BBC 2's Jeremy Vines Looks at Thatcher and Music

Culturally, Britain in the early 1980s was a watershed. As Billy Bragg, a living Crown Jewel, sang, "Which side are you on?" Mrs. Thatcher took on a system that needed change, but like most conservatives, she knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. She destroyed the working-class North and put an entire generation out of work. Thirty years on, it's hard to remember just how bad it was, but those who survived, and even thrived, have been given a gift by Jeremy Vines documentary on BBC Radio 2 "Stand Down Margaret." It will be available for only a few more days on the 'net, so get there ASAP.

The documentary will run a couple of weeks, but the first installment played Tuesday, and it encapsulates everything that music did under Mrs. Thatcher. It spends a bit too much time at the beginning focusing on the two-tone ska movement that followed punk, but the Specials and the English Beat challenged the racist structure of Britain that today still survives.

However, the interviews with Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello are priceless. Mrs. Thatcher had declared war against the poor, the dark and the under-educated. She did what Hitler failed to do, destroy British coal-mining communities, undermine the social structure, and ensure that nothing north of Potter's Bar got a fair hearing. But the soundtrack to that destruction is amazing.

The Red Wedge movement, a bunch of musicians led by Paul Weller and Billy Bragg, failed disastrously to bring out the lefty vote, and Mrs. T won the 1997 election with a bigger vote than before. And that is the real lesson. Music, kiddiwinks, ain't going to change anything. It can sum up a social movement, but it can't change lives.

Where the documentary falls short is the absence of The Clash and Joy Division/New Order. If there was a man more opposed to the Thatcher-Tebbit stupidity that wrecked Britain in the name of saving it, it was the Late Great Joe Strummer. The Clash had moved on to attack the world stage and had out-grown poor little England by 1982, and so, perhaps meant little to those left behind. Meanwhile, the Manchester sound of New Order and the rest of the synth bands offered an escapism that should have died on the beaches (the Tories were more than the enemy, they were evil) but made up a great movement of sound in 1983. The New Romantics approached Mrs. T by running away rather than fighting in the streets, but if one had ever been to a Duran Duran gig or a concert by Adam and the Ants, well, it wasn't a head-on confrontation so much as a surrender. And yet, where else should a 20-year-old have been?

Yet if it could be tattooed on backsides, was there ever a better motto than "Stand down, Margaret?"

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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