Morning Album Reviews: Thatcher Week

Over on the Patreon, I have been running a weekly Morning Album Reviews column for almost a year now. It is not focused on new music, or even on a particular genre or style–just whatever 7 records El curates for me that week. I won’t know what they are before she plays them for me, as the column’s name implies, in the mornings to wake me up. It started it’s life as a lark over on Bluesky, and blossomed out into what it is now–it’s a real study in accidentally taking something much more seriously than you’d intended.

Favorite record this week: Chumbawamba, Never Mind the Ballots

11/8 Elvis Costello’s 1989 Spike

“Let Him Dangle,” while the second track on this record, sure sets the tone for it, and this week nicely. It’s something like a goth-punk blues number with one of the darkest hooks to get lodged on repeat in my head. It’s the story of Derek Bentley and Chris Craig, two boys who were convicted of shooting a police officer whilst trying to escape him in 1952. Craig, the boy who actually shot the gun, was only 16, and so disappointed was the judge that he couldn’t hang the child that he decided to hang 19 year old Bentley instead despite the jury’s recommendation against a death penalty.

The logic was that when the officer told Craig to give him the gun, Bentley called to his accomplice to “let him have it.” Now, whether that was “let the police offer who has you by the leg take the gun, you idiot,” or “let him have it, see, nyahaha” as if they were in a mobster movie was impossible to determine, but the ambiguity proved enough to, well… “Let him dangle/Doo-doot, doo-doo-doot, doo” Bentley was pardoned in 1993, a good forty years too late, although his case was part of the campaign in the UK to abolish capital punishment. This sliver of good to come out of the egregious cruelty at the hand of the state was still four years away when Costello released Spike.

The record just has a dark vibe. Here’s another one: “Veronica,” which he wrote with Paul McCartney in a rare collaboration with my least favorite Beatle that I unambiguously like. He takes McCartney’s sweet pop instincts and throws them at a song about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, written for his grandmother for the obvious reason. It goes hard in a melancholy way, rather than a grotesque one, celebrating Veronica as much as mourning her.

Then, of course, you have “Tamp the Dirt Down,” which was plausibly the first Elvis Costello song that I knew was an Elvis Costello song when I heard it. El had played it for me years ago on a car ride—I think we’d been talking about Britain a Prophecy, and our impending first issue cliff hanger, and subsequent pitch “Come See Margaret Thatcher’s Severed Head!” (A very funny pitch to make as the American at a British comics con, let me tell you.)

Predictably, given that preamble, it’s a song about Thatcher. Specifically, Costello’s desire to stand on her grave, and “tramp the dirt down.” A simple thing, really, it opens with the image of her kissing a child in a newspaper article. It spirals out mournfully from the hypocrisy of the photo op to more images of a cruel government, and the people hurt by it. People who will “stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down” on her grave.

Costello says he does not apologize for the song, even if some find it extreme. “It’s an honest emotional response to events, and writing it was like casting out demons or something. And the song itself is the result of a form of madness, because when you get to that point of thinking these thoughts, actually wishing somebody dead, it really does become a form of madness. It’s a psychopathic thought. And it’s fucking disturbing to find it in your own head. But it would be cowardly not to express it. Because once it’s there, if you don’t get it out, it’s only going to come back and haunt you some more.”

Apparently not too many people found it to be an extreme thought as it rose to number 79 on iTunes immediately after her death. (“Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” did a lot better, making the BBC decide whether they’d play it during Radio 1’s top 40 countdown that weekend. I might be expected to have any complaints about a woman being called a witch in this context, and I can see it… but ding dong, you know?)

