doomscrollin'

I’m typing this sat in a very familiar front room. It’s a gloriously sunny December day outside, and the crispness and cloudlessness makes me want to sit on the flat-where-I-pay-rent’s small balcony and read a book. Like I did in the late spring and summer earlier this year. My reference point is Lockdown #1, when I was fully furloughed and generally divided my time between scrolling, reading on the balcony and playing hordes of board games with my flatmate. And a bit of writing.

I say a bit of writing, and that’s pretty generous. Last year, 13 years after I wrote my first performance poems, I feel like I wrote some of my best pieces ever. They became part of a show called Apps and Austerity. But in 2020, I didn’t write anything new for months. And months. I told myself, and other people, you can’t guilt yourself into writing. And yet everyone else in the Entire World seemed to be getting commissions, or writing responses, working on a new play or novel or poem or song. “Obviously that’s not true” I often reprimand my anxious brain.

How can we dare to articulate this difficult time? I’d tell other artists; as we move through a dark tunnel, it’s only on the other side that we can wrestle the experience into a communicable form. But we’re never properly on the other side of a neat metaphor. All these experiences will stay with us, and have changed us. I am not the same person who sat on the balcony back in the summer, and nor am I the same person who performed at live gigs back in January, February and March 2020, and I will never return to being the person who wrote Apps and Austerity in 2019. So if I want to find comfort and pride, I need to look at modern Henry’s achievements in these circumstances.

I’ve started writing a book about the protest music of the 2010s, tentatively titled Austerity Anthems, with a few extracts on my blog here and here. I’ve sent submissions to a few publishers, but nothing is concrete beyond a rough manuscript and some hope in my heart.

I used Bandcamp Fridays as a handy excuse to record my solo shows from across the decade. You can download them as albums for £3 off my Bandcamp (even though I’m not a band obvs). This was an interesting process, because I thought a lot of these poems were confined to the pages of history, or at least the pages of my 2018 debut collection, and were done and dusted. I wanted to make sure the recordings were solid for posterity, but also had the rough, spluttery, I-can’t-quite-remember-this-line on-tip-toes energy summoned when I perform on stage.

With Say Owt, I am so proud that we managed to hold an actual gig at the Crescent in early December. Sitting here in late December, I am worried that facilitating people coming together in a space during a pandemic was dangerous and ethically dubious, no matter how amazing the Crescent staff were at making the event socially distanced. But making something happen is a herculean effort and the vital energy of performance poetry was potent. That will stay with me all my life.

I’ve been listening to an album every day since July. I’ve been applying for jobs, sadly unsuccessfully. I’ve been reflecting deeply about my career and work. It’s felt like the arts have moved at breakneck speed and I feel left behind. I’ve felt isolated, doomscrolling deep into the night. But also occasionally inspired by the advocacy and activism I see on my social media, and inspired by my friends.

Thank you everyone. See you on the digital barricades.

(here's a photo from February taken by Henry Steel at Say Owt Slam. Look how close we are. Weird.)

(here's a picture I drew from memory of some super-heroes I created when I was a teenager. Look how close they are. Weird)