THE 1980s was a period of profound popularity for political pop. Now, 40 years later, it’s what we desperately need again with a Labour, not Tory, government applying an austerity agenda and Trump’s state-terrorism taking a terrible toll. This is because music can play a positive part in reviving and enlivening resistance.
Decrying the effects of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment, Ghost Town by The Specials from Coventry spent three weeks at No 1 in the singles chart in June 1981, just months after the first widespread rioting in inner cities for many decades.
The lead singer from The Specials, Terry Hall, then left with two other members of the band, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding, to set up a new group called Fun Boy Three. Later that same year, Fun Boy Three had a Top 20 chart hit with The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum) about Thatcher, the Tories and nuclear war.
The Specials continued as the Special AKA, led by its co-founder, Jerry Dammers. In 1984, the band released the single Free Nelson Mandela, written by Dammers. The single entered the Top 10, spending two weeks at No 9. It was, The Guardian, commented 30 years later, “one of the most effective protest songs in history”.
The Specials and their offspring are just some of the many examples of not just pop becoming patently political but also being prolifically popular, judged by record sales, chart success and airplay. Such songs and others were played on daytime radio like Radio 1 and not just on its specialist late-nights “ghetto” slots like those of John Peel.
The Housemartins from Hull are another obvious example of popular political pop. Both the band’s albums – London 0 Hull 4 (1986) and The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death (1987) – made it into the Top 10 of the album charts, and they had two Top 10 singles and four Top 20 singles.
On the inner sleeve of the first album, the band declared: “For too long the ruling class have enjoyed an extended New Year’s Eve Party, whilst we can only watch, faces pressed up against the glass. [We] say: ‘Don’t try gate crashing a party full of bankers. Burn the house down!’.”
Along the way, there was The Beat’s single, Stand Down Margaret, in 1980, Morrissey’s Margaret On The Guillotine in 1988, Elvis Costello’s Tramp The Dirt Down in 1989, all about wanting to see Thatcher terminated.
The Clash with its lyricist and leader singer, Joe Strummer, was still around, releasing a triple album in 1980 called Sandinista! in tribute to the successful Nicaraguan revolution and which contained tracks like Washington Bullets that condemned American and Russian imperialism. This was followed up by the likes of Know Your Rights (1982) and This Is England (1985) about human rights and deindustrialisation respectively.
Of course, the politics of all these political pop lyrics were wide-ranging and left-wing, ranging from radical through to revolutionary.
But later the same year as Free Nelson Mandela was in the charts, Midge Ure, of Ultravox fame and from Cambuslang, and Bob Geldof, from Belfast’s Boomtown Rats, organised Band Aid, the one-off pop supergroup, which released Do They Know It’s Christmas?’
In the US, Band Aid and Do They Know It’s Christmas? inspired Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie to write and release the single We Are the World in 1985 with an American cast of super-group singers and musicians. With sales in excess of 20 million, it became the eighth-bestselling single of all time, again raising money for the victims of famine in Ethiopia.
In 1985, Chris Dean, lyricist and lead singer of the left-wing band The Redskins (more about them later), branded Live Aid – and by implication Band Aid as well – as “Egos for Ethiopia’” In 1986, anarchist band Chumbawamba released their album, Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records.
The Redskins and Chumbawamba argued such charity initiatives were thoroughly liberal and not left-wing as they not only masked the true causes of the starvation – that is, not a lack of rain – but also were sticking plasters on a gaping, open wound.
Indeed, that Do They Know It’s Christmas? was deemed to be needed to be released twice again in the next two decades illustrated the point that the effort had not ended hunger and starvation in Africa, nor even looked at its actual underlying causes. Band Aid was, indeed, a Band-Aid (brand) plaster.
By contrast, and though he’d been part of Band Aid and Live Aid, Paul Weller, previously of The Jam and then The Style Council, put together a group of musicians in late 1984 to raise money for the striking miners so they would not be starved back to work. Called the Council Collective, they released the Soul Deep single, which reached No 24 on the singles chart. This was a more radical move than Band Aid because it meant tackling the Tories on home turf.
Weller had form here, whether with calling for a general strike in Trans-Global Express on The Jam’s last album, The Gift album of 1982 and pronouncing on Walls Come Tumbling Down from The Style Council’s 1985 album, Our Favourite Shop, that “The class war’s real and not mythologised”.
During the year-long miners’ strike, many bands and artists such as Billy Bragg, The Housemartins, New Model Army, Newtown Neurotics, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, The Three Johns as well as The Redskins and Easterhouse played countless benefit gigs to raise money and spirits for the striking miners and their families.
Bragg released Between The Wars about the miners’ strike in 1985, reaching No 15 in the charts – followed by the likes of There Is Power In A Union from his 1986 album, Talking With The Taxman About Poetry.