Perfect for: Remember when, in 1996, Donald Trump crashed the ribbon-cutting ceremony of a nursery school for children with AIDS in Manhattan, stealing actual doner Steven Fisher’s seat? “Nobody knew he was coming,” someone at the event recalled, “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door…and in comes Donald Trump.” He poses for photos, dances the Macarana with children on stage, and leaves—without donating a cent either before or during the event

11/9 The Cure’s 1982 Pornography

Pornography, written as it was under the tutelage of heavy drinking, overwork, and suicidal depression, is a bit more abstract in it’s image of Thatcher’s Britain. Smith describes it as “[channeling] all the self-destructive elements of [his] personality into doing something,” and thought it would be the last record the band made together. It nearly was, but then this is something of a repeating sentiment for Smith across his career. The man has depression, what can I say? Anyway, bassist Simon Gallup and Smith had a fight around confusion about a bar tab midway through the tour that followed Pornography. Gallup left the band that night and Smith wandered off to be the full-time lead guitarist for Souxie and the Banshees for an album and change. (Gallup would return for Head on the Door, and other than Smith himself is the longest standing member of the band. As someone who actually really likes the record that the Cure put out when Gallup was off—yeah, it’s just not quite the Cure without him prowling around.)

It was, by all accounts, a properly miserable time for the band. They did finish the tour, by the way, although given Gallup ended up yelling “Robert Smith is a cunt” into the mic on the final night of the tour one suspects they didn’t have a good time of it. It is, however, the kind of the time you expect to have touring for the album that begins with the lyric “It doesn’t matter if we all die.”

And, we might yet. The opening track to Pornography, “One Hundred Years,” is a portrait of a life under fascism. A man, mourning the death of his ambition, goes home, perhaps from work, listening to the radio or watching bloody coverage of the war on the television. Life goes on. People pray for something to change, indulge in nostalgia and drugs to cope with their new world. None of it stops, though.

“The soldiers close in under a yellow moon
All shadows and deliverance under a black flag”

The narrator dies. We all die. “Over and over, one after the other”

Smith, when talking about the record to Rolling Stone Magazine years later, describes doing things like watching disturbing films, and recording some of the songs in toilets to “get a really horrible feeling.” He describes being shocked by how evil people could be.

“I don’t have particularly fond memories of Pornography, but I think it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done, and it would have never got made if we hadn’t taken things to excess. People have often said, ‘Nothing you’ve done has had the same kind of intensity or passion.’ But I don’t think you can make too many albums like that, because you wouldn’t be alive.”

And sure enough, it’s grim. It opens with imagery of despair, desensitization, and dying animals. It doesn’t cheer up from there.

Perfect for: Remember when, in 2020, Donald Trump proudly claimed to have sent US Marshals with a kill order on anti-fascist protester, Michael Reinoehl, who was a suspect in the killing of a nazi during the Black Lives Matter protests? “They didn’t want to arrest him,” Trump gloated, “And I will tell you something: That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.” Of the 22 witnesses questioned, only one bothered to lie about the officers saying anything prior to opening fire on the citizen who had—to be clear—not gotten any sort of trial. None of the eyewitnesses saw Reinoehl holding a weapon, and in fact his rifle was in an unopened bag in his car

11/10 Billy Bragg’s 1986 Talking with the Taxman About Poetry

Billy Bragg is, as far as I can tell, is what one might reasonably call “too pure for this earth.” It’s not on this record, but he has a song called “Sexuality,” where he sings that “Just because you’re gay/I won’t turn you away/If you stick around I’m sure/that we can find some common ground,” which at some point in his live show changed to “just because you’re they.” I’m sure I have to tell you neither that that is clumsy cis ally language, nor that I absolutely adore it. But he just hits me as a little sweet, and as a result it took me a minute to warm up to him on a personal-taste level.

We actually own Talking with the Taxman on vinyl, so I’ve heard it often enough to find myself unwittingly singing along with him. Honestly, I even think it’s one of his sweeter sounding songs that eventually won me over: “There is Power in a Union.”

“There’s power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the hand of the worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand
There is power in a union”

And here’s my error: he’s not sweet—he’s earnest. Or perhaps he is both, but the song moves quickly to point out the brutality, unjust laws, and the spilt blood of workers that bought each protection we do have. Bragg has talked about seeing young people in his audience singing along to it, fists raised. “They’re nurses, they’re teachers, they’ve been on the picket line in the last year or so and they’ve probably sung that song and now they’re looking for an artist who talks about those things and there’s not many of us left,” he says. It’s not nostalgic, he says, it’s relevant.

