London (Angrily) Calling: The British Wave of Protest Punk That Might Be Due for Revival
(photo: Getty Images)
That stereotype about Brits being polite and reserved? It went right out the window, at least for a few years, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when Britannia became better known for rage than reticence, thanks to the dawning of the punk era. Unlike today’s American pop-punk bands, who have trouble finding anything to rage about besides hormones, the punk and new wave acts of the Thatcher-era U.K. had an economic and cultural crisis to react to in song, replete with unemployment and perceived xenophobia.
Sound familiar? If you think it does, then maybe you’re looking for a silver lining in England’s current furor over the Brexit vote. After all, the last time the British economy went in the tank and led to a sharp turn to the right, music fans got a golden age out of it, rife with a good portion of the most convincingly angry rock ‘n’ roll ever created, by the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols, the Specials, and other surly upstarts. If there’s a bright side to Britain’s current crisis, it might be in a coming wave of protest music.
While we wait to see if any such post-Brexit tide arrives in response to London’s burning emotions, here’s a look back at 10 of the most scathing songs to come out of that previous British crisis.
“GOD SAVE THE QUEEN” — THE SEX PISTOLS
Sometimes it’s easy for Yanks to forget that Margaret Thatcher didn’t become Prime Minister until 1979, so hardly all the furious British rock of that era was in response to her polarizing rise. Two years before that, Johnny Rotten and company found a less immediately polarizing figure to stake their sneering claim upon: the queen herself. Trashing the monarchy? Then, as now, it was somewhat taboo even on the left, and it’d been few enough years since WWII that the phrase “fascist regime” carried more baggage than it does now. But to the disenfranchised young who felt they had “no future” (or “nooooo fuuuuuuture”), the Sex Pistols pointed out a scapegoat hiding right in plain sight. After this came the equally nihilistic “Anarchy in the U.K.” Diagnosis, or prescription?
“WHITE RIOT” — THE CLASH
The racial politics of this early Clash anthem were a little difficult to parse, at least for foreigners. But after members of the band saw violence erupt between young blacks and police at a Notting Hill Gate festival in 1978, they were inspired to write a song wondering why young whites couldn’t be equally shaken out of their complacency. They later explained that they didn’t mean the call to riot literally, necessarily, but you could be forgiven for thinking the song suggested white kids should pick up a brick in solidarity with the uprising of their black brethren. Practically half the Clash’s catalog can be seen as in a protest vein, with “Clampdown” and “Career Opportunities” continuing the thread of England as a dystopia for the young.
“OLIVER’S ARMY” — ELVIS COSTELLO
A new wave revelation: protest rock didn’t have to sound angry to be legitimately nasty. The ABBA-inspired piano on “Oliver’s Army” barely belied the venom Costello held for England’s armed forces. The Oliver of the title was 17th century commander Oliver Cromwell, who established the New Model Army — which was this year’s model, too, in Costello’s eyes. He was taking on the army recruiters who, as he saw it, preyed upon youths with no hope of escaping Britain’s record unemployment. He knew “the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne” (or Liverpool, London, and Newcastle) might get sent to “the murder mile” (a particularly dangerous area in Northern Ireland), or any of the other exotic locales he name-checked: “If you’re out of luck or out of work/We could send you to Johannesburg.” Costello’s British politics-themed songs really started with “Less Than Zero” and continued with “Pills and Soap,” “Shipbuilding,” and the Thatcher-hating “Tramp the Dirt Down.”
“GHOST TOWN” — THE SPECIALS
It’s middle-class Britannia as the Haunted Mansion. This spooky but catchy neo-reggae tune went to No. 1 on the U.K. charts in 1981, although not everyone embraced the grim sentiment about urban decay and abandonment in the wake of rioting that had braced several cities the previous year. The true subject of the song was bandleader Jerry Dammers’ hometown, Coventry, where he really did see clubs closing down. “Government leaving the youth on the shelf… No job to be found in this country… The people getting angry.” This message was not brought to you by the English Tourism Board. Ironically, speaking of unemployment, it was reportedly the contentious sessions for the song that led the band to split up within two months of recording this, their biggest hit. But they left a legacy of other politically minded songs, too, including “Why” and “Concrete Jungle.”
