Music and Thatcherism.

The problem with the critics of Thatcher is that they always pick on the wrong things to criticise. Do we really want our children to leave school and get a job working underground? I grew up in Durham City but most of my friends lived in pit villages round about and I spent a lot of time in them and frankly, they were all dives.

Her lasting legacy is that everything is now about her favourite son - Blairs 3 favourite things in the world: jobs, the economy, childcare. In other words, everything’s about money.

Right now we’re constantly being reminded how awful the seventies were after years of being told of the great debt we owe to the sixties generation, far more than those who won 2 world wars. They must have been somewhere else ( as usual ) because I remember the seventies as fantastic, and think of the majority of baby-boomers as the greatest manifestation of mass culture outside Nazi Germany and terrible squares, entirely under the spell of the newly emergent mass media.

Briefly in the late sixties and early/ mid-seventies, the people took culture back and, while most people were listening to media/ radio/ commercial/ chart music, they weren’t deluding themselves they were at the cutting edge of culture, which they knew was occupied by either Rock or Soul/Funk at that time. Ironically, it was essentially punkrock that gave power back to the media and the Man.

To my mind, the year she came to power — 1979 - was the year it all went horribly wrong. It was also the year I came out from under the shirt-tails of my older brother and Alex. Alex was still in residency at the Coach and Eight in Durham but the Classic Street Funk Bands had all but sighed their last breaths, P Funk was becoming increasingly contrived and was about to implode, and even the new wave of Funk Bands, led by Cameo, Brass Construction, the Brothers Johnson and Con Funk Shun had pretty much ran out of ideas.

Alex had turned even further towards Jazz Funk, but still calling it Jazz, which was becoming interminably mindless and atonal, but in a non-musical way, and I just remember hearing endless strained alto solos exemplified by Dave Sanborn, the inheritor of Grovers crown.

That year the BBC provided significant coverage of the Montreux Jazz Festival and especially headliner Sonny Rollins - perhaps the greatest Jazz Artist still with us. This was like Grover without the Funk and led to my snobbery towards Jazz Funk and my exploration of the Real Thing ( you to me are everything the sweetest song that I can sing oh baby ). Eventually I would realise it was OK to like both.

The same year I bought Steel Pulse Handsworth Revolution from a friend and it completely blew me away. I was familiar with Bob Marleys post Peter/ Bunny pop stuff and novelty records about lollipops and Israelites but that was it. I caught up with Steel Pulse and Matumbi too before the Rebel Music and Creation Rockers compilations catapulted me into the world of Jamaican Music the following year and the rest — as they say - is history.

In terms of Soul Music, 79 was the year I consolidated Curtis, Womack, Al Green and others beyond the ‘ hits ‘ which laid the foundations for my discovery of people like Sam Dees, Luther Ingram, OV Wright and ZZ Hill the following year.

However, most people I knew were going in an opposite direction and it may seem hard to attribute this to Thatcher but Culture works in mysterious and complex ways and change is never due solely to the ‘ inventor ‘ who has the ism added to their name. When I pronounced my revulsion of the Specials and Madness, I was told it was a natural progression from Northern Soul to Funk to Two Tone, while I just thought ( and think ) of it as glorified punkrock. Some people had hung on to Northern through ( Jazz ) Funk and this was where they got off, which is ironic since others now consider this a stepping stone to Northern the way Motown was for many of my generation. Nobody I knew who was into Northern Soul in 76 was still there by the birth of the new decade.

The point was that in the year of her accession, people who ought to have known better were abandoning the ideology and discourse which had determined their cultural choices, in favour of Mass Culture and the market.

Basically, it became possible to think you were ‘ cool ‘ even if your preferences were for the stuff all over the media like a rash, just so long as you could point to something else you could claim was even more commercial and naff: new romantics, electro pop, boy/ girl bands, Cowell creations. I’ll take the perfect pop of Abba, Take That, the Spice Girls and Girls Aloud over the naughty pop/rock/ and roll of the Stones, Blur, Oasis and Arctic Monkeys any day.