Bragg seemingly has a strong moral sense of justice, and is moved by it. He’s spent much of his career tied up in activist movements, a trait he credits the Clash with inspiring, per an interview from 2000. “When I heard the Clash, it swept away all my dreams of playing in a stadium and replaced them with dreams of changing the world by playing very loud fast songs…Now I realize I was naive to think the Clash could change the world by singing about it. But it wasn’t so much their lyrics as what they stood for and the actions they took… Phil Collins might write a song about the homeless, but if he doesn’t have the action to go with it he’s just exploiting that for a subject. I got that from the Clash, and I try to remain true to that tradition as best I can.”

He also credits Margaret Thatcher. Speaking about the miners strikes of the mid 80s, Bragg said “it seemed to me that my place was to be on the picket line playing songs and it was an interesting bit of an education for me because…I didn’t go to college, so I didn’t know a huge amount about socialism, so it was a very steep learning curve.” He spent the nights having tea and cigarettes, and talking politics with the people he met there, stating that his “great inspiration in politics was Margaret Thatcher. Were it not for her, I probably won’t be a socialist.”

Unsurprisingly, her government appears on Talking with the Taxman in one of his other extremely earnest songs, “Ideology.” As is often the case with Bragg, the language is clear, and furious. After all, “There’s more to a seat in parliament/Than sitting on your arse.”

Perfect for: Remember when, just earlier this year, Donald Trump praised Elon Musk for his firing of striking workers? “You’re the greatest cutter,” he said, “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’” Musk laughed in reply; yeah, that’s probably all very legal and moral

11/11 The Beat’s 1980 I Just Can’t Stop It

To cover a bit of proper noun nuance before we get going—this band is properly named The Beat, but you might find the album under the English Beat or the British Beat depending on region, as, predictably, multiple bands have thought ‘the Beat’ would be a good name. This the Beat is a British two-tone/ska band, and I Just Can’t Stop It their debut. The record got a re-release early which adds two singles to the middle of the track listing: track 5, “Tears of a Clown” and track 8 “Ranking Full Stop,” although in my opinion the record doesn’t need them. The playful ska “Twist and Crawl” transition to the more chill reggae number “Rough Rider” is simply punchier without the rock and roll cover of The Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown.”

Likewise the tryptic that begins with “Click Click,” a frantic number about shooting yourself (“if you don’t like it just don’t do it again”) is drastically cooled by the intrusion of “Ranking Full Stop.” Take it out and you’ve got “click click click/Faster Faster Faster” straight into the lower energy, and by comparison controlled “Big Shot:”

“You’re a big shot
You want the whole lot
And if I like it or not
You still control me
You tell me what to think and what to be.”

Rounding out that tryptic is the reason we’re here: “Wine and Grine/Stand Down Margaret.” “The idea in the Beat was to be subversive,” says the Beat founder Dave Wakeling, while telling one of my favorite anecdotes of late. They had decided to get themselves on as many things as they could and “drop mind bombs if [they] got the chance.” Toward that end, they appeared on the British children’s game show Cheggers Plays Pop, and from here I’ll just let Wakeling tell the story as he does in Daniel Rachel’s book Walls Come Tumbling Down:

“Keith Chegwin [the host of the show] said, ‘Hey Dave, some of the blokes up in the production room are saying this song is about Margaret Thatcher. It’s not, is it?’ I said, ‘Of course it’s not. Are you kiddin’ me?’ I looked at Saxa [the Beat’s saxaphone player] and said, ‘It’s the name of a dance from Jamaica, isn’t it?’ and he started going into this backwards merengue. Cheggers said, ‘I knew they bloody got it wrong.’ We started the song and everybody took their jackets off and we’d all got a picture of Margaret Thatcher on our T-Shirts.”

The song in question is of course “Stand Down Margaret,” the back half of “Whine And Grine/Stand Down Margaret,” where the Beat asks Thatcher to step aside as Prime Minister. “I said I see no joy/I see only sorrow/I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow/So stand down Margaret…please”. It’s worth noting that this was only one year into Thatcher’s first ministry.

