The Coal Itself: Political Songs

To: Matt Jones
Subject: Poli Sci  

Matt,

Some quick notes for possible further discussion. Political songs: didn't we speak on the topic (and its inherent dangers) some months back? At least three numbers from the "18 Songs" mixes strike me as having a nice dollop without being at all preachy or even particularly committal. On first reading:

"All Consumers are Potential Snacks": Maybe it's all the talk these days of the growing "global anti-capitalist movement," but I can't help seeing a tiny bit of that in this one. (By the way, I got the idea that the visual commentary on this one might involve a little jar of Tiger Balm).

And maybe a bit more in "Your Duty Manager Is Roger". "Duty manager" is a strange mouthful. To my ear, anyhow. So foreign that it could only be the invention of some mid-level executive deep in the Kafka-esque bowels of some mega-corporation. Could be McDonald's, or it could be your day job in the civil service. But it rings through with a twisted, distorted nature. Roger has been bent into something else. I feel like all the things "he has to say" is really all the things "he is compelled from above to say". And the same regime warps all those below Roger, too. Am I getting that right?

"Wasting Time": just the fact that it's about you and how your computer has made you ill, juxtaposed with all that harmonica... Very contemporary and yet internally conflicted. I dig...

Alexander

To: Alexander Bailey
Subject: The Coal Itself  

A,

It would be stretching things to say that my songs have always been 'political' but the older I get the less satisfied I am with illuminating the goings on of my inner world and the more I want to describe the outer one.

The Welsh have often been accused of being melancholic but how much of this is due to our tragic history? And is that 'weltanschauung' the product of a brain which struggles to see past the effect the world, in its seeming brutishness, has on me personally rather than my fellow human beings?

As a teenager the indelible impression formed that you cannot rely on things that are here today being here tomorrow. But obviously it didn't just 'form'. True, I found this revelation difficult to cope with and writing songs was, without doubt, my way of dealing with it.

The year was 1979. I formed my first band with Nigel Boulton (The King of Wales) and Tony Calvert, surely the world's worst drummer. I played bass and sang, btw. The same year, of course, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. If I could summarise her political agenda it was probably (a) the pursuit of 'laissez faire' market driven economic policies, including the privatisation of publicly owned industries and services, and; (b) the dismantling of the British trade unions by the use of aggressive anti-union legislation. As it turned out, Thatcher's methods had a dual effect—or to put it another way—they created two societies, affluence in the South-East of England and ruination everywhere else.

To my teenage mind the closure of Duport Steelworks in Llanelli was attributable to Thatcher. It was obvious. She came to power in 79 and the works was torn down in 81, not long after after a gigantic arc furnace ("the biggest in Europe") had been installed there, its massive monolithic presence casting a happy shadow over our school playing fields. Soon, two catastrophic events were to harden and burnish my teenage notions so they shone like the clinker* from the defunct furnace.

In fact, the Miner's Strike and the Falklands War happened almost simultaneously. In 82-83 I was in college in Newcastle, writing songs (naturally) and canvassing on behalf of the Labour Party in the 83 General Election as a member of the Newcastle East young socialists. To no avail. Thatcher 'swept to power' on a South Atlantic wave. She was and is a monstrosity in my eyes. Whilst in Bluff Cove Welsh guardsmen were being incinerated on board the RFA Sir Galahad, back home Welsh miners were branded "the enemy within". The Miner's strike held firm only in Wales and the North of England where hatred of the Tories ran as deep as the coal itself. In the Midlands the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, a bosses union, was born. This was a terrible blow for the trade union movement and for the British nation as a whole - the solidarity of the working class wavered for the first time in history and soon the Strike fell. I will probably have a lump in my throat when Arthur Scargill, the controversial and heroic leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, dies. As for Margaret Thatcher, I wouldn't waste my spit on her grave.

My songs are not what you'd call happy songs but then again I haven't lived through happy times. In 1991, Margaret Thatcher was sacked as the leader of the Tory Party for her lack of imagination on Europe, i.e. she hated foreigners, whilst The Hepburns were waking up to the fact that our partnership with Cherry Red Records was over. To make matters worse, Thatcher's replacement John Major won the next General Election in April 1992, beating one of my great heroes, Neil Kinnock. Once again my own personal zeniths and nadirs seemed to be made even higher or lower by events beyond my control. Well, that's the way you look at it when you get dumped by your record label and when a measly, grey mouse of a man tames a political lion.

The trick is to realise that this is all coincidence and that sometimes factors beyond your control work in your favour, too, as illustrated by the following.
Unbeknownst to myself and Mike Thomas, the last surviving members of the original line-up, our album "The Magic of The Hepburns" had been licensed for sale in Japan. Whilst The Hepburns were travelling 300 miles to play to a handful of disinterested bystanders in The Purple Turtle, Reading, getting paid in pizza, the CD version of an album we only had on vinyl was selling well on the other side of the world. As good as or even better than this was the demise of the Tory Party who experienced a 40% slide in popularity between 92-95. At the 92 Election the signs were there and they were ominous. Although the Tories mustered 43% of the electorate their support in Scotland, Wales and the North of England had dwindled away to almost nothing. The Labour Party had reorganised under Kinnock and again under the late John Smith . Tragically, Smith died on 12th May 1994 but his successor, Tony Blair, carried on where his two legendary predecessors had left off. All this was leading to a total humiliation of the Tories at the 97 Election. I danced in the street with my friend Ken. It was my 34th Birthday. The songs I was writing at the time were to be featured on an album released in the year 2000 although I wasn't to know it then…

The late-90s will be better known for the growth of the worldwide web than for the modernisation of the British Labour Party and my second divorce. I was preoccupied with the fallout from the latter, however, and besides, I didn't even own a PC and neither did Mike. Fortunately, our manager, Simon Wright, did. My writing took a melancholy turn with songs like "Beautiful Mover" which is about loss and faded former glory. Perhaps more significantly than the subject matter, though, was that I wrote it on a borrowed Sharp word processor whilst Simon was packing 244mhz of processing power, e-mailing Hepburns fans and informing them that The Hepburns were still a going concern. By October 2000 we had our first release in 12 years and as at today's date we have another album in the shops, a single which soon will be, two albums recorded and mixed at Steer Studios and ready to go, plus one almost written. Steer is, by common assent within the band, The Hepburns spiritual home, once a coal mine on a bleak mountain top in Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen, now a recording studio, just a nissen hut in the middle of nowhere.

The only thing that's bothering me now is—what if Labour lose the next election? It's possible...

Matt Jones
23 February 2004

Footnote: Clinker is the hard, razor sharp residue left after an intense fire. There's lots of the stuff on the beach in Llanelli, the final remains of Duport Steelworks (it's the ash from the arc furnaces).