When I was doing the Manor House, the whole point was No More Excuses. Attracting the regions leading Soul Fans removed the necessity to play the same old in-demand, big, cutting edge records. As they made their excuses, supporters would tell me you have to play what people want but I always responded that I didn’t have any Abba, Beatles, Queen, Robbie Williams and Oasis records. Where do you draw the line?

In the wake of Thatcherism, the northern scene initially withdrew into itself and did a lot of naval gazing, the response being the preference for an expensive record over a brilliant one. I have gone on about this at length elsewhere so won’t dwell on it here. However, it seemed to me as a 12/13/14/15 year old in the early/ mid-seventies, that we were interested solely in the Music. I recall Soul Self Satisfaction and Seven Day Lover gaining British release and the wave of sympathy for those who had recently paid stupid ( for those days ) money on them. Bill Swift was the person who had Afternoon on the Rhino, but once it gained British release, that was it. Nowadays, reissues don’t seem to have any impact on market forces, or if they do, they increase the value.

I recall watching the poll tax riots at a Weekender and her resignation at another and it may have seemed that Soul Music had prevailed. Then we got Blair; how awful is that?

When John Peel died, it almost immediately became OK to say you didn’t like punkrock, or that you like Prog Rock which is now suffering a revival comparable to that of Northern Soul, but with new bands prohibiting the canonisation of the classic years. Ironically, this offers far more justification for vinyl over alternatives because of the significance of album sleeves. It would be great to see some retreats from the excesses of Thatcherism following her death. In my view, and many others too, the bottom will fall out of the vinyl market so flog em quick would be my advice.

The Thatcherite Right love to claim the ‘ Old Left ‘ is dead, but Academia is essentially based on Marxism and the theories which have rationalised it since. Politicians of all persuasions tend to be sceptical of Academia because Academics deal in truths which are inconvenient to them. Also, like artists and poets, Academics tend to be half a century ahead of society.

Long after GDPs and GNPs and interest rates and inflation and strikes and trade union reform and poll tax riots and regulations and deregulations and nationalisation and denationalisation and employment and unemployment and EU rebates and North Sea Oil and the sale of council houses and the Falklands are all part of the history books, Thatcher will be remembered for destroying the Traditional Nuclear Family.

Prior to Thatcher, the vast majority of children were brought up almost entirely by their Mothers and Fathers; babysitting was mostly a Saturday night thing and got the teenage girl up the street a fiver and somewhere to pet with her boyfriend; and childcare barely existed.

Thatchers ‘ big idea ‘ which was taken up by Brown and Blair, was that Traditional Families are no longer economically viable within late/ high/ advanced capitalism, which is best served by parents earning and spending money, including on childcare, and retired grandparents being absorbed into the family unit to provide resident childcare and spending more on birthdays, Christmas, holidays etc. than they otherwise would have.

The media will tell you this has always been the case or used to be the case with the golden age the C19th but check your Austen and Eliot. Culture always works by convincing people that something has always been this way because it’s natural, normal, universal, inevitable, obvious and common sense. Apparently the whole of Britain and America have worshipped the Beatles continuously since 1962 and 1964 respectively.

Nowadays, most children are brought up by a conglomerate including their mother, her parents, their father, his parents, nannies, nurseries and child-minders which doesn’t seem to afford them the freedom we had to explore and develop interests, including Music, as they’re shuttled about among people with questionable interest in them and who are probably total nerds anyway.

I think I’m right in saying her children didn’t like her very much and liked the country she bequeathed to us even less and her relationship with their children was mostly by photograph.

Politicians, ( ironically, with the exception of Jazz Loving Ken Clarke, one of her leading ministers in her final years but ultimately her Judas ) tend not to have lives outside their jobs and think we should all do likewise, and this is the real legacy of Thatcher and her children, including Blair, Brown, Cameron, Osbourne and the Eds - Milliband and Up.

So, our children will have lousy music, compilations of their favourite sing-along chunes compiled from the mass media, and their lives and their childrens lives dominated by their mother in law. Rock n Roll Man.

( Almost ) state funeral? I’d have had her kept in cold storage and sent to Shotton Colliery on Halloween, ready for Bonfire Night.