Wakeling goes on to say that “Thatcher represented a class betrayal: that somebody from above a grocer’s shop in Grantham who had gone to Oxford was not looking down their nose at everybody.” There was a resounding fear of a third world war led by the Iron Lady. “It seemed to me that when I danced my mind was freer somehow…my mind and heart felt more open. I thought if you could get people dancing they’d perhaps feel a bit stronger to ruminate on some of the lyrics. So I sang about our worst fears.”

Perfect for: Remember when, in 2005, Donald Trump bragged to Howard Stern on the radio that he’d used his position as the owner of the Miss USA beauty pageant to go “inspect” the dressing rooms while the contestants were getting dressed. “And you know, no men are anywhere,” he explains, “And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant.” His campaign back in 2016 denied the claims that they were true, or tried to say it was impossible to know what had happened before deflecting to Hillary Clinton as just as bad because her husband abused his power against women when he was in office. (Strange how both election cycles he’s had against women, his primary talking points seemed to be about the men who weren’t running.) This is the man who “is like a magnet” to attractive women. “When you’re a star they let you do it…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” He’s going to save the women of America you know, whether they like it or not

11/12 Morrissey’s 1988 Viva Hate

I gotta say, I was not expecting Morrissey, although given it’s fash week, and this is a British man with—let’s call it a complicated relationship to politics and morality—I suppose I should have been.

I guess we’ll start by breaking down that complicated relationship just a bit, because if you do even a little digging on him all kinds of “that can’t be true” quotes from this little man start popping up.

Although, to be fair, in this second Trump era, it’s a good habit to get into believing people when they tell you they are a human trashbag. After all “All of the rumours/Keeping me grounded/I never said, I never said that they were/ Completely unfounded” (From the disgustingly sexy “Speedway” on Vauxhall and I, 1994)

There is not remotely enough time to go into all of it, but here’s a nice smattering for you of relevant Morrissey facts through the lens of a single interview posted to his fansite in which Morrissey claims that the “modern Loony Left seem to forget that Hitler was left wing!” He continues by complaining that everyone’s racist these days, so it’s meaningless that music journalists keep using it against him. “When someone calls you racist, what they are saying is ‘hmm, you actually have a point, and I don’t know how to answer it, so perhaps if I distract you by calling you a bigot we’ll both forget how enlightened your comment was.’” (Was the enlightened comment perhaps the one where he muses that “you can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies?”)

In fact, it’s still up and you can read the whole unhinged thing before clicking back to the front page to be greeted with a photograph of James Baldwin adorned with the site name and “Artists are here to disturb the peace” I don’t particularly suggest it, though, as he goes directly from calling “racist” a slur to calling eating Kosher and Halal evil, sharing a ton of graphic farm animal photographs, and compares “humane slaughter” to “humane rape,” and later calls eating meat the “real racism.” “Would you eat people from Sri Lanka?” Or perhaps you’d prefer the bit where he makes fun of a man’s accent. Like… guy just can’t stop himself.

But no one is exclusively one thing—even racists. And as much as Morrisey hates the Looney Left, women in general as far as I can tell, people of color, and the Cure, he’s also no fan of Margaret Thatcher. After her death he wrote an open letter to be published on the Daily Beast of all places that ended with the—actually quite stunning—line “As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.”

This is a hatred he lets bubble out on the last track of Viva Hate, “Margaret on the Guillotine.” (Oh right, this was an album review, wasn’t it?) Still disgustingly sexy—that’s just kinda the mode Morrissey songs work in. (He’s very much a one trick pony, but in the way Pegasus was. If what you want is a flying horse… yeah, I am regrettably a mark for his exact thing. I’m just as annoyed by this fact as you, I promise.) “Margaret on the Guillotine” is soft, as he croons about the wonderful dream the kind people have of Margaret on the Guillotine, asking for her to “please die,” and to “make the dream real.” The album ends with the sound of the blade falling.

Conservative Parliament member Geoffrey Dickens was so upset by this that he actually had the counter-terrorist London police force search his home and interview him. This meeting with the cops ended after one hour, apparently, with him giving them an autograph, so one can imagine how seriously they were taking the threat posed by the artist.

