Disc One: Kirsty MacColl – A New England (1984)
‘I don’t want to change the world / I’m not looking for new England / I’m just looking for another girl’. While pop music is often criticised for failing to engage with ‘serious’ issues, in the 1980s pop was often profoundly political. And these lines in particular must have been delivered with a healthy dose of irony, sung as they were by two particularly engaged musicians: Billy Bragg and Kirsty MacColl. A New England originally appeared on Bragg’s 1983 album Life’s A Riot With Spy v. Spy, but 1980s listeners would probably have been more familiar with MacColl’s extended version from the following year.
Disc Two: Dolly Parton – Nine To Five (1980)
In some quarters the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in May 1979 was seen a sort of victory for feminism, and a sign that the glass ceiling had been cracked. Thatcher, however, was no feminist – and repeatedly said as much – and her success masked the fact that the reality for most working women was closer to that of Nine To Five: increasingly long working hours for less pay than their male colleagues, and fewer opportunities for promotion. Dolly’s complaint that ‘It’s a rich man’s game no matter what you call it / And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet’ hints, too, at the way economic inequality widened across the period as the rewards to capital began to outpace the rewards to labour.
Disc Three: Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding (1981)
… but perhaps Dolly could count herself lucky that she had a job. The global downturn of 1980-81, and the introduction of the government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy, saw unemployment skyrocket, exceeding three million by the middle of the decade. The impact on industrial Britain was particularly hard, and steelworks and shipyards all over the country closed. The invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 briefly raised hopes that war might revive the shipyards, and Elvis Costello’s song – originally performed by ex-Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt – meditates on the prospect that prosperity might be bought at the cost of the lives of young men from those same communities. ‘Within weeks they’ll be reopening the shipyard / And notifying the next of kin’.
Disc Four: UB40 – One In Ten (1981)
Unemployment was a preoccupation of Birmingham’s own UB40. The band, named for the ‘signing on’ form for unemployment benefit, formed in the summer of 1978 at a time when all the band members were looking for work, and the politics of the period was often present in their early work. One In Ten, a single from the band’s second album, was named for the proportion of the workforce in the West Midlands which was unemployed (9.6%), and was a rebuke to a government ‘which doesn’t care’.
Disc Five: Linton Kwesi Johnson – Di Great Insohreckshan (1983)
The sense of alienation articulated by UB40 – and, famously, by fellow Midlands band The Specials in Ghost Town (1981) – was amplified, for many Black Britons, by the experience of racial discrimination, nowhere more so than in Brixton. The failure to adequately investigate the deaths of thirteen young black people in a house fire in New Cross – an alleged racially-motivated arson attack – and the discriminatory use of stop-and-search powers in the Metropolitan Police’s Swamp 81 operation raised tensions between the community and the police. In April 1981 these tensions boiled over following an attack on a young black man, and the ensuing confrontation between the police and public resulted in hundreds of injuries and more than eighty arrests. While these events – and subsequent disturbances in Chapeltown, in Handsworth, in Moss Side – were described by the popular press as ‘riots’, there was another way to understand them: as ‘insurrections’, as Linton Kwesi Johnson sang in 1983.
Disc Six: Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp – Down At Greenham… (n.d.)
The women of the Greenham Common Peace Camp definitely did want to change the world. The announcement that US cruise missiles would be station at RAF Greenham Common prompted Women for Life on Earth to march on the base in September 1981… where they established a peace camp which would endure for nineteen years (far longer than the missiles managed). That it was a women’s peace camp was deeply significant, and gender became central to the protest: from the encirclements of the base, to the women who breached the fence and danced and sang on missile silos. Music was, therefore, an important part of the life of the camp, and the women of Greenham Common wrote or adapted dozens of songs to help make their point. Down At Greenham…, however, pokes fun at the way the protestors were presented in the popular press, as ‘Dirty women squatters in the mud / Mostly vegetarians’. (For those who prefer a post-punkier anti-nuclear protest, The Sound’s Missiles and Fischer-Z’s Cruise Missiles both warn of the prospect of annihilation at the point of a cruise missile.)
Disc Seven: The Proclaimers – Letter From America (1987)
Hibs-supporting twin brothers Craig and Charlie Reid are not usually considered protest singers. Yet Letter From America is arguably the cleverest political song of the 1980s. The lyrics (and sleeve) linked the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the mass unemployment of the 1980s, and reflected on the experience of young Scots displaced by economic depression. Welsh musicians, too, sang of the evils of Thatcherism. The ‘80s were the decade in which Scotland and Wales definitely turned away from the Conservative Party, in which the nationalism of the 1970s became even more pronounced, and the recitation of the names of closed steelworks in the final chorus of Letter From America is suggestive of the reasons why…
Bathgate no more / Linwood no more / Methil no more / Irvine no more
Disc Eight: Bronski Beat – Why (1984)
The 1980s began with Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out – a song which became an LGBTQ+ anthem – and the decade saw an unprecedented number of ‘out’ artists achieve chart success. But the 1980s were in many respects a period in which the campaign for gay rights suffered a series of setbacks: the AIDS crisis reinforced popular prejudices, and Section 28 extended the range of legal discrimination against gay people. Bronski Beat – an openly gay and explicitly political synthpop band from South London – captured the experience of prejudice in songs like Smalltown Boy and Why. (The sharp-eared will recognise Why as the soundtrack for the ‘Pits and Perverts’ scenes in Stephen Beresford’s film about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, Pride [2014].)
Bonus Track: The Notsensibles – I’m In Love With Margaret Thatcher (1979)
… from all of which you might conclude that the 1980s were a pretty miserable time (and we haven’t even mentioned The Smiths yet). But despite the inflation, the unemployment, the urban and industrial strife, the discrimination, and the break-up of Britain, someone clearly thought the government was doing something right. First elected in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government won two further landslide victories in 1983 and 1987. Some political historians have attributed these victories to internal strife within the Labour Party, to the breakaway of the SDP and the entryism of the hard left. But punk band The Notsensibles thought they had another explanation for Conservative success:
Margaret Thatcher is so sexy / She’s the girl for you and me / I go red when she’s on telly / ‘Cos I think she fancies me
Well, maybe not.