After the devastating defeat of the miners’ strike in March 1985, Bragg and Weller together took the initiative to form Red Wedge, a collective of mainly musicians in support of the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1987 General Election. They organised gigs and meetings. Labour’s loss to the Tories again was something of a death knell for popular political pop, with even Bragg mournfully opining on his song, Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards, from his 1988 Workers’ Playtime album: “Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is/I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses”.
This expression through music was facilitated not just by music being the quintessential component of youth culture and youthful rebellion but also by the emergence of independent, progressive record labels like Go! Discs and Rough Trade. There were then far less stringent rules for receiving housing and unemployment benefits which allowed budding musicians to hone their craft without having to undertake paid work.
Of course, an unfortunate but equally forceful – if not more forceful – movement in music was the escapism of the “New Romantics” such as Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Surprisingly, the Scottish supply of political pop was slight even though working-class communities in the central belt were equally badly affected by Thatcherism and deindustrialisation. None of the big and medium-sized hitters like Altered Images, The Associates, Aztec Camera, Big Country, Bluebells, Blue Nile, Deacon Blue, Del Amitri, Hipsway, Hue and Cry, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Lloyd Cole and The Commotions, Orange Juice, Primal Scream, Texas, and Wet Wet Wet were known for anything approximating to political pop. This was even though Sharleen Spiteri of Texas said she was inspired by Joe Strummer of The Clash and wanted to do what he did.
Where Scotland did contribute was through The Proclaimers with their single Letter From America in 1987 from the This Is The Story album. It reached No 3 with its telling outro refrain about deindustrialisation: “Bathgate no more/Linwood no more/Methil no more/Irvine no more”. On their next album in 1988, Sunshine On Leith, there was the song Cap In Hand with its key line: “I can’t understand why we let someone else rule our land; cap in hand”.
The various songs like Belfast Child and Mandela Day from Simple Minds’ 1989 album called Street Fighting Years seemed to lack authenticity given the band’s previous songs. Though Dick Gaughan, a communist folk singer from Edinburgh, never troubled the charts, his anti-war song, Think Again, of 1983 became well known in the peace movement. There was also anarchist leaning, The Exploited, from Edinburgh whose first two albums – Punks Not Dead and Troops Of Tomorrow – went Top 20.
Scotland's only other connection was through UB40 from Birmingham. Taking its name from the Unemployment Benefit, Form 40 needed for signing on for the dole, the band was fronted by the three Campbell brothers. Their hits included Food For Thought (1980) about starvation which reached No 4 and One In Ten (1981) about unemployment which reached No 7.
The Scottish connection is that the Campbell brothers’ father was communist folk singer Ian Campbell. He helped with the initial lyrical direction of the band.
There was, however, no Scottish connection to Easterhouse. The band from Manchester, led by two brothers associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, took their name from the Glasgow housing scheme as an act of solidarity with the community there.
Even though most of the aforementioned bands also wrote love songs, almost all of their political songs only dealt with what was wrong and not how to resolve the situation. The exception was The Redskins. Led by a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, their lyrics made clear that they believed unequivocally there was one solution, namely, revolution. Their single, Bring It Down (This Insane Thing), reached No 33 in 1985, and the next year, their album, Neither Washington Nor Moscow, reached No 31.
Turning to today, is this 40-odd-year-old past all but a foreign country now? There are some songs that still have a resonance today. One, for example, is The The’s Heartland from 1986 with its lines, “Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey/Let the bums count their blessings while they count their money” and its outro of, “As the pound in our pocket turns into a dollar/This is the 51st state of the USA”.
But what about new and up and coming bands? While there are still some longstanding political bands around making new music like the Manic Street Preachers from Wales, there is a deadly dearth of the new.
Bob Vylan, The Idles, Kneecap and Sleaford Mods are four of the relatively more well-known ones, though they are not exactly new. The likes of Joe Solo and Grace Petrie have kept the folk-based tradition of protests songs alive. Of course, existing bands have the potential to produce political music.
Billy Bragg puts the dearth of the new down to younger people expressing themselves through other means now like social media. But this is only half the story at best as the reduction in the costs of technology means that it is much cheaper to make and distribute music now (even if it is difficult to make a living from it).
There was no great revival of left-wing music under Blair and Brown from 1997 to 2010 because until the tail end of those Labour governments, there was economic growth, increased public spending and some hope.
Now with a Starmer-led Labour government, we find ourselves in an altogether different situation. So, with Labour’s loveless landslide turning into despair and destitution for many, the tyranny of Trump as well as endless war in Gaza and Ukraine, there’s definitely an audience for music that not just attacks what’s wrong but also points to the alternatives. Capitalist companies call that a “gap in market”.
We have to hope that we’ll soon see an array of new Billy Braggs, Joe Strummers and Paul Wellers for the late 2020s, fired up by the dashed expectations of a Labour government and the mounting anger it is causing.
Music cannot change the world in and of itself but it certainly can help change people’s consciousness, giving expression to beliefs that provide hope and inspiration. Music that expresses this can reflect a popular mood for radical, left-wing change as well as spurring on those that are organising for that very change.
