Made in England... one of the subjects of Marc Isaac's documentary All White in Barking. Picture: BBC/Marc Isaacs
Hurrah for bigotry, hooray for xenophobia, bravo for being white, working class, and Barking mad! Before you report me to the Old Bill for race hate, let me explain. A song I wrote many moons ago with my dear partner-in-crime Haines is all over the telly this week, earning us... ooh, pounds, I should think. England Made Me by Black Box Recorder is being used for the trailer of All White In Barking, the last part of their white working-class documentary season.
Having received several garbled texts and emails from TV-watching friends, I was worried that our song was being used as the soundtrack to a far-right party political broadcast. I put the box on and was soon rewarded with the money shot. Lots of largish, elderly white folk filmed in authentic old British gaffs, butcher's shops and the like, saying unreconstructed things about Johnny foreigner... as Sarah Nixey's lovely voice trills in the background and the royalty meter clocks up a fare. From what I could glean, the gist of the film appears to be that, although they hold some slightly right-of-Hitler views, these people have been unfairly demonized and ignored, the BNP has exploited them, and now that multiculturalism is off the menu, the big parties might give them a hearing after all. I could be wrong of course. It's only a thirty-second clip. They might start goose-stepping down Barking High Street or get put into a "big old melting pot" and boiled down for glue. Anyway, our song is well used, not made triumphalist or jingoistic, and it adds to the overall sense of bleakness. Anyway, it wouldn't be the first time we've been the soundtrack to televisual unpleasantness. EastEnders used The Facts of Life to accompany Phil Mitchell engaging in amorous exploits - now that was disturbing.
Anyway, we were asking for it with a title like England Made Me. We joked about it at the time, and fantasised about it replacing God Save The Queen as the national anthem, sung at football matches by beery dead-eyed psychopaths with spider-web tattoos on their faces.
Without giving the game away too much, the song, very far from being a celebration of the land of Tescos, Giros and Asbos, is about Graham Greene and cruelty. Should any political party wish to use it for its conference conga-line knees-up, à la Things Can Only Get Better, permission is very definitely not granted - unless, of course, knighthoods are guaranteed.