“TOWN CALLED MALICE” — THE JAM
Paul Weller was a very serious and civic-minded young man of 17 when the Jam started out in the late ’70s. Before their short career as a band was up and Weller moved on to the Style Council, he generated a lot of socio-political material, including “That’s Entertainment” and “Eton Rifles” (a broadside against a soldier-spawning private school that Eton alumnus and future Prime Minister David Cameron somehow mistook for a compliment to his alma mater). But the most popular of the Jam’s protest music — hitting No. 1 in the homeland in 1982 — was “Malice,” a deceptively upbeat paean to an economic downturn. “Rows and rows of disused milk floats/Stand dying in the dairy yard/And a hundred lonely housewives/Clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts” somehow made for lively, R&B-inflected new wave fun.
“ELECTRIC AVENUE” — EDDY GRANT
The protest song that no one in the U.S. realized was a protest song, thanks to our being distracted by the sparkliness that was early MTV. We should have suspected when the opening line was “Down in the street there is violence,” and perhaps we could have picked up another clue from “Deep in my heart I abhor ya/Can’t get food for the kid.” He was writing about the 1981 Brixton riots, part of which took place on, yes, a thoroughfare named Electric Avenue — which, whatever we American MTV viewers assumed, was no relation to Electric Boogaloo or Electric Dreams.
“MADAME MEDUSA” — UB40
Americans knew UB40 primarily as Neil Diamond revivalists, but there was no mistaking for Brits that the band was named after an unemployment form, and much of their initial material reflected that attention to social conditions. “Madame Medusa,” from their 1980 debut, was a nearly 13-minute broadside against Margaret Thatcher, who went unnamed but was clearly being unflatteringly depicted in a scenario that saw the title figure rise “from the tombs of ignorance, of hate and greed and lies” and had “the sick the poor the old/Basking in her radiance.” It took a lot of red wine to wash that bitter taste out.
“NOT NOW JOHN” — PINK FLOYD
The Sex Pistols supposedly came into being partly in reaction to prog-rock groups like Pink Floyd, yet Roger Waters was on much the same page as Johnny Rotten, as a non-lover of the British political aristocracy. The entire Final Cut album — Floyd’s swan song under the leadership of Waters — was politically themed, to its commercial detriment. “Fletcher Memorial Home” took on foreign political leaders like Reagan and Alexander Haig (remember him?) as well as targets in Waters’s home country. But the profane single “Not Now John” stuck closer to home, mentioning a need to “compete with the wily Japanese” and mentioning how “we showed Argentina” in the Falklands before concluding: “Won’t Maggie be pleased?”
“STAND DOWN MARGARET” — THE ENGLISH BEAT
The Specials did not have a premium on political content in the two-tone scene. The (English) Beat’s band leader Dave Wakeling told Songfacts the genesis of the song: “The late ‘70s in England were troubled times: high unemployment, secession, the fear of nuclear war breaking out, the kind of fantasy end-of-the-century, end-of-the-world kind of feeling. And Margaret Thatcher came on, kind of like the last great hope of the British Empire… And in a very few short years she managed to turn people in England from neighbors to competitors… jealously guarding our shares. Our people stopped talking to each other at bus stops. People started to become more suspicious of each other. And the sense of camaraderie was broken in a way that I haven’t ever seen fully replaced, really.” His call for her to stand down was hardly heeded, but it gave aid and comfort to a wave of disaffected mods and rockers. Of course, Wakeling’s request for a resignation seemed quite mild compared to Morrissey’s wish, later in the ‘80s, for “Margaret on the Guillotine.”
“SHIPBUILDING” — ROBERT WYATT
Elvis Costello eventually claimed this ballad for himself, hiring Chet Baker for a trumpet solo. And it’s still a haunting highlight of Costello’s concert sets. But a year earlier, in 1982, he gave it to Wyatt, offering a hot-off-the-presses perspective on England’s short war with Argentina over the Falklands. It’s ultimately less specific to that situation than war in general, pointing out the irony of the economic positivity of “reopening the shipyards” being nearly simultaneous with the tragedy of “notifying the next of kin.” Costello later made his latent anger with Thatcher’s war policies blatant in “Tramp the Dirt Down,” which became famous for wishing for the prime minister’s demise.