Perfect for: Remember when, in 1925, Donald Trump wrote that “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Oh, wait, no, that’s Mein Kampf. Trump was the one in 2023 saying that immigrants (who are “coming into our country” not just from South America, he clarifies, but “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”) are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Suggesting that they are streaming in from the mental institutions and prisons of these countries. Trump, never seeing a down he didn’t want to double on repeated that language, all caps, on his bespoke social media site Truth Social that evening. So much for the Loony Left, I guess

11/13 New Model Army’s 1989 Thunder and Consolation

I suppose it’s not surprising that we own so many “Man, fuck Thatcher” records. This is the third from this week of reviews, including this one that El bought online having to get it shipped to us from Germany. And let’s be honest, if I saw Spike in a record store, it’d go home with me.

Like Pornography, Thunder and Consolation is a more vibes-based “fuck Thatcher” than the more explicit musing on the joy one might find upon her demise. I found an interview with Justin Sullivan, the band’s only consistent member, saying that they were a bit of an outcast from the political punk scene of the era—that they were “obviously Left and anti-Thatcher, but [they] were tackling topics at oblique angles,” and that “there is no agenda…it’s really primarily about the music,” and so, he says, their peers simply did not trust them to be “on message.”

Chumbawamba might have thought them untrustworthy sellouts, but given that Thatcher’s name appears 4 times in the band’s bio it hardly feels like a stretch to claim it’s relevance. (Admittedly, it’s 38 paragraphs of text totaling just over 5,700 words, so one assumes a lot of things show up 4 times, but still—you don’t expect an essay about Kylie Minogue to bother, you know? I go back and forth on this, but I think I’m coming down on the side of “no, actually, having what is effectively a high school book report on your band’s history called your ‘bio’ is punk as fuck. Why not? There’s very little that feels more disillusioned than simply wanting to be understood.)

Anyway, you don’t have to go further than track one to see it. “I Love The World,” opens with the image of a man driving down the road on a stormy night furious about the unchecked capitalism blazing through this world he loves. “As the waters rise it seems we cling to all the rootless things,” he sings, that even though he won’t claim to be a clever man, he knows “enough to understand/That the endless leaps and forward plans will someday have to cease.” (This verse, delightfully, continues on to develop the OG Shocked Pikachu meme, in song form: “You blind yourselves with comfort lies like lightning never strikes you twice/And we laugh at your amazed surprise as the Ark begins to sink”) The song ends with nuclear war anxieties, mentioning a friend who wanted to die quick, but him?

“With no bitterness but an innocence that I can’t seem to grasp
I know somehow I will survive – this fury just to stay alive
So drunk with sickness, weak with pain,
I can walk the hills one last time
Scarred and smiling, dying slow,
I’ll scream to no one left at all
I told you so, I told you so, I told you so
Oh God I love the world”

Thunder and Consolation is aiming for a working class folk kind of punk. The whole record is drawing a striking image of living through Thatcher’s Britain day to day. They love the world after all, and more often than “angry punk,” New Model Army lands at melancholy and kind. Of course, “Green and Grey” manages both a seething resentment and love both for his English countryside, and the friend who’d left it. “Nothing changes here very much/ You used to say it never will,” he muses, the pubs are still full on Friday nights, and day by day the train takes one more of us away. “Do you think you’re so brave/Just to go running to that which beckons to us all,” he asks with a palpable sense of betrayal.

Of course, if you want the most striking image, you can pop over to the expanded edition of the record, for “Higher Wall,” to the point that I’m frankly spoiled for choice on images to share with you from it. Like, I could give you the opening:

“we’re out here on the borders with our favourite few possessions
Traded stories whispered round the fire
As shadows in the searchlights, mugshots in the files
Waiting in the camps behind the wire”

We are young, forever hungry, and you are fat and growing old as you build that ever higher wall. “We” here, being the working class: “we wait upon the tables where you dine,” and still “clutching at these papers in another office line/We’re staring from the darkness up at windows filled with light.”

This thing is just so broken hearted in it’s fury. It’s an emotion that very few albums manage to capture in such a pure form.

“Now in the queues at immigration, in the border zone
We are your bastard children, all coming home
And still you try, you try to build a higher wall
Every day you try to build a higher wall
And your money cannot stop us
And your violence cannot stop us
No you will never stop us with your higher wall”

Perfect for: Remember when, in 2019, Donald Trump tweeted (this being before he was temporarily booted from Twitter awaiting his Bromance with Elon Musk) “If Illegal Immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detentions centres, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!” His tweet undermined itself, by continuing as he claimed “many of these illegals aliens are living far better now than where they … came from, and in far safer conditions.” This is as related to the truth as anything else Trump has had to say about immigration, see, for instance, his completely bogus, oft repeated refrain from that January about women and children being trafficked across the border taped up in increasingly specific conditions, although rarely the same, as if it were merely a thing Trump spent a lot of time hungrily imagining. (As it’s impossible to prove a negative, everyone supposes it could be coming from some information source they are, themselves, personally unaware of—but all sources checked seemed flummoxed by the flagrantly cartoonish assertion.)

But ok, let’s look at those far safer conditions for a fucking second, yeah? Because remember when, in 2018, Melania Trump herself flew out to the Texas border wearing a cheap, off season “I really don’t care. Do U?” jacket which had, of course, “no hidden message?” She was focused, in her role as First Lady, on child welfare, or something like it when looked at through the funhouse mirror in which this entire family must live their miserable lives. She liked what she saw, declaring that she was “impressed with the center and the hardworking staff and leadership there.” She deemed that the children were “eager to learn” and were “in good spirits.” Seems weird, given the standard policy of separating children from their families, and that the legal requirements for “safe and sanitary” conditions do not appear to include things like toothbrushes, soap, blankets, or adult supervision

11/14 Chumbawamba’s 1987 Never Mind the Ballots

Oh, funny. I didn’t know this was coming when I alluded to the anecdote Justin Sullivan of New Model Army tells of Alice Nutter of Chumbawamba admitting, before going on stage with him, that she’d previously stood outside his shows to tell people that they shouldn’t go in, on the grounds that he was a sellout. This is, of course, absolutely hilarious in the context of the appalling radio hit “Tubthumping,” which spent approximately forever on the charts, and which my alcoholic, right wing nutjob of a mother was incapable of not singing along with.

Presumably that anecdote happened before 1997.

Anyway, we’re a decade ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Settle in back to 1987 with me for Never Mind the Ballots, where there are neither good times nor better times to sing songs for. It’s name is cute for an anarchist punk record: it’s a reference to the Sex Pistol’s debut record from yet one more decade prior, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

It has a raw and simple, furious style of punk energy, and is about the most single mindedly anarchist thing I have ever listened to. It’s just as pissed at the left for falling on it’s face as it is for the right’s party line of oppression, and at the money, disinterest, and propaganda that serve it.

The record, structured as a story, opens with “Always Tell The Voter What The Voter Wants To Hear,” which is staged as two politicians on a call in donations style program, who are trying to get callers to vote for them, throwing out meaningless promises, or ones that greatly misunderstand anything a caller is likely to be asking about: “Police oppression? You can have it, sir! Just give me your vote!”

Perhaps more accurately the record could be thought of as “Never Mind the Ballots, Here’s the Rest of Your Life,” which not only completes the Sex Pistols reference, but also is a lyric in one of the more crazed bits of “Mr. Haseltine Meets His Public:”

“Democracy Street, Britain’s longest running soap opera, with the added illusion of audience participation. Our act tonight, on the left, capitalism that’s right, on the right, capitalism is it, in the middle, probably the best capitalism in the world. Remember it’s your choice, your five seconds worth of action that counts. I mean that most sincerely folks. Sit tight, keep quiet, ’till the next time. The next time being one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days away. If freedom is the choice between three different types of the same oppression then I’ll take the one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days. Never mind the ballots, here’s the rest of your life!”

“Here’s the Rest of your Life” is also the last track on the record, and where you find the album’s call to action:

Perfect for:

“All real change
Must come from below
Our bosses must live in fear
Of the factory-floor
And when they smile
And they ask for my support
I’ll give them these words
And a bloody nose:
You don’t help your enemy
When you’re at war”